How the idea of what isn't is, and what is isn't, thrives in our culture
by James May • April 24, 2011
Update: On April 26 The Root now has a link to an article about the McDonalds beating of a transgendered person but at the very bottom of their front page; if the racial roles had been reversed my opinion is that it would've been in their headline box. The article is matter of fact but at the bottom are comments criticising the girls involved in the beating. The comments seem half hearted to me and have that 'we have to put them in' token feel rather than any outrage that usually permeates such articles at The Root when the shoe is on the other foot.
The bad news is that there is a new story about the 46 worst racist comments Rush Limbaugh ever made. Since comments that occupy the same intellectual space can be found in The Root's own 'Blackest White People We Know' feature, it's typical of the racial double standard at The Root. One can well imagine we won't be seeing the 46 worst racist comments Jaime Foxx has made on his radio show, especially ones involving underage children he and his staff did live on air. 'Justice' is a funny and elusive word at The Root.
Agitation, blame and morals based on race, class, and gender are a simple reality in America at the end of this first decade of the 21st century and need to be projected into the future as being a growing problem due to immigration and a continued addiction to political correctness, both by liberal whites and minorities; it's always possible someone will pay attention however unlikely.
Ironically, the only place the PC cultural relativism argument does not apply is in regard to the European culture in America that is the most obviously front and center on just about everything under the sun when it comes to success, because a white political candidate in this country could never call on European Americans to vote as President Obama has called on black and Latino Americans in the past. That's okay by me because I wouldn't want to be called on to vote by skin color or gender but rather with the greater good in mind - to me that's what it means to be an American, that's the dream to aspire to.
The only culture within America that has physically put in place a culture based on the greater good are European males if you wish to put a true name on it without the PC shield. In return, those disenfranchised or minorities who most benefit from their new equality continue to lambaste those same European males from head to toe as racists, bigots, homophobes, and misogynists, as if nothing has changed in America. They see Thomas Jefferson writing political tracts about freedom while whipping his slaves and oppressing his wife as if it were only yesterday and a thing to be constantly held up to scrutiny. Contemporary black Americans also appropriate slavery as if they they themselves were slaves or that black folks were the only people in the world ever enslaved and the only people in the world to never indulge in slavery; I'm surprised the word 'slave' hasn't been trademarked by some enterprising black American.
Black Americans seem to have no idea of the hypocrisy and racism implicit in making a connection to dead people based on skin color but seem to like the idea. When that same idea is used in turn to connect black Americans to gang violence then they don't like it. When white people have an opposite view where the are not connected by skin color which one would think would be the non-racist goal, black Americans don't like that either, because it doesn't allow them to blame white folks for what dead people did or what criminals did. As I said, that idea of connection by skin goes only one way and it always goes in favor of black Americans and always against white Americans no matter how you gerrymander and corral the words or flip ideas one on top of the other. That's because fairness and reality have nothing to do with this story because the real story from the point of view of people of color when it comes to racism is really simple: it is, white people bad, people of color good, no matter what.
Those who benefited most from the European-American Constitutional idea of the greater good give none in return but continue to agitate from their own peculiar views of the world as if that world and its history revolves around each of their special interests. That's all okay for them as they insist European Americans don't agitate from their own peculiar views which in reality are not all that peculiar since they encompass everything under the sun under an umbrella including that of gender and race; still, European Americans are not to agitate which is okay with them since they actually do live in a post-racial world while being accused of the exact opposite by Obama's world view and its supporters who are in fact no way post-racial unless you think a mindset trapped in an era of slavery, lynchings and Jim Crow is post-racial.
There are certain things European Americans deserve credit for as a direct result of the values and talents of their own culture which is pretty much a little bit of everything if you think in terms of the context of why everyone in the world admires the results of European-American culture. However, in PC America, those European Americans are not allowed to lay claim for the results of their deeds which are very real and demonstrable entities but which are not seen by the double standard of political correctness to belong to European Americans but to belong to all. The theory is that cultures that are not European based can not only lay prideful claim to what they do while Europeans can't, but also to things they demonstrably do not do; that theory amounts to a religious face since its results are nowhere evident in the world. When it comes to hypocrisy, ethnic and gender based culture it is a whirlwind of Orwellian perception and hypocrisy, based, not on reality, but on blame, entitlement, excuses and a vision of justice that is narrow and self-serving.
The meek are inheriting the earth because those of the rainbow coalition who agitate the most in the early 21st century are those who contribute and have contributed the least and yet expect some kind of standing ovation for just existing, perhaps for just being innocent as this is their greatest superpower, or for surviving the dual oppressions of white male exploitation and difficult to match innovation. Those European Americans and their traditions that do in fact deserve a standing ovation, which is why half the world is barging into America, are relegated to the sidelines, hapless observers of their own demise and with it, the most sophisticated culture that ever existed on this earth.
I'll say this right out: when things are so bad that many Americans are at least covertly glancing over their shoulders at the days when these special groups occupied a completely different social space, then you know things are bad. Greater good - who were the bad old days bad for?
On April 18, 2011 a transgendered white person was attacked at a Baltimore McDonalds by 2 black women [1] and much of it recorded by a cell phone camera. Had the victim been a transgendered black person and the assailants white, there would have arisen a hue and cry across America with round table discussions on every mainstream news show and with the major attention of every black culture website in the nation; Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Roland Martin, Tavis Smiley and the usual cast of characters would have been in full stride.
The fact that Sharpton and his ilk are nowhere to be seen on this incident points up how brazen black American culture is when it comes to an interest in justice dispensed by race while at the same time decrying that same mode of justice if it were done by whites as racist and unconstitutional. What in the world the American black community is thinking of is beyond me because on this issue men like Sharpton are making an argument for racism and not against it though I have little doubt they emphatically believe otherwise. On the other hand, maybe some of them are financial polemicists and just don't care.
The way black Americans see justice is textbook on how to be a racist and not the opposite. White Americans pretty much endure it and don't say or see a thing because in the United States, where racism is and where it is said to be are two completely different things; black culture websites are a perfect example and there are no white equivalents. Such websites reflect black culture within America and it is a culture that is steeped in race as the very narrow basis of their interests in society and how they first and foremost define themselves while denying the same definition to white European Americans as racist. Either both viewpoints are both racist or neither are. To indulge in an activity you deny to others as racist is to admit you yourself are a racist.
The Duke Lacrosse Scandal is an example how black Americans view race and crime when circumstances favor that view; though eventually shown to be a fraud black Americans jumped to a guilty verdict and showed great interest in the affair whereas had the woman in question been white black Americans would have been silent because as a culture they show no interest in justice except how it is applied to them. It is left to white Americans to not only carry out color blind justice but to carry the tag of being a culture that does the complete opposite.
There is an expression that goes that if you treat a man like a dog then don't be surprised if he acts like one. With so many really awful stories in the way of racial double standards coming out of the black American community one has to wonder why they are not more circumspect in being so conspicuously racial about everything under the sun. Though black Americans have enjoyed a racial honeymoon since the end of Jim Crow that allows the double standard to continue, it is evident that black Americans are not making any friends by behaving in the exact opposite manner they insist others do and that privately, among people who just happen to be not black, the honeymoon and shine of the mid-60s is starting to wear thin.
The savage McDonalds beatdown has occasioned little attention in the liberal main stream press which shares many of the same double standards about race in America as do minorities. At 'The Root', a prominent black culture website, 6 days after the McDonalds beating, there was no mention of the incident and there is absolutely no doubt that had the racial make up been reversed the complete opposite would have been the case.
At The Root for that April 24, 2011, they had this story on their front page: "'Dilbert' Creator Defends Gwyneth Paltrow From Black Writer by Hayat Mohamed" who is yet another black writer. Mohamed concludes his story about Paltrow being attacked for and defending the idea of privilege in her life, white privilege to be frank, with the following observation: "And last time we checked, being a smart and driven black woman was much more of a challenge than being someone who was born with a silver spoon in her mouth."
Do you need to really believe that such an attitude is NOT part and parcel of the black zeitgeist in America when you can see it on full display every single day? The Paltrow story and the accompanying attitude is typical of mainstream black websites in America which see everything through a lens of race in prominent displays of self-interest. Would a white mainstream site to do such things as are routine on black sites, they'd be pilloried out of existence; hard to say since there are no such things as a white mainstream website with news for whites.
There are no white websites with white celebrities featured that talk about white culture or white poets or how many whites died in a plane crash or Pulitzer Prize winning photos taken in white war zones. There are no white sites with a feature called 'The Whitest Black Folks We Know', a reversal of a title of a feature at The Root. One can only imagine the reaction from rainbow liberals and black Americans at such a feature, one where a black singer is patted on the head for possessing some imaginary white emotional musical expression doled out normally only to whites or invented by them, or how one black politician is whiter than another white politician because he grew up in a richer family, remarking on a black politician's thin lips, or giving out a 'ivy league pass' rather than a 'ghetto pass' to a black man for acting white, or celebrating as white a black news anchor for reporting from so many white countries, or accolades for black singers who sing white music.
How about this, where I make minor changes to a quote on The Root about L.A. Lakers coach Phil Jackson and envision a black hockey coach instead: "Something about the way he moves, his confident and laid-back demeanor, and his success in hockey both as a player and as a coach had some folks convinced that the blood of Mother Europe ran through his veins."
How about featuring black celebrities who look white, or something about black celebrities who date white women? It is really amazing to go through this stuff on The Root and realize to what extent I myself would be singled out as a racist were I to do the same thing. The point is that it doesn't offend me, not at all. What matters is that I would not be allowed to do the same thing. The fact that there is no white expression of such a desire is not the point, it's the principle of the thing. And there is the fact that there are adjuncts to this double standard which creep over into areas where it does matter and result in very real and race based favoritism in affirmative action programs and voter fraud or intimidation cases.
If color is only skin deep and a shallow means of interpreting the inner worth of a person then it is strange to see such a fascination distributed so freely within black culture; this is not practicing what you preach but the complete opposite and the very definition of a perceptual trap.
There is in fact a story about a McDonalds on the front page of The Root but it is about 4 black folks getting run over by a car in Cleveland during McDonalds National Hiring Day.
Also on the front page of The Root is a story about how Kobe Bryant's recent use of the phrase 'fucking faggot' caught on tape during an NBA game isn't as bad as that terrible of terrible's, the n-word. The headline for that story is "Why Kobe's Slur Wasn't Anti-Gay" There were no sports stories about hockey on The Root - for a balanced and non-racial view of sports you'd have to go to a racist European operated main stream website.
There was also a story on the front page of The Root about how M.C. Hammer will be giving 'his advice to minority entrepreneurs'. Do I have to say what would happen if a white celebrity would advocate business start-ups for white people? This type of blithe racism is not only typical of black American culture in the 21st century but it is endemic within that community. How black Americans see it as any thing other than the racism it is is beyond me but I suspect one has to work at it.
Over at Black Voices website, there is also no mention of the McDonalds affair but there is a front page story about the issue of how black children adopted by white parents are challenged when it comes to having their hair managed.
On Black America Web, there was no story about the McDonalds beating but there were many stories about the world of blackness which is not easy to do when you think of the fact that that world is only a small part of the real world and that you kind of have to dig for stories when you are dedicated to the idea of black balling stories with no racial dimension to them.
The truth of the matter is that everyone who is not a black American is expected to watch documentaries or read stories about the accomplishments of black American culture in an appreciative way and take the whole thing with good will and good humor. I have no problem with that. However the truth is that whites are not allowed to do the same thing; it is considered as supremacist, racist, offensive, arrogant and disenfranchising. Apparently it is good to be proud and do well as long as you don't do too well. In such a case the PC answer in America is to play down white culture and play up black, Latino, gay and women's culture - give them special days and weeks and months.
If I were to sit at a restaurant table with a black man and a white women and expect the same good will and good humor that is expected of me when listening to black folks talk about jazz or hip-hop culture or women who talk about their contributions to the arts and sciences, I would be sorely disappointed. Basically, if I sat at a restaurant table next to a window with these two people I could pretty much point at any manifestation of technology or innovation within the restaurant or out on the street and take credit for virtually everything in sight when it comes to European cultural accomplishment and using the same standards that black and feminist historians use for their own achievments.
There is not a doubt in my mind that smiles would wain and grow grim as I pointed to everything and said, 'It's mine, my doing, my culture, all of it.' Doing such a thing is in bad form and considered to be impolite if done by a European-American - politically incorrect would be the more proper term since it involves ignoring reality in favor of a mythical agenda based on cultural relativism, diversity and multiculturalism. In short, it is a philosophy that is a madman's philosophy and yet it resides at the very heart of the modern American zeitgeist. It is a monstrous hypocrisy in the same sense that political correctness is a monstrous and destructive form of politeness - I say monstrous because one is divorced from reality in a day by day manner that ensures delusion as the basis of ones actions rather than simple observation.
It is so bad that even the President of the United States of America indulges in the delusions associated with a politically correct racial lens and is allowed to indulge in it. To anyone who knows how to spot racism it cannot be hidden because a racist always slips but it can be denied if the cultural imperative is great enough - racism from those who are special groups is ignored and diminished - racism from whites is publicized and magnified, even when it really isn't there as the Tea Party is a perfect example of. The Tea Party is no where near the racialist organization the Congressional Black Congress openly is and yet there it sits, at the seat of American government, with some kind of special dispensation and shield and permissions when it comes to prominently advocating, associating and taking hostile positions by race. The generation of the CBC and Obama have not simply had the 'whites only' sign taken away, they have kept it and now it's used in a philosophical space wherein black Americans have not just aspired to equality but a form of payback and so now 'racism' is a 'whites only' section. One need only look at the new goals at the Obama administration's Dept. of Justice headed by the bigoted Eric Holder.
Holder started out his new career as the Attorney General of the United States by holding a press conference where he accused Americans of being 'a nation of cowards' when it came to dialogues on race and there is little doubt that he meant white America since one cannot get black Americans to shut up about race.
Holder was introduced to members of the DOJ by Acting Assistant Attorney General Loretta King who reportedly pointed to Holder and a photo of President Obama and remarked: "I can’t tell you how exciting it is to go to work every day, and look up at the photos, and see that we now have two black men running the country.", a remark that, had it been done by a white person would have been a career ender. [2]
The DOJ dropped a voter intimidation case against 2 members of the New Black Panther Party, an utterly racist organization, that was a case the DOJ had already won by default. A former employee at the DOJ named Christian Adams resigned in protest and has reported on the new imperatives at the DOJ whereby he alleges that charges of racism are applied only to whites since, because of the black history of racial oppression, blacks will not be charged with colorblind standards of the law but will in fact benefit from being black by not having cases and charges pursued against them. While some have refuted Adams assertions, the video of two New Black Panthers outside a polling station and other video on YouTube of one of them, Minister King Samir Shabazz, aka Maurice Heath yelling, "You want freedom? You're gonna have to kill some crackers! You're gonna have to kill some of their babies!" "I hate white people – all of them! Every last iota of a cracker, I hate 'em". [3]
Eric Holder is the man who had the DOJ sue the state of Arizona over SB 1070, the immigration bill said to be racist by its opponents because it encouraged racial profiling. After he filed the lawsuit, Holder admitted on national television that he had not read SB 1070. It was Obama and Skip Gates all over again except there was no mention of Holder having 'acted stupidly' as the situation merited. It is taken for granted that a racist pattern of police profiling against blacks exists despite the fact that the President himself is black and that blacks commit several times as much crime as whites because the thinking goes that if there is a disparity in black and white crime it must be because of the police and not the criminals and so the Gates affair is looked at as not only a typical example of police behavior but the typical reality of black innocence and was seen so by the President himself. It is part of the overarching liberal zeitgeist that those most responsible for negative conduct and outcomes are the only ones not responsible - it is a culture of blame, misplaced context, side-stepping and mitigation. Obviously there is a great divide between black and white America when it comes to perception on this issue but both sides can't be right.
In regard to racial slips by President Obama, his 20 years at the racist Trinity Church with a viciously racist black reverend named Jeremiah Wright famous for his 'God Damn America' video should tell one all they need to know about Barak Obama. The then candidate for President only left Trinity when he was tapped on the shoulder and told it was wrong - before that, Obama had no intention of leaving that church on his own initiative. Barak Obama got a pass - he got a pass because he was black and it is as simple as that.
When on the campaign trail in 2008 Barak Obama had this to say about voters in Pennsylvania who were facing unemployment: "And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." [4] In other words, the racial blame so typical of people from Obama's world view is projected in the form of the President's own racism and racial lens onto others he doesn't even know, apparently confident that other cultural groups think like he does and then surprised when called out on it; that statement by Obama is very revealing.
Obama's relationship with the racially debauched ACORN tells its own story and if you are unfamiliar with it then you are part of the problem and not the solution.
Obama again participated in his own deconstruction in the Henry (Skip) Gates affair, a matter that happened in 2009 during his Presidency that involved a white police officer having a confrontation with a fairly well known black Harvard professor, who the President happened to know, who was trying to enter his own house. Gates got upset and accused the police officer of racism, in effect, profiling the police officer unless Gates is a mind reader. Anyone who knows about Gates knows he has built a career on an obsession with race and yet the President of the United States, our supposed 'post-racial' racialist President who does know Gates, came back with an attitude shown on national television where he applied his own racial profiling stereotype to a white police officer by suggesting Gates had been profiled but without knowing the fact of the incident; Obama clearly came down on the side of color by saying the police officer 'acted stupidly'. When people shoot from the hip as did Obama in showing his gut reaction to this issue the results can be revealing. The results can be revealing because whenever a person takes sides in a situation in which they don't know the truth, they are revealing more about themselves than about the truth.
Richard Prince on the Maynard Institute website reported this from a Wall Street Journal poll: "Among African-Americans, only 4 percent said Gates was more at fault versus 30 percent who blamed Crowley. Among whites, in contrast, 32 percent blamed Gates more, while only 7 percent blamed Crowley." [5]
I argue that in 2011 black Americans still reside in an intellectual space that is the year 1954 and there is no sign that I can see emerging from black American culture that this is going to change any time soon. The lynchings of black Americans are still invoked with regular frequency, brought out and displayed like a box of shiny medals or as a form of intellectual blackmail wherein black Americans always win a race argument no matter if black Americans kill more white Americans every decade than blacks were lynched by whites in the history of lynching. If you point that out and win the statistical argument then black Americans will drag out slavery and what will be lost in it is the same thing that is always lost when one argues such things with black Americans and that is that this is the 21st century, here and now and that the amazing rape statistics of black men on white women is seen merely as colorblind crime whereas if those statistics were reversed white people would be hoisted up and tarred and feathered in the public intellectual arena - they are any way because reality and context have nothing to do with this argument - it is an argument that African-Americans will always win and whites always lose.
This is because it is useful for people of color to never let white Americans forget their sins against African-Americans or the world for that matter; unfortunately it is an opportunistic argument that black Americans use whereby what is a race crime one day is merely man's inhumanity to man the next - it just depends on how useful the argument is. If a black man commits a crime against a white man then it is simply because the criminal is mean but if it is the other way around it is racism. All the millions of words with their Byzantine logic written by black Americans to prove what racists whites are and how important skin color is when it suits them and how important it is not when that view suits them would be unnecessary were black Americans to simply buy into the human argument of man's inhumanity to man instead of dispensing morality by skin color. To do otherwise mean for black Americans to lock themselves into the very place they claim to most not want to be and to pull down the arguments of Martin Luther King not to mention accomplishing a form of segregation themselves.
It seems the argument on the part of black Americans is that it is only 'black culture' when it is positive or something that black Americans can take credit for. If a thing is seen in a negative light then it is not black culture but reverts to a more human context and if an innovation is seen to be outside the context of black culture then it is considered polite to not mention it.
The truth hurts - you can't tell the truth in America - truth is racist. Enacting the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization act in no way absolved European-American males of charges of racism; in that sense, it was a non-event. Any European-American wanting to repeal that Act would face virulent charges of racism - in other words, it is a situation where European-Americans never win, not ever. Use your own examples, the civil rights laws maybe - European-Americans are always going to occupy the wrong side the equation when it comes to race no matter what they do and black and Latino Americans will always occupy the right side of this equation no matter what they do and standing right next to them are gay folks and feminists. Reality and fairness have nothing to do with it since reality itself has been relegated to the status of an enabler of racism.
Like anti-Western muslim fundamentalism, this theme is one born out of a lack of self-esteem and bewilderment as to why people so equal aren't can't show it and so needing a plethora of explanations why this is so and reality doesn't fit the bill because it is the initial source of this vision and realization. It is a type of cultural absolution steeped in resentment and excuses that has no use for reality, observation, common sense or logic. If we kept score in sports the same way as we do in gauging success or failure in the social arena, every game would be a tie. That is the message at sites like "The Root".
[1] AP/Huffington Post, 'Chrissy Lee Polis, Victim In Maryland McDonald's Attack, Alleges Hate Crime', April 24, 2011
[2] J. Christian Adams: 'DOJ Opponents of Race-Neutral Law Should Explain Themselves; July 6, 2010 Pajamas Media
[3] Chelsea Schilling: 'Want freedom? Kill some crackers!', July 7, 2010, WorldNetDaily
[4] Mayhill Fowler: 'Obama: No Surprise That Hard-Pressed Pennsylvanians Turn Bitter', April 11, 2008, Huffington Post
[5] Richard Prince: 'Gates Incident Bares Racial Polarization, July 29, 2009, Maynard Institute