Six years ago I was actively fighting racism through my blogging. I came up with all the answers and I satisfied myself in many ways that racism in America was clear and present, but by and large not a danger. Along the way I found that most people, in fact the overwhelming majority, wanted racism to be beat, but they had no idea how to go about that politically. Personally, I think most people don't have a problem figuring it out.
These days, the old political punching bag is taking its hits as people from all directions call fouls and punch the racism bag in somebody else's direction. But the bag never goes away and nobody steps around it to actually punch the other person.
I am perturbed to a certain extent. On the one hand, like most people, I want to see racism defeated. Not more than I want a million dollars, but a lot. I also would like to see Americans have a single clear and comprehensive understanding of what racism is, and what to do about it. But I know that's pretty much impossible. Therefore I plink targets and do my small part within the context of the more or less perfect framework I have established over the decades.
Today my target is the people who 'play the race card'. If you understand the phrase then you understand that such people are corrosive of both civil society and true anti-racism. I accuse them of a lack of perspective, they are people who are apoplectic for inadequate reason. They are exactly like cops who arrest without probable cause, they are fanatic and misguided. But most importantly, they are a key component of the constituency that rightly wants to fight racism. They therefore need not to be defeated, but redirected and corrected.
There is only one way to be wrong and that is to be ignorant. The race carders, or 'Carders' as I will term them, along with Birthers and Truthers a swelling class of fanatics within suffering America, have history on their side. That is to say they mis-categorize current instances of racial bigotry alongside a long history of American racism which all folks understand to be heinous. So if their charges of racism are denied, they accuse the deniers of being blind not only to the present but on the wrong side of history. As I said at American Digest:
The thing to recognize about people who play the race card is that it is part of a narrative that stretches back 400 years. The cycle of accusation and denial is self-perpetuating and only strenghtens the convictions of the accusers who are convinced there is an impenetrable 'white wall' of racists and that American thought itself is its foundation.
The only way to combat this strategy is through judo - by using its own energy against it. Reason and evidence may be on the side of the Sheriff, that doesn't take bullets out of the bad guy's guns.
Therefore let us look at Effective Resonance once again which was my way of assaying what was two, four or Six Pounds of Racism. My intent, as always is to have the punishment fit the crime and rid ourselves of fanatic excess.
Class Three - Background Noise
This will include all such insults, slights and disrespect as is generally expected to be found everywhere in this nation. Examples include but are not limited to being ignored by cabbies, flying confederate flags, nazi propaganda, being mistaken for the help, being shown costume jewelry, being asked one's opinion of, or to account for the opinions of the Fungibles, and most nigger calls.Class Two - Political Intransigence
Class Two racism involves denials of public accommodation or private standing which are not criminal, yet grossly unfair and unjust. Such acts would include imposition of glass ceilings, racial profiling, white flight, medical misdiagnosis, educational tracking, false arrest, false imprisonment, racist vois dire, racist jury nullification, denials of service with plausible deniability, any institutional individual or institutional racism which must be tried in civil courts and all such active bigotry one associates with hate groups which fall short of incitement.Class One - Crime
Theft, criminal defamation, cross burnings (now), hate crimes, murder, rape & all that stuff for which America has never made any extraordinary effort to repair.
Now my own cynical point of American repair of racist crime notwithstanding, it is quite simple to look at everything that has been called racist in this 'post-racial' era and see that very little of it, including the Gates fiasco, rises to the level of Class Two.
The point, my friends, is not to tell the Carders that there is no racism going on, but to explain to them that it is not their grandfather's racism. They'll have to agree, although what is plausibly deniable gets foggy. After all, even the Carders will deny that they themselves are not making stereotypical judgments.
Recent Comments