Posted on 11/25/2006 12:35:32 AM PST by JohnHuang2
Let's take a closer look at so-called comedian Michael Richards' racist outburst that is capturing so much press and airtime. The incident, and what has ensued, tells me more about the overall pathetic moral state of our country than it does about racism.
Richards claims he's not a racist, despite attacking a black heckler at a comedy club where he was performing with a string of the most inflammatory, demeaning, and vulgar racial slurs.
Is it possible that he's not? Maybe. It's possible that he's just a moron.
But check out the deep soul searching that this inane incident has provoked across the nation.
The general sentiment is pretty much captured in a column by The Washington Post's Eugene Robinson who sees in what happened here sad proof that "racism is not dead" in America.
I am in complete agreement with Mr. Robinson that racial animosity lives. But I certainly didn't need Michael Richards' imbecility as proof of this.
If we should be thinking about anything, it should be to try and understand why, after all these years, racial consciousness persists.
As satisfying as it might be for some to watch, Mr. Richards groveling around on television apologizing isn't going to help much. Nor are any sums that left wing legal entrepreneur Gloria Allred might extract from him. Nor are apologies to Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton (the knee-jerk assumption that these two black ministers speak for 40 million black Americans I think is equally racist).
Allow me to suggest that racism and racial consciousness persist and loom large because we choose it to be this way.
Eugene Robinson says that Michael Richards did not see a heckler. Instead, says Robinson, he saw a black heckler. But we live in a country that insists on placing all its citizens in racial categories and using measures of how these categories stack up as measures of national decency.
Every major institution _ business, government, educational _ one way or another keeps track of how many blacks it has on board. Every major corporation has a diversity officer to make sure the colors of the beans are in order. Every corporation gets surveys from the NAACP asking them how many blacks they've got.
When I get a loan from the bank, the loan officer sheepishly asks if it's OK to report that I'm black.
We have institutionalized race consciousness to the very core of our society, so it should be evident why it persists. It's the law.
These laws, by transforming human beings into racial categories, dehumanize blacks and whites. Blacks feel less personally responsible for their own lives and whites are forced to relate to blacks as beans to count rather than human beings. One result is animosity of blacks toward whites and whites toward blacks.
Which leads to the second, and related, point. Racism is no longer understood as a moral problem. It is a political problem.
The success of the civil rights movement of the 1960's was its moral power. The few prevailed over the many because they had moral conviction _ truth _ on their side.
Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech was not a speech. It was a sermon. He talked about character and exhorted Americans to strive for liberty because we are "God's children."
King was not an impractical man. He knew that laws needed to be passed to deal with segregation and the absence of equality under the law. But he also knew that law "cannot change the heart" and that for us to become a greater nation, we needed to be a more moral nation.
This said, consider the circumstances of the Richards incident. It took place in a comedy club in Los Angeles. These places are cesspools of profanity and degrading sexual and scatological humor, delivered in a haze of alcohol.
The black heckler yelled out, "It's not funny. That's why you're a reject. Never had no shows, never had no movies. 'Seinfeld' _ that's it."
This tastelessness doesn't justify Richards' racist diatribe. But on the other side of the coin, blacks who want a better world ought to get out of the gutter.
For me it is commentary on our overall sorry moral state that as news shows obsessed over this mindless incident, they totally ignored an Associated Press story this same week reporting that out-of-wedlock births in the U.S. reached 37.5 percent in 2005, a record high. The figure for blacks is almost double this.
Perhaps this holiday season it is worth considering that racism will be with us as long as evil remains within us. The answer will not come from politicians and lawyers.
It will come only when we raise ourselves up. Only then, in the words of Dr. King, will we be able to say "thank God Almighty, we are free at last."
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If the comedian had been black and the hecklers white,the hecklers would have been blamed!I am sure the hecklers in this case egged it on by racist remarks of their own but the white boy hating media in this country of double standards will never show that.
Will someone remind Jesse & Al of these racists remarks & acts?
No and No.
Thank you MS for the reminder.
Thank you JH for the ping.
Note that this happened in LA, but it is inflicted on the whole country by the MSM. They are heirs to the abolitionists who fanatically imposed their moral superiority and certitude on the rest of the country. These days they continue to flog the south and fly over country for its racism, even thouth, the only white person I know who uses the N word is from Boston. They don't have a good record of conquering racism in their cities, but maintaining the illusion that it is better there than in the south is one way they reinforce their political power.
Exactly. Without "perceived racism" the hucksters would have to find another con to perpetrate. They have no desire to get out of a very lucrative business.
Richard angry rant was racist to the core.
And I don't care how many people stand up and insist Richard's isn't a hateful bigot.
Yes, and quite a little nutshell it is! She's distilled the challenge with absolutely crystalline clarity here - it's the only prism through which those of any race who seek true healing for the ethnic divisions in this country will ever be able to visualize a genuine, lasting solution.
have blacks themselves succumbed to what president Bush called, "the soft bigotry of low expectation"?
%%%%%
Just a few days of listening to listening to local talkshows with black hosts has been a real education. For many of their callers, politics trumps race. The hosts were defending Secretary Rice from a nasty cartoon about her that appeared in Arab newspapers - the one where she was shown pregnant with a monkey.
The callers defended the cartoonist because 'everyone' knows that George Bush is regularly portrayed as a monkey, so the monkey in her womb was not a racial slur, just a comment on her relationship to her master. The hosts saw the monkey as a racial epithet, not so the listeners.
During the campaign a few months ago Senator Allen calls a person of non-caucasian ethnicity Macaca, and all of a sudden he is a major racist, because somebody claimed that that word is a major racial slur. Guess what - it's not because if it was we would all be saying "m-word" instead of macaca.
Also guess what - macaque is French for monkey.
There seemed to be two co-existing, but opposing themes from these talk show callers.
1) When a black person becomes successful in any non-liberal endeavor, he or she loses his black identity.
2) White people need to do more to enable black people to succeed in the US.
So success has to be authentic "black" success, but when blacks do well, the fact is ignored or vilified.
I do not know how this mindset can be changed, and feel very frustrated by the stumbling blocks such people put in front of their own success in life.
"We have institutionalized race consciousness to the very core of our society, so it should be evident why it persists. It's the law.
These laws, by transforming human beings into racial categories, dehumanize blacks and whites."
My sentiments exactly.
I lived in an apartment 2 years ago and next to me lived a black family. There were two teenagers a boy and a girl -- for reference this was in California.
Every day after school the boy would bring his friends home and they would sit on the back patio which was next to my home office. I would listen to the talk of the mixed racial group go on about various teenage topics. Everyone talked in the same accent you couldn't tell the whites from the blacks they all talked in Black Ghetto slang. (It appears that the Whites want to imitate the blacks and it seems very popular to be Black.) Not only did they all talk the same they dressed the same.
My question is if being Black is so bad why do so many kids want to act, dress and talk like African-Americans?
Can you imagine in your day growing up in Georgia -- Whites trying to act Black?
What I am saying is that things have changed a lot but I'd be happier if kids had better role models and learned to talk English in high-school rather than Ghetto talk.
What a title!
In a country of three-hundred millions, where each one can find some form of livelihood, even if only parasitical, where every act of every one can be communicated rapidly with only a marginal amount of effort - well, hell, you can always find an example of any general statement you want to make.
The only constraint is that the general statement is consistent with physical laws - but I'm not sure if that's really a constraint anymore.
...when I was about 8 years old and he said nothing about it- his face took on an expression I will never forget though. It was a look that said he would put up with that today, as he had his whole life, but that day was going to change soon. And it did eventually.
&&&&&&
When I read your tale I knew that your parents had not taught you not to use that word, because they used the word.
Luckily South Georgia was not the whole US, and over time even Georgians have decided to live in the modern world instead of the racially separate world. In the Sixties, one of my classmates at school in Maryland was from Georgia. We had to hide from her father that fact that we had black classmates, or he would have pulled her out of the school.
One of the sad ironies of the racist past in the South, is that blacks and whites did work in very close quarters, yet the distinction of the pecking order was kept by which job or task each person did. When that ended officially and blacks and whites were doing the same task, even if they were not working elbow to elbow, many whites objected. Their objection was to the loss of the status symbol that each task represented, not to the proximity with which they worked with blacks. That kind of racism is really hard to get over, but 40 years have now passed, and so have many of the workers of that generation.
Yep. A government & its quasi-governmental appendages which relentlessly divide its own citizenry into official racial categories can't very well claim to be "shocked, shocked I tell you" when those citizens partition themselves off into the very same racial categories that the elites have assigned to them for every facet of their lives.
We are racist because our governments, politicians,courts, religious figures, educational systems, business institutions, chattering classes and communications & entertainment establishment are racist to the core, and carve up social spoils commensurate with the racist criteria they themselves have created for us.
That ain't rocket science, it's just Anthropology 101.
LOL, no. That would have been beyond my imagination back then.
Aye.
For me, this Richards thing isn't something I even get worked up over. I realise that racism is alive and well but I take comfort from the fact that every time it sticks its head up, it gets a good public thrashing. It doesn't bother me that liberals or the media are the ones doing the beat-down. Richards said what he said and is getting crucified in public for it now. I don't have a problem with that. He deserves it.
The worst part of this is that no one in the enemedia would point out that George Allen has done more to help blacks than all of his macaca critics combined.
Anyone who followed the campaign learned about how Allen abolished parole when he was governor of Virginia, with the result that crime in the state is down something like 20%. Blacks are greatly overrepresented among crime victims. Therefore, they must be greatly overrepresented among the beneficiaries of this sharp drop in crime.
Instead of being credited for this, Allen is called a racist day in and day out. Meanwhile AFAIK, no one followed up on the story about Webb terrorizing blacks in LA with his practice gun.
Whatever happened to actions speak louder than words? Apparently it doesn't apply to Republicans.
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