Racism’s Blade Dull On One Side

I didn’t get all of it. You know how quickly TV news moves.

It was something about a black woman and her children being forced to move from their home because of threats and intimidation by white neighbors. Said neighbors stood before the TV cameras, brazen in their ignorance.

I found myself wondering what that woman would think of the topic some of my readers have been urging me to write about: the rise of black bigotry. In recent months, many have asked me - “dared” might be a better word - to address the subject.

Just the other day, black conservative columnist Armstrong Williams decried what he sees as a double standard under which black intolerance gets soft treatment from media and society.

I will leave aside the fact that Louis Farrakhan and Khalid Muhammad would doubtless be surprised to hear they’ve been treated softly. I’d rather ponder why some people feel a need for the acknowledgment of the obvious - that black people, too, can be bigots.

That anyone could have thought otherwise can be laid at the feet of the black intelligentsia. The idea that blacks are incapable of racism gained currency among some in that community in the 1980s. Using a scalpel of logic, they drew a fine line of distinction. Blacks, they said, can be bigoted, biased or prejudiced, but they can’t be racist because racism is the system of subjugation - i.e., job discrimination, police oppression, voter disenfranchisement - and blacks have no control over that.

I’ve always hated that argument. Not because it didn’t contain truth, but because it seemed specifically constructed in such a way as to obscure it. It was a statement so calculatedly sensational that it blinded instead of enlightening.

“Black people are incapable of racism?!?”

How many people, black and white, never read the fine print, never heard anything beyond those incendiary words? How many bigots - of all races - used them to bolster whatever half-baked racial theories they held?

It would have been far better to forgo the fineline distinction and focus on the larger truth: Black people can be racist, yes, but what does it mean?

When black people are racist, it means they have opted to chain their spirit to a rock of ignorance and ill will. It means roads not taken, chances lost and horizons of opportunity narrowed to tunnels of recrimination. When black people are racist, it means people who would have reached for connection with them are rebuffed and sometimes, lose faith in the whole concept of hands across the divide. It means the same thing it means when anybody is racist.

But - and here is the distinction the intelligentsia sought unsuccessfully to draw - when black people are racist, white people do not lose jobs, their self-worth does not suffer, their children are not miseducated, their neighborhoods don’t go to hell, police don’t target them, their intelligence is not maligned and taxicabs do not pass them by.

White racism is a grenade that injures everyone around it. Black racism is a self-inflicted wound that, in most cases, injures only black people.

I am not making the case that black bias is excusable. It isn’t. Nor am I saying it’s unworthy of discussion. It is, especially given the popularity of men like Farrakhan and Muhammad.

What I am saying is that much of the rising furor over black bigotry seems shrill and specious, less a serious discussion than a deflection of one. I’ve lost count of how many times people have attempted to “trump” me in discussions of American racial oppression by pointing out that some black Africans aided white slavers in the plunder of West Africa.

I have yet to figure out what that has to do with the price of beans and eggs.

It is a disingenuous game, a spitting contest that would embarrass a reasonably mature fourth-grader. And it flies in the face of the obvious.

Last week on the news, I saw a black woman and her kids flee their home. I didn’t catch her name, but I didn’t need to, really. I’ve seen her a hundred times before. Sometimes she’s young, sometimes she’s old, sometimes wealthy, sometimes poor, sometimes a mother and yes, sometimes a man.

But she has never once been white.

xxxx