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Charles Jaco has written opinion and commentary pieces for dozens of magazines and newspapers. Each week, read and comment on a fresh on-line version. The discussion page enables you to share your view points world wide. If you would like to make a comment go to the " Join the discussion" link below. If you would like to view past editorials visit the Editorial Archive. Editorial: 11/19/99
The logic of the newspaper opinion piece twisted and turned enough to make the
average reader reach for the Dramamine. The author, an African-American publisher, was
attacking white people for not supporting black-owned businesses. Racism, he concluded.
The problem was that one of the businesses he featured as having no white clientele is
called AfroCentric Expressions. Which is sort of like the organizer of Polish Heritage
Days complaining that no black folks showed up at the parade.
But then, crying racism has replaced patriotism and religion as the last refuge of
the scoundrel. A business that expressly targets African-Americans complains of racism
because no white people shop there. Jesse Jackson hints that it's racism, not the
thuggy, brawling behavior of six black teens that resulted in their expulsion in
Decatur, Illinois. A black cop in St. Louis complains that he's being disciplined
because of his race, not because he gave an interview to a local African-American
newspaper calling white officers "...tobacco-chewing redneck peckerwoods." Black
activists in New York City hold a public meeting with Indian, Pakistani, and other
immigrant cab drivers to complain about the cabbie's perceived racism, and pelt them with
taunts and insults about their names, their religion, their very immigrant status.
Cutting, as the say in Hollywood, to the chase--it is many African-American leaders
and their followers who are quickly claiming the heavyweight crown for racism. Stanley
Crouch, that trenchant, acidic observer of the American scene, notes that a white girl who
puts a poster of Michael Jordan in her room probably won't hear boo from her parents.
It is, he notes, the black girl who puts up a poster of Brad Pitt who'll catch grief
from the parental units, especially, notes Crouch, if they "...are upper-middle class
and Afrocentric."
Meaning racist. Bishop Desmond Tutu, the South African Nobel Prize winner, warned
me about this sort of thing a decade and a half ago, in Soweto in the darkest days of
aparthied. Your country, he told me, will face what will happen here. And he
quoted from white South African novelist Alan Paton's novel, "Cry, the Beloved Country,"
in which a black character says of his white oppressors, "They will turn to loving some
day. And by then, we will be turned to hating."
He was right, unfortunately. The collapse of American inner cities is blamed on
white flight, not on the African-American underclass that destroyed their own
neighborhoods. The plight of urban schools is blamed on white indifference, not on the
children of the underclass who terrorize teachers and each other. The fact that African-
Americans make up 13 per-cent of the population but commit around 47 per-cent of the
murders, and are themselves victims of 51 per-cent of the homicides is blamed on white
racism, not on the breathtaking pathologies that allow the inner city underclass to
destroy itself at a rate that causes the most avowed white supremicist to shake his
head in amazement and gratitude.
It is those sorts of things, not inbred, inherent white racism, that causes many
white people to throw up their hands and walk away. If America were a totally racist
society, then immigrants from the black Caribbean and India and Pakistan and Africa and
Asia wouldn't stand a chance. Instead, many African-American movers and shakers deride
the immigrant's success stories and claim that America is racist, but only racist when
it comes to black native-born Americans. So now, white people are not only racist,
but sophisticated enough to be selective racists.
So the old-fashioned idea of being responsible for your own actions is passe.
Instead, responsibility is replaced with victimization. Reducing any group or class of
people to victims of someone else is not only demeaning. It's racist.
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