PrintAugust 23, 2009
The Race Idiots
With relativistic people, there is no such thing as a true axiom, yet you'd never know it listening to our modern mantras. We hear things such as "Our strength lies in our diversity," "Religion has caused all the wars in history," and "Everything is a matter of perspective" proclaimed with theological assurance. Of course, the last supposition is contradictory, and embracing it renders moral supposition itself meaningless. Regardless, it's natural for man to make sense of the world by "profiling" elements of reality.
Many of our assumptions pertain to race, and one is always uttered in the wake of stories such as the recent Henry Louis Gates affair. What happens is that, referring to race, people will reflexively say something akin to the following, "Well, we still have a long way to go." Even conservatives pay homage to this self-evident provisional "truth," only, they add a qualifier so it goes something like, "We still have a long way to go, but . . .," with the caboose being "we've made great strides," "we've come a long way" or some variation thereof. It's obligatory, after all. It's how you polish up you credentials as a person who "understands the problem."
It's also reflective of a hang-up. Oh, this isn't to say I believe we've achieved perfection in racial attitudes, perish the thought. It is to say, however, that seeing a failure to achieve perfection in an area as a characteristic problem is far more of a problem than what ostensibly needs invasive and aggressive remedy. It usually yields a cure worse than the disease.
Understand that bigotry is simply a manifestation of one of the Seven Deadly Sins: wrath. It is not the end-all and be-all, the source of all our woes. It is not, relatively speaking, even a major problem (although, it waxes when we let the Sharptons, Jacksons and Obamas of the world stir the pot).
If this statement raises eyebrows, perspective is needed. If we were otherwise perfect and called the ether home, any extant bigotry would rightly stick out like white sheets at a Black Panther meeting. Yet we are far from perfect. We exhibit not just one element of wrath but also its other manifestations and the rest of the deadly sins -- greed, lust, sloth, pride, envy and gluttony -- to varying degrees. So the question is not whether bigotry exists and is a problem, as this is true of every sin. It concerns whether it is a characteristic problem.
In other words, if we were to constantly lament our lacking math ability, it would imply one of two things. It either stands out in reality, making us pay it some mind, or it stands out only in our minds, in which case we are detached from reality. If the former, it would have to pale in comparison to the mathematical achievement of other nations or to our ability in other areas, such as English and history. So the question is, does our obsession with bigotry meet one of the last criterion's two elements?
No rational person can make the case that we rank high on the world's bigotry scale, not on a planet in which racial and ethnic patriotism reign supreme. Many don't realize that this is in fact man's default state, but the irony is that it's because they've fallen victim to something they might be wont to preach against: "ethnocentrism." The fact is that man is tribal by fallen nature, and there is little in the way of political correctness outside the Western world. In fact, far from being taught that it's wrong to discriminate, many groups are taught that it's wrong to not place your "people" first. Such a thing can make you a pariah.
The reality is that we kill ourselves talking about bigotry, but much of the world kills others because of it. We've all heard about this, from the Balkan ethnic cleansing in the 1990s to the Ruandan genocide in which hundreds of thousands of Tutsis were murdered by Hutu tribesman, who happened to refer to them as "cockroaches." Oh, I should mention that no hate-speech charges are in the offing.
But, okay, we're better than the monster in another country, but maybe bigotry is the worst monster roaming our countryside. Except that, well, believing this requires the most incomplete of moral compasses. Let's now contrast this manifestation of wrath with the rest of our national sins.
It's obvious where we should start. Given that we have sexual imagery and innuendo everywhere, classes in pornography and "sexology" in colleges, and stories of children re-enacting Caligula's court in schools, can we really make the case that bigotry is a greater problem than lust? What about greed? Well, given the Bernie Madoffs of the world, the recent Wall Street woes, rapacious government officials and the long-accepted maxim about the lust for money being the root of all evil, it just may rank a bit higher as well. Sloth? Our welfare state and handout-and-entitlement mentality. Envy? Class warfare. Gluttony? We have more obese people than the rest of the world combined. Pride? Given how people are loath to admit error -- think Obama and his refusal to apologize to the Cambridge police -- and the super-size egos that abound, this trumps bigotry also.
This lack of perspective is no small matter, as it leads to much destructive social engineering. Just think about race-based quotas, affirmative action and set asides. Consider the assumption that relative racial homogeneity within a business or organization equates to racial animosity in its leaders' hearts, or how largely white neighborhoods are targeted with "low income" housing because, well, we all know there just must be unjust discrimination. And think about how Obama, Gates and so many others will just assume that white police are bigoted because "We still have a long way to go." All the while we have schools teaching perversion, profligate government spending, illegal aliens "undocumented" into legitimacy, criminals who go unpunished, slackers who are rewarded, heroes who are derided and traitors who are exalted. We have caricatured virtue and vice, exaggerating some parts to grotesque proportions while ignoring others. The result is that we misdirect our scalpel during "corrective" surgery, slicing off healthy tissue while allowing cancerous tumors in our midst to grow unfettered.
Not only does this selective moral blindness numb us to our real national sins, it also allows the reprobate the illusion of righteousness. In fact, while the stereotype of the self-righteous oaf is of a rightist religious zealot, a far more fitting candidate is the loopy leftist lunkhead. He is the one who will parade about defining favored vices as virtue, worshipping sex and mammon, secure in his own saintliness because he utters nary a racial joke and bears nobly that newly-minted white man's burden. The modern leftist is as blind as a Nazi who thinks he is good because he is hygienic and punctual.
Yet this leftist conception of virtue is as shallow as it is narrow; its definition of goodness doesn't seem to involve love for what one defends as much as equal-opportunity hatred. As to this, I have long observed something: liberals treat blacks like people; the problem is that they don't treat people like people. That is to say, they treat blacks like everyone else, but they treat everyone pretty shabbily. With Torquemada-like zeal they advance the dogma that we must treat all people equally, but much is missing from that prescription. Equally at what moral level? You can treat people equally by killing them all with the same expedition and ferocity.
So here is the implied standard: you may curse people out generically for five minutes with seething hatred, just don't utter one racial epithet. You may let everyone starve, just don't give one race a morsel of food another cannot digest. You may corrupt all races with vile hip-hop anti-culture, just don't imply that it is more corruptive than anything else. This is our national hang-up, our racial Puritanism.
Leftists don't realize it, but with their obsession, they are reminiscent of a group from the past whom they view with utter contempt and mockery. While it's generally not true that authentic Christians were hung-up on sex, the people in question could be thus described. These are individuals who would, and I'll be delicate, affix mechanical devices to boys to prevent a certain normal physiological reaction. (No, this was not medieval times but those of the "Enlightenment," and the instigators were at least as likely to be physicians and scientists as churchmen.) I guess they figured that they "still had a long way to go."
Now, people weren't wrong to preach chastity just as we aren't wrong to preach charity. But among the legitimate moralists of the day were those who caricatured the virtue, thereby perverting it, just as we do today with racial brotherhood. The question is, will you and I be voices of reason or, in obeisance to the age, insist that all racial talk is "dirty"? If the latter, then we will be deserving of the mockery when people two centuries hence laugh at how "repressed" we were.
