This is in reference to Bob Carter’s piece on racism in last week’s News-Herald. First, I must agree with Bob that our election of America’s first (half) black president will not usher us into a new era of post-racial bliss, no matter how people suffering white-guilt wish for it. Racism has always been part of the human experience and will be until the end of time.
Even so, rather than dwell on all the injustices that have occurred in our national past, I think we might take considerable comfort and pride in how far we as a nation have come. Even Bob’s chosen examples of recent racism are laughingly trivial compared to what goes on elsewhere in the world.
Additionally, community activist organizations like the “People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond” may be cruelly and dangerously promoting the very evil it says it is against. By continually keeping race issues upfront and promoting a victim mentality in the minority groups it seeks to help, it may be keeping these groups from coming to grips with the very real pathologies that plague them.
Why should they? It’s not their own fault. It never is.
To deny that a very powerful racial grievance industry exists in the country is to deny reality. Do you think Jesse Jackson longs for a post-racial society? Or Al Sharpton? Or Jeremiah Wright? Or Leonard Peltier? Or Ward Churchill? Or Waziyatawin? Or groups like ACORN, NAACP, or PISAB? No.
Without stirring up racial grievances and instilling a sense of racial entitlement in their clients, they would lose all power and funding.
I close by reminding those in doubt of a very public example that we are far from living in a postracial period. When the President of the United States, without knowledge of or care for the facts, slanders an honorable white policeman for arresting a black man, saying he “acted stupidly,” surely he made things “very clear.”
Racial stereotyping and profiling still exists in this country – even if it goes both ways. Definitely a “teachable moment.”
Daryl Popkes
Gunflint Trail
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