The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Just in Case New York Times Readers Don’t Feel Enough White Guilt Yet …

Posted on | March 8, 2013 | 41 Comments

. . . Ta-Nehisi Coates is there on the op-ed pages with a stern sermonette for them. It involves the fact that an employee of a New York deli didn’t recognize the actor Forest Whitaker and accused him of shoplifting. Coates offers a few more examples — including from before he was born — of a racism that “haunts black people with a kind of invisible violence.”

And also haunts them, we might add, with dramatic prose.

Far be it from me to say that New York deli employees aren’t in the thrall of atavistic ethnic prejudice, their minds crowded with ignorant racial stereotypes and hateful bigotry. But, on closer inspection, that doesn’t seem to be Coates’s point:

In modern America we believe racism to be the property of the uniquely villainous and morally deformed, the ideology of trolls, gorgons and orcs. We believe this even when we are actually being racist.

Who is this “we”? But never mind that. In fact, Coates is right, insofar as he is suspicious that the “good people” — even nice, well-meaning, liberal white people — are more guilty of racism than they would like to admit. How often, for example, have I given my opinion on the utter hopelessness of the public education system, only to have some parent explain to me that they live in a good district with good public schools. The suspicion that “good” is actually a synonym for “mostly white” is hard to avoid, but these parents don’t want to think of their personal choices in that context, and so I don’t bother to point this out.

Frankly, there are a lot of things about contemporary race relations I don’t bother to point out, because I am a white man who isn’t a liberal and one who has, indeed, often been called a racist.

There are no New York publishing houses offering me contracts to write The Complete NeoConfederate Guide to Better Race Relations, although it has occasionally occurred to me that problems which seem insoluble inside the margins of Political Correctness could most likely be improved by more truly radical thinking.

Here’s a radical thought: What if racism isn’t really the problem?

Ethnocentric attitudes are commonplace, a logical consequence of mankind’s innately tribal nature.

Everyone is self-interested and, insofar as he has any actual thought about race, is chiefly concerned about whether anything might affect the mental category of People Like Me.

Obviously, race is not the only such category. We might mentally categorize ourselves in any number of ways: Male, female, old, young, urban, rural, Crimson Tide fans, et cetera.

Man’s innate tribalism persists, but in a media-saturated consumer society one notices that there are many people who classify themselves by what they buy and what they watch on TV.

You see this especially among young people, where high school cliques are sometimes defined by certain fashionable clothing brands. But high schoolers denominate themselves by all kinds of crazy classifications that make no sense to sane adults, and which honestly never made sense to me even when I was a teenage dopehead. (“Teenage dopehead” being a rather large fraternity in the ’70s.)

 One category which young people are avidly encouraged to join nowadays is Not a Racist.

Membership in the Not a Racist Club is exclusive to white kids, because the same mentality that castigates whites as racist is also constantly telling non-white kids that the most important thing about them is their race. The result is that while the minority kids get their heads crammed full of ethnic chauvinism, white kids are taught — often quite explicitly — that being white is a source of shame.

Such indoctrination produces effects consistent with Newton’s Third Law of Motion: Every teaching has an equal and opposite reaction. One occasionally encounters white people who have so entirely internalized ther anti-racism lessons that they run around all the time pointing fingers at other white people, yelling, “RAAAAACIST!”

That’s annoying, but it is not as troubling to me as the opposite reaction: White kids who, resisting the indoctrination, develop a profound resentment of the non-whites whom they are constantly told are their moral superiors (in the liberal calculus where victimhood is superiority).

Trust me, Ta-Nehisi: It ain’t the old-fashioned white racism you need to worry about, it’s this disturbing new racism of kids quietly embittered at being branded with a collective mark of racial shame for the sins of dead white guys hundreds of years ago. You can call it “backlash,” or you can call it “unintended consequences,” and you might even wonder if the accidental results of the White Guilt curriculum weren’t occasionally manifested as something that doesn’t look like racism, but rather an inchoate rage: Columbine, Tucson, Aurora and so forth.

Lot of really angry young white guys out there, eh?

“Racism” is a word that has been degraded by promiscuous overuse, and if we can still recognize racism at work in the unfair suspicion directed at Forest Whitaker by a deli employee, it’s almost a miracle, considering how often nowadays we are told that “racist” is effectively a synonym for “Republican.” (Was the deli employee Republican?)

In truth, however, actual racism — a generalized hostility toward other races — is a psychological defense mechanism, a rationalization of personal failure by resort to blaming the scapegoated Other.

We recognize this in the life of Adolf Hitler, the failed artist who became an eager acolyte of anti-Semitism after being rejected at the Vienna institute. And we see how the German people, humiliated by defeat in World War I, responded to Hitler’s blame-the-Jews message as an explanation for the collective insult to their pride.

Anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools, Bebel said (as if socialism itself weren’t foolish enough, we might add). And the interesting thing about the Third Reich is that it was the National Socialists who created it. The Nazis’ particular hybrid of socialism was disowned by other socialists, whose habit is always to dismiss any failed socialist experiment — from the Stalinist nightmare to Pol Pot’s murderous lunacy to Hugo Chavez’s sordid mess in Venezuela — as Not Really Socialism.

But Hitler’s socialism was Really Socialism in the sense that it was about the victimhood of the allegedly virtuous masses at the expense of the vicious Other. Just substitute “Jews” for “bourgeoisie,” and it’s the same thing as more orthodox socialism. It’s about scapegoating — externalizing the causes of failure — and it doesn’t really mattere who the chosen scapegoat is, or what elaborate ideological superstructure one erects to justify it, the Politics of Blame is always the same.

How about that One Percent, huh?

NYPD arrest Occupy Wall Street protesters, Oct. 1, 2011

“In the hands of a skillful indoctrinator, the average student not only thinks what the indoctrinator wants him to think . . . but is altogether positive that he has arrived at his position by independent intellectual exertion. This man is outraged by the suggestion that he is the flesh-and-blood tribute to the success of his indoctrinators.”
– William F. Buckley Jr., Up From Liberalism (1959)

Well, “Occupy” mobs raging against bankers may seem harmless enough, but I wasn’t the only one who noticed that those mobs were mostly a bunch of idiot white kids, and who knows where their victim mentality may lead? Not in my lifetime, of course.

As bad as schools are and as vicious as our politics have become, America isn’t likely to go through any violent revolution or totalitarian dystopia soon. We seem to be traveling The Road to Serfdom by baby steps. Yet the escalating ignorance of history, and the dying off of those who have any direct memory of fighting against dangerous “un-American” ideas, creates a genuine risk of future generations surrendering to Bad Ideas we thought we had long ago vanquished.

Pardon the long digression, Ta-Nehisi, and sorry to bust your hustle, but why does the New York Times only want a black man to write op-eds for them when the subject is racism? Why don’t the editors ever solicit your thoughts about the budget or foreign policy? Are the editors of the New York Times the sort of liberals who think black writers can’t write about anything except being black? Isn’t that attitude . . . racist?

That box you’re thinking inside? Throw it away.

You might be surprised what the world actually looks like, once you escape the indoctrination and begin thinking for yourself. 

 

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Category: Culture, History, Intellectuals, New York Times, Racism

Comments

  • Mike G.

    You ought to read one of his screeds on the War We Should Have Won. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/02/why-do-so-few-blacks-study-the-civil-war/308831/

  • http://twitter.com/richard_mcenroe richard mcenroe

    I guess that means the folks who arrested Winona Ryder were part of the War on Women.

  • Mm

    “. . .why does the New York Times only want a black man to write op-eds for them when the subject is racism?” BINGO!

  • jakee308

    Teh-Nehi needs to get a grip (and not that hooker in his lap) and acknowledge that because of the number and type of incidents of black crime, a black person is more likely to have committed a particular crime than say a white person. The odds favor that assumption and I’m presuming that Whit may have accidentally or on purpose made some move that was suspicious.

    Maybe he was looking for publicity, maybe he was looking to create a racial incident for what ever reason. Liberals don’t need logic when they do stuff like that. Also plenty of other stars of various and sundry colors and sexes have fallen into petty crime for what ever motive or reason (or unreason)

    If I look for stereotypes, I’m sure to find them. Why does ol’ Teh-Nehi think he’s immune? Think that black skin makes you less likely to be a douchebag?

    Oh, and if Whites are still so racist these days, why don’t more incidents like this happen every day? And why is it that black on white crime is 10 times higher than white on black crime. Of course his answer will be racist cops which interestingly also applies even if the cops are black. How does that work Teh?

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  • Count de Money

    I don’t know how long this clown has been in NYC, but as a long suffering NYC resident, I haven’t seen a white person working in a deli for a long time. The workers in delis that I’ve been to are either Arabs, Pakistanis, Koreans, Indians, Chinese or Mexicans.

    But it’s the policy of the NY Slimes not to let the facts get in the way of a good narrative.

  • http://opinion.ak4mc.us/ Scribe of Slog (McGehee)

    Blaming the “Other” = Orwell’s “Two-Minute Hate” = the substantially longer-than-two-minute hate that has characterized the Left and official Washington since 2008.

  • http://evilbloggerlady.blogspot.com/ Evi L. Bloggerlady

    We need to feel guilt on all levels. Who needs the Catholic Church when we have the New York Times!

  • Jo Nobody

    I completely agree with you Stacey. I have been shaking my head in sadness about this since I went to an academic awards ceremony for elementary school kids sponsored by our local NAACP a few years back. These were kids who excelled in science and math and were being recognized for their achievements.

    The speeches which proceeded stunned me. Besides finding out they have their own National Anthem (the real one was not sung, nor was the pledge recited). The kids were told their achievements happened despite the fact that white people don’t like them. They will always suffer from white people. They can’t really achieve because …. white people.

    I couldn’t believe it. I think today’s “racism” seen by such as Mr. Coates has more to do with low self esteem caused by their elders constantly telling them how “unworthy” they are and can never achieve because…… white people.

    It’s the content of their character and not the color of their skin that I judge. I was disgusted that our local NAACP indoctrinated a bunch of good and talented kids with the message that they can’t really achieve because …. white people. Rather than integrate, they segregate themselves voluntarily. I shake my head at that too. We aren’t segregating them, they are. When did the NAACP start self-segregating as a goal, when Dr. King wished for full integration?

    Now, it seems to have become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Sad. It wasn’t “white people” keeping them down. It was the NAACP.

  • drew458

    Thanks for the link Mike. This is one of the best essays on the Civil War I’ve ever read. Yes, Coates gets a bit resentful in it, here and there, how Black’s efforts during and before that conflict have been minimized by later historians; he himself minimizes that such things may have been done to present a history that could help heal a wounded nation. He also misses the major point about why Reconstruction was mostly a failure, but his essay was primarily about the war itself, not so much about what came after. But your comment is a tad vague; I can’t tell if you are supporting or excoriating Mr. Coates. Which is it?

  • drew458

    What if the deli owner was right? Just because someone is a well-paid actor doesn’t mean that person can’t also be a shoplifter. Right Wynona? Right LiLo?

    And how do we know that Mr. Whittaker wasn’t in “undercover mode”, hiding his identity, like many stars do when they’re out in public going about their daily lives?

    It does seem rather rash to call racism on this without more evidence.

  • Pingback: The Unconscious Pigeon Holes of Ta-Nahesi Coates | Daily Pundit

  • Mike G.

    Coates is a good writer and seemingly a smart guy, but as far as I’m concerned, he’s just a more intelligent version of Al Sharpton and Jessie Jackson. They are grievance mongers who are still living in the past.

    I have yet to see an article from him excoriating the perpetrators of all these recent flash mobs and other Black on White violence.

    If he was truly an objective journalist, he would treat both sides equally in his writing. I will give that he did come out against making a hero of Christopher Dorner, though.

  • http://profiles.google.com/rob5136 Rob Crawford

    Perhaps they DID recognize him — just as the folks who caught Winona Ryder shoplifting recognized her.

  • Finrod Felagund

    In the 1990s, before he went completely nutzo over the Bush administration, Michael Moore did an experiment in Manhattan where he had two people trying to hail a cab in the same block: Yaphet Kotto, and a white thug that had been in prison before. The cabs consistently went by Kotto to pick up the white thug.

    Now is that racism, or a conscious decision on the part of cab drivers to not want to drive to Harlem?

  • http://profiles.google.com/rob5136 Rob Crawford

    Tennessee Tuxedo: “In modern America we believe racism to be the property of the uniquely villainous and morally deformed, the ideology of trolls, gorgons and orcs.”

    Actually, racism is uniquely the ideology of the left.

    So he may have a point as to “morally deformed”, “trolls, gorgons, and orcs”.

  • http://profiles.google.com/rob5136 Rob Crawford

    “The kids were told their achievements happened despite the fact that white people don’t like them. They will always suffer from white people. They can’t really achieve because …. white people.”

    Hey, you know what they say about “teach your children well”.

    There’s a segment of the population that has carefully nursed its children on race-hatred. It ain’t white, it ain’t conservative, and it ain’t Christians.

  • http://profiles.google.com/rob5136 Rob Crawford

    You always ask the foremost practitioners in a subject for their input, right?

  • http://profiles.google.com/rob5136 Rob Crawford

    “Coates is a good writer and seemingly a smart guy…”

    Bullshit. He’s a talented minstrel, shucking and jiving in just the way his masters on the plantation want.

  • G Joubert

    Brilliant piece.

    But we tend to gloss over and not give full cognition to the obvious, the raw brutal history of the black subculture. Two hundred years of slavery, followed by one hundred years of Jim Crow, followed by 50 years of dependency on the doled out liberal programs. This is why they don’t trust anything white people have to say.

  • earlscruggs

    Good liberals oppose school choice because they dont want THOSE kids in their schools.

  • PGlenn

    I made it through about half the essay, which was enough to conclude that Coates can write powerfully about his emotional experiences and perspectives, but he is most certainly not a serious student of 19th century history.

  • Jo Nobody

    The friend that attended the NAACP awards dinner also introduced me to the concept of White Privilege. We attended a business luncheon together along with another friend. The three of us wished to sit together and none of the tables had three seats together. I moved someone’s planner over one spot to create three open spots. When the person came to the table, I explained what I had done and asked if that was ok, did she mind?

    She did not mind and kind of laughed a bit as if that would have been silly. Of course she didn’t mind. She was by herself and didn’t care in the least. My friend said that I had committed a crime called White Privilege. I went ‘huh’ and she said black people couldn’t have done that. Just white people could be so assertive to move someone’s belongings. I was stunned and explained that was ridiculous.

    Later at the same luncheon, a couple of white women left early. People leave business luncheons early a lot due to having to get back to work. I didn’t give it a single thought.
    My friend explained that was White Privilege too. Black women would never feel they had the right to leave early.

    It was ridiculous. I kept telling her she was kidding me. She was serious as a heart attack. She was taught this by a black college professor and fully believes it. It’s like believing in ghosts. I was being a racist and I didn’t even realize it. Leaving a luncheon early? Politely moving someone’s belongings over a foot? Wow. Raaaaacism.

  • http://evilbloggerlady.blogspot.com/ Evi L. Bloggerlady

    Meanwhile back at the GOP:

    La Commedia è finita!

  • Pingback: about that conversation on race | Thoughts of a citizen

  • http://alanye.com/ Dai Alanye

    No, it’s because of the insidious comfort of having an external excuse for failure.

    I know the feeling, having long been thwarted by those in power due to resentment over my wit and good looks.

  • http://profiles.google.com/rob5136 Rob Crawford

    How were they dressed? What were the expressions on their faces?

  • http://opinion.ak4mc.us/ Scribe of Slog (McGehee)

    They keep me down because of my daunting intellect and awe-inspiring masculinity.

  • Finrod Felagund

    From what I remember, they were both dressed casually, and I don’t remember any particular facial expression.

  • Quartermaster

    The lot of blacks was actually improving under Jim Crow. The fore they had to fight against to advance yielded a greta strength they have lost since so much is now handed to them. Ask Sowell and Williams about it. Both of them made it during Jim Crow. I doubt either of them would a return of it, but they won’t have much truck with the whiners and babies that pass as leaders among blacks these days.

  • http://thecampofthesaints.org Bob Belvedere

    Brilliant, Evi!

  • http://thecampofthesaints.org Bob Belvedere

    In his cell, Charles Manson is laughing at this woman.
    #HelterSkelter

  • http://thecampofthesaints.org Bob Belvedere

    Bravo, Stacy!

  • jakee308

    I’ve always thought that Charlie was chronological dislocated.

  • Dana

    Our esteemed host wrote:

    Who is this “we”? But never mind that. In fact, Coates is right, insofar as he is suspicious that the “good people” — even nice, well-meaning, liberalwhite people — are more guilty of racism than they would like to admit. How often, for example, have I given my opinion on the utter hopelessness of the public education system, only to have some parent explain to me that they live in a good district with good public schools. The suspicion that “good” is actually a synonym for “mostly white” is hard to avoid, but these parents don’t want to think of their personal choices in that context, and so I don’t bother to point this out.

    Perhaps if the writer would have traveled not that far south, to New Castle County, in very blue-state Delaware, he’d have his eyes opened. The forced busing order of 1978 let to what was basically the destruction of the public school system, and anyone in New Castle County (which surrounds Wilmington) who can in any way possible afford to send his children to private school, does.

    There are four diocesan high schools, with the tuition of $10,300 per year; they have waiting lists to get in. There are four non-diocesan Catholic high schools, where the tuition is $21,825 a year. And there are several non-Catholic private schools.

    Of course, it’s not just the schools; New Castle County is the most segregated place I’ve ever lived . . . and I grew up in the South. The city of Wilmington is heavily black and Hispanic, but travel to Hockessin, a suburb just six miles away (and where I lived), and if you see a black man there, he must be working, because he sure isn’t allowed to doesn’t live there.

  • http://alanye.com/ Dai Alanye

    Like me, you are simply too honest for your own good.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=709880186 Eric D. Mertz

    *stands and begins a slow clap* This is a BRILLIANT article which belongs in newspapers across the country. This kind of retort is sadly missing from our politics today.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=709880186 Eric D. Mertz

    A lot of truth to that message. We should push it some, start to point out the cognitive dissonance of most progressive talking points when applied to reality.

  • Sydney Bruce

    “Trust me, Ta-Nehisi: It ain’t the old-fashioned white racism you need to
    worry about, it’s this disturbing new racism of kids quietly embittered
    at being branded with a collective mark of racial shame for the sins of
    dead white guys hundreds of years ago”

    That’s it! Really I’ve been sensing this happening even here in Australia, where brown friends experienced no racism 30-40 years ago but get weird vibes from young people now – sparking know-alls to assert ‘it’s from their parents’, but we know from experience when their parents were young that the know-alls’ formula is wrong. ‘Quietly embittered at being branded’, ‘disturbing new racism’. Exactly. This is the world the liberals have created, God help us all.

  • SDN

    I think today’s “racism” seen by such as Mr. Coates has more to do with
    low self esteem caused by their elders constantly telling them how
    “unworthy” they are and can never achieve because…… white people.

    Exactly backward. These children have extremely high SELF-esteem, because they have been told all their lives they are special snowflakes who deserve the trophy because they were there.

    Unfortunately, life doesn’t and can’t work that way. Sooner or later, they have to actually have the skills and persistence that produce genuine esteem from others… and they don’t. However, they know they deserve that esteem, and when they don’t get it, it must be someone else’s fault.

    And the racial warlords like Obama, Sharpton and Coates are there. “Just send us checks and votes and we’ll make those raaaaacists treat you right.” Except there aren’t that many racists, and lots of people are starting to come around to the idea that if we are going to be treated as racists, we might as well be racist and have all the benefits we’re accused of getting from it.

  • Doug

    This is hardly new, alas. I experienced a big dose of this back in the early 80s, when I was a Georgia boy attending a New England prep school.
    The difference was that then I “was a racist” because I was from the South, not because I was white. I can remember being told I was obviously racist, by friends, in the very same conversation where they had been telling racial jokes minutes before.
    That said, I never developed a resentment of blacks… I developed a contempt for liberals.

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