The ultimate example of blaming white racism instead of black misbehavior

Joe L. writes:

You write,

“No matter how badly blacks behave, the real problem is always whites and conservatives.”

As if on cue, columnist Mark Brown writes in the Chicago Sun-Times:

“The Wright affair has such resonance in this campaign because Wright has shown himself to be the kind of black person that white people don’t like. He brings out our prejudices. Yes, I said ‘our’ prejudices.

“Part of it is Wright’s ignorance and part of it is his arrogance and part of it is that he talks louder than white people would prefer and part of it is that he uses the sing-song cadence they associate with other black ministers they have grown to hate over the years such as Jesse Jackson….

“In short, I think I know racism when I see it, and the Rev. Wright affair has it in full bloom.

“This is a gut check time for white America, and don’t give me the ‘double standard’ baloney. If we could ever clean up the white racism, the thing that some of you consider black racism would take care of itself.”

To Brown, Wright is at worst ignorant and arrogant, and he talks loudly and in a particular manner. But it is white people alone who are the racists. “He brings out our prejudices.”

Now that is audacity.

LA replies:

Here’s the sentence of Mike Brown’s I want to focus on:

In short, I think I know racism when I see it, and the Rev. Wright affair has it in full bloom.

First, note that he doesn’t say that Wright has racism in full bloom, but that the Wright affair—meaning white society’s response to Wright—has racism in full bloom.

Second, racism in full bloom can mean nothing other than pure, unadulterated racism of the worst kind, such as hating and degrading blacks and denying their humanity purely because they’re black, such as Nazis rounding up Jews and stripping them of everything that made them human and finally killing them—because they were Jews. What else could the full bloom of racism be?

And that’s what this Brown person thinks is at work in the public revulsion at Jeremiah Wright.

As Auster’s First Law of Majority-Minority Relations in Liberal Society states, the worse a designated minority group behaves, the more the whites must be attacked as racists for noticing and criticizing that minority behavior. Wright’s behavior is so egregious, and so embarrassing to the notion of black equality, that whites in reacting against it must be seen as not just racist, but as being in the full bloom of racism. Whites’ fictional racism is a function of Wright’s actual racism.

The happy side of the picture is that Brown’s demented liberal construction of the event seems, for once, to be a decidedly minority view.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 01, 2008 10:07 AM | Send