..with a vengeance
I borrowed my title from a meme I saw yesterday. It’s perfect. The same people who were worried about Commie Flu hot spots four days ago, the same ones who ridiculed first amendment protesters, the same ones who called church-goers potential Darwin Award winners, seem to have utterly forgotten the horrible danger of this “killer virus.” It’s safe out there again.
Because, after all, everyone knows that when a man is innocently strangled to death by police, justice requires you take out your anger on a shoe store, right? Naturally, you might kick a store owner to near death for protecting his property, right? Everyone would completely understand why you burn down the establishments — many of them minority-owned — of people who had nothing to do with the original injustice. Right?
Well, none of that can really be explained, but I thought I would try to summarize my sense of what I believe about the “race problem” in America. I love Fox News’ Harris Faulkner, but there’s only so much a news anchor can add to a visual of urban thug-rats breaking shop windows and fighting over Gucci bags, so in her lovely, alto anchor-voice, she began wondering out loud about America’s race problem. Seriously, when you listen to anchor desk voice-over and it’s very apparent they have nothing to add to the story, I really believe just reading any Wiki article on any subject would be preferable to high-minded improv. (Harris, we were looking at violent thugs who belong on a road crew, not Rosa Parks.)
A Dozen Truths
Back to my sense of race in America, in particular the problems faced by African Americans..
- Chattel Slavery was a horrible evil that was eventually beaten back by Christianity, and the American conscience. We understood, at the founding of our republic, how morally compromised we were by the institution. Hundreds of thousands of men died bringing it to an end.
- Slavery, like socialism, weakens culture. The Hebrews who escaped Goshen speak to this reality — once free, they longed to return to their masters, just to enjoy the cucumbers and the honey of Egypt. Slavery isolates you from the blessings and the responsibilities of freedom.
- Culture, not race, is everything. Those same Hebrews, given the law, given literacy, given God’s truth, given freedom, became a culture that blessed the entire world. (Check out the number of Nobel prizes won by Israelis, vs, well, just about any other country on earth.)
- America, post Civil War, has faced the difficult task of integrating and enfranchising former slaves into one of the most self-governing republics in the history of the world.
- We have had mixed success. Jim Crow and government imposed segregation was a horrible evil, and an evil, moreover, that went without real censure or consequence for decades. On the other hand, African Americans have achieved enormous success and celebrity in every imaginable field of endeavor.
- The Civil Rights movement of the 1960s fundamentally changed the American conscience. Anyone who attended school as a child in America was taught to abhor the evil of racism. Martin Luther King’s dream of being judged by the content of our character and not the color of our skin became a bedrock cultural assumption.
- Prior to the war on poverty the black American family was making genuine political and economic progress. Entitlement programs ushered in during the LBJ era actually encouraged single parenthood and the grinding poverty resulting from it. Affirmative action programs unavoidably called into question the veracity of minority academic achievement, and created racial tension, by creating a new class of the “preferred races.”
- The emergence of critical race theory and intersectional schemes for evaluating privilege took to race and culture what Marxism had failed to do with class. It turned the civil rights movement on its head and actually encouraged citizens to count their victim credentials and make racist and identity-based judgments against anyone with perceived privilege. As a result, by 2015, it was perfectly acceptable to encourage Caucasian college students to apologize for their “whiteness.” On the internet, no one would object to telling an “old white man” to be quiet simply because he was white. Asking black students to apologize for their “blackness” or “old black men” to be quiet would be unthinkable, precisely because majority America took Martin Luther King very seriously.
- Absolved from any charge of racism, black religious leaders such as Jeremiah Wright and Louis Farrakhan have been free to encourage a black separatism and even a gross, genocidal antisemitism (in the case of Louis Farrakhan). These leaders, moreover, have huge followings, share the dais with celebrities,and advise presidents.
- There is simply no “white nationalism” or “white separatism” or “white supremacy” in America with anywhere near the potency of the Farrakhan reality in reverse. Aspiring white politicians would shun the endorsement of a David Duke but Barack Obama actively courted the favor of the racist Louis Farrakhan and sat under the preaching of the separatist Jeremiah Wright for twenty years.
- This is a double standard we are warned to ignore at the peril of our jobs, our respectability, our right to work, and our First Amendment rights. If you even question this double standard, you are accused of racism without apology — by people so afraid of this status quo they will rush to establish their credentials by affirming the judgments of the new, approved oppressors.
- The apostle Paul advised Christians to “love without hypocrisy.” We will never end racial hatred until we simply end it — without hesitation, without qualification, without endless “interracial reconciliation” confabs, without one generation being asked to apologize for the crimes of another. We all know a family member who claims to have offered forgiveness, when their actions make it clear their very identity cherishes the privileges of perpetual victimhood.
Sooner or later, the race card must be allowed to expire, and we must be willing to shame anyone who plays it.
