As one of the relatively few people (percentage wise) to have spent more than a decade on both sides of our political divide, and also to have participated personally in the civil rights movement in the South in the sixties, I am going to say something that will be extremely controversial to liberals, indeed make them hate me. Given all those years I spent on the two sides, I have observed liberals to be vastly more racist than conservatives and libertarians.
It isn’t even close. During the time I was on the left, I heard many racially disparaging comments by my associates either offered in confidence or as off-hand remarks. During my time on the right, I heard such a comment only one time — and that was by a Frenchman. (Frankly, it didn’t surprise me. I have spent a certain amount of time in France and heard more racism around the dinner table than I ever have in this country.) I will add that, though I don’t classify myself as a Tea Party member, in the seven years I was CEO of PJ Media, I met or spoke on the phone with dozens of Tea Partiers. Not a single one of them ever said or did anything that approached racism to me. And I was certainly paying attention. That was my job.
The roots of this divide are not just the obvious Freudian projection — those who accuse you of something evil are usually the ones perpetrating it. That’s true enough. But it’s far more than that. The Democratic Party has been waging a War on Black People since the Great Society of 1964-65 (actually for far longer than that) that has reached horrifying proportions in our time. That nearly 73 percent of African Americans are currently born out of wedlock, 67 percent living in single parent homes, is nothing short of disastrous with yet more disastrous auguries for the future.
And all this during the administration of our first black president. The level of hypocrisy is astronomical.
To be fair, at first this war was unconscious. I know. I was very much a supporter then. In fact, I remained so for much longer than I should have. But after a while, as the Great Society programs, ratified under both political parties, failed to accomplish what was intended with the social conditions of African Americans actually growing worse, I finally arose from my lethargy to wonder why this was happening.
The answers weren’t that complicated. All these social welfare programs, affirmative actions, etc. were a signal to African Americans that they were inferior, that somehow they couldn’t make it without help. This became a self-fulfilling prophecy, a kind of mass Stockholm Syndrome. And, quite naturally, it engendered a great deal of anger.
The system wasn’t all that different from giving heroin or alcohol to a family member to ease him or her out of their addiction. It didn’t work but it kept them dependent.
Meanwhile, plenty of African Americans succeeded without this dubious “help,” because, quite clearly, they realized they didn’t need it and went on with their lives. Motivating the supposed “help” the others were getting were two factors: 1. liberal white racism and 2. a desire on the part of the Democratic Party to turn African Americans into a class that would vote for them perpetually, something that party has clearly succeeded in to the complete detriment of African Americans, if we believe even part of all the depressing statistics.
So how do we counter this? First of all, by calling out the true racists, not the fake ones. A recent example is Rep. Barbara Lee’s (D-CA) attack on Paul Ryan for his actually rather tepid remarks on poverty. She called Ryan a racist, when Lee herself, an African American, is far more racist than Ryan, working against the interests of her people. Lee, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and others of their ilk are oddly like the Jewish sonderkommandos and kapos who lorded it over their own brethren in the concentration camps. Well, perhaps not that bad, but bad enough.
As I have written before, and recently, as has PJM’s Zombie, instead of waiting to be attacked, we should call out the real racists first. Offense, not defense. The country is waiting. And, most of all, you will be doing minorities a favor. They are the ones, more than any, being oppressed. Don’t be afraid of helping them get free of their oppressors by telling the truth. It’s the most humane thing we could all do.
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