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The Great Lie of Racism

Once upon a time racism used to be relatively easy to pin down. It was segregated lunch counters and slave ships, it was nooses and chains, it was the legal oppression of a group of people on account of the color of their skin. Then racism stopped being a set of laws and became an abstraction, first a set of attitudes and then a set of attitudes implying another set of attitudes.

Racism changed from laws that deliberately discriminate against black people to policies that serve to disadvantage black people, whether or not that is their intent. In 1971, 17 years after its landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling, the Supreme Court decided that schools shouldn't just not be forcibly segregated, but that they could be forcibly desegregated with the use of busing, even if there was no actual intent to segregate and where the racial differences were the result of geography. That same year in Griggs v. Duke Power Co., the Court ruled that a high school diploma job requirement was racially discriminatory because fewer black people possessed them.

From an attempt to overturn racist laws, the war on racism had shifted to forcibly legislating big government's idea of racial equality. The goal was no longer removing inequality, but artificially creating a desired statistical outcome.

In 1965, LBJ introduced Affirmative Action as the "next and more profound stage of the battle for civil rights". The new goal was "not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and as a result." And manufacturing equality first required manufacturing inequality to achieve a perfect balance. Equal opportunity in the free market was traded for an equal result in a planned racial economy. And it worked about as well as all planned economies do.

In the process, racism was conflated with socialism. Principled civil rights objections to government laws were the new racism. Obstructing the unlimited power of the Federal government had become the equivalent of bigotry. To truly support racial equality, one had to support racial inequality and to show one's opposition to past government racial laws, one had to support the new government racial laws meant to redress those laws... even 60 years later.

Racism had not only become an abstraction, it had become the abstraction of an abstraction,  transcending race to fuse with attitudes toward government power returning to the old Civil War Republican formula of Federalism as anti-racism and States' Rights as racism. 150 years after the Civil War, federalism as anti-racism is a false formula imposed on a debate going back to the Washington Administration about where the center of political power should rest.

That formula is the one still being used to tar Republicans, who invented the formula of Federalism as Anti-Racism. In 1872, Thomas Nash was smearing abolitionist Horace Greeley as a racist for resisting Grant's Republican Federalism. In 2012, Nast's even nastier ideological descendants are treating any challenge to unlimited Federal power from Republicans as a cross burning on the White House lawn. If Nash was at least operating within a historical framework where Federal power was used to restrain racial violence, 140 years later those same attacks are the clothes of power worn over the frame of a naked cynicism.

Obama is neither Grant nor Eisenhower. When he wields unlimited power, race is only there to disguise the power of the naked emperor and his naked empire. Throughout the 20th Century, Democrats searched around for a compelling justification for seizing and wielding unlimited power the way that their Republican predecessors had.

President Wilson did it in the name of a global crusade, imprisoning critics of his intervention in World War I. FDR did it in the name of an economic crisis and the underclass, even as he put his boot on small business and targeted Jewish and Italian immigrants for raids and show trials for economic crimes. But his Democratic successors zeroed in on race and made it their own, abusing power in the name of combating racism.

Like Wilson, Obama abuses power in the name of wartime contingencies. Like FDR, he abuses power to combat an economic crisis. But mostly he uses the same excuse that his white predecessors used. Race.

Racism is no longer about race. Not when Bill Clinton was the first black president and Allen West is a racist for bringing fried chicken to a Congressional Black Caucus meeting. Liberalism is the new race, and it is a category that transcends and encompasses race. Liberalism defines race, allowing white liberals to be defined as black and black conservatives to be defined as white.

The race in racism is nothing but a symbol now, but since most people still assume that racism means hating black people, rather than questioning government power, it helps to have a half-black man around as a symbol of why abuses of government power are justified for the greater good of race relations.

Most people, black and white, don't understand the switch that has been pulled on them or that the racism being talked about is not the kind that involves a white man hitting a black man, but a debate over unlimited political power between two political parties, both of whom have at one time eroded the "States" part and emphasized the "United" part with a variety of justifications, among them that of treating black people as wards of the Federal government.

Racism accusations are delivered by white people speaking on behalf of black people and black people speaking on behalf of white people for an agenda that is not about race, but about power and wealth. These accusations have become increasingly ludicrous as they have become disconnected from actual racism and even from race.

On MSNBC, Lawrence O'Donnell insisted that "golfer" is a racial stereotype and Chris Matthews dubbed "Chicago" a racial codeword. Besides the obvious display of hackery, the search for codewords is a sign of how abstract racism has become. Racism is no longer a slur or a stereotype of a black man, but a criticism directed at a Democrat who happens to be black.

The decline of racism and the unholy union of race and government has turned it into a wholly abstract thing that may still be nourished by fond memories of civil rights marches and opposition to the DAR, but actually means nothing at all. The language of racism no longer has a coherent grammar. Racial accusations are everywhere, but they no longer mean anything because they have lost even their most tenuous connections to race.

Say any word often enough and it begins to lose its meaning, look at it long enough and it begins to look misspelled. In a world where "Chicago golfer" is a racial slur and a racial slur is in one of the country's bestselling songs, racial slurs no longer mean what they used to. The national grammar of race has shifted and while liberals talk incessantly about race, they have nothing to actually say about it.

Racism, for the most part, was never really about race, it was about power. It was about power when slave votes and slave labor were being used to shift the balance of power. And it is about power when black votes and accusations of racism are used to shift the balance of power. And in one of history's great ironies that renders PBS pieties so absurd, the same Party was responsible for both sets of actions. The ideology, whether that of the permanent racial inferiority of black people of yesterday's Democratic Party or the permanent social inferiority of black people in today's Democratic Party, was and is just the clothing that the naked emperor wears on his power trips.

Racism still endures in the nooks and crannies of the country, but it isn't the kind of racism that's talked about in the news. It's the unextraordinary and unexceptional bigotry of small petty men, of any color and creed, who practice their small mean-spirited acts outside the law. This is not the political racism that we talk about as a national phenomenon. That political racism is not about a man being beaten outside a bar, it's about the power of the bar's lawyers to wield unlimited authority in the name of a problem that can never go away, no matter how abstract it becomes, because they have turned it into the source of their power.

Real racism is slowly dying out, but political racism can never go away. Instead it is rediscovered in ordinary words, in "Golfer" and in "Chicago." The more it declines, the more it emerges everywhere in dogwhistles and hidden codes that become more and more abstract until no one can find it anymore.





Comments

  1. There's one good thing that's come out of this: it's replaced "Nazi" as the derogatory term of choice.

    For my part, there's only one race: human. Among us, there are two kinds: those that are decent, and those that are not.

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  2. As Thomas Sowell has pointed out, black Africans were not enslaved because of their skin color, but because of their availability. Over a 3,000 year period, many persons of different races were made slaves. "Racism" was a term not invented until much later, and has now been so misused and overused by the Left that its current meaning is completely unclear.

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    1. Africans were also granted the only benefit of sickle cell anemia, which is a resistance to malaria. If servants\slaves were wanted irish, and scottish would have been bettercommon language, common religion, common diet, but they would also have been sick from malaria just like the owner.

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  3. Anonymous4/9/12

    "the Supreme Court decided that schools shouldn't just not be forcibly segregated"

    "the Supreme Court decided that schools shouldn't be forcibly segregated"

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  4. Mr ED4/9/12

    Once again an excellent, thought provoking article.

    Ravenous, power-hungry Modern Liberals are continually searching for both rationale and proscription which will serve to feed more power into their vicious little hands. Before the era of the pretend Leftist saviours those who sought power/wealth did not also seek to hide their intentions behind a veneer of victim-group advocacy but reveled in the honesty of desiring power for powers sake. Not so the Modern Liberal who wishes not only to aquire that same power but be thanked for aquiring it.

    Race is but one rationale and set of proscriptions designed to serve the needs of the false Leftist saviours, never the ones in whose name those saviours presume to act. It should be apparent that the goal posts of what constitutes racism, homophobia, ad nauseum will never be allowed to rest in one place. In the world of Modern Liberalsim, the needs of the few (Liberals) outweigh the needs of the many. And they always will.

    The morphing of desegragation into bussing should be an object lesson here. So should the morphing of poverty into "inequality". The Leftists search for a rationale for power will never end, because it is in their DNA and they cannot stop being who they are - false saviours who desire power over all else and who seek to hide their lust for power by creating/inventing victim groups who they presume to speak for and to hide behind.

    BTW I have told everyone I know about this site because it is almost unique, offering truly intelligent, thought provoking ideas without being constrained by the boundaries set by the Libfilth MSM/infotainment cabal.

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  5. Not that I like to invoke the memory of GW Bush, but he did sum it up nicely by calling it the Liberal "Racism via low expectations".

    We see the same thing when it comes to the Women issue too. You are considered "sexist" if you believe the government has no business dictating to smaller businesses what they should compensate their own employees. So they twist it to claim Republicans voted down a bill that would give women equal pay for equal work.

    And get this, leading the charge is Elizabeth Warren. She has an entire ad here in Mass running currently claiming this against Senator Brown. So a women, who gets paid $350,000 from Harvard to show up twice a year is worried that she isn't getting equal pay to a man with the same gig. I would like to see if there is indeed a man from any University being paid to run for Senate. I bet there are not.

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  6. It's difficult to get along while saying racism doesn't exist, when we witness people going through all sorts of contortions to prove the point.

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  7. well done once again, daniel. yes, racism has always been about power. but how to get the pawns to see themselves on the board is the conundrum. we just have to keep infecting others with our sensible thinking. keep up the good work! :)

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  8. Anonymous4/9/12

    The Democratic Party was always the party of racism. They switched over from anti-black racism to anti-white racism when they realized the vast untapped votes that they could receive from the blacks.

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  9. For the Dems it's not entirely about racism. It's more of a branding effect. Most people, including Dems, don't wake up every day looking the next example of 400 years of oppression. Oh many of their pundits, artists and opinion leaders do but not otherwise. And this is primarily why the Dems lost their white blue collar base. After a generation of Dem leaders beating them over the head with cries of "You're all racist", those people simply stopped saying "No, we're not" and moved over the to the GOP. But if you watch MSNBC you'd think the entire Democratic machine is engaged in a real time life or death struggle with precisely 7 fat rich white guys who literally are trying to enslave the black man again.

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  10. Anonymous4/9/12

    "race is only there to disguise the power of the naked emperor and his naked empire." This phrase says it all. It's gone from a race card to a race herring. The best thing we can do might be to ignore the charges entirely and keep the focus on current issues. The Democrats' strategy of focusing on imaginary racism is as absurd as if they tried to connect everything to the laying of the transcontinental railroad or the free coinage of silver.

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  11. Anonymous4/9/12

    As misguided and terribly flawed as the Left was in the early 1960. they at least seemed sincere. JFK seemed sincere and geniunely outraged when police turned firehouses on black Americasns. I'll never figure out why Obama is (or at least was) so fixated on JFK--an "old money" Irish Catholic president.

    At least the liberals in JFK's era believed in something (or faked it really well). Obama can't even geniune outrage at real racism.

    Keliata

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  12. Anonymous4/9/12

    " In 1971, 17 years after its landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling, the Supreme Court decided that schools shouldn't just not be forcibly segregated, but that they could be forcibly desegregated with the use of busing"

    IMO forced busing is reasonable for the destruction of US communities:( No wonder so people are clamoring for a return to neighborhood school.

    The old days when kids could walk a block of twp to school, have lunch at home, play with the same kids after school that they went to school with.

    Keliata

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  13. Anonymous4/9/12

    Just one more comment on why both Obama and Romney have each compared each other to Kennedy. It's interesting. Take this quote from Irish Central:

    "JFK’s father was one of the wealthiest men in America and was the first chairman of the SEC. Almost all of his income came from a trust he shared with other family members.

    “This is not a nation that divides people based on whether they’ve been successful or not. We don’t say, ‘Oh, boy, this person won the lottery and therefore they can’t understand me.’ We instead look at people and celebrate their success and their achievements, and we look for people who have the skills we think will make our lives better,” Romney added."

    A fake war on racism isn't going to make our lives better.

    Excellent article once again.

    Keliata

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  14. We still have segregation of a sort in this country - look at how the public housing is concentrated, and how the congressional districts have been gerrymandered along racial lines. It is all about votes and power - to get the power, the Dem's have concentrated much of the poorest black population in areas deisgned to fail (bad schools, poor employment opportunity, etc) and then forced the bussing of students so that they can see what they don't have in the wealthier suburban communities, thus strengthening and propagating both the truth of segregation, adn the myth. The truth is that racism *does* still exist...but the myth is that conservative, predominantly white suburban families are all racists. Fact is, it is primarilly the white, URBAN Democrats who are the real racists.
    And when TSHTF, those same white urban dem's will get what they have coming...
    http://ncrenegade.com/uncategorized/what-is-coming-and-what-we-must-do/

    WE HAVE BEEN WARNED

    LT
    ~Those who abuse Liberty, do so at their own peril!

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  15. Racism exists only where the races try to co-exist. There is no Racism in China - it's full of Chinese. Howabout in Japan - Nope, it's full of Japanese. Howabout Israel, well they are working on removing most of the Arabs from their boarders - and thereby separating themselves from their Racial enemies. Why is it that only the White countries of the world must allow unrestricted immigration to Prove that we are not Racist? Have all you "constitutionalists" forgotten that this Country was established by and for the Posterity of Europeans - not the Prosperity of the non-white world? Read the Document again - this time without your PC filters on. Am I the only one here, so far, who has the balls to admit that I'm a 'racist' by our Patriotic use of the word? I am a 'racial separatist' who understands that history and nature and God have crafted the different races of man and put each of them on a different continent to develop their own culture. It was White Technology and Jewish greed that undid this plan and planted the seeds of the coming Race Wars in most of the formerly White nations of the Earth. I am not ashamed to say that I moved my family to North Idaho to self-segregate my five white children from the presence of non-whites (blacks and browns) in the Baltimore area to ensure that we do NOT interact / socialize with non-whites and thereby grow up to miscegenate what nature and God and my Forebears bequeathed to us - White genes. Am I a thought -criminal? Would I be denied entry or citizenship in the New Restored Republic? Would you forbid me Militia service or refuse to let me serve by you in the front lines for my beliefs (believe me I would not want to serve in a Diverse Unit of Whites and Non-Whites)? I won't go into the history of the failures of the White race, as most of those reading this have already made up your minds - Nazi! (Yes, I believe He was right, as did most Americans before the "war"), Racist (Yes, by your definition) Un-Amerikan Bastard (If you say so), but all we need to do is look to our Valiant Ally, Israel, to see the path to Democratic Success in the coming struggle: Racial Segregation = National Survival. The Jewish people are forcing all Arabs from Greater Israel and, by law, forbidding Intermarriage in an effort to save both the Jewish people and the land that they occupy. We are loosing the Land that Whites occupy because we are becoming a minority in our own countries.

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  16. There's plenty of racism in Japan and China. Do I even need to go into what's going on in Africa?

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  17. Anonymous8/9/12

    My brother-in-law has always joked that he wishes he were a black man, theoretically he thinks by voting for blacks he is partway there. A high school dropout and a racial dropout. Lars

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  18. Brilliant.

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