Posted by
Philip Mella on Thursday, July 30, 2009 3:11:03 PM
The recent racial flare-up between a Harvard professor and a Cambridge police officer could have been scripted by a liberal sensitivity trainer, but it's still horrible theater. Beyond the stunningly poor judgment by President Obama when he reflexively weighed on the matter, there are doubtless thousands of similar scenarios just waiting to be triggered by the permanently heightened awareness concerning race, compliments of the left.
For an apt example, let's look at Jehmu Greene's piece in the Huffington Post, which could have been a lecture or a multicultural training seminar since it has all the liberal buzzwords and cliches which effectively indict America as an innately racist nation. You see, the left views America through the distorted prism of identity politics, which means we're all guilty until, in the unlikely event, we're proven innocent. Indeed, when a member of a given race exploits the presumed uniqueness of their status and the historical wrongs they have suffered, it will always produce predictable results, because perception is front-loaded with bias. That, in turn, is designed to maintain their victim status and perpetuate a self- generated grievance industry,
Notice Greene's insistence that "critical thinking" and "conflict resolution" will solve our race problems. She itemizes a nearly limitless list of academic race jargon, but conspicuously fails to mention the hallmark novelty that we should all treat one another equals and not predicate our thinking and behavior on skin color. That's hostile the liberals' implied conviction that race tells us something about values and principles, that because someone's ancestry was in Nigeria and not Scotland the former has a special standing, which means we can and ought to embrace that person because doing so will somehow raise our consciousness. Whereas the chap from Scotland, he's, well, just another white guy.
Whether it's income disparities or racial tensions, the left has a knack for creating cultural fissures whose goal is the perpetual expansion of government to regulate behavior. That's why they endorse President Obama's belief that differences in income are due to institutionalized racism, not individual talent and work ethic. And, that when a police officer who happens to be white is responding to a possible break-in by a person who happens to be black, there simply has to be a racial motive. And, of course, the professor hewed closely to the script which led the officer to take a more aggressive tack.
It probably won't surprise you to read Greene's quote by Dorthoy Thompson, that "peace is not the absence of conflict but the presence of creative alternatives for responding to conflict." This is nonsense. Fashionable as it sounds, there's no reason to be believe that invoking "creative alternatives"--whatever that means--will lead to a favorable resolution than simply speaking candidly to one another as mature adults. The truth, when it comes to race, most of the 'conflicts' are the product of a fictional narrative that's been culturally imbued into our thinking, and which has convinced us that a tension is real when it's between a black and a white person, but the same circumstances are benign when those involved are of the same race.
That's not to say racism is a fiction, but that the left has instituted a reflex that instinctively magnifies and distorts every interaction when its between members of different races, but is curiously silent when they're the two parties happen to both be black.
The kind of 'conflicts' Greene and Thompson are opining on minimize real conflicts, situations in which all the creativity in the universe will have no impact whatsoever. It's a uniquely dispiriting time in America today, because the likes of Greene has successfully mainstreamed a racialist view of every dimension of our civic life, and has created a veritable industry and a special interest nomenclature that we're all obliged to invoke at the slightest hint of tension--lest we be called racist.