re: #298 Kruk

The problem I have with this line of argument is that if racism doesn’t rise to a certain level of violence or exclusion, then it’s not “real” racism. (And naturally, anyone calls out racism below that externally imposed line is crying wolf, playing the race card or just plain making it up.) A few decades ago, people could have said with just as much justification that excluding people from jobs or housing on racial grounds was trivial when compared to lynchings or civil rights abuses, and calling job related discrimination racism denigrated “real” victims.

And no, we haven’t come as far as we would have liked, but I think many people believe that we have come a lot further than we have. There’s a real discomfort in acknowledging how deeply racist attitudes are ingrained in speech, stereotypes and culture, and it’s a lot easier to say that those things are made up.

How did we come to where those who agree to the letter, and in perfect conformity to the spirit, with MLK’s hope that people would be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin, are held to be racist?

From the point of view of the PC-left, any test that fails to yield the desired numerical results is racist, even if no one can detect anything in the test that is racist, and even if the test is a good clean fit to the job requirements it’s built for. The Supreme Court came down on the side of the New Haven fire department, but to the PC-left, that just shows that the Supreme Court is racist.

By this standard, MLK was a racist. It’s Orwellian.

It’s bad tactics too, if you’re trying to bring the nation around to where just about everybody wants what MLK wanted. The fact that so many charges of racism are without merit gives cover to dog-whistle tactics. The whistle-blower can hope that the neutral middle doesn’t hear the note he’s struck and only sees yet another accusation, which, going by past record, might well yet again be unfounded.