As the US progresses into the final third of 2021, we find ourselves farther away from the eternal dream of equality and tolerance between races, creeds, ethnicities and genders than we’ve been since the civil rights struggles of the early 1960s.
At least that’s what much of the activist media and first-level thinkers would insist you believe. If that is indeed the case, we need look no further than today’s relentless focus on tattooing the world’s inequities on whomever is most convenient and least able to mount a defense. It turns out there’s gains to be made by keeping the blame moving back and forth between assigned groups.
The tactic kicked into overdrive in the violent aftermath of the George Floyd tragedy. Rather than blame that victim’s death on a sadistic sociopath cop and the lack of moral courage found in his fellow officers on the scene, the media and activist message quickly expanded its significance and threw the crime at the feet of all police and – over the long haul – white supremacy.
If people object to the generalized blame heaped on millions without consideration or trial, they’re branded racist. It didn’t matter if you’re an unfortunate outcast who was also justifiably disgusted and saddened by the images of a smiling cop enjoying slowly grinding the life out of a semi-conscious man face down in the street. Your pity and grief wasn’t officially sanctioned and wasn’t welcome. The choices were “accept responsibility and wear your shame” or be exiled.
In the months following the Floyd murder and resulting riots, a movement grew to boost minority communities. It was a welcome response to a series of violent actions and bloody reprisals, but it came into being for the wrong reasons. Rather than promote, say, corporate investments in inner-city schools or the aggressive hiring of minority job candidates as a way to elevate the lives of more Americans, the true purpose of such efforts was to promote a mood of punishment toward those who were seen as hoarding education or job opportunities.
Such issues came up in past decades and wore debated monikers like quotas or affirmative action. No matter the good intentions of systems christened to open doors to more economic classes and ethnic communities, they unavoidably degrade into tribal warfare with the cyclical battle cry of “more for us, less for you.”
Eventually, if you continually confront a proponent of this clumsy, poorly defined redistribution of both opportunity and responsibility with a reasoned argument pointing out that it defies both logic and grace to punish someone’s race in the name of racial equality, you’ll get down to the true motivation of this collective equity war. If the victims of reverse discrimination say they never harbored racist tendencies, never harmed anyone and made an utmost effort to treat the human beings in front of them with decency, they’ll hear the inevitable:
Now you know how it feels to be a victim of discrimination.
So, in the end, all of the high-minded talk of a post-racial society and building a more peaceful and tolerant community really amounts to nothing more than revenge. It’s the civil rights crusader happily saying, “To reduce the perceived injustice and suffering of group A, we will punish group B – and we’ll enjoy watching the punishment.”
That’s sadly in keeping with human nature, so it will continue indefinitely. My main objection here is, if that’s the chosen strategy, its perpetrators should embrace it openly and honestly. Claim your revenge proudly. Grab hold of that oppressor’s mantle with vigor. After all, you’ve become the people you hated. You might as well enjoy the new gig.
If I might help you with your manifesto, it should read something like this:
“We can’t seem to force everyone to get along, to share, to accept each other quite the way we want. So, we’ll punish whomever seems to be on top of the food chain at the moment. When that group is adequately humbled, we’ll move to attacking another subgroup. It’s certain we’ll never acquire anything resembling justice or freedom with such tactics, but we’ll have a lot of fun watching our political enemies suffer – and we’ll don deeply satisfying, though wholly unearned, auras of intellectual and spiritual superiority along the way.”
That’s a little wordy, but I’ll workshop it.
Our march to equality slowly rotted away into little more than a sort of socio-economic ‘Whack-a-Mole.’ The sad game’s designers hammer away at whomever they can blame this round, then shift their outrage where convenient and beneficial.
Of course, once properly slammed down into place, the group that shouldered the blame will react with understandable defensive anger. Eventually, one whacked mole blames another smashed rodent… Soon, those bruised moles blame the wielder of the hammer and fight to wrestle the handle away… And the game plays merrily on with different racial, ethnic and gender groups never learning to accept each other or work together.
It never enters the fevered frontal lobes of the enlightened social-equity champions that equality, tolerance and cooperation is impossible if the citizenry is instructed, encouraged or outright forced to identify themselves and everyone else around them as members of separate, unequal and competing tribes.
Of course, that’s the real purpose of perpetuating this vengeful assigning and reapportioning of blame for society’s ills. There’s political points to be won, notoriety to be hoarded and egos to be fed by pitting letters on this squad against numbers on that team – and entire alphabets love to hear that any problems befalling them are always the fault of an unseen digit somewhere. There’s simply no profit to be made if we all just get along
When different parties build up their stockpiles of power and prestige as profiteers of racial class warfare, the weapon powered by prejudice and tribalism is never really unloaded and put on the shelf. It’s just pointed in a new direction.
Bang.
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