We white liberals, always opposed to racism, understand that racism is in the national water, in the air, the ether, the soil, and while we are trying to eradicate it, and clean the air and soil of it, and we've had some success, it still infects us. And so we find that we are racists struggling with our racism. It's not intentional racism, but if it's in the polluted air we breathe and the polluted food we eat, we're bound to be a bit diseased by the pollution.
White conservatives, the political ancestors of whom defended cultural racism and 400 years of institutionalized racism with slavery and Jim Crow and segregation, become apoplectic when it anyone even hints at the possibility of racism coursing through their healthy bodies politic. No inoculation needed! Their insistence of complete racial innocence is inoculation enough! Then they point to people of color who've done some wrong to some white folks. "That's racism!" they insist.
The racism I harbor as a white liberal is not something unsophisticated like thinking "n____r" when I'm saying "Black" or "African-American." It's not a matter of hoping our sons and daughters don't marry "one of them." No, my racism involves sometimes forgetting the unearned pergs and privileges that come with being born white in the United States and acting like I earned, all by myself, every break I've ever gotten.
A conservative doesn't typically harbor the unsophisticated racism either. They don't see a rash, so they don't see the insidiousness of the disease. So a conservative's racism involves an unwillingness to acknowledge the unearned pergs and privileges that come with being born white in the United States and an insistence that the real racism now is a indignities exhibited by people of color toward whites. It is an unwillingness to do a damn thing about continuing racism "because, after all, laws have been passed and slavery's been over for more than a century and you better not call ME racist!"
Historically incorrect. Democrats were the racists that perpetuated all the anti-black laws and attitudes that permeated the south. Your revisionist history, like all liberal talking points become axiomatic and unchallenged in the echo chamber of liberalism. This is one of the weaker arguments liberals use mostly because there is an historical record that proves your wrong and the sad part is that liberals are the guilty ones. This is no different than a kid breaking a window by deliberately throwing a baseball through it and then blaming someone else who wasn't there, and then spending the rest of his life telling everyone what a bad person the innocent kid was for breaking the window.
ReplyDeleteAs for this trite line of distinction you draw to explain differences between white liberals and conservatives, give me a break. Classic straw man argument and all the while you get to beat your breast while groveling at the alter of political correctness. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Liberals SHOULD feel guilty because they are responsible for slavery and all the deleterious effects their actions had on the black community for the next century.