This racist harangue embodies everything that is wrong with our modern one-sided dialogue regarding race. Let me quote what I take to be the key point:
Don’t you dare come here and tell me about your feelings. Because until you understand the depth of mine and people like me, nothing you do or think will ever matter to me. Learn about what happened to the early Blacks and Native Americans erased from history and then ask yourself: “Where is my empathy?”
You didn’t do it, You’re not responsible for the legacy of slavery. I get that. But you still benefit from the results whether you like it or not, whether you know it or not and when you pretend it didn’t happen.
Here we see exemplified two pathologies that define our non-stop, toxic public discussion of race issues:
- White people have no right to speak. They need to shut up, listen and learn.
- The legacy of slavery remains with us, so regardless of whether or not you were personally involved in slavery, you might as well have been, because, if you’re white, you’re benefiting from it, so we need to implement policies in reaction to that brute fact.
This is precisely what I have described and addressed in this article, https:[email protected][email protected]-98eeea6b6151, which cites actual empirical research showing how power dynamics have shifted so that white people are being regularly silenced and bullied in conversations about issues such as race and which also observes how the history of slavery and discrimination in this country are being routinely used as “original sins” deployed to browbeat people who had nothing to do with those sins and to dictate policies that are counterproductive and backward-looking, further reifying racial divisions instead of helping to heal them. (Here is one great recent example, an article explaining how affirmative action, a policy intended to help blacks in light of white America’s “past sins” against blacks, has, as its main effect, discrimination against Asians, who, of course, had nothing to do with slavery or its aftermath: http://www.city-journal.org/2016/26_1_college-admissions-discrimination.html.) As I describe in my article, there is an important distinction to be drawn between, on the one hand, acknowledging past mistakes, which is something important that needs to be done, and, on the other hand, letting those mistakes dictate present policy and power dynamics, which only perpetuates mutual resentment, hatred and division. Your historical disquisition, in other words, impressive though it might be (and surely intended to bowl white people over with guilt at all the suffering they’ve inflicted on black people), proves nothing other than what we all already knew: black people in the U.S. are the quintessential and perpetual victims of American history. It, nonetheless, remains a mistake to use such history to form any conclusions about what we should or should not do or say right now, today. Slavery, discrimination and racism perpetrated against anyone, no matter their race, are all just as wrong today as they ever were, regardless of whether or not people in the past recognized this truth.
I’m sorry Mr. Howze, but racism against white people is rampant, extreme and open right now, and racism is wrong. The term “white” is itself regularly being used as an insult (“you’re just a white guy; shut up!”). (And please, let’s not have that whole tired black people can’t be racist because racism = prejudice + power formula trotted out to save the day. This is nonsense, and I rebut it here: https:[email protected][email protected]6l37.) One injustice doesn’t sanction another, two wrongs don’t make a right and when a loud, obnoxious, racist white idiot is shouted down by a loud, obnoxious, racist black idiot, the result is little more than a net increase in loudness, obnoxiousness, racism and idiocy. This is exactly what we’re seeing in our society, a sad race to the bottom where voices of reason are being silenced by shameless shouters, and all perspective is being lost amidst the escalating chorus of rage. Being the victim of historical oppression and racism, as black people undoubtedly were, does not give anyone the license to be vulgar (I note the free and totally unnecessary use of profanity in your article, including in the title), rude, insulting, inconsiderate or, wait for it … racist!
