Saturday, July 24, 2010

Stop it. Just FUCKING willyouplease STOP it!

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White men.  White men in America in 2010.  There seems to be an outcry from the White Male Constituency that they are suffering from some kind of racial bias, and that, as victims of racism, they deserve some kind of alleviation or mitigation or something diametrically opposed to the kick in the groin I'd LIKE to give them.  I swear, we're only weeks away from hearing calls for affirmative action.  What will it take to put an end to this ugly, artificial and dishonest campaign?  Honestly, I can't even think about it without seeing the leering visage of Rush Limbaugh.  Liars, charlatans and bigots.  Ok, let's think it through.

The first question one has to ask is who, exactly, is doing this discriminating against white men?  Is it other white men?  Because overwhelmingly, the business owners and decision makers in America are white men, and historically they have actually quite blatantly favored other white men.  If it requires people of color being in a position to exercise racial prejudice against white males, as represented in the fear mongering that President Obama favors African Americans over whites, then the opportunity for real world expression of this racial animosity is tiny.

Which is not to say that there are no poor white men in America.  Of course there are, plenty of them.  But they are not poor because they are being discriminated against because they are white.  They are poor because, in post-Reagan American economy, opportunities for upward mobility have been reduced to effectively zero.  If you want to know if an American will be wealthy as an adult, you need merely look to see if he or she was wealthy as a child.  The greatest predictor of wealth in America is birth status.

Second, and more importantly, you have to wonder where is the evidence of this anti-white bigotry?  White men still seem to have the vast majority of the money and the power in the US.  They occupy overwhelming majorities in State Houses, Legislatures, Congress and the Judiciary, while blacks and Hispanics occupy overwhelming majorities in penitentiaries and inner city poverty.  The thing that makes each of these examples of anti-white racism so ridiculous is that each is a small anecdote out of day-to-day life, a conflict (remember Henry Louis Gates?) or the kinds of old resentments that America's ugly past has built into the family and community history of most of her citizens.  There is precisely NO evidence of the kind of widespread, systematic and institutionalized unfair treatment that we can, tragically, so easily document in the case of African Americans and other people of color.

As a final note, there is something else that needs to be mentioned when we are talking about race relations in America.  It seems that there are a lot of white people in America who have grown frustrated at a society that has been moving past it's own history of racial animosity for over fifty years.  Well represented by the teabaggers and their ilk, they seem desperate to be allowed to express public racial fear, resentment and hatred without being considered racists.  How that is even possible is unclear, but you see them constantly railing against being forced to speak in "PC Terms", when they'd like nothing more than to be able to use raw racial slurs in the discourse.  You see them finding it difficult in modern America to openly hate Black people, so they turn quickly to Latinos, who they can tar as "illegals".  It's odd that even though immigration is down due to the economy, deportations are up significantly and crime along the border is at the lowest levels in decades, the outcry against the so-called "illegals" gets louder and uglier.  I suppose we are not supposed to notice that it's actually a hatred for Hispanic people being couched in immigration terms.  Or perhaps we ARE supposed to notice - these white people seem to be trying to make their mindless hatred clear.  And the worst expression of this desire to go back to a white supremacist world where hatred of other races led to regular, open slurs and dehumanization, and incitement to violence is the treatment we're seeing of Muslims, both foreign and American.  The excuse, as inaccurate and deceitful as it is, is "they attacked us".  But it's become obvious - that's just another excuse for a large number of white American racists to vilify and discriminate against another group who is not like them.  It seems almost part of their DNA.

3 comments:

  1. I'm starting the NAAWD, 'cause there's no institution in American society today that actively supports the White Dude.

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  2. Let me know how it goes, M. Bouffant. With the same concerns in mind, I'm thinking of organizing a Suburban League.

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  3. Had to come on over here and check you out, after the haiku-off.
    NOt shabby writings around these parts.
    I'll be back.....

    ReplyDelete