Fear of a Racist Country Wednesday, July 17, 2013, Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog
For the last 150 years this country has been on a long strange trip and the one and only thing that we know about it anymore is that it's racist. Bild entfernt (keine Rechte) Racism has become an indisputable fact of the universe. When everything else is in doubt, racism isn't. It can't be. It's become the anti-weather, the thing we discuss because everyone knows that it exists and everyone knows that everyone is racist.
America is racist. Just look at Segregation, the Trail of Tears and whatever happened last week that is already being analyzed on Salon, broken down at Atlantic Wire, trending on Twitter, spun on Think Progress and then chewed and digested by the slower eaters on CNN, MSNBC and the surviving outposts of the print media.
Everyone and everything is racist. When the racism microscope is turned on or a racism signal is beamed to the giant orbiting racism satellite launched last week by that fortress of white extraterrestrial privilege, NASA, or a special racism submersible is dropped into the ocean, their enhanced analytical powers reveal that racism is everywhere in America.
That may seem unlikely to anyone who actually travels to any of the places in the world that still have slavery. They are much less concerned with media images of black people over in Mauritania which still has slavery. There's not a lot of interest in white privilege over in Sudan, where actual genocide is still taking place. And if you get a chance, stop by Papua, where Obama's friendly Indonesian step-folks are still killing black people.
But that's actual racism. We don't have real racism. What we have are cashiers writing insulting things on receipts, landlords who occasionally prefer not to rent to black people and the occasional drunken idiot who starts shouting slurs at a black man. It's not exactly up there with genocide, but fortunately the racism industry has supplemented it by denouncing every movie and television show ever made and every police or even non-police shooting involving a black man as racist.
A hundred years ago educated people subjected themselves to psychoanalysis sessions which proved conclusively that their fear of heights was caused by wanting to kill their fathers and rape their mothers. And if you didn't dabble in some amateurish psychoanalysis, the intellectual elites of New York or Chicago wouldn't even bother sneering in your direction.
These days racism is the new psychoanalysis. Educated people check their privilege and discover that they are the reincarnation of Simon Legree. They are horrified to find that they take it for granted that people in movies look like them and talk like them. They gasp as they realize that they actually manage to get through the day without thinking about race and weep in shame as they are told that black people are constantly thinking about race and their failure to do the same thing is a form of privilege that makes them no better than Jefferson Davis or Archie Bunker.
Black people don't actually spend all their time being racially conscious, much as factory workers in the 19th century didn't actually go around being class conscious all the time. That was just one of the things that Marxists successfully convinced the eagerly guilty elites of. About the only people who do spend all their time viewing everything through a toxic prism of race are MSNBC analysts, and like prostitutes and people who test dangerous cosmetics on rabbits; they only do it because they're paid to.
Our search for racism has become an inner spiritual search for the racist within. The new racism is an unawareness of racism, which says all that there is to say about the prevalence of this terrible threat. When the biggest issue with racism is that not enough people are constantly thinking about it, then the real problem is that there isn't a problem.
That candidly sums up the state of American racism, which is a problem searching for a problem. But that is different than the state of American race relations, which is characterized by suspicion, irritation, guilt and occasional explosions carefully stirred up and set off by an entire field of professional provocateurs in academia and the media.
One of the greater fallacies of racism is to assume that it equates to race relations. It does not. The problem of racism involved the way that governments and people behaved toward each other. That's different than how people see each other. That form of racism, like the monsters that began pouring out of the brains of patients lying cushioned on the psychoanalyst's couch, is not something that we can or should be dealing with.
If we look back at the countries that we all came from, we find that once upon a time we all hated each other. The English, the Irish and the Welsh, the Spanish and the Portuguese, the Norwegians and the Swedes, the French and well everyone else. And turning east, the Chinese and the Japanese, and over to Africa, where no one got along, resulting in slavery, and where no one still gets along, resulting in genocide.