You probably are one.
No, I don’t mean the sort you might find renting a trailer on Uncle Dawson’s pea farm, after finishing a 10 year stretch at the Tucker, Arkansas Maximum Security Unit, or the sort you might find in a Hollywood “look how far we’ve come” flick. We all know those guys are so far and few between you could count the awkward conversations on one hand. Can’t we all admit this? White people aren’t racist anymore. A genuine race-hating insurance agent, attorney, ad man? Are you kidding? That would be something like sighting the rare Antioquia Brushfinch, after a lifetime of birding.
I’m talking about the quiet, arrogant, self-satisfied sort. In my brush with race virtue-signaling, I’ve come to see the utility in a fairly simple test: if you are afraid to let a person of color know they said, or did, something stupid, you are precisely the sort of person preventing us from total racial reconciliation in America. Think about it. You worry so profoundly about their self-esteem, you can’t tell them the truth. You hold them to a lower standard.
You’re a bad friend, in other words, and you’re the real racist who doesn’t get called out, because you dutifully go along with obscene displays of false humility (kneeling and asking forgiveness for a slavery you never practiced and they never endured; remaining silent in the face of Louis Farrakhan’s ugly, genocidal antisemitism; saving your academic gig by extending emotional distress exam relief for the race-grievance du jour.)
I have a teacher friend who has been called “racist” simply because she hasn’t weighed in, one way or another, on the riots and looting associated with the last round of BLM protests. What thinking person in their right mind wouldn’t be a little afraid of honest observation, in a world where even progressive Ellen Degeneres can be forced to tearfully apologize for using “people of color” instead of “black” in reference to the most recent George Floyd protests. Get it straight, Lesbian lady!
The wrong observation and the wrong silence, in other words, can earn you the career-ending, business-ending, relationship-ending “racism” charge. And you also have to be careful to observe the enforced ceremonial silence as well. In an episode that has now become routine, one divinity student at an “educational” conference was told he couldn’t speak, or ask questions, because he was white. Object to this and you are accused of both “white fragility” and racism. But if you don’t call this out, speak up, and disrupt, I think they have something on you: you really are a racist because you allowed blatant racism to savage you without comment.
These last two weeks have seen a new wave of politically liberal and conservative young people rushing to the barricades against police brutality, as they should — but they need to take their minds along for the ride. I would worry if you weren’t moved by George Floyd’s sad departure from this life, but don’t forget the “wise as serpents” part, kids. Black Lives Matter, if their website means anything, stands for “common sense gun control” (read confiscation), “prison abolition” and lots of other nonsense..
“We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.”
“We foster a queer‐affirming network. When we gather, we do so with the intention of freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking, or rather, the belief that all in the world are heterosexual.”
“We deserve and thus we demand reproductive justice..”
“What does our collective Black future look like in technology, reproductive health, trans justice, education, prison abolition, food, family, and more through a Black Feminist lens?”
Folks, you know better. Remaining silent in the face of an agenda that is only using police brutality to extort a sweeping social justice ransom is treating Black Lives Matter like the slow kids in the class who can’t endure an idea being called “dumb.” Abolishing prisons? The nuclear family?
Stay silent and let them think those ideas have merit? Treat them like idiots?
Just who is the real racist here?