At Puget Sound Community College, a group known as Staff, Faculty and Administrators of Color publicized an event in an email that read:
If you want to create space for white folks to meet and work on racism, white supremacy and white privilege to better our campus community and yourself, please feel free to do just that.
When some people objected, a woman who had a hand in drafting the email, Karama Blackthorn, defended the decision, saying that people of color would be able to have a more honest discussion without the participation of white people.
More on Ms. Blackthorn and her perspective, anon.
Next, the irrepressible Reverend Al Sharpton, he of the Tawana Brawley hoax, declared that Rand Paul had no business commenting on civil rights, as if civil rights only applied to minorities. That it's the Reverend Al sometime diminishes the importance of the statement, given his proclivity for making outrageous comments and championing ridiculous civil rights cases. But since the lunatic fringe that runs MSNBC saw fit to give this tool his own show, he has a strong pulpit from which he can spew his brand of reality, and to that extent requires attention.
Both Ms. Blackthorn and Reverend Al are misguided, and not innocently so. They seem to have bought the fallacy that because of past injuries suffered by minorities in general and blacks specifically, unto them and them alone has the right to decide what is right been given. In a sense, this is an extension of the concept that blacks use to justify the use of the execrable term nigger, disallowing its use among whites (no matter how benign) while seeing no problem with it being tossed around among themselves. Since we were harmed by this (nigger, racism, discrimination), only we can use it/decide how to remedy it.
There are a couple of problems with this approach. First, the remedies to discrimination, although prompted largely by the NAACP and other similar groups, relied upon an all-white Supreme Court for the Brown v. Board of Education decision that rendered separate but equal obsolete. Without a largely white Congress, the Civil Rights Act, supported by millions of whites, would never have gotten passed. Abolitionists both at home and abroad were overwhelmingly white. So to discount white involvement on the subject of diversity is ludicrous.
Beyond that, there's the simple idea that by excluding whites from discussions, diversity loses its meaning. One can no more exclude a group and declare diversity than he could close all the drapes and blinds in a house at noon and declare it night. There is no doubt that this country was largely racist at its birth, and that racists -- both overt and closet -- exist to this day. But to deny white participation in a discussion about race makes the participants in such a discussion racist themselves. Of course, they wouldn't see it this way, because according to them, only people in power can be racist, and blacks aren't in power.
Well....
...check that. They weren't in power when the discrimination was at its height....
The point is that a serious discussion about ways to resolve racism necessarily involves whites. As shown above, there are plenty of well-intentioned and kind-hearted whites who earnestly wish to see an end to discrimination. Barring them from the discussion serves little purpose and in fact may harm efforts to do away with it.
What is to be done with a white person married to a black person? Is it simply because of the pigmentation that the person is to be excluded? Shouldn't that person be presumed to share the goals of the group? If not, then is it fair to brand all blacks as rappers, or athletes, or artists, or, worse yet, criminals?
The position Ms. Blackthorn and her ilk take is antiquated at best and racist itself at worst. They can employ all the sophistry they want to justify their beliefs, but they're simply wrong.
As for the Reverend Al, he's just whack.
(c) 2014 The Truxton Spangler Chronicles
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