Bigotry, Inc.

In the midst of the great national debate over Confederate statues, Alabama native Charles Barkley declared that, growing up around such statues, he never noticed them. He advised African-Americans to get to work and stop committing crimes.

Naturally, he was quickly denounced as a white supremacist.

The American left is becoming dumb and dumber. It is running a pogrom to cleanse the culture of everything it finds offensive. We will end up living in a world with only one permitted book: The Little Red Book of the sayings of Chairman Mao.

As for those who want to ask where the pogrom will go next, the answer is simple. After finishing off all the statues and grammatically correct pronouns, pogromistas will go after people. In the sense of: human beings. Twas always thus....

The current obsession with bigotry is really about Barack Obama. We had our first African-American president and the nation’s media—with one conspicuous exception—declared him to have been the Messiah. Thus, everything he did was the best that had ever been done. Obama made no mistakes. He made no errors. He was not just the best and the brightest. He was the greatest. If you don't think so, you are a bigot. No one was allowed to criticize the Messiah, lest they be taxed with racism. Thus, no one spoke ill of Obama.

It was unfair and condescending, but Heaven help you if you disagreed.

Now, to the shock and dismay of the cognoscenti, the American people roundly rejected the Democratic Party at the ballot box. And, as though to stick a finger in the eye of the mainstream media, they elected someone who, by their moral calculus, resembles the Antichrist. Just as Obama could do no wrong, Trump, in the eyes of the media, can do no right.

If journalists want to be respected, they should begin by respecting themselves. That does not just mean reporting fairly about the Trump administration, but also reporting fairly about the Obama administration.

Worse yet, and to the chagrin of Nicholas Kristof, the Trump administration is rolling back the Obama legacy. When Obama transformed the nation via executive order, no one noticed that governing by executive fiat bespoke despotism. And none of those who were cheering from the peanut gallery noticed that these orders could easily be revoked and rendered null, by another executive.

The notion that media idolaters might lose their religion and their god-- seeing that he had feet of clay-- was too much to bear. They launched a cultural revolution, roughly as Chairman Mao did, in order to cover up their leader’s failures, but especially to shift the blame for his failures on everyone else. The fault was not with Obama. If his administration failed, the fault lay with systemic, endemic American racism.

Today, for example, we have been informed that the Democratic mayor of Houston told its residents not to evacuate while the Republican governor of Texas told them to do so. Naturally, supporters of the mayor are now out claiming that he was totally right. We know that he will never admit to error.

I promise you, in time, the media will blame the Houston catastrophe on Donald Trump. They will announce that it is God’s way of showing that Trump has lost the Mandate of Heaven. If you thought that these secularists did not believe in God, you were wrong.

Is that clear now?

Today, Shelby Steele explains the liberal con over racism. While racism still exists, Steele says, it is no longer the systemically enforced policy that it once was. The problems the African-Americans face today are less about racism and more about what Charles Barkley said: work harder, get an education and stop committing crimes. If the African-American community has lost those values, the fault might reside more with their leaders and less with racism.

Besides, did we not read in the New York Times that decades worth of affirmative action programs in American universities have done nothing to solve racial disparities. In fact, minorities are more underrepresented in colleges than they used to be. The fault lies with family structure and community values. Now, as you know, Asian American students are overrepresented—perhaps because they have Tiger Moms. Or perhaps it's because of their white privilege.

Steele opens his column:

It used to be that racism meant the actual enforcement of bigotry—the routine implementation of racial inequality everywhere in public and private life. Racism was a tyranny and an oppression that dehumanized—animalized—the “other.” 

He adds:

Today Americans know that active racism is no longer the greatest barrier to black and minority advancement. Since the 1960s other pathologies, even if originally generated by racism, have supplanted it. White racism did not shoot more than 4,000 people last year in Chicago. To the contrary, America for decades now—with much genuine remorse—has been recoiling from the practice of racism and has gained a firm intolerance for what it once indulged.

In the late 1960s, however, racism became recast as a sin, the worst of all social evils. For the most part people rejected racism. That did not stop the anti-racism warriors. Those who were fighting racism claimed that they possessed the ultimate virtue. Their word could not be questioned or challenged. They were fighting the ultimate evil, so any means were justified.

Steele writes:

What makes racism so sweet? Today it empowers. Racism was once just racism, a terrible bigotry that people nevertheless learned to live with, if not as a necessary evil then as an inevitable one. But the civil-rights movement, along with independence movements around the world, changed that. The ’60s recast racism in the national consciousness as an incontrovertible sin, the very worst of all social evils.

How does one rid one’s nation and one’s psyche of sin? By paying off a debt. Americans are guilty. White Americans are the most guilty. Those who practiced institutional racism they are now obliged to accept their punishment, to flagellate themselves, and to pay reparations to those who suffered:

Thus, redemption—paying off the nation’s sins—became the moral imperative of a new political and cultural liberalism. 

And yet, if you tell a community that everyone owes them a living, what incentive do they have to go out and work?

The war against racism gave liberals a sense of moral superiority. It defined their moral identity, even if their personal behavior left a great deal to be desired:

This liberalism always projects moral idealisms (integration, social justice, diversity, inclusion, etc.) that have the ring of redemption. What is political correctness, if not essentially redemptive speech? Soon liberalism had become a cultural identity that offered Americans a way to think of themselves as decent people. To be liberal was to be good.

Liberals became the high priests of a new religion, a cult where they were empowered to grant absolution from sins:

Here we see redemptive liberalism’s great ingenuity: It seized proprietorship over innocence itself. It took on the power to grant or deny moral legitimacy across society. Liberals were free of the past while conservatives longed to resurrect it, bigotry and all. What else could “Make America Great Again” mean? In this way redemptive liberalism reshaped the moral culture of the entire Western world with sweeping idealisms like “diversity,” which are as common today in Europe as in America.

Racism, Steele continues, empowers liberals. In part, politically, but also culturally:

The liberal identity must have racism, lest it lose innocence and the power it conveys.

Are we getting over this moral tyranny? Steele suggests that we are reaching “race fatigue,” and that it’s time to turn toward policies that might actually achieve what liberals promised:

But today there are signs of what I have called race fatigue. People are becoming openly cynical toward the left’s moral muscling with racism. Add to this liberalism’s monumental failure to come even close to realizing any of its beautiful idealisms, and the makings of a new conservative mandate become clearer. As idealism was the left’s political edge, shouldn’t realism now be the right’s? Reality as the informing vision—and no more wrestling with innocence.