How not to repair relations between the races

by: Eric B.

Sat Oct 13, 2012 at 14:27:33 PM EDT

Matt Davis, MLive's conservative affirmative action hire and in-house sedetionist, wrote about the races the other day, saying that the reaction by black people to the endorsement of Stacey Dash of Willard Romney is a sign that racism continues to live. The story, in its raw form, is less a story about racism and more about more about why Twitter is stupid and best left to people who don't need more than 140 characters to express their deepest thoughts (and social media consultants, who need the money they earn showing you how to set up Twitter accounts to pay their rent).

The incident isn't really racist, since the underlying idea isn't that white people aren't fit to be president. It's tribalism, which isn't much better, but it's based on the idea that black people ought to stick together. More on this in a minute.

What does genuine racism look like? Well, there's this:

It's unambiguously racist, and naturally missing from Davis' piece. Why? Because when you go out and seek out someone to fill a specific niche as a columnist, you wind up not with good opinion journalism but propaganda. MLive hired Davis to be its thoughtful conservative columnist, which means that he needs to thoughtfully bash liberals and/or liberal ideas. So, when you want to attack racism, you have to do it in a way that also attacks "liberals" and not the genuine racism reflected in the above photo, or the highway sign in Indiana that looks like it was painted by a guy who might still have a couple of lawn jockeys in his backyard, or the empty chairs that were lynched in places like Texas and Virginia. No, sir, the real racists are the people who bombarded a hitherto little known actress with venom for electorally straying outside their ethnic group.

They aren't racists, as mentioned above, but they are guilty of tribalism. It's not a hell of a lot smarter. It just comes from a different place. Now, I'm not black. I'm not even half-black. In fact, I come from one of the whitest parts of the state. How white? About three years ago, we deported the town Jew back to Massachusetts or wherever the hell he came from, and since have been happier than swine in shit.

I have, however, spent most of my adult life working shitty jobs, which means I've spent a lot of time working with members of minority groups (they even let them serve in a desegregated military!). Now, I could be completely wrong here, but my experience has been that being a member of a minority group -- especially one victimized with a long history of oftentime violent oppression -- engenders an, "We all hang together, or we shall certainly hang individually" mentality. When people who believe that see someone else try to break away, they tend to react very negatively. 

I'm not going to try to defend it. People should think for themselves and express themselves accordingly, and yelling at them for expressing their opinions is not the way to do things. What I will say, however, is that it exists and comes from a different place than simple racism. You may wish to stamp it out, although I think this is ultimately as hopeless a task as forever stamping out racism itself, and if that's what you wish to do, calling people who feel that way "racists" does nothing to reduce their incentive to go on, because it affirms that at the end of the day they're better off together because the oppressive majority always erects new barriers towards their achieving real equality.