My last post was a rant against the tendency of some on the right to use a sort of “reverse political correctness” against throwing down the “race card.”
In this post I want to make the case that not only should playing the race card be legitimate because it’s still in the deck…
but also because it’s a necessary move towards making it (race) obsolete as a factor in our society.
And I am talking about endemic versus reactionary racism. I will explain shortly.
When events transpire that are tinged with even the faintest scent of racism, the card should appear…every time.
Why?
It is one of the ultimate evils in our (and any) society.
But let’s get straight on what I am referring to by racism.
Every time there is a race eruption, you hear the specious argument that attempts to delegitimize use of the race card since it (racism) exists on both sides of the equation.
But there’s a big difference between black racial attitudes against whites, which I’ll call reactionary racism, and the endemic racism that is the prevalent evil in our society.
Do some blacks (well more than some perhaps) harbor negative attitudes towards whites?
Certainly.
But it’s not because of immutable traits like color, physical characteristics or culture…it’s a reaction to suffering the first 100 years of their involuntary presence in this country as chattel…
and the next 100 being socially, politically and economically oppressed.
That would tend to make one a bit suspicious, perhaps even pissed off.
they hate them because those assholes tried to exterminate the Jewish race!
You see, it’s reactionary.
I grew up in the South during desegregation and was intimately exposed to racism. I knew very clearly (then, as well as now) that whites didn’t harbor negative racial attitudes against blacks as a reaction to the incendiary political views of the Black Panther party. They hated them because of immutable traits that they (the black people) were born with and could not change.
And that’s where the real evil lies.
So, it appals me when Bill (the bloviator) O’Reilly delivers a spitting venomous diatribe blaming the totality of problems blacks face in our society on their taste in music, or because they tend to be hornier than he would prefer them to be…while completely dismissing the fact that there has been systematic societal oppression against the black race for over 200 years!
If an event in our society occurs as a possible result of race, it should be thoroughly investigated, prosecuted (if truly present) and bold steps taken to insure against racism’s future presence in a similar situation, so that real endemic racism has a chance of being eliminated as a pernicious societal sin.
That’s what I would term legitimate use of “the race card.”
I could envision that when that happens consistently, the reactionary “racism” that whites often lament will rapidly evaporate.
image credit: Brittany Anwender via Compfight cc
