Is Some Racism Okay?

Elizabeth Vaughn at The Federalist calls for a national conversation on racism, but it's not what you might think. Vaughn wants a national conversation about the racism that's being directed at whites.

She discusses primarily the June 30th remarks by Nick Cannon in which he claimed that white people fear black people because of their lack of melanin, that melanin gives blacks their soul and compassion. He said this:

The people that don’t have it – and I’m going to say this carefully – are a little less…and, and, and…cause I’m bringing it all the way around to Minister Farrakhan, to where they may not have the compassion or the, when they were sent to the mountains of Caucasus, when they didn’t have the power of the sun, the sun then started to deteriorate them, so then they’re acting out of fear, they’re acting out of low self-esteem, they’re acting out of a deficiency. 

So, therefore, the only way they can act is evil…They have to rob, steal, rape, kill, fight in order to survive.

So, then these people who didn’t have what we had – when I say we, I am speaking of the melanated people – they had to be savages. They had to be barbaric. They’re in these Nordic mountains, they’re in this rough terrential [sic] environment.

And so, they’re acting as animals. So, they’re the ones that are actually closer to animals. They’re the ones that are actually the true savages. And then they built up such this, this – I want to say warrior – but they built up such this, this conquering barbaric mentality.

Cannon was fired from one position he had with Viacom because other remarks he had made in this same incident were anti-semitic, but despite both his anti-semitism and racism he remains as host of Fox News' "The Masked Singer." It's hard to imagine a white celebrity saying something like this about any minority group and not having his career ended on the spot.

Part of the reason for the relatively mild treatment Cannon has received is, perhaps, that the definition of racism has undergone an evolution in this country. A generation or two ago one was racist if he or she hated members of another race simply because they were members of another race or if he or she merely believed those others were somehow less than fully human. 

Today that definition is obsolete. Today, at least among progressives of every race, racism is defined as a disease that uniquely afflicts white people and which taints everything white people do.

The contemporary definition is self-serving and tendentious. Once it's accepted then no matter what a black person says or does, whatever it is it can't be racist. Moreover, whatever a white person says or does is often racist solely by virtue of the fact that it's a white person who says or does it.

Thus the conversation on race in America is not a genuine conversation but a lecture in which blacks speak and whites are to shut up and listen. If a white person ventures to dissent from what she's being told in this "conversation," whatever dissenting view she expresses is ipso facto racist and thus disallowed. 

This is not a "conversation," of course, it's indoctrination. It's a demand for total conformity to the views of those who wield the power in the relevant social setting.

Moreover, whatever problems beset the black community are often blamed on white racism, either current or historical. According to leftist progressives blacks have no responsibility either for causing the problems or for solving them. Whites are responsible so whites must solve them, not by telling blacks how the problems could actually be solved, that would itself be racist, but simply by handing over money to the community in question.

As long as these attitudes and conditions exist the racial divide in this country will only grow wider. The contemporary understanding of racism is guaranteed to breed further resentments and hostility between the races. 

An equitable society is one in which everyone is treated fairly, and the rightness or wrongness of one's words or actions do not depend on the color of the person's skin. If an act would be wrong if a white person did it it's just as wrong if a black person does it. Race should be irrelevant.

Progressives once praised the words of Martin Luther King who longed for the day when his children would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. To quote those words today, however, is at best an act of racial naiveté. 

Today among progressives the color of one's skin is often all that matters. To say, as King did, that skin color should not matter in assessing how one is judged by others is to adopt an anachronistic view of race and racism that's largely rejected not only by the Nick Cannons of the world, but also by progressive government bureaucrats, academics and media opinion-makers.