Not Just for White Southerners

MIchelle Malkin, through the crab-in-the-bucket metaphor at the end of her column, correctly identifies envy as the motive behind the kind of spiteful attacks leftists dish out to "people of color" who dare to live their lives as they judge best -- especially when doing so does not conform to what is expected of them based on some accident of birth.

Malkin writes from experience as she speaks up for an actress who married outside her race:

Time doesn't lessen the vitriol or hostility. Take it from someone who knows. "Oriental Auntie-Tom," "yellow woman doing the white man's job," "white man's puppet," "Manila whore" and "Subic Bay bar girl" are just a few of the printable slurs I've amassed over the past quarter-century. You wouldn't believe how many Neanderthals still think they can break you by sneering "me love you long time" or "holla for a dolla." My IQ, free will, skin color, eye shape, productivity, sincerity, maiden name and integrity have all been ridiculed or questioned because I happen to be a minority conservative woman happily married to a white man and the mother of two interracial children who see Mom and Dad -- not Brown Mom and White Dad.

Such behavior tells us much more about the the people who do it -- and the multiculturalist left -- than it does about any of its targets. Were multiculturalists really about ending bigotry, they would refuse to perpetuate it by recycling racist slurs. They might also decide not to waste time speaking to anyone who was really helping perpetuate racism, unless something could be gained in the good fight. (And if they did, they would deliver much more devastating blows -- based on facts and arguments -- than the multitude of twenty-first century synonyms for "uppity" that they actually spout off.) As it stands, what we get are numerous examples of what Ayn Rand called "hatred of the good for being the good".

My thanks and admiration both go to Michelle Malkin for helping me understand this phenomenon better for myself and for standing up to it. Understanding and courage are the only way not to fall victim to such spite.

-- CAV

P.S. The following excerpts from the piece on multiculturalism linked above bears repeating here:

Many people have a very superficial view of racism. They see it as merely the belief that one race is superior to another. It is much more than that. It is a fundamental (and fundamentally wrong) view of human nature. Racism is the notion that one's race determines one's identity. It is the belief that one's convictions, values and character are determined not by the judgment of one's mind but by one's anatomy or "blood."

and

The spread of racism requires the destruction of an individual's confidence in his own mind. Such an individual then anxiously seeks a sense of identity by clinging to some group, abandoning his autonomy and his rights, allowing his ethnic group to tell him what to believe. Because he thinks of himself as a racial entity, he feels "himself" only among others of the same race. He becomes a separatist, choosing his friends—and enemies—based on ethnicity. This separatism has resulted in the spectacle of student-segregated dormitories and segregated graduations.[bold added]

It is precisely this confidence that is under attack in every example Malkin provides in her column.

P.P.S. Just to clarify for passers-by: I do not think that all (or even, in this day and age) most white southerners are bigots.

Updates

Today: Corrected a typo and a link.