PrintAugust 31, 2010
The File Clerks of Racism
Glenn Beck is a racist, right? That is what self-anointed civil rights leaders are saying. The fact that members of Dr Martin Luther King's family and other conservative blacks are conspicuous at his rally in Washington means nothing to those trying to slime Beck and other conservatives with the moral crime of racism. What can one do if born into a despised race? There is no remedy for the wrong birth in the grim and shadowy world of racism. Defining moral status by accident of birth is despicable, but using our revulsion for true racism to score cheap rhetorical points or to gain petty advantage spits upon the graves of real victims of racism.
Racism and its sibling, sin, thrive around the world. The untouchables of India suffer appalling mistreatment. These 200 million souls are never mentioned by American civil rights leaders. Women in Islam are considered immoral, and Mohammed said that the general population of Hell is female. So-called "honor killings" occur even in America. Where are the civil rights leaders on the vital global question of Islamic misogyny? The blacks in Sudan suffered genocide for a generation before any of these American civil rights leaders deigned to protest seriously.
Six million Jews were killed in the most horrific example of racism rampant in human history. Yet where does explicit anti-Semitism flourish in America? The ugliness of civil-rights bigotry against Jews reached a grim apex when the leader of the New Black Panther Party (the group that Eric Holder found did not merit prosecution for threatening white voters in Pennsylvania) said that no one ever talked about all the bad things Jews had done to Hitler and Germany before the Holocaust.
The kulaks in Soviet Russia, virtually ignored by all civil rights groups today, were deemed class enemies while still in their mothers' wombs. How many millions of kulaks brutally liquidated by Stalin will never be known? But their memory and suffering are never mentioned by civil rights leaders. Which civil rights leader notes the Armenian holocaust today? None do.
There is no profit in defending the Dalits of India or the girls of Iran, and profit is just what the self-anointed civil rights leaders want. So they cleave themselves body and soul to the Democratic Party and the left. The first modern leftist, Woodrow Wilson, was as bigoted as the old Klansman, Robert Byrd, another Democrat and another leftist. But the left pays its flacks well. So the prostitution of the noble movement of Dr. King means that the notion of racism in America has been reduced from somber importance to hucksterism and silliness.
What would Dr. King have said to Mike Nifong when he tried to lynch white boys for the crime of being white? How would Frederick Douglass have addressed the honor killings of young women in America? The ghosts of those who challenged, those who fought, and those who bled for the right of all human souls to be treated on their own merits -- in Dr. King's words, by the "content of their character" -- have watched the moral high ground of that movement shift from Dr. King's philosophy of love to Hitler's and Stalin's philosophy of hate. They have seen sacrifice replaced with avarice, noble hearts replaced with party hacks, and the moral force of Dr. King melted into mush.
When someone in America is charged with racism today, what does it mean to most Americans? It means nothing morally serious at all. Instead, a charge of racism is another tired claim that the welfare state is the only cure for vestigial traces of racism, and it means anyone challenging that claim is a racist. It means that any new way of raising black people into a happier state -- one that does not involve an elaborate bureaucracy of civil rights file clerks -- is racism. It means also that only certain people can be official "victims" of racism, sexism, and similar offenses. So when black leaders speak the unspeakable -- killing white babies -- people on the left yawn, dulled into the trite notion that blacks cannot be racists and whites cannot be race victims.
No consciences, anymore, are enlivened by these so-called civil rights leaders. These frauds terrorize, bribe, threaten, and pontificate, but they do not speak at all to our sense of right and wrong. Fifty years ago, many good people like Charlton Heston went with Dr. King to Washington. Now, if Heston were alive, black civil rights leaders would excoriate him for not slouching along the party line on gun control or tax cuts or the war on terrorism. The jaded, lifeless mindset of interest politics infests a movement which once appealed to goodness and to God. Now it is not only nothing -- it is something less than nothing.
Bruce Walker is the author of a new book: Poor Lenin's Almanac: Perverse Leftists Proverbs for Modern Life.
