By Bill Murchison
Tuesday, April 15, 2014
So "Racism" once more stalks among us! The
Obama administration and its congressional minions are in full-court press
style on the topic.
The country's president and chief magistrate asserted the
other day at a political rally put on by, of all racial demagogues, Al Sharpton
that poor people and black people find it harder than ever to vote. Along came
Atty. Gen. Eric Holder with his own tale of racial woe. A Republican-dominated
House committee had roughed him up, he thought. "What attorney
general," he asked the same political gathering, "has ever had to
deal with that kind of treatment? What president has ever had to deal with that
kind of treatment?"
New York Democratic Congressman Steve Israel, the party's
point man for congressional elections, took a similar line: "The
Republican base does have elements that are animated by racism." In chimed
Nancy Pelosi: Race had "something to do" with Republican resistance
to immigration reform.
The positioning of Race at the heart of every political
controversy is a Democratic specialty which wasn't -- here is the oddity about
it all -- supposed to endure into the second Obama term, or at least not in the
virulent form of 100 years ago. Biracial Barack Obama presented himself in 2008
as the presidential candidate who would show us the way to national unity: no
red America, no blue America, just America; all for one and one for all.
Candidates tend to talk that way in election seasons,
especially candidates eager, like Obama, to attract attention in spite of
inexperience and lack of conventional qualifications. He made an impression not
only on the Democrats who were going to vote for him anyway but on whites who,
as the biracial author Shelby Steele noted, were seeking propitiation for past
racial injustices.
Whatever intentions Obama may genuinely have harbored
regarding the prospect of racial reconciliation, he switched relatively quickly
to the tried and true tactic of race baiting. Not the baiting of blacks; no one
(such is our good fortune) does that anymore; rather, the baiting of
unidentified, because unidentifiable, white people who want to keep power out
of black hands.
The only race war going on around here in 2014 is the one
that Democrats wage for the immemorial purpose of gaining and holding onto
power. With Obama low in the polls and Democratic control of the Senate
threatened, the party sinks to the occasion. Make sure black voters remember to
show up in big numbers next November -- such is the plan.
"Racism" in 21st century America, with its
biracial president, its multitude of government programs meant to nurture and
raise up non-whites, its affirmative action programs at universities and
corporations, racism endures largely as a plug-in political concept. It doesn't
refer to the process and practice of tribal identification. It means,
"Watch out, bad guys coming." Likewise "sexism," though
that's not today's topic. Outside the realm of power politics you rarely hear
such pejoratives.
That's because politicians alone -- virtually all of them
liberal; at least I haven't heard of any conservative co-conspirators -- act as
though everything in the wide world is centered on race or class or sex. In the
world of modern liberalism, you can't be an individual. First you have to
register at the Group Classification Office and listen to a sermon about why
despicable people despise you and what to do about it -- namely, beat them at
the polls.
Speaking of the polls: Obama, in full-flush of
race-mongering, depicts the right to vote as somehow endangered without his
feeling obliged to explain how or why. "Ah," we're all supposed to
exclaim, "he means Voter ID and such like" -- measures meant not to
narrow the right to vote but rather to make all play by the same rules.
Far be it from our president to address such concerns --
if he really has them -- outside a political rally. His record embodies a great
irony; to wit, racial demagoguery flourishes anew, just when, after all these
years, it was supposed to end.
No comments:
Post a Comment