It’s not every day that you see an honest piece in the media about race in America. This one is fascinating, because I think it describes well the feelings many white Americans experience in their interaction with their fellow black citizens. It can be flat out uncomfortable. You will probably find yourself relating to a number of examples he uses, which I’m sure are not confined to Philadelphia.
The question is why this dynamic exists at all, if indeed it does; I have no doubt about it, because I’ve experienced it myself, and I’m pretty sure I’m not all that unusual. I have a theory that seems blindingly obvious to me, but that won’t sit well with our committed left-liberal friends. I lay the blame at the feet of a kind of modern liberal racism, and a view of racism only the modern liberal could conjure up.
In this view, racism is fundamentally about skin pigmentation, and for some inscrutable reason one skin pigmentation is more susceptible than others to thinking itself superior to other races; that would be those whose skin we call white. Americans devoid of color, we might call them (liberals like to call certain folks “people of color” so it follows, right?), are by definition racists, whereas people of color cannot be. Why should this counter intuitive assertion be so intuitive to the left-liberal? Because people devoid of color have all the power and thus their view of another race has consequences, whereas those of color don’t and so their views of another race are irrelevant in the power struggle that is the essence of life in society as left-liberals see it.
Remember that the modern liberal does not believe in something we would call human nature, which posits that human beings are not fundamentally determined by their environment, but in their being are a certain way regardless of it. The idea that human beings are in effect born as a blank slate upon which what happens to them determines them goes back possibly to Rousseau. But regardless of its philosophical antecedents, the idea that human beings are born without a specific nature or specific inclinations is a logical consequence of a godless universe; it is materialist through and through. Karl Marx was a product of such a view of the universe, and modern liberals are his progeny.
What has any of this to do with race in America? It’s all about the power struggle I referred to above. If all we are is about our environment, then he who controls the environment wins. Thus, Americans devoid of color have all the power; they control the environment so only they can be racists. By definition blacks cannot be racists, so any racial tension in American must be the fault of whites.
When you add to this worldview slavery and the disgusting racial intolerance in American history, Americans of pallid countenance don’t have a chance. For generations since the birth of the modern liberal in the 1960s, blacks as victims of American oppression have been part of the cultural zeitgeist. It isn’t enough that every legal avenue of oppression has been outlawed, because in the very nature of things (ironically) black people don’t have a chance. Without the status as victim and the government largess that comes with it, there is no hope.
The problem with perceived victimhood, and this gets to the heart of the issue, is that it leads to self-pity, felling sorry for oneself. It is destructive, negative and as politically incorrect as it is to say nowadays, evil. If you talk to any of my three children they will tell you that pity parties are not popular in our household; they are simply not allowed. A tremendous saying I remember from my Amway days in the 1990s (for you youngsters that is not a basketball arena in Orlando, but a business), life is hard and it can either grind you down or polish you up; which it is, is completely up to you. Another I remember, it’s not what happens to you in life that matters so much, but how you respond to it. Or, if life gives you lemons . . . .
Sadly, Democrat politicians and all our culture forming professions, education, media and entertainment, have consistently communicated victimhood to black Americans (yes, there are exceptions, but that is the general rule) over the years in ways subtle and overt. Whites oppress blacks, and even if it is not explicit underlying everything is a tacit racism, even if we Americans devoid of color are completely unaware of it! It’s amazing how that works.
The problem with the left-liberal worldview in this regard, among many, is that it’s a poison in the body politic, one that has dripped slowly but surely over the last half-century into every corner of American culture. As overt racism receded from American life, liberals and many blacks assumed it just went underground, so although we could not see or experience the actions of racism that had been so prominent throughout American history, its alleged effects continued to reverberate throughout American society.
Thus suspicion underlies much of the interaction between the races. I’m not sure this is ubiquitous, but when African-Americans vote 90-95% for Democrats, the party that sees racism around every corner, it’s got to be close. I’m not saying this is a debilitating malady for our social discourse with our fellow citizens of color, but it’s a damn shame nonetheless. And there is nothing in the nature of things that says it has to be this way. Unfortunately, left-liberal propaganda suffuses the culture, in addition to our politics, so don’t expect Martin Luther King’s dream to come true anytime soon:
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.