Funny man and shock jock Howard Stern used to have as a frequent guest Daniel Carver, A Ku Klux Klan member from Georgia whose explicit racism made for some damn funny radio. When people would call-in and take issue with the nonsense coming out of Carver’s mouth, Stern’s reaction was generally “What do you guys expect? This guy’s in the KKK!”
I’m at the same point with white liberals. What can one expect from silly white liberals at this point, so many of who are so obsessed with race that they’ve become parodies of themselves. Half the criticism I’ve read concerning the alleged racism of Tea Partiers and grassroots conservatives recently, read like scripts for Saturday Night Live and I have to constantly remind myself that these people are not kidding. And they’re not.
This story from Friday’s National Post “White & guilty: ‘Whiteness’ workshop helps expose your inner racist,” by
Johnathan Kay is a perfect example of this silliness, and though it might be considered a bit extreme even by some liberals, this really is exactly how these folks think. Writes Kay, who attended a class called “Thinking About Whiteness and Doing Anti-Racism”:
I felt sympathy for just about everyone in that class. In private conversation, they all seemed like good-hearted, intelligent people. But like communist die-hards confessing their counter-revolutionary thought-crimes at a Soviet workers’ council, or devout Catholics on their knees in the confessional, they also seemed utterly consumed by their sin, regarding their pallor as a sort of moral leprosy. I came to see them as Lady Macbeths in reverse — cursing skin with nary a “damn’d spot.” Even basic communication with friends and fellow activists, I observed, was a plodding agony of self-censorship, in which every syllable was scrutinized for subconscious racist connotations as it was leaving their mouths.
While politically correct campus activists often come across as smug and single-minded, I realized, their intellectual life might more accurately be described as bipolar — combining an ecstatic self-conception as high priestesses who pronounce upon the racist sins of our society, alongside extravagant self-mortification in regard to their own fallen state.
As I watched, I tried to detach myself from this spectacle, and imagine what this unintentionally comic scene — a group of students sitting around, self-consciously egging each other on to be ashamed of their skin colour — would look like to, say, civil rights protesters from a half-century ago. If the instructor and her students ever allowed themselves to laugh, they might have found it funny.
Race—like sex, age, gender and geography—matters. Yet, the older I get the less I think it matters, and I find writing about this immutable fact of life to be extremely boring. I’ve admired thinkers who thought race was a pretty big deal, and have even been guilty of some of the white guilt nonsense so common amongst liberals, particularly in my teens.
Yet when I find myself addressing the issue of race these days, it is almost always attacking liberals and their skewed perceptions of what is and isn’t “racist.” Like Daniel Carver, race colors so much of what liberals think about themselves and their fellow Americans—and to such a ridiculous degree—that it’s often hard to take them seriously. That so many do take the Left so seriously, I suppose, keeps me employed.
Still, it’s hard to deny that the two groups most obsessed with race today are genuine racists ala Daniel Carver—and white liberals. At this point, having a conversation with either group is comedic, at best.
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