Kyle Korver of the Utah Jazz spends much of his April 8 "Privileged" essay on ThePlayersTribune.com decrying racial prejudice and urging greater awareness of related issues.  Those certainly are fine admonitions.  I would heartily echo them.

But Korver does not stop there.  He wrongly goes on to endorse racist philosophy against one skin-color group, at the same time rightly bemoaning racism's effects against others.  And, late in the writing, he attacks freedoms of thought and speech, those constitutional rights (among others) so despised in modern SJW circles.

"How can I — as a white man, part of the systemic problem — become part of the solution to racism in my workplace?  In my community?  In this country?" asks Korver.

He asserts without foundation that a problem of systemic nature exists.  He then engages in the self-flagellation so beloved by legions of white liberals.  They believe the terrible blood libel that an entire people are damned because of an immutable characteristic not of their creation.

It's as if by cursing their very being, and taking up remedial responsibility they do not have, fanciful emotion-gushers believe themselves to be attaining some higher morality.  The worse they feel about themselves, paradoxically, the better they feel about themselves.

My suspicion is that many who today claim to see white racism under every bed do so out of a yearning for moral purpose.  They were born too late to take up arms in historic battles they've read about.  So they fabricate new ones in current days.  And some others, surely, exploit the matter for political and cultural power acquisition.  I call that surfing to authority atop the suffering of others.

It was once generally understood that people are presumed innocent of wrongdoing until their individual participation could be established.  Racist theory assigns broad-brush guilt.

Don't believe Democrats.  Racism is not voter integrity safeguards, citizenship laws, or some suddenly disfavored figure of speech.  It is, simply, the erroneous faith that all members of a group defined by a shared inherent characteristic can be either inferior or superior. 

Korver advocates for the same foulness upon which many historic wrongs were predicated.  Racism is a contemptible fiction.  It cannot somehow turn from bad to good and enjoy legitimacy depending on the identities of its practitioners and targets.

He recounts a teammate's mistreatment by police and opines that he, because of his skin color, would definitely not have suffered similar mistreatment.  That is unfounded speculation, and it is Korver's racially prejudicial view of America.  He presumes guilt.

Korver justly condemns sports fans who heckle with racist slurs.  "But in many ways the more dangerous form of racism isn't that loud and stupid kind," he argues.  "It isn't the kind that announces itself when it walks into the arena.  It's the quiet and subtle kind.  The kind that almost hides itself in plain view.  It's the person who does all the 'right' things in public: They're perfectly friendly when they meet a person of color.  They're very polite.  But in private?  Well...they sort of wish that everyone would stop making everything 'about race' all the time."

Phoniness merits condemnation, but Korver doesn't stop at that reasonable point.  His essential arguments are that all disparate world phenomena can and must be viewed exclusively through the narrow prism of race; that there can be no undue attribution of racial concern; and that no opinions are acceptable, save for the One True Outlook he espouses.

All who dispute Korver's reasoning are "part of the problem."  Should they express a somewhat different view, they are "more dangerous" that actual bigots.

So much for debate among good people about how to suitably address and reconcile problems in our common world.  So much for individualism.  So much for intellectual freedom.

Injustices like slavery and Jim Crow were never of America's true ethos.  Both are, thankfully, in the distant past.

They were not manifestations of true American character.  But they were put down because of it.

DC Larson is an author, essayist, and blogger.  His writings have run in the Daily Caller, American Thinker, Goldmine, No Depression, and newspapers nationwide.  His political blog is https://americanscenemagazine.blogspot.com.