In case you didn’t know, if you are white, you are a racist. Go ahead and admit it, you racist pig. I didn’t know that racism was specifically determined by the pigment of one’s skin either, but according to one Jim Grimsley this sadly is the case. As I read his piece in the LA Times, “White Americans are nearly as blind to their racism as ever before,” I actually already knew that according to the modern liberal/progressive worldview, only white people can be racists. It would be better if we just admit it, and purge ourselves of the guilt and shame that comes with being white in America. Unfortunately, we can never really be purged because, well, we’re white! In case you doubt, here is Mr. Grimsley speaking of some anecdotes from his life hearing white people deny their racism:
[T]hese are symptoms of the insanity of white culture and our refusal to understand that racism is part of our makeup — each and every one of us, north, south, east and west — from cradle to grave.
Think about that for a moment, part of our makeup. Racism is in our DNA, part of our nature, inescapable. There is some truth to this, as I’ll explain, but in the warped mind of the modern liberal/progressive it is all lie.
As I read this piece, I couldn’t help think of the Hutus and Tutsis. In 1994 the east African country of Rawanda became synonymous with horrific slaughter. In a matter of months, black people mercilessly killed something like 900,000 other black people for who knows what reason. I use the word slaughter because most of those killed were butchered by machete. So logical as I am, I concluded that skin pigment certainly cannot be the primary cause of racism. Then why do liberal white people think they and all the rest of white America are inveterate racists? If you understand that the modern liberal/progressive worldview is fundamentally communist, this will make more sense. Grimsley’s confession gets to the heart of the matter:
White liberals — and I am one — are adept at using these naming and shaming tactics to avoid looking inward. Comfortable in our beliefs, we ignore the fact that we sit inside an ideology of white superiority that gives us enormous advantages even when we mouth the right opinions, trade memes about the awful racist act that one of us committed, and pat ourselves on the back for our sensitivity.
We ought to at least feel better that white liberals are just as guilty as we right-wing white conservatives. All of us, as this paragraph implies, are victims of something that is a foundational presupposition of the liberal/progressive religion: privilege. We white people have been born into it, ergo we are racists, ergo we are guilty, whether we are aware of it or not. What this means is that a black person can look at you and your lily whiteness and hate you with a venemous hatred just because of your lily whiteness, and by definition this is not racism. Modern liberal progressivism went down the rabbit hole a long time ago, and they only go deeper and deeper into irrationality with every passing day.
The roots of this perverse worldview go back to the convoluted philosophy of German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whose historical determinism inspired Marx. Ultimately it is informed by a materialist view of reality, that is the material is all there is, which ultimately invalidates it, but that is for another very long blog post. We are all, according to this view of reality, determined by historical processes beyond our control. Another word for this is, victim. That word gets at the essence of the modern liberal/progressive worldview. Victimology is the spark that lights the fire of their passions for government to do everything to redress the supposed suffering of the victims, while being lukewarm at best for the liberty of the individual. Psychologist B.F. Skinner, good materialist that he was, wrote a book in 1971 called, Beyond Freedom and Dignity. The title of the book captures well how modern liberals/progressives view their fellow human beings. Only government in their inconsistent, illogical, and contradictory worldview can give us back our freedom and dignity.
One current example of how this works can be seen in how they view the “anger” of white people versus black people. I find it fascinating, but perfectly predictable based on these premises, that there is so much hand-wringing in the media elites over the anger that is supposedly driving the rise of Donald J. Trump. The implication is that the anger is irrational, dangerous, provincial and small-minded. It is a bad thing because it will cause these white people to fulfill their constitutional duty to vote for the wrong person. But when black people’s anger prompts them to burn down cities, it is understandable. They are simply helpless victims whose anger, and violence, are a justifiable response to their fundamentally helpless existence. You can see why I call it perverse.
The reason I said there is some truth to the assertion that racism is part of our nature, is that all human beings have a certain aversion to that which is different from them. This is natural to the human condition as we find it, and as it has been for all of recorded history, not as we wish it were, per the liberal/progressive view of things. Racism is a vile and evil thing, and we must resist it whenever our hearts are inclined to absolutize differences, but our hearts will always thus be inclined.