Random Thoughts on "Racism"

Back in 2001 I had my political awakening to race-card politics duly blogged under the heading “Is This White Woman Racist and Does She Really Fucking Care”. This was in response to the so-called Cincinnati riots. (Here is the local media’s politically correct distortion of the events, and here is the correct assessment.) As I review those early posts I can trace my journey from someone who had absolutely no issues with any race or ethnicity to my present views on racism.

As a pre-teen, I was not a participant in any civil rights movement, wasn’t particularly aware of it, but never had any perception of blacks as inferior. I think what frightened me most, as I remember, was associating poverty with blacks. My mother, born shortly after her parents immigrated from Yugoslavia, was thrust into an orphanage at a young age and her dire tales of want and hardships chilled me as a child, leaving me far more wary of that particular condition, no matter what color skin bore witness to it.

It actually is very hard for me to think in terms of ethnicity. I have never felt need to make claim to my Romanian-Serbian roots nor lament the plight of my gypsy kin in Transylvania. My daddy grabbed his American name from a billboard and proceeded to move himself steadily up the economic ladder.

By the time I was born, he had turned his allotment of rags into riches, and I was, quite frankly, a spoiled little rich girl, without the attendant social status. I felt we had much in common with the Beverly Hillbillies. My dad may have known how to make a buck, but uneducated white men who sold cars for a living didn’t get much respect in the wealthy neighborhood I grew up in. And my dad, an independent cuss, could not have cared less. But there was never a moment in my life that I defined myself, or others, according to blood, skin or lineage.

Black men worked for my father at the dealership. He also hired them to cut our grass and paint our home. There wasn’t a disparaging word uttered by my parents. They were treated like any other contractor that came to the house.

I do have vague memories of the Cincinnati riots in 1966. Those were actual riots. I remember my dad getting the gun out of the safe. In retrospect, our neighborhood was so far from Cincinnati center that the likelihood of anyone driving out to do us rich folks harm was minimal. But he didn’t talk about shooting “niggers”. The word wasn’t in the home and my guess is he would have gotten the gun out no matter what race was having a riot.

But here’s the rub. It isn’t about civil rights anymore. It’s about victimhood. It’s not about equality. It’s about extortion. It’s not about unity. It’s about vengeance and pay back. Obama dresses it up with flourishes of pompous rhetoric and spices it with the incense of mysticism but it’s the same ole same ole race, entitlement and “justice” rhetoric that constituted “dialog” during the riots here in 2001.

When trying to debate racism in some local Cincinnati forums in the aftermath of the riots, I argued with one fellow accordingly.

…for those of you who claim to know the white man so damn well, I would counter, you better look again. You think you know the white race but, by virtue of your incessant self-obsession and constant caterwauling, you have failed to see you are dealing with a generation of white people who have, for the most part, from childhood on, stepped all over themselves trying not to offend a black person.

Should we say black, or is it negro, or now is it colored, oh, now it’s african-American – and god forbid you inadvertently say the frigging ‘N’ word lest everyone shatter like so many fragile humpty dumpties and we have another damn mess to clean up.

You’ve been insulting and alienating a generation of people who have taught their children to respect all people and immediately challenged REAL racist, behavior. A generation who has enjoyed and appreciated the appearance of more and more visible black performers, newscasters, journalists, analysts and personalities. Not as material for the purpose of caricaturing black people, as so often accused, but for the brilliant HUMAN talent there to be enjoyed.

And guess what? It wasn’t hard. Counter to what you appear to believe, there is no a cauldron of repressed black hatred lingering in the white heart. We don’t connive in small circles to make a black man’s day bad. There is no boogie man.

(original post)

The charge of racism today has become no more than a handy shibboleth intended to silence all criticism. It no longer holds weight with me. It is another word hollowed out of all meaning by the language re-framers on the left.

I finally quit attempting to communicate with the activists, but came away from the entire experience with a far more informed view on race and civil rights than ever supplied to me in school or via the PC media.

Below is the conclusion I reached in 2002 and it hasn’t changed in 2008. In fact, events in the intervening years have only strengthened my position. My guess is, the “unexpected consequences” of multiculturalism and political correctness that abets race-card politics has resulted in multitudes of Americans feeling about the same.

I began this venture trying to grasp what the perception of racism is and what I have found is this; because I ascribe to a particular set of principles and standards, because I adhere to a particular work ethic, because I disdain mewling dramatics and solipsism, because I demand accountability and responsibility…in other words, because of my values, I am deemed a racist.
So be it.
I am not going to cheapen my standards to accommodate some distorted version of civil rights. I’m not going to subscribe to a crippled social doctrine as define by malcontents just to appease the likes of you and your gang. Your quest for ‘equal treatment’ has served to lower the bar in every field of endeavor, but, I assure you, you will not continue with such chicanery. There are more more and more un-hyphenated Americans who know when to say the madness has gone on far too long.

(original post)

With Obama being teflon-ed from relevant criticism by his supporters it appears I will be visiting the topic of racism yet again. I’m not signing on to the Party of White Guilt.

Related Reading:

2001 Cincinnati Race Riots:Over 100 whites assaulted (video)

What Really Happened in Cincinnati – Heather McDonald

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Obama and Hillary: Steeped in the Rhetoric of Oppression

I never signed up for a course in the “-isms“; Marxism, Socialism and Communism – but researching the ideological underpinnings of the two progressive contenders for the presidency is teaching me more than I ever wanted to know.

I will frankly say that I will not vote for any black presidential candidate who chooses to designate himself as an African-American (as opposed to an American). In my mind that hyphen has come to symbolize race card politics, signaling an agenda of divisive grievances, not national unity.

And quite frankly, I could never bring myself to vote for a woman. Do with that what you will, but there was only one Margaret Thatcher and Hillary is her anti-thesis. But Hillary feeds at the same socialist trough as Obama, devouring the same multicultural, kumbaya swill.

With either candidate, it’s always about race, or class warfare, or gender issues, but never about celebrating America and it certainly is never about promoting – dare I say it – American exceptionalism.

The trinity of American exceptionalism could be described as (1) dynamism (support for equality of individual opportunity, entrepreneurship, and economic progress); (2) religiosity (emphasis on character development, mores, and voluntary cultural associations) that works to contain the excessive individual egoism that dynamism sometimes fosters; and (3) patriotism (love of country, self-government, and support for constitutional limits).(link)

I always find it amusing that the admonitions to respect the traditions of all cultures that are preached from the pulpits of multiculturalism have failed to make an impression on the very “cultures” that seek protection behind the PC mantle. But then, multiculturalism is a weapon aimed directly at the idea of “American exceptionalism”, as well as at whites, Euros, Anglos and other various “oppressor groups”. You may denigrate those cultures at will.

Obama and Hillary are steeped in the rhetoric of white supremacy, sexism and oppression, as are the academic elites who have poisoned American education.

Kors states that at an academic conference sponsored by the University of Nebraska, the attendees articulated the view that “White students desperately need formal ‘training’ in racial and cultural awareness. The moral goal of such training should override white notions of privacy and individualism.” One of the leading “diversity experts” providing scores of “training programs” in universities, corporations, and government bureaucracies is Hugh Vasquez of the Todos Institute of Oakland, California. Vasquez’s study guide for a Ford Foundation-funded diversity film, Skin Deep, explains the meaning of “white privilege” and “internalized oppression” for the trainees.

from…Why There is a Culture War

Might I suggest that the generations of blacks who have been indoctrinated to believe that they are oppressed get some training as well. If they want to claim that racism is institutionalized by whites, than I would have to say that entitlement and victim hood is institutionalized among all so-called minorities who jump on the grievance train.

From Shelby Steele’s ‘A Dream Deferred”

I believe this acceptance of victimization is a totalism caused by the downfall of post-sixties liberalism. This is where liberalism lost it’s balance and ultimately its integrity. Many observers who lived through the sixties realize that it was the old American problem of race that did liberalism in. To accept victimization not as one of many variables but as a totalism was to see it as structural – so built into the patterns of society that that it could be manifested apart from human will. And if the evil was structural. only structural remedies would work against it. You couldn’t fight racial victimization on a case-by-case basis; you had to put into place structures that would prefer the victim in compensation for the victimization we could presume he or she endured. Thus liberalism becomes preemptive rather than defensive. It no longer protected individuals and fought for equal opportunity but it pursued group rights and equal results. It remedied the victimization before it was manifest. This transformation came from the embrace of victimization as a totalistic explanation of black difficulty. But it changed the basic terms of American liberalism from freedom, rights, and responsibilities to planning, engineering and entitlements.

I absolutely do not buy that minorities in this country suffer under systematic oppression. Instances of prejudice and incivility, yeah, I am sure that there are incidents galore. It’s called human nature and the only fools who think that they will be able to extirpate prejudice completely from the human psyche are , well – fools like Obama and Hillary – magical thinking elitists who presume to know just the right alchemy necessary to recreate the human soul.

One such social engineer is a far left radical Saul Alinsky, often mentioned in both Obama’s and Hillary’s accounts of influential political mentors.

Diane Alden on Saul Alinsky…

Alinsky asserted that he was more concerned with the acquisition of power than anything else: “My aim here is to suggest how to organize for power: how to get it and how to use it.” This is not to be done with assistance to the poor, nor even by organizing the poor to demand assistance: “[E]ven if all the low-income parts of our population were organized … it would not be powerful enough to get significant, basic, needed changes.”

Alinsky advises his followers that the poor have no power and that the real target is the middle class: “Organization for action will now and in the decade ahead center upon America’s white middle class. That is where the power is. … Our rebels have contemptuously rejected the values and the way of life of the middle class. They have stigmatized it as materialistic, decadent, bourgeois, degenerate, imperialistic, war-mongering, brutalized and corrupt. They are right; but we must begin from where we are if we are to build power for change, and the power and the people are in the middle class majority.”

But that didn’t stop Alinsky and his followers from using the middle class for their own purposes. They counted on the guilt and shame of the white middle class to get what they wanted. In order to take over institutions and get power, the middle class had to be convinced that they were somehow lucky winners in “life’s lottery.”

Alinsky’s radicals found a perfect vehicle for their destruction of the American system and more particularly for taking and maintaining power. That instrument was the Democratic Party.

from….Saul Alinsky and DNC Corruption

More on Alinsky and the political lens through which Obama and Hillary view America in coming posts.

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Hillary Clinton’s Wellesley Thesis

Center for Community Change

Mr. Obama, You’re No Jack Kennedy

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