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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Charles Tutt who wrote (265165)	6/19/2002 10:11:14 AM
From: goldworldnet	Respond to of 769670

In the early 1960's, it appeared that America might at last be becoming a society in which a person's race would not matter. Since then, though, color lines have made a strong comeback -- but with a twist. Formerly, the advocates of racial separatism were those who imagined they could gain an advantage as members of the master race -- that is, white people. Today, most of those who openly advocate strong racial divisions are those whose racial group has historically have suffered from them -- that is, black people, egged on by white liberals. American culture is opposed, at least in name, to racism; but those who advocate racism on behalf of blacks have escaped criticism by the transparent technique of claiming it is their critics who are the racists. It's amazing that this technique has worked at all, but it is wearing increasingly thin. Jim Sleeper is a liberal himself, but in Liberal Racism he applies the term "racist" where it belongs -- to those who claim that race is destiny, that people should identify themselves according to their genes and skin color. Though it addresses political issues, the book's focus is really on how people view themselves and one another. He holds that "it is America's destiny to show the world how to eliminate racial differences -- culturally, morally, and even physically -- as factors in human striving." He repeatedly challenges the notion that "your skin color signals a 'group identity.'" He denounces those who "applaud society's thirty-year-long regression from trying in the 1960s to ensure that people were not categorized officially by color and surname to ensuring now that they are so categorized, at liberals' own behest." At his best, his responses to liberal hypocrisy are devastating. His criticism of liberal silence over murders of blacks by blacks is an example: "Just as murders register more strongly in the traditional racist imagination when committed by blacks against whites, they register more strongly in today's liberal imagination when committed by whites against blacks. Both mind-sets, blinded by color, eclipse the human reality that transcends it." In discussing racial gerrymandering, he cites the liberal expectation that blacks can be elected to Congress only if districts are artificially segregated by race, and its refutation by the fact that most of the Representatives who were elected in such districts were re-elected after the race-oriented districting was struck down. "Voters, not judges," writes Sleeper, "had been telling liberals to stop making official what should be shameful -- defining one's citizenship mainly by color." He also pillories one of the worst manifestations of racial discrimination which still have legal standing in the U.S.: the still-widespread bar against interracial adoption. He cites the case of an Irish-American family that tried to adopt a black baby, only to be stopped by state regulations mandating a "culturally consistent" (i.e., racially correct) environment for adopted children. Incredibly, these regulations were backed not by the KKK, but by the National Association of Black Social Workers in the name of "diversity." However, the book suffers from weakness in support and argumentation. He often reaches conclusions without offering sufficient justification. For example, he refers to O. J. Simpson's acquittal as "jury nullification" and compares it to "the dark days when white juries often acquitted white killers of blacks such as NAACP leader Medgar Evers." While it can readily be argued that the jury in the Simpson case failed to consider the evidence properly and gave far too much weight to Mark Fuhrman's racial bias, the conclusion that the jury regarded Simpson as guilty but chose not to convict him is much more difficult to justify. Sleeper does not give the necessary support to this claim. There are problems elsewhere of assuming too much. He quotes a voice mail message from an unidentified caller and proceeds to draw conclusions about other beliefs which that person holds. He refers to a "Freudian slip" by the president of Rutgers, but quotes so little of that alleged slip that it is impossible for the reader to tell what was meant. Also, Sleeper doesn't get down to a philosophical level, and thus doesn't address the root causes of liberal racism. In the liberal view (here, as in the book, the word "liberal" refers to the modern use of the term, not the honorable one), individual initiative and market forces are powerless or untrustworthy, and social problems must be solved by legislation. This inevitably leads to a patronizing view of the "beneficiaries" of governmental intervention. Sleeper alludes to this when he states that "liberals often think that they can treat any black skin as an automatic signifier of disadvantage and aggrievement," but he doesn't trace the issue back to the ideas which are called "liberal" in modern society. But for all the problems and inconsistencies in the book, Sleeper must be praised for his courage. It is inevitable that Sleeper will be smeared as a racist, in spite of the obvious sympathy which the book shows for black victims of racial discrimination. The demagogues who play group against group and reap the political profits have gotten away with it far too long. Liberal Racism may help to bring their racket to an end, and to bring us closer to a society in which people can see each other not as members of racial groups, but as individuals. panix.com * * *