Flashes of Soft Bigotry
Wednesday, June 20, 2012
Walter Williams ends a column about racial double standards by rightly stating that
they are "in some ways worse than the cruel racism of yesteryear". I agree: It
is patronizing not to expect, as Williams puts it so well, for "blacks [to] be
held accountable to the same standards that whites are and [to] be criticized
for conduct that we'd deem disgusting and racist if said or done by whites."
A couple of items on Williams's list caught me by surprise. First, I
was disappointed by Morgan Freeman, who had impressed
me years ago with his stand -- for what sure sounded like the right reasons
-- against Black History Month.
Morgan Freeman said that the campaign to see that Obama serves one term is a "racist thing."Obama's term has been such a disaster that many of his own past supporters are having trouble getting excited about him this time around. He only needs to lose a fraction of that support to lose his bid for reelection. Or was voting against him or abstaining the first time around also an act of bigotry -- or self-hatred?
I was also aware that there had been a few instances of mobs of black youths randomly attacking white people, and had heard of "flash mobs" attacking people. I had not, however made the connection between the two. Nevertheless, apparently, flash mob has become what would be termed "code" for black mob were the people using it not leftists pandering to black people:
Racial double standards also apply to how crime is reported. I'm betting that if mobs of white youths were going about severely beating and robbing blacks at random and preying on black businesses, it would be major news. News anchors might open, "Tonight we report on the most recent wave of racist whites organizing unprovoked attacks on innocent black people and their businesses." If white thugs were actually doing that, politicians would be demanding answers. Such random attacks do happen, but it's blacks preying on whites.I can't help but wonder how many white people Williams has just made aware of this serious failure in journalism. He deserves to be thanked for pointing this out, but will probably receive lots of flak. We live in a sad day and age when simply speaking the truth and standing up for justice are acts of courage.
...
Similar episodes of unprovoked violence by black thugs against white people chosen at random on beaches, in shopping malls and at other public places have occurred in Philadelphia, New York, Denver, Chicago, Cleveland, Washington, Los Angeles and other cities. Most of the time, the race of the attackers, euphemistically called flash mobs, is not reported, even though media leftists and their allies are experts in reporting racial disparities in prison sentencing and the alleged injustice of the criminal justice system.
-- CAV
6 comments:
The Left seeks to divide the West (primarily America) against itself by means of collectivist premises, with the end-of-road being civil war and the complete end of the Enlightenment. Who the sides are in that civil war, where the battle lines are drawn, or who "wins", does not matter; the war itself, and the consequent descent into tribal Dark Ages, is the point. Should it come to pass, it would mark the climax of the Left, which would cease to exist in its current form at that point.
It doesn't mean that there aren't Leftists working the fault lines of other collectives; witness the Occupy movement with its "99%" retread of Marxist economic class divisions, and the "war on women" effort along gender lines.
It just so happens that race is the deepest division in America and the most crudely, perceptually obvious. Witness the recent smear by Bill Maher against Matt Drudge; the unreasonableness of that sort of "cry wolf" smear serves to push whites at the margins of being racists, into it. "Hell, if that sort of nitpicky BS is racism, it's impossible not to be one, so here I go."
Racism is also where the Left gets the biggest assist from their thinkalikes among the conservatives, such as John Derbyshire and that bio-conservative (or whatever) movement that "madmax" is so enamored with.
Make no mistake about it -- there is plenty of white racism these days; witness the stupid controversy over casting a black woman as "Rue" in "The Hunger Games". The spirit of old Jim Crow is still alive. However, while he himself is a hangover of the old European racism of the ages, it is primarily the Left who sustains and feeds him today -- "fighting the fire while feeding the flames".
"[T]he unreasonableness of that sort of 'cry wolf' smear serves to push whites at the margins of being racists, into it."
That's the whole point of that folly.
I think the term is "bio-diversity." Stave Sailor is a big name here. He posts on his own website and vdare.com
I don't think they are racists, unless you believe that anyone who thinks difference in IQ and temperament among the races has a biological basis is a racist.
Anon,
As you should know, I consider the whole question of whether race affects IQ open (although I myself think it probably doesn't affect IQ), and saddled with dubious evidence to begin with, but I am open to the idea that there could be such differences between races. That said, people in all races have free will, and all, as humans, possess individual rights.
That said, the whole idea that the well-documented problems with America's black culture are due to innate mental differences is absurd, given the lack of definitive evidence on IQ or temperament, and ignores the role of philosophical ideas shaping cultures.
Either these people hold that all men have free will and act on ideas (good or bad) or they don't. In the latter case, these people are staking out a deterministic -- and thus racist -- position. Or they're saying that members of some races aren't human, which is as ridiculous as it is vile.
If you are who I think you are, you may leave. You've wasted enough of my time already.
Gus
Race is a function of genetics, as is the size of someone's nose -- and just as relevant to any questions of politics and society (which is to say, it isn't).
Rereading my first comment, I just noticed something: of the three "fault lines" the Left is working, the recent efforts on two of those are largely failures -- the "war on women" and the "99%". The one that continues to succeed is the racial one. The increasing efforts by Leftists to inject race into any discussion of ideas in which they are in danger of losing (which these days is pretty much all of them) reflects their awareness of this.
It's not just because they are out of ideas and must steer the conversation away from such (thought that is true), nor is it solely a political effort to steer attention away from Barack Obama's lousy economic record (though that too is true); it's also the one "pitch" that gets the strongest resonance across the irrelevant Ackbar Spectrum. Not only are there Leftists salivating over "racism", you also have many "rightists" attacking the Left for trying to foment "race war" -- in terms suggesting that they can't wait for it to get started.
There were already some deep fundamentals at work that are forcing the eventual repatriation of racism to the Left. It's why I correctly predicted in 2008 in comments on this blog and elsewhere that we would see the persistent Leftist labelling of all opposition to Obama's policies as "racist". I did not, however, expect in 2008 that the election of the first so-called "post-racial" president would actually accelerate this process.
That outcome is one of those things that makes perfect sense in retrospect, but is well nigh impossible to predict. After all, a reasonable person would conclude that racism, if not basically dead, was on the wane as a cultural force, given the evidence of a popularly-elected black president.
It is in the culture at large, but not on the left.
Incidentally, I have been astounded from time to time over the years by the number of leftists who have either turned out to be bigots.
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