FASHIONABLE RACISM AND A WIDENING RACIAL GAP

Racism has become quite fashionable, as long as it’s directed towards the correct racial group. Today, it’s the Whites who are being coerced to pay the price of their sins. Which sins? Jim Grimsley, the author of “How I Shed My Skin: Unlearning the Racist Lessons of a Southern Childhood,” presents a lengthy list:

• [White liberals] ignore the fact that we sit inside an ideology of white superiority that gives us enormous advantages. http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0223-grimsley-white-conversations-racism-20160223-story.html

I have never seen an “ideology of white superiority.” Nor does Grimsley provide any documentation for such a thing. While there is absolutely no doubt that this had been a racist nation and that the Black people are lagging economically and vocationally, it is unfounded that this is caused by the remaining remnants of White racism. Nevertheless, Grimsley continues:

• More than simple anecdotes, these are symptoms of the insanity of white culture and our refusal to understand that racism is part of our makeup — each and every one of us, north, south, east and west — from cradle to grave.

Grimsley mentions several racist encounters. I have no reason to question their veracity. I am sure that there are racist Whites as I am sure that there are racist Blacks. However, Grimsley makes a quantum leap by insisting that “racism is part of our makeup — each and every one of us.”

How can he call ALL Whites racists? Instead, I know many Whites, even Grimsley, who go out of their way to prove that they are not racist by showing favoritism to the Blacks. Nevertheless, Grimsley insists that Whites:

• Re-segregate our schools using every available strategy and continue to profit from long-standing systems that are biased toward the hiring, advancement and empowerment of white people, all the while decrying the racism we see in others, pointing fingers at this or that extremist

What strategies? In fact, Affirmative Action, has tipped things in the opposite direction. I had worked in the NYC Department of Probation for 15 years, where it was the Whites who were vulnerable and had to watch themselves. They could not even dream of forming a society of White Probation Officers. However, the same is not the case for people of color.

I don’t blame them for this, However, it is evidence of a double-standard, reinforced by a good dose of White guilt, happily administered by Grimsley and other racists like him. However, Grimsley seems to admit this:

• White liberals — and I am one — are adept at using these naming and shaming tactics to avoid looking inward. Comfortable in our beliefs, we ignore the fact that we sit inside an ideology of white superiority that gives us enormous advantages even when we mouth the right opinions, trade memes about the awful racist act that one of us committed, and pat ourselves on the back for our sensitivity.

White guilt, instead of being focused on the needs of the Black community, as we should be, and failing to “look inward,” has been motivated more by guilt-reduction, than the welfare of others. Consequently, their social programs have done more to hurt the Black community than to help it.

In fact, I have heard Blacks confess that they were better off before Civil Rights had become a reality. Why? For one thing, their families had been relatively intact. Now, 72% are born into single-parent families.

In Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make it Harder for Blacks to Succeed, Jason Riley argues against White guilt and its destructive impact:

• The intentions behind welfare programs, for example, may be noble. But in practice they have slowed the self- development that proved necessary for other groups to advance. Minimum-wage laws might lift earnings for people who are already employed, but they also have a long history of pricing blacks out of the labor force. Affirmative action in higher education was intended to address past discrimination, but the result is fewer black college graduates— particularly in the fields of math and science— than we’d have in the absence of racial preferences. And so it goes, with everything from soft-on-crime laws that make black neighborhoods more dangerous to policies that limit school choice out of a mistaken belief that charter schools and voucher programs harm the traditional public schools that most low- income students attend.

Conservatives have oft spoken against the negative effects of the welfare system. For this, they have been labeled “racist.” The church has been widely criticized for betraying their mandate to care for the poor. However, if the entitlement programs have done more to hurt the poor than to help, there may be sound reasons for the church’s opposition.

Opposition to the welfare system is not merely anecdotal. It is both empirical and logical, according to Riley:

• Time and again the empirical data show that current methods and approaches have come up short. Upward mobility depends on work and family. Social programs that undermine the work ethic and displace fathers keep poor people poor, and perverse incentives put in place by people trying to help are manifested in black attitudes, habits, and skills. Why study hard in school if you will be held to lower academic standards? Why change antisocial behavior when people are willing to reward it, make excuses for it, or even change the law to accommodate it?

Conservative and Liberal alike can agree that the Black community continues to suffer. However, they differ greatly in their analysis. While Liberals blame the system for the fact that there is a disproportionate percentage of Blacks behind bars, Riley writes:

• Although black civil rights leaders like to point to a supposedly racist criminal justice system to explain why our prisons house so many black men, it’s been obvious for decades that the real culprit is black behavior— behavior too often celebrated in black culture.

If black behavior is the cause, then black behavior must be addressed and not the alleged racist system. Meanwhile, the disparity is growing worse in many areas. Riley writes:

• In September 2011 white unemployment was 8 percent, versus a unemployment rate of 16 percent. For black men it was 18 percent, and for black teens the jobless rate topped 44 percent. Nor was employment the only area where blacks as a group had regressed economically under Obama. According to the Census Bureau, black homeownership rates in 2011 had fallen to a point where the black- white gap was the widest since 1960, wiping out more than four decades of black gains.

Grimsley and Hilary Clinton ascribe the problems to underlying racism and its determination to exclude blacks from society. Sometimes it is called “systemic racism,” a sinister and unseen master-plot to keep blacks in their place. Why do the Leftists invoke this imaginary conspiracy? Since it is an incontrovertible fact that there is no longer legal racism! All of the racist laws of the USA have been over-turned. Therefore, the blame-spinners must re-envision racism in another way. Even black-on-black crime is a product of this conspiracy. However, Riley resists the blame-game:

• Race consciousness helps cohere the political left, and black liberalism’s main agenda is keeping race front and center in our national conversations. That’s why, for example, much more common black-on-black crimes take a back seat to much less common white-on-black crimes. The last thing that organizations like the NAACP want is for America to get “beyond” race. In their view, racial discrimination in one form or another remains a significant barrier to black progress, and government action is the best solution.

Grimsley, Clinton, and other race-mongers have widened the racial gap, fueling unjustified anger that will erupt in violence. However, White guilt and its pathetic “mea culpa” simply refuses to address the issues and offers only false and destructive solutions.