Commentary
Barack Obama famously accused red state conservatives—Republicans in general, I suppose—of “clinging to their guns and religion.”
Condescending and nasty as that was, to some extent he had a point. But another way to say the exact same thing and give it a more positive overtone is “clinging to the Bill of Rights.”
Nothing wrong with that, in fact it’s laudable, unless you’re a Marxist, another kind of totalitarian or, apparently these days, the United States ambassador to the United Nations.
The Democrats, however, “cling” to something far more pejorative and pernicious—racism.
You could say they can’t live with it, can’t live without it, but the emphasis should really be on the latter. They can’t live without it.
We have seen that virtually everywhere since Obama’s election that many of us hoped would put an end to racism. It did the reverse. It brought it back, or more accurately, talked it back, as we hadn’t seen it in decades, reversing a very positive trend the left found threatening, possibly fatal to their interests.
It was as if the Democrats and the rest of what we might eye-rollingly call the “liberal intelligentsia” (media, entertainment, academia, ad nauseam, ad tedium) suddenly panicked.
Who were they without the accusation of racism to hang around their opponent’s necks? In what way could they demonstrate their undeniable superiority?
This attitude reached its apotheosis in the Biden Administration with all the endless talk (that word again) of “systemic racism.”
But what is “systemic racism”? What is the ”system” exactly to which they refer? Racist actions have been against the law for decades, as they should be.
That is not enough for our “liberal” and “progressive” friends. There’s a system behind the whole thing, they say. Everyone’s a racist, no matter what they do or say. It’s systematized; they’re sure of it. Critical Race Theory tells us so.
And now they want the whole world, at the United Nations no less, to know just how bad our country is, how infected by racism from the start. (Maybe that’s what they mean by “The System.”)
From The Hill:
“Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield said that white supremacy is ‘weaved’ into America’s ‘founding documents’ during a speech Wednesday to the National Action Network.”
Weaved into the founding documents? Sounds pretty bad, except…
What’s really woven into the founding documents, if you read them, is the ability to self-correct, to “amend” the propositions themselves—and those amendments have been used to do such things as eliminate slavery, give blacks and women the vote, limit the number of times someone can be elected president, and so forth.
What the Founders were smart enough to know is that they weren’t perfect (who is?) and that they should structure into their documents a manner through which they could be improved as time went on and conditions changed. And that is what has happened, obviously, as in all history, by fits and starts.
Ms. Thomas-Greenfield may have virtue signaled her pompous nonsense to a particularly receptive activist audience (National Action Network) but her words were not whispered in secret. You can be sure they were noted with pleasure by Iran, Russia, China, North Korea and others of a similar ilk who will be delighted to exploit them.
Under Biden, the United States has reversed Trump and rejoined the infamous U.N. Human Rights Council, an Orwellian group dominated by the above mentioned nations that have given us such institutions of unremitting present day horror as Tehran’s Evin Prison and the concentration camps of Xinjiang Province.
These near Nazi-like fellow “progressives” are now Ms. Thomas-Greenfield’s colleagues on the UNHRC, but she urges us to approach them with “humility” because we once had slavery.
Never mind that we long ago worked our way through this and Iran, under the mullahs, and China, under Xi Jinping, are headed in the opposite direction—toward more oppression on a global scale.
But who are we to criticize? We, after all, are racists. It’s systemic. (Can you imagine what the average Tibetan, Uyghur, or Taiwanese must think when he or she hears her?)
The Thomas-Greenfields of the world—and they are legion among the left side of the American polity—consciously or unconsciously are working to preserve racism (systemic or otherwise), not to eliminate it.
If they really wanted to do away with it, they would listen to the words of Morgan Freeman in a Sixty Minutes exchange with Mike Wallace way back in 2005:
Wallace: “Black History Month, you find …”
Freeman: “Ridiculous.”
Wallace: “Why?”
Freeman: “You’re going to relegate my history to a month?”
Wallace: “Come on.”
Freeman: “What do you do with yours? Which month is White History Month? Come on; tell me.”
Wallace: “I’m Jewish.”
Freeman: “OK. Which month is Jewish History Month?”
Wallace: “There isn’t one.”
Freeman: “Why not? Do you want one?”
Wallace: “No, no.”
Freeman: “I don’t either. I don’t want a Black History Month. Black history is American history.”
Wallace: “How are we going to get rid of racism until … ?”
Freeman: “Stop talking about it. I’m going to stop calling you a white man. And I’m going to ask you to stop calling me a black man. I know you as Mike Wallace. You know me as Morgan Freeman. You’re not going to say, ‘I know this white guy named Mike Wallace.’ Hear what I’m saying?”
Stop talking about it? What a unique idea! I wonder if it ever occurred to Linda Thomas-Greenfield or, for that matter, Joe Biden.
Sadly, not long thereafter, Morgan Freeman, under the predictable pressure, walked back his words.
But I still think, if you want to end racism, it’s the best, and probably the only, way. Stop talking about it.
Roger L. Simon is an award-winning novelist, Oscar-nominated screenwriter, co-founder of PJMedia, and now, editor-at-large for The Epoch Times. His most recent books are “The GOAT” (fiction) and “I Know Best: How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic, If It Hasn’t Already” (nonfiction). He can be found on Parler as @rogerlsimon.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
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