Dear Nephew,
An overriding subject in U.S. society, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, is race or ethnicity-insensitivity or color-apprehension or any term having to do with the fact that white people are routinely accused of being guilty of something related to it. There’s racism – the short definition of which is “racial prejudice or discrimination” – in every culture or people-group but in the U.S. racism is confined as an attribute only of white folks. This is true within much of the white community itself, especially among those like myself, devotees to the Force. The charge or even admission-of by white people like me of racism is used in many areas – political, religious, social, cultural…you get the picture. Even the president – especially the president – has made use of this subject, whether in calling attention to himself or accusing others of pointing attention to either him or other blacks. In 2008, when you were barely a teen and might not have noticed, the president as a then-candidate made a famous speech in Germany, with its most salient point being that he was somehow “different from what Germans might have expected,” i.e., that he should have been white, perfectly understandable, of course, since the black population is only 14% of the total U.S. population. In the first half of last century, German leaders simply used the army to wipe out minorities, certainly not elect them to office.
To be sure, racism is a moral issue and is an attitude never to be tolerated, at least under normal circumstances; however, sometimes fire has to be fought with fire in societies in which malice can be a motivator encouraging governmental disruption/dysfunction and even oppression of the targets of racists. In the U.S., 90% of racists are republicans, easily proven in black voting patterns. Blacks vote as a 95% bloc favoring democrats against republicans, the vast majority of whom are white, thus the proof. The president accented this fact in an interview in Philadelphia in 2008 when he said that the typical white person was like his late (white) grandmother, who raised him, i.e., that she was wary of people not like her—him, in other words. This explanation of racism was brilliant of him, a first-hand example, though his grandmother probably didn’t have horns (little joke there). This interview was on the day after an entire speech on the subject of race in which the president exhorted white racist-Americans to try to understand the president’s black non-racist minister, the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright, who had publicly and justifiably exhorted God to damn America because, for instance, a previous president (white, of course) had ordered the unspeakable destruction of Hiroshima. This ended WWII and saved millions of lives but you needn’t bother with that fact as you discuss racism (racially motivated mistreatment of the Japanese) with your friends.
So, you see – at least I hope you see – that there’s a benign use to be made of a bad thing. Usually, this use accrues to a political reason. Some would claim that the president was playing the race card, but actually he was educating the republican citizenry, namely, imposing upon it the guilt it so richly deserves. In the process, he used an important tool of the Force—class warfare. Class warfare sounds like a bad thing, but it’s good in that opposition to a good thing, like a level playing field, can be divided in order to conquer. This would not be possible, of course, if democrats were also racist but, while admitting they, too, are mostly white, I assure you that democrats form the party of compassion, goodwill, color-blindness, ethnicity-centeredness and warm hugs all around.
In the final analysis, it can be said that racism accrues to the slavery question, though just how, no one ever seems to explain. Slavery was abolished nearly 150 years ago and the current president is black. However, racial antagonisms have never quite disappeared, an expected eventuality of the bloodiest war in probably the world’s history until then. Descendents of slaves justifiably hate most, not all, white people, since some, not all, are the descendents of some slave-owners, while descendents of the 600,000 or so white soldiers who died in the war freeing slaves seem to exhibit an unjustifiable attitude resenting their loss. After all, war is war. You must be careful in this area as you make your points, hopefully in favor of the philosophy of the Force, which is diametrically opposed to republicanism. It’s true, as I’m sure you’ve heard, that the democrats stood in the way of civil rights legislation in the 1960s, while republicans furnished the votes to make it successful. In 1966, for instance, the Congress was 68% democrat, but these are facts I’m giving you so you can construct arguments to explain them away, the main attribute of any serious scholar.
Admittedly, there are rare cases of reverse-racism, i.e., a black person certainly inadvertently casting aspersions/insults at a person of another race. This well documented incident – the president accusing a white policeman of acting stupidly – will come up in discussions, always by a republican thug. You need to explain that the president was probably just very tired, as he was during his campaign when he alluded to the 57 states he had visited and had only one more to go. The proper riposte is always to insist that a sinner should never cast a stone at another sinner, though the president was perfectly innocent of any racism as proven by his selection of multitudes of white czars to run the government on the philosophy of the Force.
Don’t be afraid to discuss race but be sure you have created the proper spin for every eventuality.
As ever,
Redtape
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
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