Contemporary American racial politics have got to be more complicated than any other kind of politics.\u00a0 In fact, they have got to be more complicated than astrophysics and neural brain surgery.<\/p>\n
Even Americans for whom their country\u2019s racial politics have become like a first language to them still have great difficulty in mastering it.\u00a0 Outsiders aspiring to achieve fluency in America\u2019s racial politics have nearly insuperable obstacles to surmount.<\/p>\n
With an eye toward making \u201cthe text\u201d of our racial politics at least somewhat less convoluted, I offer the following \u201ccliff notes.\u201d<\/p>\n
First things first: \u201cracism\u201d is the worst thing with which to charge a white <\/i>person.\u00a0 To repeat, there is no conceivable catalogue of evils in which \u201cracism\u201d does not rank at the top (or bottom) of the list\u2014for white people.\u00a0 <\/i>To put this point another way, although every American, of every race, loudly and proudly repudiates \u201cracism,\u201d by the latter they almost always mean white <\/i>racism.<\/p>\n
This brings us to the next note.<\/p>\n
There is endless hand wringing over \u201cequality,\u201d \u201cfairness,\u201d and \u201cjustice,\u201d it is true.\u00a0 And \u201ccolor blindness\u201d is extolled as the premiere virtue.\u00a0 In reality, though, whites and non-whites\u2014especially blacks\u2014are not regarded equally in America.\u00a0 All talk of \u201cwhite privilege\u201d clashes violently with the fact that non-whites, especially blacks, just simply are not judged by the same standards as their white counterparts.\u00a0 And, as this one example of \u201cracism\u201d illustrates, the double standards are glaring.<\/p>\n
Not infrequently, at least nowadays, calls on the part of racial activists and their followers for justice or equality are ideological smokescreens designed to advance their own interests and\/or the interests of the groups that they represent.\u00a0 Such activists, regardless of their color, shout from the rooftops for \u201cjustice\u201d for blacks and Hispanics, say.\u00a0 However, for whites, particularly those whites who have been aggrieved in some way by non-whites, they are nowhere to be found.<\/p>\n
Third, though it sounds counterintuitive, race <\/i>in America is less a matter of skin tone and more a matter of ideology.\u00a0 Actually, race is as much an ideological <\/i>concept as any.<\/i><\/p>\n
There is a narrative concerning American race relations that has become the official history. As it has achieved the status of dogma, it tolerates no competitors.\u00a0 According to this narrative, for all practical purposes, \u201cracism\u201d begins in the United State with the enslavement of African blacks.\u00a0 Notwithstanding their tireless attempts to repent of the oppression to which they\u2019ve subjected blacks throughout the centuries, whites continue to fall prey to their delusions of racial \u201csupremacy;\u201d they cannot do enough to make amends.<\/p>\n
Now, this narrative is false not entirely for what it says as for what it neglects to say.\u00a0 Blacks had been enslaving one another for eons before the first white man stepped foot on the African continent\u2014and they resisted European efforts to end the slave trade.\u00a0 Had it not been for Africans there would have been no Trans-Atlantic slave trade, for it was Africans who sold their fellow Africans to the Europeans.\u00a0 And what is true of Africans is no less true of America\u2019s aboriginals who had been enslaving one another long before whites reached the Western hemisphere.<\/p>\n
Of course, there are other critical facts that the official creed omits.\u00a0 Blacks enslaved blacks in the antebellum South <\/i>and <\/i>blacks fought for the Confederacy.\u00a0 Blacks have a far higher standard of living in modern America than most people, black white, or other, have living in any other place on Earth.\u00a0 From their emancipation from the bonds of slavery to the destruction of Jim Crow and everything since then\u2014including the election and reelection of a black president\u2014blacks\u2019 gains in America would never have been possible had it not been for the blood, sweat, and tears of whites.<\/p>\n
Today, blacks are murdered and victimized by blacks to a vastly greater extent than they are victimized by whites (or the members of any other racial group).\u00a0 And the overwhelming majority of interracial crime is black-on-white\u2014not the other way round.<\/p>\n
Still, those blacks like, say, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who resist the orthodox narrative are deemed \u201cinauthentic\u201d: Thomas and other blacks, you see, aren\u2019t really <\/i>black.<\/p>\n
That race is ideological in contemporary America is as well borne out by the fact that the Hispanic-looking George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch member in Sanford, Florida who shot to death black teenager Trayvon Martin, is treated as an honorary white man\u2014in spite of being a mixture of black, white, and Hispanic.<\/p>\n
For over 20 years, Hispanic gangbangers in Los Angeles have been conducting what the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as a \u201ccampaign\u201d of \u201cethnic cleansing\u201d in black neighborhoods. This outrage has been met with deafening silence by the national media and the racial activists.\u00a0 Thus, it is difficult not to think that had Zimmerman his mother\u2019s Spanish surname, or had he been a gangbanger, as opposed to a community activist, we would never have heard of either him or Martin.<\/p>\n
Racial politics in America is tricky business indeed.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Contemporary American racial politics have got to be more complicated than any other kind of politics.\u00a0 In fact, they have got to be more complicated than astrophysics and neural brain surgery. Even Americans for whom their country\u2019s racial politics have become like a first language to them still have great difficulty in mastering it.\u00a0 Outsiders…<\/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-903","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n