There are few things as nauseating as watching some redneck high school dropout standing on his front porch in his wife-beater
T-shirt, holding a beer, rubbing his belly, and complaining that “them niggers took all the good jobs. You can’t get a job
if you’re a white man.”
Right, Virgil. I’m sure the fact that you’re forty-two and still living in your mom’s trailer has nothing to do with flunking
out of the sixth grade, your continued illiteracy, or the half dozen arrests for public drunkenness. No, no, no, I’m with
you, buddy. Why, the earning potential for a lazy, gap-toothed clod who can’t operate a pencil sharpenerwithout trained supervision must be enormous! It is only through constant thwarting of your superior Anglo-Saxon genetics
by a vast conspiracy of “niggers” (probably with the help of their friends the Jews) that you’ve been prevented from moving
up to
assistant
night manager at the Wal-Mart.
If you’re a liberal racist gerrymandering congressional districts, you want to argue about racial discrimination and its historic
legacy. If you’re a conservative racist, you want to argue about reverse discrimination and the plantation mentality of America’s
black leaders.
Either way, you are a racist. You are clinging to the fundamentally southern worldview that race is determinant, relevant,
an inescapable part of the human experience. You divide the world by race, as when you draw voting lines or school districts.
You treat people differently by race, through so-called hate-crime laws or racial-profiling police tactics. You view your
neighbors, coworkers, and fellow citizens, not as individuals, but as representative members of a larger, ethnic gang.
“All black people should get a reparations check for slavery, regardless of their circumstances, and all white people should
pick up the tab.” Or: “All black people are bad students in school, disruptive and incompetent; and good white children shouldn’t
have to go to class with them.” There is no different in the philosophy behind either of these statements. They are the ravings
of a race-obsessed redneck, and I reject them both.
I reject the premise of reverse discrimination (“The only people you can be prejudiced against are white Christian males!”)
for the same reason I reject the premise that underlies affirmative action (“Whitey is keeping medown!”). They both start from the same premise as Bob Jones: Race matters.
Which is what makes the constant battering we Southerners take from Northerners on the issue of race so unbearably annoying.
I have actually had Northerners who support government-funded, racially segregated, blacks-only public schools accuse me of
racism for supporting school choice!
The tendency among the typical (racist) American is to dismiss my rejection of race as Pollyannaish. “Of course, race matters,
Michael,” I have been told hundreds of times. “You can pretend it doesn’t, but it does. Are you saying America isn’t racist?”
Of course, I’m not saying that. I’m saying the exact opposite, that the same
New York Times
and CBS television network that helped lead the assault on redneck racism in the 1950s and ’60s are enthusiastically practicing
an updated version of the same racism today.
I’m not arguing that we live in an America where race doesn’t matter, but rather that we have rejected the idea that race
shouldn’t
matter. That was the premise of the Civil Rights Movement, that racism was fundamentally wrong. Dr. King summed it all up
in one sentence: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged
by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
Martin Luther King, Jr., gave that speech before a crowd of 200,000 people in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Today, every
American who agrees with him could fit in a booth at Denny’s, where they would wait
T-shirt, holding a beer, rubbing his belly, and complaining that “them niggers took all the good jobs. You can’t get a job
if you’re a white man.”
Right, Virgil. I’m sure the fact that you’re forty-two and still living in your mom’s trailer has nothing to do with flunking
out of the sixth grade, your continued illiteracy, or the half dozen arrests for public drunkenness. No, no, no, I’m with
you, buddy. Why, the earning potential for a lazy, gap-toothed clod who can’t operate a pencil sharpenerwithout trained supervision must be enormous! It is only through constant thwarting of your superior Anglo-Saxon genetics
by a vast conspiracy of “niggers” (probably with the help of their friends the Jews) that you’ve been prevented from moving
up to
assistant
night manager at the Wal-Mart.
If you’re a liberal racist gerrymandering congressional districts, you want to argue about racial discrimination and its historic
legacy. If you’re a conservative racist, you want to argue about reverse discrimination and the plantation mentality of America’s
black leaders.
Either way, you are a racist. You are clinging to the fundamentally southern worldview that race is determinant, relevant,
an inescapable part of the human experience. You divide the world by race, as when you draw voting lines or school districts.
You treat people differently by race, through so-called hate-crime laws or racial-profiling police tactics. You view your
neighbors, coworkers, and fellow citizens, not as individuals, but as representative members of a larger, ethnic gang.
“All black people should get a reparations check for slavery, regardless of their circumstances, and all white people should
pick up the tab.” Or: “All black people are bad students in school, disruptive and incompetent; and good white children shouldn’t
have to go to class with them.” There is no different in the philosophy behind either of these statements. They are the ravings
of a race-obsessed redneck, and I reject them both.
I reject the premise of reverse discrimination (“The only people you can be prejudiced against are white Christian males!”)
for the same reason I reject the premise that underlies affirmative action (“Whitey is keeping medown!”). They both start from the same premise as Bob Jones: Race matters.
Which is what makes the constant battering we Southerners take from Northerners on the issue of race so unbearably annoying.
I have actually had Northerners who support government-funded, racially segregated, blacks-only public schools accuse me of
racism for supporting school choice!
The tendency among the typical (racist) American is to dismiss my rejection of race as Pollyannaish. “Of course, race matters,
Michael,” I have been told hundreds of times. “You can pretend it doesn’t, but it does. Are you saying America isn’t racist?”
Of course, I’m not saying that. I’m saying the exact opposite, that the same
New York Times
and CBS television network that helped lead the assault on redneck racism in the 1950s and ’60s are enthusiastically practicing
an updated version of the same racism today.
I’m not arguing that we live in an America where race doesn’t matter, but rather that we have rejected the idea that race
shouldn’t
matter. That was the premise of the Civil Rights Movement, that racism was fundamentally wrong. Dr. King summed it all up
in one sentence: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged
by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
Martin Luther King, Jr., gave that speech before a crowd of 200,000 people in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Today, every
American who agrees with him could fit in a booth at Denny’s, where they would wait
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