Human beings, regardless of time or place, share in common a perennial fascination with tales of enigmatic creatures, beings that, in spite of the numerous testimonials that have been offered on their behalf, remain questionable.\u00a0 Sasquatch; the Lochness Monster; and the Abominable Snowman, are just some of these who immediately come to mind.\u00a0 While some really believe in the existence of such entities, others are unsure, and still others just don\u2019t care, there is a fourth class of people that never fails to crop up wherever tales of this sort prevail.\u00a0 This class is composed of those who may be either indifferent to or even incredulous regarding such legends, but who, nevertheless\u2014through sales of souvenirs, the production of documentaries, or what have you\u2014stoke the flames of belief in order to turn a profit.<\/p>\n
I suggest that to this list of mythic beings we add White Racism.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Just a moment\u2019s worth of sober reflection in no time reveals that there is more than sufficient warrant for treating White Racism of a piece with Bigfoot and the rest of similarly mythic beings.<\/p>\n
Actually, there is a sense in which reports of Bigfoot sightings are more credible <\/em>than similar reports of White Racism.\u00a0 Bigfoot sightings from across time, though they tend to differ in degree as far as relatively trivial specifics are concerned\u2014e.g. height, weight, etc.\u2014nonetheless neatly coincide.\u00a0 Reports of White Racism, on the other hand, diverge wildly from one another.\u00a0 White Racism is the ugliest of creatures; upon this all who claim to have spotted it agree.\u00a0 But beyond this, so varied are the accounts, it is impossible not to think that witnesses are talking about different things altogether.<\/p>\n White Racism is seen rearing his horrific head at a Ku Klux Klan meeting in the Deep Southof yesteryear as well as in the shop owner who keeps a suspicious eye on the group of rowdy black teenagers who wander the aisles of his store.\u00a0 It is spotted in Adolph Hitler\u2019s genocidal regime just as easily as in a Tea Party movement demonstration or a Republican Party convention.\u00a0 In fact, even in the case of Hitler\u2019s Nazism, for as awful as it was, it remains doubtful whether it is actually White Racism<\/em> that we witness, for biologically or racially speaking, both the Nazis and their Jewish victims are indistinguishable: both are white.<\/p>\n The point is that if <\/em>Bigfoot exists, we at least have some idea as to what we would see if we were to encounter him.\u00a0 White Racism, on the other hand, is a far different matter.<\/p>\n By some accounts, White Racism sounds as if it may even be something like a god<\/em>, for it is said to exist independently of individual whites.\u00a0 When it is described as such, it is given the name \u201cinstitutional racism.\u201d\u00a0 White Racism is at once pervasive and just as destructive as it has ever been, according to this perspective.\u00a0 Indeed, it is much more <\/em>destructive than it has been in the past.\u00a0 White Racism is embedded in the very \u201cstructures\u201d that constitute American society.\u00a0 As such, it informs the worldview of the best intentioned, most magnanimous of whites.\u00a0<\/p>\n Those individual whites who voted against Barack Obama as well as those who voted for him; Obama\u2019s grandmother, who feared being harassed and molested by a black panhandler who had already harassed and nearly molested her; those who call for an end to \u201caffirmative action\u201d and those who want to preserve it; those who suspect blacks of being inferior and those who think that they are superior; those who believe in a common \u201chuman nature\u201d and those who reject it; those who demand race-neutral criteria of evaluation and those who repudiate such criteria; those white employers who provide opportunities to non-whites immigrants and those white citizens who want to diminish the flow of such immigration; Confederate soldiers and Union soldiers; Nazism, Fascism, and \u201cthe American Way\u201d; Capitalism and Communism\u2014White Racism allegedly appears in every instance.<\/p>\n There is another respect in which White Racism resembles other legendary figures like Nessie and Bigfoot.\u00a0 Just as there is no shortage of would-be profiteers ready to cash in on the latter, so an entire industry has emerged to capitalize on the notion of White Racism.\u00a0 The captains of this industry comprise a diverse lot, it is true: academics, media pundits, politicians, and racial (\u201ccivil rights\u201d) activists receive the lion\u2019s share of the spoils.\u00a0 But it would be a mistake to think that they are the only beneficiaries of the Racism Industrial Complex (RIC).\u00a0 It would be equally mistaken to suppose that the only benefits to be had are material <\/em>in nature.<\/p>\n Legions of common folk, white, black, and other, gain also, but they gain much more in the way of psychic<\/em> rewards than they could ever hope to gain monetarily.\u00a0 Against all of the evidence that White Racism hasn\u2019t any more substance than a phantom, the members of the various races, whatever their biological differences, ultimately rail against this mother of all monsters for the same reason: doing so elevates their own self-conceptions.<\/p>\n Like Roman Catholics who, in renewing their baptismal promises, unequivocally renounce Satan and all of his works, \u201cthe believers\u201d in White Racism can\u2019t resist the temptation to unequivocally renounce it<\/em>, for doing so enables them to discern virtue in themselves.\u00a0 This virtue is as much a phantom as the White Racism that fills their imaginations, of course.\u00a0 It is virtue on the cheap, so to speak.\u00a0 The \u201canti-White Racist\u201d can no more be possessed of wisdom, justice, or courage for standing up to the unadulterated evil of White Racism than can the merchant who decides to set up shop selling souvenirs near a Bigfoot sighting be said to have such virtue.<\/p>\n Neither the committed \u201canti-White Racist\u201d nor the merchant really <\/em>believes in that of which he speaks.\u00a0<\/p>\n In my home state of New Jersey, we have our \u201cBigfoot.\u201d\u00a0 His name is \u201cthe Jersey Devil.\u201d\u00a0 The Jersey Devil is said to dwell in the Pine Barrens, thousands and thousands of acres of forestry.\u00a0 Every year, just about, for several years, my late father, my brother, and I would venture out to the Pine Barrens for camping trips.\u00a0 We are all born and bred in the city, mind you, three of the least \u201coutdoorsy\u201d guys you could ever meet.\u00a0 Yet it was always fun to imagine that we were driving into the wilderness to live off of the land and combat all of the challenges that untamed nature would dare to throw our way\u2014including and especially the abomination of the Jersey Devil.\u00a0<\/p>\n In reality, we spent the night on a campground with a heated bathroom and showers and a grocery story about a mile or two down the road.<\/p>\n And, obviously, we knew that there was no Jersey Devil.<\/p>\n Likewise, those who rally most ardently to defeat White Racism know, at least at some level, that there is no such thing.\u00a0 They must <\/em>know this.\u00a0 Not only are they eons apart from reaching agreement as to what White Racism is; there is ample proof of the most virulent anti-white <\/em>animus all around them and yet their silence is deafening.\u00a0 Worse, the purveyors of the White Racism myth typically seek to deny or even excuse the shocking levels of hatred and violence<\/em> to which blacks and Hispanics have regularly subjected whites.<\/p>\n If White Racism was really the ubiquitous evil that it is claimed to be, then presumably it is because \u201cracism<\/em>\u201d is an evil; that it is whites<\/em> who allegedly promote the \u201cracism\u201d should be neither here nor there.\u00a0 That those who live and die by the ideology of White Racism, our \u201canti-White Racists,\u201d those contractors of the Racism Industrial Complex, do not really believe in the windmills with which they do battle is effortlessly grasped once we consider that they care not a lick about combating real racial animus as long as the guilty are non-white and the innocent white.<\/p>\n No, White Racism is indeed the new Bigfoot.<\/p>\n Jack Kerwick, Ph.D.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Human beings, regardless of time or place, share in common a perennial fascination with tales of enigmatic creatures, beings that, in spite of the numerous testimonials that have been offered on their behalf, remain questionable.\u00a0 Sasquatch; the Lochness Monster; and the Abominable Snowman, are just some of these who immediately come to mind.\u00a0 While some…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n