Apparently, I Am A Racist
I have long been fighting the characterization. I grew up in the 60’s. I remember my father telling me when we lived in Chicago, how he would go to bat for blacks who were cheated by bosses because of their color. When we moved to Phoenix he hired blacks and there was never any difference between the way he treated them and anyone else. I never saw a difference whether it was the Mexican, Black or the Yugoslav who worked for him. Heck, I figure, since he married a Jewish Russian girl in college, he must have figured it didn’t matter about your origins, it mattered who you were. Mom was the same. She married a German Lutheran farm boy. She figured it didn’t matter either.
I believed what Martin Luther King said about the content of your character trumping the color of your skin all day long. It’s what I was taught. It’s what my heart and mind said was right. In 6th Grade, I punched a kid out at the bus stop for bullying and calling my friend Carlos a spick. It’s how I was brought up. (Today, I would probably be expelled from school and been sent off for re-education. Or maybe not, I clocked a bully and a hater. Maybe I would have been given a medal.)
I was a big believer in Civil Rights. I thought it was wrong to judge someone not on his actions, but on what race he was. I thought those things that mattered were a person’s honesty, his work ethic, how he treated others.
I don’t know when it happened. When things changed. Equality to me was always about getting the same pay for the same work. Or not being discriminated against based on your race or religion if you wanted to live in a particular neighborhood or get a particular job. But somehow, this changed and I became a Racist. My understanding of equality was no longer applicable. I realize now that I must have been a hater all along. I learned I had to get my mind right.
I will explain: Let’s say some guy comes up to me and starts beating on me. If he is the same color as me, and I defend myself, then it’s ok. We are equal. We are the same color. But if the guy is black, and I defend myself, then I am a Racist. I didn’t understand that before. But I get it now: Because if he is black, then he is not capable of holding his temper, or controlling himself because he has “black rage.†It’s not fair to him because he doesn’t possess those attributes. So, if I defend myself, I have been insensitive to his plight. He is likely poor and from a single parent household and has been subjected to all kinds of inequity. He has been told his whole life that he is a victim of white oppression. I have learned that he has years of anger and unfair treatment that make him who he is.
And there is probably some deep-seated desire on my part to hurt him just because he is black. Something I may not even be aware of, but is there nonetheless. They call that “unconscious racism.†Means basically that I can’t help myself not to like blacks. That’s because I am white. Aha! You say, but if you can’t help but be a Racist, and he can’t help but be out of control, then who is really responsible for their actions.
That of course is a Racist question. Individual responsibility requires that we both have the same natural characteristics; that a black man has the same ability to make rational choices that I do. That is insensitive and probably Racist.
But what if a black man says he hates white people and engages in assaults on white people because he hates them. Like for instance that “knockout†game. Isn’t that a hate crime? Another Racist question: You weren’t paying attention earlier. These are victims and they are just under the influence of “black rage†brought about by years of mistreatment by whites.
The upshot of all this is very simple. I needed to learn that I have it coming to me because I am white. I need to feel guilty, because I am guilty. This whole notion of “defending†myself is Racist in itself. As if I have a right to defend myself against the centuries of horrific treatment blacks have been given at the hands of my race.
We are finally teaching the truth. Our young black men are being taught that they deserve justice, that they are entitled to their righteous anger. What I have learned is that white aristocrat slave-owners, who had no moral authority to speak or write about such things, skewed my whole notion of equality. They were hypocrites clearly. And I no longer listen to the excuse that they lived when these attitudes and institutions had been in place for many centuries and were the reality of the times. Nor that it was the US Constitution that codified ideals about equality and the rule of law, and that it was the unresolved tension resulting from the violation of these new principles that brought about the Civil War. A war, in which 600,000 mostly white Americans died, that ended slavery.
I can say now that the best I will ever be is a recovering Racist. I now understand that it will take years of penitence to just scratch the surface of my guilt. It is good and right that we continue to teach black children that they are victims of centuries of abuse at the hands of whites, and that they must continue to be enraged and lash out. That they have a right to be white hot angry and this may result in their engaging in violence when that rage bubbles over the top. They must never surrender to the notion that they have the opportunity to break this horrific cycle that puts them in harm’s way. They must never yield to a different idea that they are every bit as capable of overcoming hardship and abuse as others in history who have endured persecution.
I know now that I had it all wrong. I used to think that Blacks, Whites, Jews, Native Americans, Irishmen, Italians, Germans, and other groups persecuted, even murdered by the millions, were all the same. That anyone can be anything they want to be. Victimhood was a choice, I thought. We all have the same opportunity to heal and to emerge from adversity stronger, better, more independent, with a story of victory to tell, instead of a legacy of dependency on former persecutors.
To imply that Blacks did not possess these characteristics, was true Racism in my mind. But I see now that I was wrong. There is a bigger issue here. A larger agenda. New enlightened handlers are needed for the greater good, to teach them that they need to hold on to that rage and in turn, teach all of us about the injustices that we have caused.
A thousand young black men like Trayvon Martin and the “Gentle Giant†may have to die in order for me to learn my lesson.
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7 comments
Let’s not fall into the claptrap of accepting the opponent’s agenda, or definition of terms which contravenes traditional usage.
As the Founding Fathers and their Mothers would say, “Give no crap and take no crap!” Please forgive me for using the word ‘give.’
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Marcia Reply:
August 27th, 2014 at 9:35 am
Thanks for commenting but I believe this post was meant as irony. It’s in the style of Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.”
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Yes, it was intended as irony. As far as I am concerned, the prevailing mentality is that we poison the minds of our black youth and embitter them to their own future. We load them up with a narrative that they are victims and that they are entitled to have a chip on their shoulder. Of course, Liberal policies are never held to blame. The fact that the black unemployment rate among young black men rose to 49% under the current Administration and is now about 34%, (by way of comparison, it was 8% in 1960 before the tyranny of affirmative action and the minimum wage) and that more black children are aborted in New York City than are being born. No, I didn’t misspeak. Check it out for yourself. You won’t see this on CNN. Taboo. Inconvenient and horrific results of the left’s social engineering. Then we turn uneducated, poisoned black youth out into the world, and wonder why their attitude gets them into trouble and perpetuates the cycle. It makes me think that the Democrats haven’t changed all that much since the days of the Klan and . That the real goal is not to give blacks the tools to make themselves self sufficient so they can provide economic freedom for themselves and their families, but instead to keep them under the yoke of their political handlers. Keep them in lockstep with the victim narrative. When someone like Ben Carson, or Condoleeza Rice, or Clarence Thomas, or Herman Cain come along and have the audacity to step outside the liberal plantation, they are excoriated and called house niggers. It makes me sick and it ought to make classical liberals like me everywhere sick to our stomachs. The real assassins of black youth are the race baiters. The real haters are those who don’t give black men a chance to discover their value and determine their future, and instead, keep them enslaved in rage and anger and dependency.
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David J Gill Reply:
February 21st, 2015 at 10:32 am
Erich,
You are willing to make some outrageously offensive accusations and lay the blame for a multiplicity of ills at the feet of liberals, many of which have complex causes that you make no effort to consider while others clearly are not the fault of what you call liberal policy, and still others are quite simply the fault of conservatives or of conservative disengagement from urban issues.
But, this comment is both offensive and utterly ludicrous: You say, “…we turn uneducated, poisoned black youth out into the world, and wonder why their attitude gets them into trouble and perpetuates the cycle. It makes me think that the Democrats haven’t changed all that much since the days of the Klan and . That the real goal is not to give blacks the tools to make themselves self sufficient so they can provide economic freedom for themselves and their families, but instead to keep them under the yoke of their political handlers.”
Isn’t it disingenuous to both castigate liberals for what you think are policy blunders and then try to pin the legacy of the Klan on “Democrats” when you know very well that the Democrats you refer to were were, in fact, conservatives, most of whom became Republicans in the decades following the Civil Rights act? And you know very well that those who have succeeded them in the House and Senate are very much their ideological heirs.
Explain to me the logic you use to conclude that the intention of Democrats is to keep black Americans dependent on government aid. One of the current crop of irrational claims of “what liberals do” is the idea that Democrats buy votes by providing handouts to those that elect them. Hand and hand with that nonsense is the idea that these people don’t want to work, they just want handouts.
This is a kind of conspiracy theory thinking that looks for (and makes up) the cynical true purpose of policy measures. I often think that this kind of accusation is made by conservatives because that is how they conceive policies…how will it benefit them politically. And, in fact, that is true. The glaring example these days is the coordinated voter ID legislation Republicans are jamming through Statehouses along with a nice package of misdirection and disinformation administered with talking points for state reps and coordinated with a media campaign at FOX News.
We all know there is no voter fraud problem to be addressed and that the purpose is to discourage the Democratic vote. (The cynical contempt for democracy is breathtaking to behold.) I suppose it is an electoral handicap for Democrats that they are burdened by earnestness.
Racism is real, and Democrats have the same concerns about self actualization, education and motivation that conservatives do. The problem I observe (there are many others I am less able to speak to) is what law enforcement, the justice system, credit reporting and employment policy do to create and maintain a permanent underclass. Young black men in poor communities fall afoul of law enforcement at higher rates than everyone else. and stiff penalties for petty crime and unavoidable convictions can create permanent barriers to employment, housing, credit and voting. The US Army won’t even take these young men.
It’s law and order conservatives who maintain this counter productive system. When we send petty criminals to prison there are no winners…the system has little deterrent effect and imprisonment consigns those convicted to terms for living that make selling drugs seem like the only clear option.
Conservative need to get over the simplistic idea that these people just don’t try hard enough. That’s a simple minded cop out that wonderfully justifies doing nothing.
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Erich Sielaff Reply:
February 21st, 2015 at 12:21 pm
David,
Ah, where to begin. In fact, conservatives have never disengaged from urban issues. Jack Kemp and countless others have offered solutions only to run into the wall of opposition by the pariahs who understand that empowering blacks destroys their power and exposes their corruption. Conservatives offer the only real solutions to these problems. Empowerment, not bondage. And yes, I am laying the blame on liberal policies, because that insanity has created these enormous problems. Not to mention a degree of corruption unprecedented in modern history.
When I grew up, the social consensus was that finally, segregation, and the policies of separate but equal, were being vanquished. In sports, the arts, the marketplace, blacks were finally moving past the barriers of the past. It was a change of heart. It was a time of great hope. But that has all been perverted. I honestly cannot understand why the Left doubles down on policies that have done so much damage to blacks over the past 40 years. From black unemployment, to the abortion rate in the black community, to diminished intact families, welfare children, to the abysmal quality of education, to the minimum wage that have in effect kept blacks and youth of all races out of the marketplace. By all social standards and measurement, things are worse now than they were 50 years ago, and then add to it that there is an unspoken bigotry that tells blacks “you need us to help you, because you are victims, you can’t do it on your ownâ€. This casting of blacks as victims, further perpetuates the cultural barriers that keep blacks from self-realization. Those that speak up against this institutional racism, are pilloried, and called Uncle Toms. Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Shelby Steele and others have written eloquently about this horrific result and been ostracized or ignored. Most recently, speaking to a new generation, Jason Riley’s book,“Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeedâ€, he writes about the legacy of generations of these policies on young blacks and how they are mocked in their communities for not being “black enough” if they speak “white” and try to sound intelligent.
As to your “offense†at having the legacy of the Klan pinned on Democrats, whether it be the Klan or Planned Parenthood, those organizations founding goals could not be more at home in the Democrat party. (If it walks like a duck……) The proof is in the pudding. More black babies are aborted in New York City than born. Margaret Sanger would be proud!
No liberal ever owns or is accountable for the results of their “well meaning†programs. That assertion is evident in your outrage here. Your ox is gored because I dared impugn your motives! You could care less about the havoc that you have wreaked through your “compassionâ€. You don’t even address it. Nowhere in your rebuttal do you come to terms with the damage you have done. Instead you defend your “earnestnessâ€. I am amazed you can write that without falling on the floor laughing, are you SERIOUS? “Democrats are burdened with earnestness?†That is hilarious. You must be doing a Jonathan Swift here, you can’t possibly not have your tongue in your cheek.
As to your other knee slapper,(“we all know that there is no voter fraud problem to addressâ€), you blithely ignore the 100% vote for Barack Obama across precincts in Philadelphia and the transportation of voters in Chicago and precincts in Ohio to vote 20 and 30 times, or the precincts that submitted more ballots than there are registered voters, or the dead people that voted in New York City, or the vote swap for cigarettes and booze, and you say there is no voter fraud. You are either willfully blinded by ideology, or ignorant. You are quite correct that the purpose of Voter Fraud laws are to discourage Democrat voting, but only ILLEGAL Democrat voting. The argument that presenting identification to vote is somehow discriminatory to minority voters is not just absurd, its stupid and it flies in the face of common sense. And then you stand amazed that people react as they do and wonder if there is some kind of hidden agenda.
You bemoan the impact that “justice system, credit reporting agencies, and employment policy….create……a permanent underclass� That is classic inside out (liberal) thinking. Holding people accountable does not create an underclass, it exposes the one that is already there. The one that the Great Society and all its malformed descendants have created and seem hellbent on perpetuating.
Your closing statement is pretty much that conservatives make these arguments and so are “wonderfully justified in doing nothingâ€.
Doing nothing is infinitely preferable to the vast and awful harm that Liberals have done in the name of compassion.
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Yes, thank you Marcia.
Well said, Erich. And think of the 100’s of $millions poured into inner cities aimed at helping those who needed help, but which were diverted into the quicksands of the money managers’ and their cronies’ pockets.
Sad upshots are that Allen West could not gain reelection and stalwarts like West and Thomas Sowell are ignored by those who need to listen most carefully. ‘Cry, the Beloved Country’ indeed!
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@ Howard: Right on Brother!! Can I get a witness!
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