{"id":170450,"date":"2012-05-28T03:05:18","date_gmt":"2012-05-28T09:05:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/?p=170450"},"modified":"2013-09-06T18:09:14","modified_gmt":"2013-09-07T00:09:14","slug":"the-new-face-of-american-racism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/?p=170450","title":{"rendered":"The New Face Of American Racism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards<\/em><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

There is\u00a0a “liberals are hypocrites” post that is going viral among right-wing zealots on facebook, with thousands of\u00a0shares and hundreds of comments on some of them, in which a news story about two African Americans who committed a violent crime against a white is, once again, proffered as proof that 1) George Zimmerman was right to pursue and shoot Trayvon Martin, 2) “Stand Your Ground” laws are good and necessary, 3) those who oppose them are trying to turn good, law-abiding (i.e., “white”) folks into unarmed innocent victims of bad, law-breaking (i.e., “black”) folks, and 4) Liberals are hypocrites because we aren’t concerned enough about black-on-white violence.<\/p>\n

My following response, which is an expression of sheer disgust at continuing to see this ugly\u00a0bigotry repeated over and over again, apparently resonating with far too many people, only addresses\u00a0the first three\u00a0of these issues. (The fourth can be summed up as follows: There is virtually no one defending black-on-white violence, and no laws bringing into question whether some incidents of it –or, more precisely, acts of violence by those you DON’T identify with against those you DO identify with–\u00a0can be prosecuted or not. The reason the white-on-black violence of the Trayvon Martin\u00a0shooting is\u00a0a larger\u00a0issue is because there are people defending it as a non-issue and advocating laws that make it more likely to occur more often.)<\/p>\n

The\u00a0news story\u00a0(about\u00a0an incident of black-on-white violence), used in this way,\u00a0highlights the fundamental difference between almost all variations of right-wing ideology and almost all variations of left-wing ideology: The former is firmly rooted in fear and hatred, while the latter aspires to hope and humanity. Those on the right scoff that those on the left would be so naive, though, in reality, hope and humanity is not only a\u00a0more positive orientation, but, when leavened with reason and information, is also more pragmatic,\u00a0better serves one’s own self-interest, than the fear and hatred that informs those on the right. (See, for instance, Collective Action (and Time Horizon) Problems<\/a>, for one\u00a0reason why this is so.)<\/p>\n

Those on the far-right are blithely indifferent to the death of an unarmed black teen at the hands of an armed white vigilante, because the armed white vigilante, in their mind,\u00a0had every right to defend himself against any and all potential or perceived dangers, while the unarmed black teen lacked even the right to life, as long as it is one of them rather than the government that deprives him of it. One rationalization that is used is the presumption of\u00a0guilt laid on the teen\u00a0due to the possibility that he reacted violently to being pursued, something that these ideologues should respect rather than condemn, if we each have a right to protect ourselves against perceived threats! Ironically, however, they only defend the armed pursuer’s right to “defend” himself, and not the unarmed pursued’s right to do so!<\/p>\n

If these right-wing ideologues had any integrity, any consistency, were anything other than implicitly racist hypocrits, they would not point to the possibility that\u00a0Martin was beating Zimmerman before he (Martin) was shot as justification for the shooting, but rather with approval that\u00a0Martin was defending himself against the armed individual pursuing him! Why aren’t they chanting that it’s a shame Martin didn’t kill Zimmerman before Zimmerman killed Martin, since it was Zimmerman who was the armed pursuer, and Martin who was the unarmed pursued?<\/p>\n

But, of course, that’s not the way their little minds work, because it’s all about who they identify with, and who they identify as their implicit enemy. The armed vigilante is LIKE THEM, and that’s all that counts. The unarmed victim is THE OTHER that they fear and hate, and so his innocence, the fact that he had his life taken away unjustly, is just no big deal. They excuse the armed pursuer, because they identify with him (racially, and ideologically as an armed pursuer of someone he thought was a criminal); they implicitly condemn the unarmed teen to a death sentence without a trial because they don’t identify with him (racially, and as someone who someone like them was inclined to suspect of being up to no good). It’s the very nature of their way of thinking, and the reason why it should be odious to all rational people of goodwill.<\/p>\n

What an amazingly convoluted ideology it is that does such contortions to be indignant that anyone would raise any objections to an armed pursuer shooting to death an unarmed teen apparently doing absolutely nothing illegal at the time the pursuit began, but spares no indignation whatsoever\u00a0on behalf of\u00a0the unarmed teen who was shot to death! The imagined threat to Zimmerman, who was both the pursuer and the wielder of\u00a0deadly force in this instance, is more salient to them than the real danger to Martin, who was the pursued and unarmed victim of a shooting death!<\/p>\n

What gets me most about this is what it indicates about how far we’ve sunk as a nation. This isn’t just a fringe ideology that a few grease-painted jack-asses adhere to. This has become a mainstream ideology, a cult of implicit violence and hatred justified by fear and generalized enmity.<\/p>\n

It goes beyond the rationalization of offensive deadly violence by an armed pursuer against an unarmed victim,\u00a0justified only by the pursuers “reasonable” fear of crime in general (!), essentially legalizing paranoid racist violence. It goes beyond\u00a0conveniently targeting those “scary blacks” (as the news story used to stoke the right-wing indignation\u00a0so poignantly illustrates)\u00a0whose crimes\u00a0justify Zimmerman acting as police, judge, jury, and executioner at the sight of a black kid in his neighborhood. It even goes beyond their assertion that there is no racism in America, that their now oft-invoked fear and hatred of those blacks who have not proven that they are\u00a0not a threat isn’t racism at all, but rather merely the rational response to the “racism” of those\u00a0who think that laws that facilitate killing unarmed black teens due to a generalized fear of crime are a bad idea.<\/p>\n

It includes and goes beyond all of this. It extends to and is fed by\u00a0the delusion that there is no social injustice in America, that people fare well or poorly primarily by virtue of their own merit,\u00a0 a notion that is not only absurd on the face of it, but is also thoroughly disproved by statistical evidence (see The Presence of the Past<\/a>).\u00a0It combines a blithe indifference to the legacies of history that relegate people to sharply unequal opportunity structures at birth, with the equally blithe willingness to subtly loathe the\u00a0entire categories of people\u00a0who, born into such opportunity structures, are\u00a0overrepresented among the\u00a0poor. But irrational bigots are not swayed by such things as fact and reason and human decency.<\/p>\n

The fact that such a belligerent, inhumane, and just generally dysfunctional\u00a0ideology can survive as a major ideological strain in American culture is scary beyond belief. This cultural virus has always been with us, but never before in my memory so virulent and widespread as it is today. Anyone who has any desire for us to remain or become a rational and humane people needs to take stock of this, to repudiate it, and to oppose it, passionately and constantly, because it is truly ugly and destructive insanity.<\/p>\n

(See the following related essays on different aspects of American racism and xenophobia: \u201cSharianity\u201d<\/a>\u00a0and Godwin\u2019s Law Notwithstanding<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards<\/em><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards There is\u00a0a “liberals are hypocrites” post that is going viral among right-wing zealots on facebook, with thousands of\u00a0shares and hundreds of comments on some of them, in which a news story about two African Americans who committed a violent crime against a white is, once again, proffered as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[14,13,21,33,4],"tags":[1303,12553,1510,12552,12556,1319,12555,522,12200,12198,12554],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170450"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=170450"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170450\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":404113,"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170450\/revisions\/404113"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=170450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=170450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=170450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}