Mine is not a popular opinion. In fact, it's probably tantamount, in this crazy time in which we live, to hate speech which, in a bygone era, would be protected under the First Amendment but which now is actionable under several questionable statutes.
With the death/murder of George Floyd, the country has lost its collective mind. Cities burned, reparations were demanded, a semi-terrorist group, Black Lives Matter, was founded. Corporations caved in, commercials began to feature nothing but biracial or black people and kente cloth found its way on to white people's shoulders not named Father Pfleger.
That Floyd's death was wrong and actionable is without question. But the torrent it unleashed has been less justifiable. Now, we have to defund the police, because police departments and the men and women in blue are uniformly racist. Corporate America needs to reconstitute itself, because there aren't enough black people in higher positions. Hollywood has to diversify, because whites win too many Oscars. And we all need to examine our white privilege.
Enough.
By no means am I suggesting there aren't inequitable situations in the country. And blacks' ancestors suffered through the horribly traumatic period of slavery. I'm not minimizing ongoing racism that still exists.
But this is not a racist country.
There are too many examples of how this notion of systemic racism is a red herring. For me, let's start with the seminal SCOTUS opinion of Brown v. Board of Education, the long overdue opinion that put an end to the notion of separate by equal, from 1954. If there was such systemic racism, how is it that nine old white men voted unanimously to end the Plessy standard? Why didn't the court use its sophistic talents to uphold Plessy in the name of systemic racism?
Martin Luther King, Jr., famously declared I have a dream that my four little children will done day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. Dr. King would be disappointed. Because today, it is not permissible for a white person to judge a black person at all, much less because of the person's character, because due to white privilege, white people are inherently racist. No, any comment made by a white person about a black person, however slightly critical, is now ipso facto grounded in race. So if LeBron James is hypocritical about inequities in the United States compared to those in China, we must remain silent. If the SCOTUS nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson has a questionable sentencing record as a judge, we must remain silent. If Will Smith walks up on stage during the Oscars telecast and slaps Chris Brown for making a gratuitous joke about his wife, we as white folk must sit silent, because we can't possibly understand black culture.
Meanwhile, openly racist behavior by such luminaries as Caryn Elaine Johnson, also known as Whoopi Goldberg, Joy Reid, Maxine Waters, Nick Cannon and a bevy of wannabe eugenics experts must not only be tolerated by applauded. To question the falsity of their statements, or the overtly racist overtones, or the openly hostile comments is to be racist.
What Dr. King was promoting was equality. For a person to be judged on the same level as another of a different race using the same measuring stick is equality. To not judge a person in a similar fashion is to distinguish, to discriminate, to treat differently. So if a black person makes a heinous statement for which a white person would be taken to task, it is only fair and right that the black person be held to the same standard. Yet that's not acceptable in today's heightened race conscious society.
It's hard to say from where this more aggressive attitude is originating. It could be from affirmative action, descried by critics as a spoils system. It's counterpart -- reparations for slavery -- smacks of the same sense of entitlement. Which brings us to an interesting conundrum for the recently confirmed Justice Brown Jackson:
Harvard University has a case pending before the Supreme Court. In Students for Fair Admissions, Inc., v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, the organization is taking the university to task alleging that it discriminates against Asian-Americans by imposing a soft racial quota against Asian-Americans. The case will be heard in the 2022-2023 term. That's where it gets interesting.
Justice Brown Jackson currently sits on the Board of Overseers, which provides counsel to the school's leadership on a number of issues. The newly-minted Justice has said, rightly, that she will recuse herself from the case. This, of course, is unnacceptable to the neo-racists. To ask the Justice to recuse herself in a case where there is a very real conflict is, necessarily, racist. Were the situation reversed, and a white Justice were asked to recuse himself due to a conflict, that would be expected and not in the slightest racist.
Double-standards are wrong. No amount of justification can bless double-standards. Blacks can be as racist as whites.
It's time for real equality to replace the double-standards.
(c) 2022 The Truxton Spangler Chronicles
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