by James May • May 19, 2011
Once again the conspicuous voices of the black American intelligentsia break out in a nearly solid chorus of advocacy and concern centered solely around skin color to no one's surprise outside that myopic community who has eyes to see; that community is the obtuse, contradictory and bewildering world of Afrocentric philosophy where all roads lead to race.
It is that remarkable chorus of race speech that emanates from the African American community as well as the liberal Left in America that is so very puzzling since at the center of its own hateful racism it posits that white Americans in general, white conservatives specifically or indeed anyone who disagrees with certain policies of the Left are racists; what seems to fuel this is the view on the Left and the black elite that there is no history of black folks but only as Thomas Sowell puts it, a "history of white people's treatment of blacks." It's a strange point of view to have in 2011 and requires events long past to be constantly brought to the fore to engender arguments for today's world.
It concerns me this hate speech is being accepted not only in mainstream venues by way of people who work at CNN and MSNBC but similarly institutionalized by universities such as Princeton, Syracuse and Tulane among many others. This points up the true danger of hate speech being one where it gradually inserts itself into a public dialogue in a way that becomes quite accepted and therefore blindsides a nation because of its very sheen of approval. It also concerns me that, like the Jews were blamed for all the ills of Europe by Hitler's regime, so too does the black elite in America blame white folks for all the ills of black people in America and to a lesser extent abroad. Like the Nazis in Europe in regards to Jews, the black elite in America posits that black folks are good and white people are bad and comes up with the rhetoric to support such views after the fact, leaving common sense by the side of the road and a nonsensical philosophical core consisting of nothing more than disdain and even hatred for whites. The fact that this philosophy is so very public, even when it comes to the topic electing a man to the Presidency of the United States out of its core, it should be troubling to more people but it is not.
On the part of those "racists" on the conservative Right attacked by this philosophical core, there is no sign of a monumental rhetorical discourse centered around race except in so far as fending off attacks of being racist in the first place by the "progressive" political Left in America. On the contrary, that massive rhetorical discourse centered around race emanates almost exclusively and conspicuously from the African American community and it's "elite" thinkers and writers and teachers. What the Left does is look for signs of racism and does find some in the way of emails from conservatives making fun of blacks such as a picture of President Obama as a member of a family of monkeys or Gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino's 2008 video of African tribesman supposedly preparing for President Obama's inauguration and there's more in the way of such things here and here.
I am neither a Conservative nor a Republican but the way I see such things is like this: these examples of racism from the political Right do not seem to reflect an overarching rhetoric among white folks, Conservatives or Republicans that can be so easily and consistently found within the writings of the black elite in America.
If I am wrong, then show me the writings, the mainstream essays, the lectures, the interviews, the teachers and the college courses that in any way reflect a pride or absorption with white race - such an overarching philosophy or interest simply doesn't exist and the overwhelming majority of people I have known in my life who are white think of such a concept, when they think of it at all, as disgusting not to say stupid and simply unworkable. To those people, race is simply a non-issue and yet the black elite would have you believe that this represents an avoidance of race issues, a cowardice and an example of the unwitting sea of white privilege white folks swim in - when put this way, it is an unwinnable and demonizing argument that forces concepts onto others they have no desire to be a part of and non-compliance is only more proof of racism.
From the black community in America, the argument for white racism seems to go something like this: white folks are speaking in code or they're keeping their racism underground and such racism as is reflected in the emails I have used as examples are just the tip of the iceberg. White racism is expressed in white privilege or prison statistics or lack of diversity in a given area. The problem with that argument is that there is no equivalent of the Black Congressional Caucus among white Americans or mainstream white cultural web sites to match black cultural web sites such as The Root and many others like it or the racial rhetoric that emanates from America's black elite or organizations formally organized around concepts of white skin color which are so tiresomely common among non-whites.
On white racist web sites like Stormfront.org or DavidDuke.com you'll find no mainstream ads for Visa or interviews with white actors or mainstream anything for that matter because such expressions of racism in America outside the black community are marginalized and discredited as they should be - in my world, there is simply no room for such nonsense although in my opinion sites such as The Root emanate from the same vile intellectual and philosophical space - one side is allowed to have traction and one is not, but such white obsessed sites should be consigned to the boondocks and The Root should be alongside them along with the entirety of the rhetoric that comes out of the African American black elite which makes no secret of its racial advocacy or its absorption and admiration for people with dark skin.
There is no case to be made in 2011 that there is a taste among white Americans for racial supremacy nor can one show cogent examples of white Americans viewing the world through a willful lens of race such as is the case among black America's elite. Evidence put forward of white racism usually consists of things implicit, tacit, anecdotal, inferred, implied, cherry picked and unconscious such as accusations of racist ads for skin cream or artificial constructs such as white privilege or examples I refer to later on of graduation cards and city council meetings where the term "black hole" is used - not exactly the stuff of cross burnings or the basis or sign of a philosophy; white racism in the past in America wasn't based on an unconscious state of unconscious slights towards black people based on harmless semantics or unwitting privilege. Among the black intelligentsia, the preponderance of blacks in prison is not a sign of a failed value system in their own community but a sure sign of white racism. Sherlock Holmes these people are not.
Contrast those considerations with what I am going to write about which on this occasion is Cornel West, "Professor of African American Studies and Religion at Princeton University", and a famous voice among black Americans, being the cause of controversy in the black American community as he took President Barack Obama to task for selling out black folks in an article posted at Truthdig on May 16 by Chris Hedges called "The Obama Deception: Why Cornel West Went Ballistic".
Anyone who has ever read or listened to West knows his entire outlook is laced with race and that this outlook is reflected by the vast majority of black intelligentsia in the United States; this is a community that disagrees on many things but a world view devoid of racial self-absorption is not one of them. In point of fact, if Cornel West and the entire black American artistic, media and educational community prohibited themselves from speaking about race for a year they would have little to say or do.
In my opinion that community couldn't do it - it's like an addiction and there would be every excuse under the sun heard as to why they should keep doing it, probably fighting injustices they in no way asked for would reside near the top of the list. However, since most of the rhetoric in the black American community stems from events long past or interprets current events as the result of a hangover from old events or simply puts forward white racism as a natural fact of life, it is evident that all they really need is a new clock and better glasses not to say a new line of patter.
West is quoted by Hedges as saying “When you look at a society you look at it through the lens of the least of these, the weak and the vulnerable; you are committed to loving them first, not exclusively, but first, and therefore giving them priority,”
One doesn't have to be a genius to figure out that this nonsensical view and the "lens" West speaks of is aimed directly at black Americans and with as much concern for justice in the sense of the greater good as one might get from a cat.
Hedges quotes West:
I was thinking maybe he [Obama] has at least some progressive populist instincts that could become more manifest after the cautious policies of being a senator and working with [Sen. Joe] Lieberman as his mentor,” he says. “But it became very clear when I looked at the neoliberal economic team. The first announcement of Summers and Geithner I went ballistic. I said, ‘Oh, my God, I have really been misled at a very deep level.’ And the same is true for Dennis Ross and the other neo-imperial elites. I said, ‘I have been thoroughly misled, all this populist language is just a facade. I was under the impression that he might bring in the voices of brother Joseph Stiglitz and brother Paul Krugman
Hedges then writes "West says the betrayal occurred on two levels" and adds this:
There is the personal level,” he says. “I used to call my dear brother [Obama] every two weeks. I said a prayer on the phone for him, especially before a debate. And I never got a call back. And when I ran into him in the state Capitol in South Carolina when I was down there campaigning for him he was very kind. The first thing he told me was, ‘Brother West, I feel so bad. I haven’t called you back. You been calling me so much. You been giving me so much love, so much support and what have you.’ And I said, ‘I know you’re busy.’ But then a month and half later I would run into other people on the campaign and he’s calling them all the time. I said, wow, this is kind of strange. He doesn’t have time, even two seconds, to say thank you or I’m glad you’re pulling for me and praying for me, but he’s calling these other people. I said, this is very interesting. And then as it turns out with the inauguration I couldn’t get a ticket with my mother and my brother. I said this is very strange. We drive into the hotel and the guy who picks up my bags from the hotel has a ticket to the inauguration. My mom says, ‘That’s something that this dear brother can get a ticket and you can’t get one, honey, all the work you did for him from Iowa.’ Beginning in Iowa to Ohio. We had to watch the thing in the hotel.
“What it said to me on a personal level,” he goes on, “was that brother Barack Obama had no sense of gratitude, no sense of loyalty, no sense of even courtesy, [no] sense of decency, just to say thank you. Is this the kind of manipulative, Machiavellian orientation we ought to get used to? That was on a personal level.
Hedges continues later on about the personal animus between West and the President:
Obama and West’s last personal contact took place a year ago at a gathering of the Urban League when, he says, Obama “cussed me out.” Obama, after his address, which promoted his administration’s championing of charter schools, approached West, who was seated in the front row.
“He makes a bee line to me right after the talk, in front of everybody,” West says. “He just lets me have it. He says, ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself, saying I’m not a progressive. Is that the best you can do? Who do you think you are?’ I smiled. I shook his hand. And a sister hollered in the back, ‘You can’t talk to professor West. That’s Dr. Cornel West. Who do you think you are?’ You can go to jail talking to the president like that. You got to watch yourself. I wanted to slap him on the side of his head.
“It was so disrespectful,” he went on, “that’s what I didn’t like. I’d already been called, along with all [other] leftists, a “F’ing retard” by Rahm Emanuel because we had critiques of the president.”
Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to the president, has, West said, phoned him to complain about his critiques of Obama. Jarrett was especially perturbed, West says, when he said in an interview last year that he saw a lot of Malcolm X and Ella Baker in Michelle Obama. Jarrett told him his comments were not complimentary to the first lady.
And West later follows up, according to Hedges, by saying about Michelle Obama, "Why not spend some time in the hood?"
Hedges' article continues and portrays a man who can only be viewed as race obsessed:
“I think my dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men,” West says. “It’s understandable. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he’s always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He is just as human as I am, but that is his cultural formation. When he meets an independent black brother, it is frightening. And that’s true for a white brother. When you get a white brother who meets a free, independent black man, they got to be mature to really embrace fully what the brother is saying to them. It’s a tension, given the history. It can be overcome. Obama, coming out of Kansas influence, white, loving grandparents, coming out of Hawaii and Indonesia, when he meets these independent black folk who have a history of slavery, Jim Crow, Jane Crow and so on, he is very apprehensive. He has a certain rootlessness, a deracination. It is understandable.
“He feels most comfortable with upper middle-class white and Jewish men who consider themselves very smart, very savvy and very effective in getting what they want,” he says. “He’s got two homes. He has got his family and whatever challenges go on there, and this other home. Larry Summers blows his mind because he’s so smart. He’s got Establishment connections. He’s embracing me. It is this smartness, this truncated brilliance, that titillates and stimulates brother Barack and makes him feel at home. That is very sad for me."
Using a term like "brilliant African father" is typical Newspeak among the black elite's rhetoric when referring to one another, strapped onto the front of black scholars names like "comrade" in the old Soviet Union, as if they themselves doubt such a possibility and it posits that apparently the main requirement for being "brilliant" is simply to be black and West's blithe belief that white folks have a "certain fear of free black men" is the type of obvious wishful thinking I would expect out of the mouth of a man who is not only a childish racist but an idiot. As a representative of a culture that continually berates white Americans for expressing their hidden racism in code, one can only express bemusement at West's lack of any kind of restraint in this sense, showing that the idea of white Americans talking in some kind of code, nonsense or not, is certainly not a requirement for the black intelligentsia in America who operate within a protective double standard that basically enables them to express their preference for people by the color of their skin in a manner white Americans would be called racists for doing and are portrayed as such in any event, even though white Americans show no signs of philosophical racial huddling in such a monumental form of rhetorical and philosophical agreement as do black Americans.
Hedges expresses West's anger at the President's policies in this way:
“This was maybe America’s last chance to fight back against the greed of the Wall Street oligarchs and corporate plutocrats, to generate some serious discussion about public interest and common good that sustains any democratic experiment,” West laments. “We are squeezing out all of the democratic juices we have. The escalation of the class war against the poor and the working class is intense. More and more working people are beaten down. They are world-weary. They are into self-medication. They are turning on each other. They are scapegoating the most vulnerable rather than confronting the most powerful. It is a profoundly human response to panic and catastrophe. I thought Barack Obama could have provided some way out. But he lacks backbone."
Adam Serwer, a man who is bi-racial and lets you know it, responded at the American Prospect on May 17, 2011 in an article titled, "To Be Black, And Also A 'Mutt'" writing the following about West's comments:
Let's be clear about where this is coming from -- West complains that Obama didn't give him and his family tickets to the inauguration and was unresponsive to his phone calls. West reveals these details in the midst of a larger critique of the president's liberal bona fides, but his real problem seems altogether personal.
West speaks in the language of common humanity, but his verbal assumptions undermine the charade. “He feels most comfortable with upper middle-class white and Jewish men who consider themselves very smart, very savvy and very effective in getting what they want,” West says, as though interracial intimacy, finding oneself "at home" with a "them" were, by definition, a form of self-hatred. My mother faced such accusations, having married my father in the late 1960s. Time has a way of excusing ignorance, but at least insults hurled in the street do not make any pretense to intellectual respectability. West believes what he is saying is profound. It is petty.
Let me be clear on what it is that Serwer pulls up short on: West is not being "petty", he is being a racist and there is no other way to put it and smearing lipstick on it as does Serwer is itself an apology for West's nearly unbridled bigotry. Add into this mix the fact that President Obama himself spent 20 years as a member of Chicago's Trinity Church whose pastor was none other than that premiere racist the good Reverend Jeremiah Wright. According to the Daily Press Wright himself famously said about the President and Jews in 2009 "Them Jews ain't going to let him talk to me,"
To his credit, Serwer follows his application of make up by all but calling out West as indeed being a racist:
In response to perceived social slights, West severs Obama from any individual claim to blackness while inviting him to accept the terms of an implicit contract by which his lost negritude might be restored. For mixed people, blackness is not accepted as a fact of existence but something negotiable, a question of membership to which those whom are Truly Black may grant you access. This gives the game away of course, the reality of race as an invention, if one we have no choice but to live with.
Growing up mixed you sometimes face a kind of confusion. Those around you press you to make a choice about how much of yourself you're willing to give up, how much you're are willing to pretend in order to claim membership in one club or another. West demands to know why Obama isn't sitting at the black table in the dining hall, while reminding him that he's only welcome there by his graces. What you eventually learn is that peace is not something the "gatekeepers" have to offer and is the last thing they want you to find. Eventually you learn the rules of the game are silly and destructive, and who you are can't be negotiated either way.
Unfortunately Serwer's racial dithering makes the same mistake people of West's ilk does right after that statement:
To some degree this is just a part of adolescence, but most people have grown out of this kind of racial pageantry by middle age. West has not, but perhaps worse, he assumes the president has not. Perhaps he did not read the president's autobiography, or he would have realized that Obama is not a lost little mulatto child who is willing to give West something in exchange for that which is not West's to trade. Obama's struggle to find peace with himself is essentially the opposite of "deracination," a term that takes on all the force of an epithet here. Obama is lambasted as a Kenyan anti-colonialist by the likes of Newt Gingrich, and as a wide-eyed surrogate of "upper middle class white and Jewish men" by the likes of West. To have one group of morons question your citizenship while others question your blackness. To have one's very being interrogated by those who, because of their own pathologies, see your difference as a kind of terrible mistake, an anomaly to be soothed with toxic balm of archaic social binaries, this is what it means to be black, and also a mutt.
Portraying President Obama as an anti-colonialist or questioning his birth certificate is not a pathology or racism but West's assertions very much are. Serwer himself has not moved beyond the simple fact that the President himself speaks the same language as does West but is smart enough to hide it although not always successfully given his remarks about Pennsylvanians being bigots and saying the police "acted stupidly" in the Henry Gates affair. Then there is the President's claim that during his 20 years at Trinity Church he never heard Rev. Jeremiah Wright talk in a racist manner when Wright in fact seems incapable of doing anything other than doing so; together this speaks to not only the President's own casual racism but his conspicuous attempts to downplay it - to see such a thing is not a pathology or projecting one's own pathologies onto the President but fact-based statements and events. One may be wrong about President Obama being an anti-colonialist but it is certainly not an expression of one's own deluded racism; Trinity Church is almost by definition anti-colonial and it's Black Liberation Theology in no way kind to white folks. Trinity's Black Liberation Theology is based on the writings of James Cone and if there was ever an analogue to Joseph Goebbels in the American black community this man is it.
James Cone neatly encapsulates the main themes of the black elite's problems with white people who simply put, they emphatically do not like; Cone writes in his book Black Theology and Black Power:
While it is true that blacks do hate whites, black hatred is not racism. All white men are responsible for white oppression. It is much too easy to say, "Racism is not my fault," or "I am not responsible for the country's inhumanity to the black man...Racism is possible because whites are indifferent to suffering and patient with cruelty.
With the NAACP jumping down the throat of Hallmark Cards because of a graduation card recording uttering the words "black hole", one can only wonder at the reception I would get from the black community were I to say "blacks are indifferent to suffering and patient with cruelty." And don't balance any plates on your head waiting for James Cone to use his own reasoning to feel responsible for black crime; in fact, it's the exact opposite.
In an interview with James Cone on Bill Moyer's Journal that I can only charitable describe as remarkable, James Cone talks about the history of lynchings and when asked about it's presence today he responds:
It's in the prisons. It's in prisons. It's all over. Prisons, I would say, is the most prominent. With black people being 12 percent of the US population and nearly 50 percent of the prison population, that's lynching. It's a legal lynching. So, there are a lot of ways to lynch a people than just hanging 'em on the tree. A lynching is trying to control the population. It is striking terror in the population so as to control it. That's what the ghetto does. It crams people into living spaces where they will self destruct, kill each other, fight each other, shoot each other because they have no place to breathe, no place for recreation, no place for an articulation and expression of their humanity. So, it becomes a way, a metaphor for lynching, if lynching is understood and as one group forcing a kind of inhumanity upon another group.
Cone thereby echoes one of the most prominent themes of the manifestation of white racism in the U.S. today among the the African American elite's writers and it pretty much boils down to the fact that black folks are always on the right side of such issues and white folks always on the wrong side. Another common theme is to spread white racism over as much of American history in terms of territory and time as possible. Cone says:
You know, racism and white supremacy is-- was not confined to the south. It was all over America. It's just expressed in different ways. So, it's as deeply-- in many ways, more deeply felt and present in the north of the - or outside the south largely because it was not acknowledged. Truth that white supremacy is as present in New York City as it is in Jackson, Mississippi. That's the truth. And when America can see itself as one, not just the south did the lynching, but it is a part of American culture, then we can figure out how we can start to overcome that. You can't overcome something if you never acknowledged its presence.
It should be noted in passing that in 1910 90% of black Americans are said to have lived in the old South so I'll leave it to you to conclude how much of a guilt ridden white supremacist a Polish farmer just arrived to central Minnesota or a white barber in Oregon a hundred years ago was. Also, it is a mystery how Lincoln ever cobbled together an army to fight the Confederate South given the white supremacy supposedly prevalent everywhere.
If you want to see an accurate view of lynching in America to counter Mr. Cone's revisionist history of the United States, visit this link at PBS.org for an interactive map that is based on statistics and not wishful hatred. The despicable Roland Martin who works for CNN Tweeted devoid of context and therefore truth: "We used to picnic to watch public hangings, but WE figured out, that was some sick s*it." Martin takes a very rare event and explodes it into a myth that makes it seem like white folks in America used to do such things as a common Saturday afternoon entertainment.
In fact some 95% of all lynchings of black folks from the end of the civil war to the end of Jim Crow were done in the former slave states. Outside of the deep south during that same period, 75% of the lynchings were of men who were not black. In total more than 80% of all lynchings occurred in the south. In an April, 2002 article in Time Magazine the following is written: "In a prefatory essay in Without Sanctuary, historian Leon F. Litwack writes that between 1882 and 1968, at least 4,742 African Americans were murdered that way." By coincidence 4,742 is the exact number cited on the PBS.org site of the total number of all lynching during that exact same time period so one has to take such things with a grain of salt when approaching this issues as it is evident that there are agendas in play.
The bottom line is that James Cone is being disingenuous to the point of breaking the truth when he discusses lynchings; in fact Cone's truth is not the truth and one only has to consult the statistics of the Tuskegee Institute, itself a black institution, to see another version of truth. The vast majority of lynchings occurred directly after the Civil War and then again from 1890 to 1925. Although I am loath to speak in such terms, were I to use Cone's own thought processes, the number of whites killed by blacks across America in the last several years alone equals all the lynchings of black folks in this entire period from 1865 to 1965. Exaggerating historical numbers for effect in comparison to contemporary events just amounts to putting blinders on one skin color in favor of another and is simply a form of lying. To a man like James Cone, skin color is what matters when it comes to murder while he bitterly accuses others of the exact same practice he so willfully indulges in himself.
Considering Cone's influence within Barack Obama's United Trinity Church, it is worth noting what Thomas Sowell wrote about Obama:
Among people who voted for President Barack Obama in 2008, those who are likely to be most disappointed are those who thought that they were voting for a new post-racial era. There was absolutely nothing in Obama's past to lead to any such expectation, and much to suggest the exact opposite. But the man's rhetoric and demeanor during the election campaign enabled this and many other illusions to flourish. Still, it was an honest mistake of the kind that decent people have often made when dealing with people whose agendas are not constrained by decency, but only by what they think they can get away with.
The comments section that follow Mr. Serwer's article earlier demonstrates the almost universal language of racial self-absorption and advocacy that uses an awful lot of words to merely trot out the same old theme which is: black people good, innocent and not racist and white people, malicious, racist and bad, while ignoring their own unabashed racist comments which have not an iota of either self-awareness or irony; the problem in all this isn't Cornel West but the cultural sea he swims in which dismisses it's own explicit racism and pretends to an awareness of issues involved in West's views without the slightest acknowledgment that there can be no issue oriented philosophy that revolves around racial advocacy - simply coming to the conclusion that white folks are racist and therefore the root cause of all the problems within the black community is not exactly a nuanced argument nor is siding with other black folks because they are black folks.
There is no real disagreement between West and his black colleagues who berate him because of his remarks about Obama since they all agree white folks are the problem - the only disagreement is in what to do about it and in terms of hate speech it is the difference between arguing about slapping a person because of their white skin or kicking them.
When Eric Holder called America a nation of cowards for not indulging in a "frank" racial dialogue it was clear who the cowards were since one cannot get the black elite to shut up for one day about race. I consider Holder saying "On Saturdays and Sundays, America in the year 2009 does not in some ways, differ significantly from the country that existed some 50 years ago" truly sad and extremely significant given the propensity of people of Holder's ilk to keep the past alive as "evidence" of white racism. Many Americans took issue with Holder's remarks.
A black writer named Charles M. Blow wrote a rather amazing op-ed about Holder's views at the N.Y. Times where he said "I take exception to Holder’s language, but not his line of reasoning" and I'm saying so it is with the black elite and Cornel West where they are of a single mind when it comes to such "reasoning". The amazing part of Mr. Blow's typical rehash of the white-as-racist-blacks-as-not scenario is where he sets out to show that before following Mr. Holder's advice "it might be helpful to have a better understanding of the breadth and nature of racial bias." Mr. Blow then starts to set us straight:
According to an ABC News/Washington Post poll released last month, twice as many blacks as whites thought racism was a big problem in this country, while twice as many whites as blacks thought that blacks had achieved racial equality. Furthermore, according to a 2003 Gallup poll, two in five of blacks said that they felt discriminated against at least once a month, and one in five felt discriminated against every day. But, a CNN poll from last January found that 72 percent of whites thought that blacks overestimated the amount of discrimination against them, while 82 percent of blacks thought that whites underestimated the amount of discrimination against blacks. What explains this wide discrepancy? One factor could be that most whites harbor a hidden racial bias that many are unaware of and don’t consciously agree with.
And that notion of white America's "hidden" and unconscious racism dovetails perfectly with the constant refrain from the black elite as it must since there is no documentation similar to the black elite's own mountains of race writing to show anything like an overtly racist philosophy on the part of white people.
Mr. Blow cites an online test called Project Implicit whose title is so ironic I'm surprised it wasn't created by a mole from the KKK and whose conclusions are worthy of a fantasy novel.
In tests taken from 2000 to 2006, they found that three-quarters of whites have an implicit pro-white/anti-black bias. (Blacks showed racial biases, too, but unlike whites, they split about evenly between pro-black and pro-white. And, blacks were the most likely of all races to exhibit no bias at all.)
Given the nature and quantity of black web sites and writings on race when it comes to the American black intelligentsia, that is about as self-serving a piece of science fiction as you'll likely ever come across. The rest of the article invokes the usual cheap psychology so prevalent among race speakers and tries to pass it off as science but which is worthy of the moronic Bell Curve. I recommend the article as a lesson on how people can ignore the obvious and provable and see the hidden with no problem at all with the help of a test that shows that no one is in control of the way they think, especially white folks.
These types of circular and self-congratulatory arguments run roughshod through the logic and writings of virtually the entirety of the black elite in America and they are in no way hidden and need no "tests" to ferret out and proposing that a group of people who think the most about race are in fact guilty of thinking the least about race is a type of lunacy mixed with hypocrisy that is particular to all forms of formulaic hate speech.
We're talking about a philosophy prominent within a community of self-styled intellectuals where bigotry comes first and the rationale to back it up comes a distant and pitiful second. Unbelievably, Mr. Blow quotes another study that takes whites to task for not “talking about race, or even acknowledging racial difference.” What racial difference? I thought the whole point was that race doesn't matter. Chauncey DeVega in his destruction of at the time possible Presidential candidate Herman Cain writes of his grandmother's belief "that black folks are like everyone else."
DeVega takes Cain and conservative Republicans to task because they "recycle conservative fantasies of self-made men and women, the dime-novel Horatio Alger tale, and embrace the myth of meritocracy." Since such a value system is in fact the very basis of success in America it becomes plain to see that only failure can result in rejecting such values and failure is what you have and the blame to go with. What is the opposite of such a value system that would in any way enable success? In fact Mr. DeVega despises the very value systems that would do the community he so lovingly advocates for by skin color the most good and that is the Catch-22 and perceptual trap Mr. DeVega finds himself in since nothing good can emerge from racist philosophies and its attendant hate speech. In fact, Mr. DeVega has traded sides with Adolph Hitler and Jesse Owens and it is the wrong side. Mr. DeVega, like so many of his ilk, is addicted to glibness and passes it off as an articulate argument.
It's ignorance on top of stupidity on top of insanity and one doesn't have to look very far to see the reasons for failure in the black community if such systems of success are rejected as myths but without putting forward a means to success other than getting white people to admit to and stop being inveterate racists. To suggest that Mr. DeVega's reasoning and his article itself is degenerate is putting a kind face on it. Where fantasy in fact lies is in Mr. DeVega's view of American history and in the nature of human beings, altering that nature as he sees fit in order to bolster his "reasoning". While Mr. DeVega at least show he understands the idea of projection when he writes about "a projection of white fantasies", he has no documentation to back up his assertions as do I in this essay or awareness that he is the one doing the projecting.
Once a person establishes that race does makes us different then one is opening that Pandora's Box wherein those differences by race can then be specific and both good or bad and that is a view that once bruited about cannot be controlled in a manner where it does not bite the hand that opens such a box since racism doesn't choose sides or have eyes to distinguish friend from foe.
Joan Walsh had an article at Salon where she writes "The only good thing about the (West) fracas is that maybe, finally, America will learn that there's no monolithic 'black community' and no one set of black leaders: The diversity of African-American opinions about the West-Obama tangle has been fascinating." This is itself fascinating for its inability to see the truth she and her political correctness prevent her from seeing since if a 95% vote for Obama doesn't represent a "monolithic 'black community'" then I don't know what does.
Ms. Walsh continues later perhaps "Obama defenders being attacked racially and personally, have wonderful and sincere reasons for continuing to support him fervently." Well, that's all fine and good but, assuming Ms. Walsh is speaking of Obama's black supporters, we don't have to guess at their "wonderful and sincere reasons" given the 95% black vote and the obvious racial advocacy combined with the just as obvious disdain for white people and their endemic racism in the form of hate speech that would do a Nazi proud.
This isn't about name calling but documenting racial rhetoric in the form of consistent and very public views and philosophies by the black elite in America as opposed to a vacuum of such rhetoric from white mainstream writers - there is no moral equivalency that amounts to the idea that there are always two sides to an argument but a clearly documented case with a paper trail that could be laid out in a court of law while the case on the other side has a lack of such a paper trail and relies on white racism reflected in white privilege and crime statistics, as if the people who don't do the crime are the most responsible - that doesn't work in a courtroom nor in debate.
As with the writers among the black elite themselves, Ms. Walsh misses the point that this so-called gentlemen's disagreement among the black elite all still agree that the monster on the block is white America. The lamentable Latoya Peterson at Racialicious not only agrees with my own assessment but incredibly endorses what I criticize by in turn criticizing Ms. Walsh's assessment of the West fracas for implying "that analysis of political opinion through the lens of race and other identities is without merit." What more do you need? Ms. Peterson not only admits it but considers it right! Ms. Peterson further endorses my own assessment of what the black elite consider the equivalent of a paper trail documenting white racism by pointing at "racist emails, sound bites and placards featuring Obama in tribal dress with a bone through his nose?" Ask yourself: which wins in a debate: a mountain of careful philosophizing on a daily basis by the black elite in essays or anecdotal evidence? Hard for me to lose this debate when I have the people I'm debating agreeing with my point of view. Ms. Peterson adds:
Of course the election of the first non-white president has sparked lots of debate of race and racism, just as Hillary Clinton’s historic run for the White House sparked talk of gender and naked sexism. We are a highly gender- and race-biased country. Having a man of color or a woman in prominent and powerful spaces touches a sore spot.
And there you have the perfect case of projection I'm talking about; such things are a sore spot for her and no one else unless she can show it by proof - it has nothing to do with me or anyone else without a name or face except for gender and white skin color she automatically and smugly presumes dictates sexism and racism while absolving herself and the entire black community of being vulnerable to the exact same things in the exact same proportion. There is always the scent of the moral high ground among black writers when it comes to such issues but with no evidence of the actual morality to back it up given the hateful and racist nature of their rhetoric.
It is simply assumed that black Americans occupy a position of defense and innocence and are in a very real sense in no way responsible for failures in terms of academic achievement or crime but that white Americans are. It is implicit in the writings and interviews of nearly the entirety of the black elite from James Cone to Michael Eric Dyson, from Cornel West to Ta-Nehisi Coates, from Boyce Watkins to Nikki Giovanni, from Alice Walker to Angela Davis, from Jesse Jackson to Al Sharpton, from Tavis Smiley to Roland Martin, from Harry Belafonte to Louis Farrakhan, from Melissa Harris-Perry to Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and from a further host of writers to numerous to put down here.
What those writers have developed is a definition of racism that allows black folks to advocate and self-connect by race til the cows come home but even the slightest hint of such a thing on the part of anyone else is instantly denounced as racism. This is the reason problems within the black community are not even honestly addressed let alone fixed since the culprit is already known and in the bag and it is white America and so it is white Americans that must be addressed as the source of black problems and also as the means to fix such problems.
Ms. Peterson makes the rhetorical comment: "I’d like to talk about whether black people are really more loyal to Barack Obama than, say, Bill Clinton." Really? Are you kidding me? How many black folks cried when Clinton was elected; why was President Obama's inauguration a virtual NAACP convention?
This mountain of rhetoric centered around black advocacy for black people while pillorying whites as racist for not even thinking the same way but which is nevertheless taken on faith is just abysmal. The rhetorical question for black Americans whether they ever think of anything but black Americans would, I guarantee you, be entirely lost on the African American intelligentsia. This is because their imperatives derive from an era of slavery and Jim Crow but it is the 21st century and they either refuse to or are simply unable to connect those simple dots.
The black community in America is slinging onto faceless white Americans in their millions racist nonsense that is no where evident in any kind of monumental agreement in art or literature among whites or a demonstrable feeling that there is even such a thing as a white culture let alone one that is self-absorbed with thoughts of race or disdain for black people; it can't be shown and it can't be proven, certainly not through direct observation but the black elite has developed a special vision and rhetorical argument and steadfast belief based on a correct reading of society's tea leaves that white racism is not only present but that it is obvious - black failure doesn't exist in a vacuum but is directly connected to white people and white success does not exist in a vacuum but is built on black failure. The ways the black community has developed to arrive at such conclusions are worthy of a trip to Alice's Wonderland - cause and effect is thrown out the door and one sees racism in reflections and by its shadow. The result has been an infallible belief within the black community that they themselves are incapable of racism which has led to the most startling expressions of their own racism and on a daily basis.
On May 17 Cornel West appeared on "The Ed Show" on MSNBC and denied his comments about the President were personal and instead said "I am relentlessly criticizing him in the name of the plight and predicament of poor children, mistreated workers, those unfairly incarcerated;" Since those West mentions are obviously black folks and those "unfairly incarcerated" are in some fantasy world of West's entirely black folks while white prisoners are apparently fairly incarcerated, all West's does here is offer further proof that he operates from the same intellectual space as does any racist hate group; keep in mind: this guy is a professor at Princeton University. In my opinion West has no business teaching at any public institution in this country - you may as well hire David Duke if you want a non-stop cavalcade of advocacy and blame by race.
Melissa Harris-Perry of Princeton University now moving to Tulane University appeared on that same segment directly after Cornel West and she only affirms that the black intelligentsia only really disagrees on the extent to and direction in which the President has been successful as the President of Black America and not whether he should be - there is no disagreement within the black elite about black advocacy by the President. Miss Harris-Perry said:
This is a President who signed an act that actually reduces the ways in which we go after marijuana, make it harder to put people in jail around cocaine at the Federal level, actually liberating more black bodies from the criminal justice system...
To me, that is an incredible statement to make in public since it apparently says that black folks use more marijuana and cocaine than anyone else and that to cope with it marijuana and cocaine laws need decriminalizing - why says Ms. Harris-Perry? Well, it's simple: she's black and those being prosecuted are black and that is all she needs. The greater issue of justice is nowhere to be found as it applies to people in general nor is such an interest to be found at the NAACP, the Congressional Black Caucus or among America's black intellectuals - the concept of the greater good and the carrying on of that tradition is unfortunately left to racist whites. The Horatio Alger story which reflects a meritocracy so disdained among black writers is in fact a recognition that good things are where you find them and not where you expect to find them. By extension, this means that bad things are also going to occupy that same space. The idea that hate speech is always going to come from a guy in a white hood or wearing a swastika arm band and so ignoring all else is hopelessly childish.
In the case of Ms. Harris-Perry it is especially surprising to hear such nonsense coming from a person who claims to despise racism and sees that racism in white folks while utterly unable to see it in herself. Let's have a version of her comments with President Bush saying something like her statement about liberating white "bodies" from the prison system and see how quickly the Goebbels/Nazi/hate speech comparison sticks. These people in America's black elite don't even make a secret of their racism and no one challenges them on it, least of all each other.
Miss Harris-Perry admits on camera that not only did President Obama decriminalize laws that are unfavorable to black folks but that she's happy he did it and thinks it's right. I'm not sure how it could be the goal of anyone but an utter racist to liberate people from the criminal justice system based on their skin color but that it is the goal of this woman is undeniable and echoes Michael Eric Dyson's own moronic commentary on this issue wherein he states that "there is a vicious prison system that hungers for young black and brown bodies."
In regards to this on June 1, 2011 the New York Times ran a story called "Retroactive Reductions Sought in Crack Penalties." The story says that "the vast majority of the overall group consists of black men..."
I find it amusing that Ed Schultz can have a woman like Ms. Harris-Perry who is a clearly a racist on his program and be nice and friendly to her but one week later on his radio show refer to Laura Ingraham as a "right-wing slut" for being critical of Obama. There is some really disturbing disconnect there because no matter how wrong Ingraham was in her portrayal of Obama it just doesn't rise to the level of advocating the gerrymandering of laws around skin color which is clearly racist. Schultz received a one week ban from his MSNBC TV show for his radio comments but he should've received it for being so chummy with 2 racists like West and Harris-Perry.
No doubt Ms. Harris-Perry feels that criminal laws are unfairly slanted against people of color but saying that and it being true are two different things. In Ms. Harris-Perry's view, I'm guessing she thinks that an inequality is being addressed that targets "black bodies" and so it is only right that laws that right that wrong target those same "black bodies." The question is really one of taking it for granted that our system and white people in general unfairly punish black criminals rather than resorting to the idea that people who commit crimes are the arbiters of their own destiny.
Are we to now decriminalize laws based on how popular crime is within a given sub-culture of American life and base the idea on white racism no one can show exists except by distorting statistics and reason and logic? If most of the people who are arrested for using meth-amphetamine are white, is there something wrong with the law or with the value system of people who break the law? If, for whatever cultural reasons, cocaine is more popular within the black community than in other groups, should we then say the law is a "profiling" law - isn't the culture "profiling" and targeting itself not to mention breaking the law - what does it matter how harsh the penalties are when one can simply not break the law? The whole thought process of Ms. Harris-Perry sounds an awful lot like discussing people who can't control themselves.
Miss Harris-Perry is just another in a long line of racists within the black American community for which she claims for that community that "there's always heterogeneity, there is no one black community, it's part of what makes us great" and the italics on the us are mine since it is a degenerate word to use considering the amount of bile extended towards white folks at the thought of using the word us for themselves or even worse, them, to refer to black folks.
It's a moot point since white folks in America don't really think of themselves as an us since, contrary to the Ms. Harris-Perry's claims of black "heterogeneity" when it comes to white Americans being a group of racists, white Americans in no way huddle around the type of racial rhetoric black Americans do. To use the word "heterogeneity" within the context of the African American community is laughable in light of the absurd 95% black vote in favor of Obama which speaks to an interest in skin color devoid of issues unless by issues one means advocating for black folks. In fact, the mind set prevalent in articles written by the black elite are so similar in view when it comes to the idea of white people being a group of unapologetic racists that they often seem as if they were written by the same author.
If white Americans really did think in the manner people like Ms. Harris-Perry accuse them of, President Obama wouldn't be President and it's as simple as that - if white Americans thought like black Americans, their vote would've been 95% in favor of John McCain but this type of thinking is too plain and obvious for the arcane rhetoric and reasoning built around demonizing white folks as racists and excusing black folks for ever being capable of the same, even when it's obvious; that's what makes it hate speech.
You have a person like Ms. Harris-Perry who was actually a teacher at Princeton and so one need not look very far to understand why a type of reverse racism has become institutionalized in America based on the casual and unquestioned view that white people are endemic racists. How this "doublethink" has traction at such an institution is simply beyond my ability to comprehend since it is empty and the exact opposite of the term intellectual or higher learning. Stanley Crouch feels otherwise and portrays Ms. Harris-Perry TV appearances as containing "answers to questions about race and ethnicity that are well thought-out and articulated in a communicative speaking style." Since their is no moral dimension indicated other than the lack of one which I have laid out, one can presume to say the same about Joseph Goebbels.
If one needed any more evidence of Ms. Harris-Perry's utter obsession with race you will find her writing's suffused with not only race, but the penchant of black intellectuals to connect present day events to events long dead, as if the black community were reading newpaper headlines from 1855 that only they can see. In an April 29, 2011 article originally posted to The Nation called, unsurprisingly, "For Birthers, Obama's Not Black Enough", Ms. Harris-Perry lays out a case for her own endemic racism and not of that of anyone else. And there is this, also from The Nation called, "Are We All Black Americans Now?" in yet another disgusting example of how all roads lead to black folks and Ms. Harris-Perry's utter immersion in the idea of present tense white supremacy connected to the past and a context that ignores the larger world in favor a ethnocentrism that is staggering in its obsessive quality.
Reflecting that obsession with blackness and the idea that white people are simply racists, there is also this article about Ms. Harris-Perry by Jamal Eric Watson from Feb.28, 2011 in which he writes:
Scholars say that Harris-Perry’s biggest contribution to the field is explaining how Black people negotiate the dueling identities of being both minorities and Americans in a country where racism is very much a part of the dominant culture.
I urge you to read Mr. Watson's article and ponder what would happen if these self-congratulatory intellectuals ever read their own articles, changed the characters to a white writer writing about race in such a morally one-sided and patently offensive manner and come to see that they are the very epitome of all they self-righteously claim to hate. Mr. Watson's article is so delusional and so loving of blacks and so derisive of whites that I can only say that anyone thinking of sending their kids to Tulane University where Ms. Harris-Perry is establishing a new career should have their head examined.
Suffice it to say that any white person who wrote books with such titles and subject matter as Ms. Harris-Perry does would be completely ostracized from any possibility of a career in teaching or gigs on MSNBC and rightly so; the fact that white Americans show no signs of any interest in such an appalling hobby puts paid to notions among America's black elite about white racism and why they so consistently have to resort to either the distant past or arcane explanations and interpretations of current events to show such racism which the black elite nevertheless takes on faith. In the case of Ms. Harris-Perry, we're talking about a woman who can't even talk about Michael Vick's conviction for dog fighting without bringing the entirety of the history of Jim Crow and slavery in America into the story which brings me to conclude that Tulane University will recruit mental cases if they are the right skin color. The real and simple explanation is that Ms. Harris-Perry sides with black folks in all things and manufactures rhetoric after the fact and projects her own racist views onto white folks as an accomplished fact.
Obviously such racism from America's black elite is allowed since it claims to operate out of a defensive posture but that is always the claim of groups that indulge in disdain based on race: they are defending themselves. The problem here is that the Jim Crow during which black folks actually were defending themselves is almost a half century in the past and the idea that black people comprise almost half the prison population while being 12% of the population is because I am a racist is not a compelling argument to say the least.
Basically you have Cornel West saying that the President of the United States should act more black and Miss Harris-Perry saying he's acting plenty black. None of this is new or rare in the black community when it comes to Barack Obama who many black Americans seem to have thought was the President of Black America. Earlier in 2011 The Source quoted entertainer Sean "Diddy" Combs as saying about President Obama "I feel there was a promise made to God to look after people that was less fortunate, and [many] of those people are African-American...” If a white entertainer said such a thing they'd be hounded right out of a career. The implication over whether white entertainers feel the same way is rooted in a firm belief in the black elite that they in fact do but have merely learned to keep their mouths shut and this in itself therefore empowers statements like this by Combs or Alicia Keys.
The despicable Mary Frances Berry, who was amazingly a former chairwomen on the U.S. Commission for Civil Rights once said: "Civil rights laws were not passed to protect the rights of white men and do not apply to them", is as brazen as her apparent belief in having that special shield which means no matter what she says, it's not racist, even when it is. Ms. Berry also wrote in July of 2010: “Tainting the tea party movement with the charge of racism is proving to be an effective strategy for Democrats. There is no evidence that tea party adherents are any more racist than other Republicans, and indeed many other Americans." Publically admitting that one is a liar and a race pimp in only 2 sentences is rare and why I used the word despicable.
If one needed even more proof of black Americans routinely advocating that which white Americans do not but are accused of doing by those who do, there is this from the Congressional Black Caucus who not only feel that President Obama is the President of black Americans but that they themselves serve skin color as if anyone without a brain needed proof other than the despicable title of their group - trust me, this is George Orwell at his best in this article by Mike Soraghan at The Hill.com:
The Congressional Black Caucus is asking President Barack Obama to direct money from an anticipated jobs bill to poverty-stricken communities. The caucus stressed that it is not criticizing the nation's first black president and is not simply asking for money for African-Americans."We're not talking about race. We're talking about the hardest hit," CBC Chairwoman Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), said at a news conference attended by at least 17 CBC members. They (the CBC) said they were concerned that the administration wasn't doing enough to help African-Americans weather the stormy economy. Lee said the move wasn't criticism of the president, but an attempt to ensure that African-Americans and their elected representatives are heard. "The president is the president. It's our job and our responsibility to advocate for our constituents," Lee said. "We are waking up to the fact that we are loyal and consistent members, but we are not paying enough attention to the misery in our communities," Waters said.
Well surprise, the CBC is of course talking about race when they mean "our communities" and they are not talking about the greater good which is a concept their office demands but of black faces. Why in the world someone in congress doesn't stand up and demand this racist group disband itself is something I don't get.
Of course the entire blow-up into a feud among black elites was covered at The Root, the poster child web site for black cultural self-absorption with a healthy dose of unadulterated racism whose fundamental mantra bewilderingly posits that it is black folks that are innocent bystanders in a world of racism while The Root itself shows absolutely no interest in news devoid of a racial dimension. At the same time The Root had the article about the Cornel West dust up they also ran an article called "Intellectual Property: Owning What's Yours" wherein the author Latoya Peterson (surprise - the editor of Racialicious.com, a site which can only be described as a social hate site that should change its name to DoubleThink.com or StereotypeFactory.com) blithely and incredibly describes jazz as "our intellectual property." Apparently this is the same philosophy that enables James Cone to say "All white men are responsible for white oppression." But again, if I then say all white men are responsible for their good works like technology then I am a racist. It is pure "doublethink" and these people could make even George Orwell break down and cry.
One can only imagine the dust up if a prominent white American claimed the internet and computers were "our intellectual property" but this is the racist "doublethink" that is not only common at The Root but the centerpiece of it's rather horrid and odious existence. People at site's like The Root just don't understand that it is just as stupid to celebrate a man by race as it is to stigmatize since both ideas must emanate from the same philosophy and to try and deny one and affirm the other is a recipe not only for failure but endemic hypocrisy and double standards in one's thinking.
A brief visit to Racialicious reveals a link to an amazing story at Columbia Journalism Review by black writer Pamela Newkirk called "The Not-So-Great Migration: From the black press to the mainstream—and back again." Ms. Newkirk argues that there is a danger of "draining mainstream media of diverse perspectives." I find the idea that skin color in and of itself brings a diverse perspective a troubling one. What perspective does skin color bring to the table? A narrow perspective based on a racial lens that is the opposite of the idea of diverse?
The story includes the following:
Kathy Times, of NABJ, said she was taken aback during a recent visit to the Houston Chronicle. She went to the news meeting and “was very disappointed to see not one black editor in that room of about sixteen editors who decide what readers would see.”
And the answer to this is to create a separate but equal journalistic mind set of all black editors that keeps African Americans informed of how many black people died in a plane crash or how many points a black man scored in a game? Near the end of the article there is this:
Many of these reverse migrants describe a sense of relief about working for African-American media after years in the mainstream. “It was like coming home,” said Michael Cottman, a senior correspondent at BlackAmericaWeb.com, who in 1978 began his career at the Atlanta Daily World, the city’s oldest continuously published black newspaper. In between he worked for The Miami Herald, New York Newsday, and The Washington Post. Cottman said at mainstream organizations he sometimes felt resistance to story ideas or suspicion about his ability to be objective while covering black-oriented subjects. He said at Reach Media, his professionalism is assumed.
And once again such things are said without the least hint of irony that I at once find amusing, perplexing and disturbing. A standard that is insisted upon is rejected when asked to be applied to themselves because to use the word "objective" in the middle of all of this word play is pretty nuts. And it is word play because the word "professionalism" as used here really means expressing one's views through a lens of race as if race itself is a culture and it is word play because web sites like The Root embrace for themselves the lack of a diverse view they conspicuously profess to deplore in what they characterize as white journalism when in fact that journalism just happens to be done by whites - it is not a purposeful segregation any more than being Chinese in China is.
Bewilderingly, Ms. Newkirk, in quoting a 1968 National Commission On Civil Disorders report writes:
The news media, it continued, reflected the biases, paternalism, and indifference of white Americans and treated blacks “as if they don’t read the newspaper, marry, die, and attend PTA meetings.”
And yet blacks bring a diverse opinion not available to white folks and create black only web sites that somehow posit that in fact black folks "don't read the newspaper, marry, die, and attend PTA meetings.” If you're having trouble keeping up with the doubletalk believe me so am I. And oh yes there's more.
Mira Lowe, like many of these reverse migrants, described feeling a greater sense of purpose when she moved to an African-American outlet.
Really? Would that by any chance be because of the racial self absorption whites are accused of having and do not and who are forbidden such a thing anyway but which self-absorption is in turn cultivated by black Americans? Reading the comments section for the article yields the usual delusional racism associated with delusional racism.
Keep in mind that web site's like The Root commonly put stories a hundred years old on their front page as if it is today's headlines and you know what: among the elite in the black American community, they are today's headlines as it is a community that, devoid of any obvious expressions of racism in America today, must keep alive the past and does so in order to "prove" what cannot be proved. I am not suggesting that history should not be presented and examined but in the case of black cultural web site's like The Root it is the context in which such stories are presented that is disturbing because within that community notions like lynching are very much alive and not at all seen as a past either dim or fully in that past. The Tuskeegee Experiments, slavery and Jim Crow are continually in the forefront of conversations in the black American literary community; imagine if World War II were discussed in such a context with the Germans still Nazis and the Japanese still bigoted imperialists and the Italians dedicated fascists and you can see the problem associated with using old clocks.
If you extend Ms. Peterson's thinking onto the lack of success of the African American community she seems to be saying that people have no access or claim to things that are the heritage of another race/culture by innate values yet out of the other side of their mouths black writers like Ms. Peterson consistently claim that the lack of access to white skill sets is due to white racism and privilege and that in fact there is no innate cultural claim on the arts and sciences. This type of mind-bending racial "doublethink" based on the idea that anything good in the black community is a reflection of it's innate creativity and anything bad the result of outside negative influences starkly shows not only the childish thoughts of such racism but also an accompanying mind set that is that of a resentful and blaming child, incapable of understanding what a double standard is or to see it or even care about such considerations. Racism is always a stacked deck in favor of one color and against that of another and all the words and bluster are nothing more than shallow window dressing devoid of nuance or a sense of reality and pragmatism, designed to massage bruised cultural egos at the expense of other ethnic groups.
Contrary to claims of heterogeneity in the black community there is reflected in it's racial rhetoric a homogeneity that speaks virtually with one voice and it is a voice that is accusatory towards white people by race and practices absolution by race for itself while turning racism on it's head in a way that gives true meaning to the idea of rose colored glasses. Meanwhile things like Racism 2.0, white privilege, "white rage" the "new confederacy" and the "New Jim Crow" will assure us all the prospect of a battle that in fact cannot be won, only lost.
In the end, the problems for the black community in the United States is that the Byzantine rhetoric by the black intelligentsia is intellectually debased glibness passed off as being articulate; when one is a racist by one's own standards of racism and can somehow deny that fact, then there is a disconnect from reality. That disconnect from reality is at once purposeful and unaware. It is difficult to see how someone can countenance arguments that are consistently self-contradictory but then self-contradiction resides at the core of all racism and that is what makes the concept entirely a hollow lie.
James Cone himself on pg. 24 of his Black Theology and Black Power takes white folks to task because they "tolerate and sponsor racism in their educational institutions, their political, economic and social structures, their churches, and in every other aspect of American life, they are directly responsible for racism." Yet this is exactly what the black elite does and approves of. Apparenty Cone thinks there is no contradiction because several pages earlier he says "While it is true that blacks do hate whites, black hatred is not racism." You got that? In other words the black elite is never wrong because they can't be. This is no surprise and perhaps an easy explanation as to why Reverend Jeremiah Wright is an esteemed figure within the black community and a vicious racist to anyone with any concept of proportion or balance in their thinking. Trinity Church historian Julia Speller said of Wright "Is there an assumption that because of the hate talk, nothing good can come from him?" Like maybe when Hitler made freeways? That was good.
It's true that people like Cornel West or Melissa Harris-Perry are representatives of a culture that are victims but not in the sense they think. What they are victims of is a carefully constructed ideology built around race and a false narrative of the history of America based on a series of urban myths and cheap psychology. At it's core we're talking about hate speech - that's what we call it from the outside looking in but the people who indulge in such speech don't see it as hate; the Nazis and KKK didn't feel they were preaching hatred but a view from their own cultural standpoint that was true and real and defensive.
The Ku Klux Klan at times also has had a carefully constructed racial and cultural supremacist logic and so too does Islam in it's strongest imperatives although racial supremacy is not a complex mechanism at it's core. This construction of rhetoric and supposed logic is nothing more than a con game but one in which both the grifter and the victim are ensnared in a web of lies so complex and self-contradictory that it requires a playbook to keep track of thought and is a place where simple common sense is neither welcome or required in the face of constructs that explain why white folks have been, are and will in the future be racists.
It is a web spun out of deceit, wishful thinking, hurt pride, low self-esteem, half-truths, cheap psychology, over thinking, exaggeration, double standards, disingenuousness, disdain, projection, smugness, arrogance and intellectual laziness. Included in the construction are bizarre notions like one-drop rules, 3/5 myths, morality and creativity by skin color, historical revisionism, and the idea of ethnocentrism stretched into a fantasy world where erudite black scholars would be having enlightened conversations in air conditioned domes amidst stacks of books if it weren't for evil white people.
And of course the clincher is that black American's will set aside any challenge to their constructed logic by simply saying white people can never know what it's like to be black in America which has a convenient circular logic to it because it explains that racism exists by saying that racism exists. It establishes a black-folks-only benchmark for oppression and a barrier forever beyond the ability of white folks to understand or experience or touch and is therefore it's own explanation but one that cannot be explained otherwise. It cannot be explained to white folks because it asserts that white folks live in an unwitting sea of privilege based on their own stupid false assumptions about the non-existence of white supremacy that are nevertheless very real assumptions to black folks since they feel white folks control the power and the narrative; so a group of black Einsteins could never come to fruition in such a scenario since a white person will always be there to smash a DNA model or burn papers that build on the Uncertainty Principle.
Privilege is the order of the day and implies that white folks have whatever they do have because of luck and a racial predilection to oppress and exploit people. Within this narrative there is no room for the idea of a meritocracy but the ability to construct a motorcycle engine or replicate a mathematical formula for the liberation of the power of the atom are abilities that carry with them their own version of privilege; whether one admits it or not reality will intrude itself and it is doing so in black communities across America. To the black elite such considerations are cast-off players in the logic surrounding the conspicuous lack of black achievement and the just as conspicuous success of white folks all over the world. Lost in all this are the very real causes and effects of successful value systems and philosophies of thought that work quite well in relation to reality and have nothing to do with skin color. Standards are standards, 2+2 is always 4 and achievement doesn't really care what color you are. To claim to be unable to build a space ship because the cultural deck is stacked against you only leaves you without a space ship but with the satisfaction of being right; this is more or less the reality that black Americans reside in, at least those who wish the standards demanded by reality itself altered to suit them.
In this regard, there is a story in Courthouse News Service for May 16, 2011 that goes to the heart of that issue and begins:
Four white teachers at a Philadelphia elementary school say they suffered various forms of race-based, disparate treatment at the hands of administrators, including being accused by a principal "of being unfit to teach the African American students." As part of "professional development" at Thomas Mifflin Elementary School, a former principal forced employees "to read an article instructing the teachers that white teachers do no have the ability to teach African American students," according to four federal complaints filed last week.
The Root also ran that story as it did another story at the same time about white Mississippi teachers who were punished by the school board because their mostly black students had voted them the most effective teachers; it was encouraging to see that kids, who are our future, are perhaps not going to buy into the idea of pure information having a racial dimension and the comments sections on both stories at The Root ran against the usual grain there and that I also find encouraging. I pick on The Root a lot but only because it is a prominent template of a large number of such web sites.
Thomas Sowell writes in his 2006 essay "Black Education":
As for the racism of whites as an explanation of black educational deficiencies, there are enough black-run schools, colleges and universities where there would be dramatically better results than in white-run institutions, if racism were the explanation. But no such dramatic differences are visible.
The essential lesson of American life throughout it's history and one people like the writers at such sites as The Root claim to champion in such essays as "The Little Man at Chehaw Station" by Ralph Ellison is in fact entirely lost on them and it is the simple democracy of reality that good stuff is where you find it. Black cultural web sites and people like Cornel West and Melissa Perry-Harris institutionalize race in a way that is quite unhealthy for a new generation of young black Americans to be raised into and justifying such a highlighting of race in the name of cultural self-ego is looking for solutions in all the wrong places in the name of the "truth". Good stuff, good men, good ideas, will not be found in a skin color that feels comfortable to be around nor immorality and racism in a skin color uncomfortable to be around. That good stuff will be found wherever it resides and it will not be where you expect it. The idea that black culture in America in 2011 has some claim to perception and truth that enables it to never be perceptually blind-sided and to at the same time reserve for itself the ability to blind-side white folks is quite demonstrably false; it is a cultural conceit without a stick of wood in it. In fact, the black elite in America are preaching about perception from deep within a perceptual trap and escape from that trap is at least a couple of generations away.
Read black writers of essays in the United States: read Ta-Nehisi Coates, Cornel West, Harry Belafonte, Rev. Wright, Jim Cone, Alice Walker, Carol Swain, Tavis Smiley, Latoya Peterson and on and on and on. There is a consistency of thought among such writers regarding the essential innocence of black folks and attribution of traits according to dark skin or light skin and also a fundamental belief in the essential immorality and even brutality of white folks that is quite startling to behold. However you parse it, turn it on it's head, shake it, set it back upright again it amounts to racism and hate speech and delusion and from that can emerge exactly nothing but what it gives: hate, delusion and racism and all that equals is failure.
Such members of the black elite preach and believe in a connection by race when and if it suits their purpose. Therefore you have them feeling a connection to jazz music or slavery because it suits either their egos and victim mentality to do so. However when it comes to black crime or black non-achievement in education that connection is not only cut but reconnected to white folks. It's pure "doublethink".
If one is arguing from an racial philosophical space, which is an empty space to begin with, that "your people" have suffered greatly because of racism and one wishes to set an example, perhaps blathering on about race in every facet of a life experience stripped down to only those aspects that have some racial dimension or self-interest would be something to avoid. Projecting the cheap psychology of "privilege" onto faceless people by their skin color and trying to pass it off as cause and effect science belies the experience of history as even a casual look at biographies of successful people famous or otherwise will show. Josef Stalin came from Georgia not the center of power and the same is true of Napoleon and Hitler and President Obama himself; he didn't even live in the U.S. for 5 years and was raised in Hawaii, a long ways from Capitol Hill. People have the right to fight for a place in the sun and not the right for a place in the sun, especially rights based on workplace statistics or pointing to a lack of black faces in a given group as proof of racism and privilege while ignoring a group like the NBA which is over represented which of course is not something the agenda driven black elite have a problem with - it is off the map, an inconvenient non-event; but facts are not a convenience to be manipulated, pointed to or ignored to bolster an argument. And again, Thomas Sowell:
Anyone who has watched football over the years has probably seen at least a hundred black players score touchdowns– and not one black player kicks the extra point. Is this because of some twisted racist who doesn’t mind black players scoring touchdowns but hates to see them kicking the extra points?
Science and common sense are not something cherry picked and to do otherwise is to claim that rain only gets you wet sometimes. The only time that could be believed true is when black poets, students or artists organize themselves by race and somehow expect that to be a preparation for and ticket to mainstream success; integration by segregation. Black Americans who broach the subject want everyone who is not black to step outside themselves and check out other cultures which, bewilderingly, they already do; there are many black musicians who would have no careers at all if it were not for a white audience and, for example, Jazz Fest in New Orleans would die out from lack of interest if you took away the white ticket goers. Country Western music would die is left to black folks and tennis and hockey.
By contrast then, many expressions of human endeavor in America that have no obvious racial dimension to them would go the way of the dodo bird were they to rely on an interest emanating from the "diverse" black culture in America. This so-called "debate" within the black American community over Cornel West's remarks about the President amounts to pedantry since the black elite still talk with one voice in matters of race, giving white Americans marching orders to at once ignore race and not ignore it and, not surprisingly, not able to keep up with the endless and highly evolved dialogues within the African American community about how everyone in America is a racist except racists, there is no winning here from the bemused whites who stand outside the nutty world of Afro-Centrism.
Clearly, the ability to score ideological points against American society or Western civilization, or to induce guilt and thereby extract benefits from the white population today, are greatly enhanced by making enslavement appear to be a peculiarly American, or a peculiarly white, crime.
That is a quote to which I'd add, "by making enslavement appear to" have never gone away. Thomas Sowell wrote it in an essay titled "The Real History of Slavery" in his 2006 book Black Rednecks and White Liberals - needless to say, Sowell is not very popular with the black elite in America. That Sowell essay is a virtual compendium of the context, proportion and balance that is so utterly lacking in the rhetoric of the black elite in America. In place of an idea of white people being endemic racists, Sowell speaks to the idea of man's inhumanity to man which is an idea that does not distribute blame or morality or lack of it by skin color, making innocents or perpetual victims of people of color nor perpetual oppressors out of Europeans. People who are cruel opportunist's exploit what they can and are not purveyors of ideologies but rather of the simple language of brutality towards other people. In short, black folks were enslaved because they could be enslaved.
In writing about the false narratives black Americans have encouraged and put in place to accompany the story of slavery in America Sowell says:
First is the objection to falsification itself, that the damage which this does to the general level of understanding and trust in a society is incalculable, and can easily outweigh, in its long-run consequences especially, any immediate good that might be expected from an expedient taking of liberties with the truth. Second, even the short-run benefits are by no means clear. Has a sense of special grievance helped any people...
There is also this from a Dr. Don Beck: "too often peace-making consists of stretching across a deep and historic wound, thus attempting to seal it over at the top. Unhappily, the trapped 'poison' and angry motives of pay back revenge are trapped within, only to fester and even grow more destructive."
In this sense, the only thing about Cornel West and his ilk worth discussing is the harm they have done to the communities they move about in and with their exposure in the media it is considerable. Suffice it to say that it is a mistake to look at history through the eyes of today's morality or lack of real information and this is doubly so when paired with an agenda. Put on top of that an agenda of blame and innocence by skin color and you have nothing more than hate speech with lipstick and an entirely undeserved sheen of morality. Among the politically correct liberal Left and the elite of the African American community, the history of Western civilization has been simplified and decontextualized until it is unrecognizable in America; nuance has been replaced by stereotypes and the glib have shouted down the articulate with cries of racism and profiling.
On May 25, 2011 The Root, home that day to its typical non-racist lack of racial self-absorption that would challenge a Nazis propagandist, stories like "Oprah's 25 Best Black Moments" and an article by "BlackAIDS.org" and an article about a half-black woman reminiscing about her long ago trip to Ireland with her white mom and fun things like Ireland's endearing "racial cluelessness" and playing "spot a black person" and getting "a souvenir to commemorate the only time in my life I've ever been called a nigger!", had a follow-up article about the West-Obama matter by Nsenga Burton titled "Cornel West: The Fallout Continues Over Obama Comments" The article mentions "the complete demolition of West's character in op-ed's around the country" but if this is so it is for all the wrong reasons and these "op-eds" referred to are almost entirely by black writers.
The article goes on to list quotes from various news outlets and one example shows that not only has no lesson been learned but that there is only the continuing monumental hypocrisy and unwarranted projection of racialism by those who indulge in it wholesale onto white Americans who, again, don't show the least sign of or interest in an such an overarching rhetoric or philosophy or even think of themselves as white Americans. All arguments by the black American elite to posit a monumental and pervasive white racism are commonly centered around statements that start out with: "This is just like lynchings or slavery or Jim Crow..." because there are no such arguments, and devoid of a present day enemy, one must then reach into the past which is where the intellectual black American community resides with its talk of reparations, payback, level playing fields and nowhere in the 21st century can this actually be found, only in arguments based on echoes and the dead.
The article's quote from Black Star News, which title tells you their entire world view in a nutshell, is by Eric L. Wattree and goes:
The fact is, anyone who considers West's remarks toward President Obama merely an objective and scholarly critique of the political environment needs to go back and take a refresher course in both freshman English and forensics. The comments directed at President Obama by Cornel West was nothing short of a racist and petty personal tirade by a woefully presumptuous and undisciplined mind. His comments were not only less than constructive and nonspecific, but they were also saturated with unsubstantiated personal attacks against the president. They were, indeed, Palinesque in both nature and intent.
And there you have it, laid out in plain English the author themself at once chides others for not being able to parse but himself has no access to. Mr. Wattree understands Cornel West is a racist but not why he is a racist since Mr. West has been one long before his comments about President Obama. That is what is troubling because Mr. Wattree doesn't get it despite his tone that he emphatically does and the gross racial rhetoric so common to West and nearly the entirety of the black elite in America Mr. Wattree cannot see but exists in millions of words, he nevertheless blithely projects onto Sarah Palin though there is not the slightest bit of rhetoric from Mrs. Palin that could be considered racialist.
The real truth is that Palin is a racist through disagreement which is West's real crime in Mr. Wattree's eyes since before West's critique of Obama he apparently wasn't a racist at all. Wattree himself in his article quotes another race thumper celebrated within the black elite which puts the word "brilliant" in front of any black professor as if it's part of their surname, Dr. Boyce Watkins, who graciously refers to Melissa Harris-Perry as a "darker-skinned staple in the white liberal establishment" says that West is doing "what he’s always done, which is to advocate for black, brown, poor and working class people." Really? Shocking that. In reality, this is all the black elite itself does and if one substituted their mountains of rhetoric surrounding race and substituted the word "black" one million times it would be a more astute and true reflection of what is really going on in the black American intellectual community which consists of nothing more than endemic racism and projecting that racism onto others. Boyce Watkins himself shockingly goes out on a racial limb no blacks have ever climbed on before when he says:
My agenda is simple: I want to see leading politicians address massive black unemployment, mass incarceration, rampant racial discrimination in the workplace and the dysfunctional educational systems that are destroying black children and families.
And in case you didn't get that he later says it again:
...black unemployment continues to rise, mass incarceration decimates our people and our children are not being educated.
And in case he wasn't clear that white people's racism is behind everything, Boyce Watkins adds this about:
...middle class black people ( the bulk of whom experience rampant and unregulated discrimination in the workplace...
And here is what Boyce Watkins knows:
All I know is that I just talked the daughter of a formerly incarcerated man who told me that none of his five children graduated from high school because their father was not there to guide them. I am not sure why any black person on the planet would have any incentive whatsoever to vehemently support an administration with a black male attorney general who has not lifted a finger to reform a justice system that is undeniably racist.
So a guy in jail or maybe just Boyce Watkins on his behalf blames white folks instead of himself for his own family's travails and he was apparently a prisoner of white racist injustice rather than an actual crime. Funny how if white folks said things like that about black folks they'd be called racists. I know that cuz they in fact don't say such things and they're still called racists as a sort of eternal default position within that un-monumental black American culture everyone seems to want to think of as the hockey and Tour de France obsessed culture of diverse interests it shows no signs of being. In what world is Boyce Watkins anything other than a stupid racist? He mentions "a system that clearly isn’t working" but has no idea that the reason it isn't working is because he's chalking up black failure to white racism without addressing the black communities value system which is nowhere depicted as more depraved and empty than in his own ridiculous statements about where blame and responsibility lies.
Mr. Wattree in his article steps right up to the water but refuses to drink when he writes about Dr. Boyce-Watkins defense of West as simply doing what he's always done:
But with respect to Dr. Boyce Watkins, I am indeed shocked to see a respected scholar engage in such sloppy thinking. His article suggests the following syllogism: All dogs have fleas. My cat has fleas. Therefore, my cat is a dog. What kind of logic is that?
Yes indeed Mr. Wattree, what kind of logic is that? Apparently one that posits that Sarah Palin has fleas and all white people are racists because black folks think about race a lot - this is like awarding someone a PhD. by thinking about it a lot, once more projecting nonsense onto reality. I know the answer to what kind of logic is involved here and here's a hint: it's the same kind of "logic" that revolves around a madman's idea of "black holes" as racist terminology. It's the same "logic" that is incapable of attaining to any kind of standard or benchmark around which to vet one's "logic" or step outside oneself and look back for a glimpse of one's own glibness which is mere words passed off as an articulate argument based on a non-existent overarching and cogent philosophy because in fact that overarching philosophy which parcels out morality by skin color is its own "black hole" which has sucked in all of Mr. Wattree's words and also the light of reason that so artfully eludes Mr. Wattree and his odious community of "thinkers". Mr. Wattree's words have no meaning.
Ms. Burton's article from earlier concludes with characterizing the West-Obama "feud" as:
...a new-media version of an old-media narrative: black folks, even those who should, not getting along. Spectators sit ringside, poking, prodding and instigating in hopes of seeing a real smackdown between West and Obama. How interesting is it that West seems to have played into many of the stereotypes that assail African Americans: "crabs in a barrel," "inability to work together" and the "black brute" -- by uttering those controversial words about President Obama?
But we do hope that this plantation narrative that is spiraling out of control in the new-media space will right itself and become a discussion about something meaningful -- explicit policies to protect the poor -- as opposed to an abundance of attacks on a brother, even West, who admittedly was dead wrong.
Like I said: wrong for the wrong reasons since within this example of "reasoning" lies the truth as I laid it out; Cornel West is wrong but he is still a "brother" and by "spectators" read "white" and by "poor" read "black", because in this scenario skin color trumps considerations of right and wrong and that means that having the wrong skin color means you are never right. In Ms. Nsenga's narrative, millions of white people once again serve as a baleful backdrop to moronic considerations about "black brutes" that puts words in the mouths of those not in the least involved themselves other than by having a light skin color that is its own argument and rhetoric and once again the present is proved by the past in that very revealing reference to "an old media narrative."
That reference is echoed again in yet another article about Cornel West and Obama at The Root called "Black Chatter, Not Leadership" that refers to a "media that love a Negro brawl." You don't need a cryptographer to say that the authors take it for granted that white folks simply don't like black folks and love to see them fail and supposedly reveal their "true" nature. Pretty disgusting stuff and it's daily fare at The Root and many mainstream black cultural sites like it that have mainstream credibility, mainstream ads and mainstream writers. In that same article the author Jill Nelson refers to a "nonexistent monolithic 'black community'" without a trace of irony, apparently convinced that 95% of black voters voted for President Obama on the "issues". She believes that the very web site her article appears on just happens to be all black and in which she trots out the same old themes of "unemployment, poverty, mass incarceration and a failed education system" and a "fabricated "war on drugs" and ensuing mass incarceration that Michelle Alexander illuminates in The New Jim Crow" wherein it is implicit in her remarks and the remarks of the in fact monumental voice of the black elite that such considerations are not the fault of black folks but white racism. Every moment is a chorus of epiphanies at such sites as The Root. At the end of her article Ms. Nelson reveals all is not well in racist paradise as her misandry takes hold which nicely fits in alongside her own casual racism as she says:
As a black feminist, I see the whole debacle as illustrative of the limits and failures of traditional black male leadership, a gender-based end of the road reached some time ago but still largely unacknowledged in black communities and unchallenged by black women. Enough of the dickpolitik!
With sites like The Root we're not talking about some racist sites in the margins but sites that are fully accepted in the black American community like NEWSONE, with an article titled "Should Latinos Be Allowed To Use The N-Word?" or theloop21 with an article titled "Don Barden, First African American Las Vegas Casino Owner, Dies" or Elev8 with an article titled "Longest Living Married Black Couple Gives Advice" or hellobeautiful with an article titled "Vogue Italia’s All-Black Model Fashion Spread: 'Jump & Smile'" and "Sexual Chocolate: Black Men That White Women Love" or tvoneonline that has an ad on its homepage that says "Find black women in your area" or theurbandaily with an article titled "Black Is Beautiful: Dark Girls, A Documentary On Color Bias In & Out Of The African American Culture." There is much more. Needless to say any white equivalent site would be hounded out of existence first and foremost by black folks. But that's not why white sites don't exist - they don't exist because white folks just don't care about such considerations. Generally speaking, the reason white folks can't be insulted by racial slurs is because they're bemused at such things.
I'm trying to imagine a web site run by whites that announces the highest scoring white NBA player just died or with an ad about finding white women in your area or an article about white men that black women love or French Vogue's All-White model fashion spread. What in fact this vile crew of new age Nazis has contrived to construct is a blacks only water fountain and whites are not invited to drink.
In the community of America's black elite, the past is never far away at all and can be referenced and plucked into the present to "prove" almost anything in the same way Cortes conquest of Mexico "proves" white endemic imperialism. This is evident in referring once again to Syracuse University's most eminent racist, Dr. Boyce Watkins in his article at NEWSONE, "Slavery Was Never Completely Abolished – Seriously." The article has related topic articles listed like "Judge Mathis Calls U.S. Prison System Modern Day Slavery" and "The Amistad Travels To Cuba As A Reminder Of Slavery". My question is that why would anyone need to send a ship to Cuba as a reminder of slavery when black folks in American talk about it like slave ships are being unloaded in New York harbor this very minute. My own opinion on this matter is this: anyone thinking of sending their children to Syracuse University should have their head examined.
In Ms. Burton's very last comment in her article she talks about "moving... this country forward." The problem is that in the eyes of people like Ms. Nsenga Burton America can never move forward without the consent and race rules of 12% of the population and that population one that sees the world through a lens of race not shared by the rest of America, protestations to the contrary. James Cone puts it as "It would mean that we would talk about the lynching tree. We would talk about slavery."
White people, connected by their racist skin to a dead past peopled by the dead would be dragged about the scene of lynchings and slave ships like Scrooge, made to survey the landscape of white damage and oppression to purge their guilt and this is a theme encountered time and again when it comes to America's "original sin", the idea that white people must bow and admit their crimes and their addiction to racism; only then can "we" move forward, an entire country subject to the racial whims of 12% of the population and their own addiction to skin and their peculiar ideas of what skin endows.
As Cone writes: "The time has come for white America to be silent and listen to black people...." But how can the guilt of white America be expurgated when Cone writes about the modern day lynching of blacks by whites that "today whites destroy him by crowding him into a ghetto and letting filth and despair put the final touches on death." In truth we are not talking about a desire for reconciliation but for revenge but those responsible are dead and gone, forever beyond the reach of justice and so whites but be made to take up the mantle as proxies. Cone says "it's white America's original sin and it's deep."
In this regard however, the country has been and is moving forward and the black elite are not coming along for the ride, preferring instead to score points based on lynchings and Tuskeegee Experiments and the sins of white people that can only be expurgated, not by any benchmark or standard of human morals or behaviors but by the standards of the Byzantine, racist and almost undecipherable hypocrisy and double standards of black rhetoric on the subject. The black elite like to talk about Martin Luther King's dream and a post-racial America but in fact have no interest in such a thing, no idea of how to achieve it if they did and in fact are themselves the biggest stumbling block towards moving into such a future. The traditions and nomenclature of racism are most prominent in the very culture of people who claim to be the most devoid of such considerations and that is black Americans.
The problem is that for America's black elite to present racism in a light that posits their own utter disinterest in such a thing other than a desire to defend oneself against racism is stupidly ludicrous. In the 1930s and 40s America had to engage in a dialogue and much worse with Nazism and that was a genuine case of dealing with a subject only insofar as eradicating it and then moving on. There is no such persuasive argument when it comes to black Americans and their addiction and firm belief that race matters while arguing that it does not or then again does according to a whim rather than a philosophy. The word "brother" is a one-word argument that says otherwise and the rhetoric of the black elite in America is a complete example of being tangled in the rhetorical web that they themselves weave.
The problem as I see it within the black American community revolves first around the relatively modern American phenomenon that posits that everyone's opinions are equally valid; they're not. The ability to reason and use logic is not doled to everyone with a keyboard and an understanding of how to write English. In my view, the average American is much more fascinated by the sound of their own voice than was the case 50 years ago. Certainly people have always been opinionated but that is not the same thing as being philosophers who are always right. The idea that a Hallmark Card actually says "black ho'" rather than black hole because someone says so or that a Dallas county commissioner thinks the term "black hole" is offensive for the same reason is ludicrous. These people are idiots and conspicuously so but their conduct and attitudes are telling because they didn't come out of nowhere. We're talking about people hyper-conscious of race and looking for the least sign of racism and jumping on it when they think they have a fish on the hook.
The second problem among America's black elite is that they live in a world of race and can't see it because they presume everyone else in the world feels the same way and the echo chamber they live in speaks to each other without regard to voices outside their provincial world or even common sense for that matter, constantly reinforcing their own views - this is how insulated cultures can take stupid ideas seriously and even go mad. If I am sitting at a table with 10 other people and I say 2+2=4 and the 10 all say 2+2=5 the correct standard must nevertheless win out for their own sake and the sake of the larger community they move in.
What then is the solution to this thought experiment and how can correct standards be applied and maintained in an environment wherein anything that is not a demonstrable physical skill like playing a piano or guitar is considered to have equal provenance? People who can think, write and reason clearly used to be looked up to but in the new America this is no longer so as we have a nation of bloggers with the ego of Napoleon himself but with a conspicuous lack of conquests to list that would normally act as a drag and provide a venue for self-criticism but no, it is the sheer power of their intellect and judgment that wins the day and so there are no standards but only a million voices, each the master of their own domain and which congregate around other voices only for the warmth of their agreement and not as a challenge to their own provincialism - it is a community that advertises itself as the voice of challenge but hates to be challenged itself and has no interest in or mechanism to resort to even if it did by which it could hold up a mirror to its own vapid suppositions.
The events in Dallas and Los Angeles surrounding the use of a scientific term like "black hole" are real events that really happened and are supported by far too many within the black community which is proof in itself of the non-existence of a mechanism by which idiocy can be checked and peer pressure exerted since those peers themselves are awash in the idiocy of unadulterated racism and like the West incident points up, it is not the racism that is really seen as the problem or even seen at all but the manner in which that language is used - in fact, the language itself is the problem and should be done away with entirely. The black elite may challenge the particular cases of a stupid criticism of the term "black hole" but not the underlying supposition and that is why nothing has been learned within that black elite from the Cornel West issue; they're still right - West is wrong but still one of "them" and "them" in this sense is nothing more than skin and not morality or community of ethics or philosophy but instead a pure form of bigotry and racism.
The problem within the community of voices that comprises the black elite in America is that there is no mechanism they can take advantage, no self-criticism by which a mature standard, a benchmark of thought can be applied to itself; there is simply no dialogue available or even wanted it seems by which the nature of racialism itself can be seen as the problem rather than the pedantic particulars within which that racialism resides such as in the case of Cornel West's comments about President Obama.
Were this not so, the black elite in American would've not only called out Cornel West years ago but itself as well but don't hold your breath waiting for that event - this is a group too far down a perceptual trap to countenance such a thing. The American black elite have a simple view of the world and it is that black people are good and white people are bad and they need mountains of reasoning, logic and cheap psychology to buttress that view, deny their own racism and add flesh to what is after all an entirely depraved and childish notion devoid of even a trace of proportion or balance or fair play.
Ironically, in Jonathan Capeheart's article cited in Ms. Nsenga Burton's piece I cited earlier, Mr. Capeheart in turn criticizes Dinesh D'Souza as being just as "offensive, harmful and wrong" as West because of a D'Souza article at Forbes.com titled "How Obama Thinks". Truthfully, D'Souza's article is entirely devoid of the endemic racism of Cornel West and in fact lays out a pretty good argument to back up his thoughts. What article Capehart was reading I don't know but it seems that the race colored glasses are very thick ones at Mr. Capehart's office. Jack White at The Root on May 28, 2011 sides with Capeheart and writes:
There is not, after all, that much difference between accusing Obama of being afraid of "free black men" because he was reared by Caucasians, and bashing him for possessing a Kenyan anti-colonial view of the world that he supposedly got from his African daddy.
D'Souza lays out a definition of anti-colonialism that I believe resides at the heart of the childish black-people good-white-people-bad rhetoric so loved by the intellectual African American elite and perhaps even at the heart of Obama's own views. It goes:
Anticolonialism is the doctrine that rich countries of the West got rich by invading, occupying and looting poor countries of Asia, Africa and South America. As one of Obama's acknowledged intellectual influences, Frantz Fanon, wrote in The Wretched of the Earth, "The well-being and progress of Europe have been built up with the sweat and the dead bodies of Negroes, Arabs, Indians and the yellow races."
Anticolonialists hold that even when countries secure political independence they remain economically dependent on their former captors. This dependence is called neocolonialism, a term defined by the African statesman Kwame Nkrumah (1909--72) in his book Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. Nkrumah, Ghana's first president, writes that poor countries may be nominally free, but they continue to be manipulated from abroad by powerful corporate and plutocratic elites. These forces of neocolonialism oppress not only Third World people but also citizens in their own countries. Obviously the solution is to resist and overthrow the oppressors. This was the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. and many in his generation, including many of my own relatives in India.
How in the world portraying D'Souza as "offensive, harmful and wrong" can be so positively stated is bewildering without a counter-argument from Capehart that must be persuasive indeed. On a side note, the fact that D'Souza points out Edward Said as having been one of Obama's teachers at Columbia and that the offensive Joseph Massad is a mentor of Said and teaching at Columbia right now is interesting in that it shows the once vaunted Ivy League to have lost a great deal of its intellectual luster not to mention an utter inability to ferret out racism on its own campuses.
If you want to see an example of how to advocate by skin color without seeming like it Capehart mentions Al Sharpton's views on the West-Obama shindig:
Sharpton urged African Americans to hold Obama accountable but not in a way that undermines him. “I’ve seen this movie before,” he said. “We had the first black mayor of New York, David Dinkins. And we got mad every time he went to a non-black event and we pouted until some of us didn’t vote, he lost and we got eight years of Giuliani.” He went on to say, “We fought to have a real president,” Sharpton told me. “We want him accountable, but we don’t want him to be accountable to us any differently than anyone else so that it’d be used against him and us.”
And what about the charge that Obama isn’t black enough? “First of all, who’s saying that? And who defines what is black enough?” Sharpton asked before rattling off a list of things Obama has done or is attempting to do in the areas of education, poverty and unemployment that have helped Americans, blacks in particular. “So, from black farmers to black colleges, a lot is being done,” he said. “More needs to be done. But, again, I think that there are those that have gone in the industry of being the blacks against Obama rather than trying to help the black community.”
You got all that? Just whistle and look up at the sky or something and then dash into the voting booth and put yer X next to the black guy like 95% of black Americans did for Obama and maybe no one will notice cuz according to Sharpton it's all working out just fine; you just have to pretend it's not. For a group that complains so bitterly about the hate speech of others America's black elite seems to have not a clue as to what hate speech really is.
In regard to this and the idea of "nice" racism, there is this article at The Root about the Obama-West fracas by Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. called "Black Critics and President Obama" that pretty neatly sums up all the false assumptions and rootless narratives that consume the attention, credibility and vitality of black Americans. For me, it's pretty incredible to read. For black Americans generally speaking, it is reality and it is history because in going through the writings and interviews and lectures of America's black elite, it is a story that is told over and over again and it is not one gracious to white folks nor for that matter to themselves and anything else under the sun I can think of, least of all reality. Lost in all this is experiencing something because of it having something worthwhile rather than a racial dimension - when you start reading poetry and books by the skin color of the authors, you're in one hell of a lot of trouble. What we're really talking about is a goofy type of Nazi Party without an army that sets up whites as an almost hereditary enemy and accuses that enemy of all the characteristics most prominently displayed in the mirror that is so elusive to America's black elite racial hate mongers.
One should be very careful about allowing hate speech in a society but in particular in regard to where hate speech raises its ugly head. Right now we have a situation in the United States where blatant racism and hate speech within the African American community is not only allowed but put on mainstream television, in classrooms and on the lecture circuit because it passes itself off as an entirely defensive posture, a duty forced upon black Americans by the endemic racism of whites.
In the 1930s in Nazi Germany, a culture that really didn't have anything wrong with it slowly drove itself mad by the unbridled use of hate speech, blame and race formulas that attached morality and competence to ethnicity. In the end, the madness within Germany drove it from the ranks of the world's nations and into acts of murder, mass starvation, naked aggression, torture and brutality that numbered its victims in the millions.
I am not suggesting any kind of scenario of brutality within the U.S. although as we have seen, we should in no way consider ourselves immune to the concept of a culture going mad; we certainly did so in regard to Viet Nam. What I am saying is that the madness is already upon us and it is the most dangerous ideology in our nation's history and I am talking about the mad ideology of poltical correctness whose tenets and dogmas fly in the face of common sense and wherein people with a heightened sense of compassion allow hate speech within their ranks as if such a thing can be controlled and directed in such a way that allows that racism has a moral compass and knows its friends and will always pass over the righteous like an angel of death. It is a Gordian Knot and a double edged sword and the concept of the "greater good" is practically laughed at in favor of racial self-absorption.
Racism is a thing that is obvious and is not expressed in ways that are hidden, expressed in unwitting and almost indecipherable "privilege", written in code, or needs psychological tests to ferret out. When racism is not obvious and yet is pointed to as a thing that is, then the only thing being expressed is a desire to see racism where there is none. The racism on the part of America's black elite is neither hidden, written in code or in need of "implicit" tests to find the clues to one's own bigotry. That hate speech hides in plain site, hidden by the skin color of those who indulge in it who get a pass because of past injustices. However the very conspicuousness of that indulgence is starting to wear the sheen off the veneer of protection and many people are starting to pay attention to the words and not the skin color of those who are uttering them.
One wonders why a community of people so convinced they are living under the oppression of white supremacy wouldn't simply up and leave the country - I know that I would and many people have done so in the past and the 1 million people who emigrate into the U.S. every year legal and illegal and the millions more who flock to Europe show what happens when there are real reasons to emigrate from real oppression and real economic hardship.
If all things African and black are so very wonderful one wonders why black Americans living in such a baleful shadow of white racism don't emigrate to Africa. Since the argument within the black community of writers is consistently one wherein that black community is held back by white folks why not move to Africa where that baleful influence will be removed and the full flowering of black expression in the arts and sciences can finally take place?
Since no such movement is underway or even remotely contemplated within the black American community one can only come to the conclusion that the entirety of their racial hoo hah is a lot of nonsense built to assuage low self esteem and to assign blame onto others for the short comings of the black community's own value system. That value system puts a high value on skin color rather than interests and issues. It spouts off about the great benefits of diversity and then turns its back on the concept with symposiums on black poetry and black associations of journalists. It trumpets Africa and has not the least interest in actually living in the place. And don't forget that racism pays when it comes to the black elite - they have made lifelong careers and house payments on it. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson have become rich off of racism though they don't appear to have actual jobs but just run around saying white people are racists. Cornel West makes a lot of money.
As someone who has spent 7 years in 15 Third World countries, the idea of acting black in some manner, which is an addiction to many black Americans, is simply childish; there is no such thing. Around the world cultures have their own expressions but it has nothing to do with skin. Skin endows nothing and it takes nothing away. The only culture in the world that I am aware of in the 21st century that has arranged itself around the notion of skin color first and foremost and with any expressions of mutual interest taking second place is the culture of black Americans. If one truly believes in Martin Luther King's dream then you cannot have an Association of Black Journalists but must have journalism come first. In my own many and varied travels around the world I can freely admit that it has never on one single occasion occurred to me to seek out the companionship of other white people; frankly, the idea of connecting with people by the color of their skin is an absurdity to me. "It was a great thing...I just felt so good." declares Serena Williams in HBO's The Black List in speaking of how wonderful she felt upon a visit to Africa and being around black folks. She contrasts this in opposition to the idea of how she felt visiting white Europe and Russia and says that white folks in Africa might get the feeling in Africa that she might in Russia. She says this all without a trace of self consciousness although I wince every time I watch that segment. These are the people who talk about the racism of others but who indulge in racialism to an extent that can only be described as unwholesome.
One cannot claim that there is a white strangle hold on journalism and blame racism for it any more than one can make such a claim for the National Basketball Association's predominently black make-up. Should someone create a white basketball league in order for whites to have a fighting chance? It's absurd and vile as well as are all the black web sites who have some weird notion that there is such a thing as black news or black science or black architecture. Such notions are devoid of skin. Black web sites and associations all claim as the core of their philosophy that they themselves consider what they themselves do vile if white folks do it and yet grab onto the concept with two hands. It's madness and it's blatant racism and their own words damn them. Unless one can prove to me that the stars in the sky care about such considerations as race, there is no argument in this regard, none whatsoever.
In researching this and previous essays on the subject of how black Americans generally view race in America, I have to say that I was startled by the unanimity with which black voices seem to view life in the U.S. in the 21st century.
The general idea seems to go something like this: there is no value in the idea of a meritocracy or a Horatio Alger story for black Americans and to whatever extent there could be, black Americans have to work several times harder than a white person in order to achieve equity. White Americans are endemic racists and this innate quality is connected by skin color. White Americans move in an unconscious sea of white privilege and networks that enable them to succeed and this network is denied to black Americans.
The reasons given by the black elite for the skewed numbers when it comes to black crime is because of undue attention given to blacks by a white system that is at its core racist and corrupt. Among other factors are black ghettos and the drugs and alcohol in those ghettos that are enabled by white people. Basically, black Americans believe laws should be gerrymandered for them to aleviate the discrepancies inherent in the justice system between the way whites are pursued and sentenced and the way blacks are.
Generally speaking blacks, because of their history in America, are incapable of racism in the true sense of the term and should be the target of civil rights imperatives and not whites and are also less prone to stereotype by race because of this history. Failures in education in the black community is generally laid at the door of white folks for a variety of sometimes contradictory reasons.
For myself I can say that I am at astounded by how delusional these myths are and also by how much currency and traction they have among liberal whites. It is simply taken as faith that black cultural values are the full equal to larger classical values in the world and therefore any failures within the black community are a sure sign of white racism and that's pretty much the end of the story.
To me, people such as Cornel West, Melissa Harris-Perry, Dr. Boyce Watkins, Ta-Nehisi Coates, James Cone, Michael Eric Dyson, Roland Martin and Tavis Smiley are little better than idiots and they can put "brilliant" and "premiere intellectual" in front of their names when referring to each other all they want and it's not going to change a thing; in point of fact, the reason such names get a pass on their muddled and racist utterances is because of a cultural condescension rather than any real respect. The depraved so-called intellectualism of America's black elite points up the dangers of racial huddling rather than putting common interests and standards ahead of considerations of race. How in the world does an Association of Black Journalists serve journalism? It ensures only that the membership will be black and that all other considerations will be secondary. Not exactly a recipe for being a successful journalist. If race and therefore a certain world view are paramount in an association of journalists, then when and how does journalistic concerns devoid of such things enter into the mix?
As I alluded to earlier, within the black American community there seems to be little interest in or cultural traditions that enable objectivity and self-criticism; rather, it is a culture with a propensity to blame others for its own shortcomings. A culture that does not cultivate reasoning skills to account for failure, learn from it and avoid it in the future in favor of toeing a racial line will fail and it is as simple as that. Alongside these cultural traits which are not only not criticized but encouraged, there is a denial of reality itself accompanied by reams of rhetoric about why black Americans are never wrong. The problem with this is that if one cannot recognize reality in the first place then there is no chance of accepting reality and dealing with it.
An anonymous commenter on a blog put it very well:
Enslavement was a grievous crime against blacks – but ten generations later you’d think that many blacks in America suffered themselves as slaves given the vividness of their victimology narrative. That narrative has done very little to liberate blacks from slavery’s insults – but has done much to reinforce their alienation, and indeed enshrine it as a holy relic of their very existence. This is bad for the Blacks. It also blinds them to the fact that many white Americans never supported slavery – and indeed hundreds of thousands of white Americans died to end it. Yet the narrative concentrates mainly on America’s badness, and thus disowns Blacks from be partaking in America’s goodness. This is a profound tragedy visited upon many American blacks by their own adherence to a storyline of eternal victimology.
"Many of what are called social problems are differences between the theories of intellectuals and the realities of the world - differences which many intellectuals interpret to mean that it is the real world that is wrong and needs changing." Thomas Sowell