Cosmic injustice

If you want more incredulous laughter, maybe not quite laughter fit for the gods, but at least a hearty, soul-cleansing belly laugh, see Powerline’s report on the latest black victimization claim: global warming. That’s right. Appearing before the National Press Club to announce the launch of the Commission to Engage African-Americans on Climate Change, House Democratic Whip James Clyburn said that climate change “disproportionately impacts African-Americans.”

Powerline continues:

The launch came on the heels of a separate report by the Environmental Justice and Climate Change Initiative (EJCC), which claims African-Americans are more vulnerable to the effects of climate change. EJCC describes itself as a “climate justice” advocacy group.

Environmental justice! Climate justice! How about that for blacks’ tendency to reduce every issue, even the weather, even sun spots (which actually cause global warming), to black victimhood, followed by demands for funding to help blacks pay the costs of their victimhood? Now, it’s a truism that everyone sees the world through the filter of his own character, his own desires and preconceptions. As a wise man (I forget who) once said, if a pickpocket encountered Jesus, all he would see would be his pockets. Well, by the same token, if a black encountered the universe, all he would see would be “disproportionate negative impact.”

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Paul K. writes:

Actually, regarding “cosmic injustice,” the search for racism boldly went where no man has gone before in early July, as reported at VFR:

Dallas County officials spar over ‘black hole’ comment

A special meeting about Dallas County traffic tickets turned tense and bizarre this afternoon.

County commissioners were discussing problems with the central collections office that is used to process traffic ticket payments and handle other paperwork normally done by the JP Courts.

Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield, who is white, said it seemed that central collections “has become a black hole” because paperwork reportedly has become lost in the office.

Commissioner John Wiley Price, who is black, interrupted him with a loud “Excuse me!” He then corrected his colleague, saying the office has become a “white hole.”

That prompted Judge Thomas Jones, who is black, to demand an apology from Mayfield for his racially insensitive analogy.

Mayfield shot back that it was a figure of speech and a science term. A black hole, according to Webster’s, is perhaps “the invisible remains of a collapsed star, with an intense gravitational field from which neither light nor matter can escape.”

Other county officials quickly interceded to break it up and get the meeting back on track. TV news cameras were rolling, after all.

LA replies:

Indeed. The fact that there are cosmic bodies of huge mass, collapsed stars, known since their discovery several decadees ago as “black holes” because they emit no light, is further proof that the black man just can’t get a break, anywhere in the universe.

The remarkable incident was further discussed here. Instead of dropping his ridiculous complaint, Price insisted that the term “black hole” be eliminated from the English language. Maybe under the Obama administration it will be.

Laura W. writes:

Blacks aren’t the only ones mistreated by cosmic forces. According to June Zeitlin, director of the Women’s Environment and Development Organization, “Women are disproportionately affected worldwide by climate change.” This is so even though women have “a smaller carbon footprint” than men. (Aha! I knew it!) It may seem to defy common sense. Aren’t women the ones always reaching for their sweaters? Don’t men sweat more? Rain and wind, storms and oceanic currents: can they tell the difference? In fact, Zeitlin explained in a recent public statement, women are swept away in disproportionate numbers by the floods and tsunamis that are now a commonplace due to man-made changes in the atmosphere. When the very skies above treat women unfairly, what’s the answer? Not surprisingly, Zeitlin advocates putting women “at the table where climate change policy is being made.” If men continue to make a mess of the atmosphere, strewing their dirty carbon socks all over the place, only a few well-paid women can put the whole thing in order again.

Philip M. writes from England:

Even Hitler never tried to claim that the Jews were making it rain. I’m afraid I didn’t find this article funny, I just wonder where this is all heading. Open racial hatred against whites on the flimsiest of pretexts is actively encouraged and endorsed, and any whites who object are vilified. This story reminds me of the absurd Nations Of Islam mythology retold in the Malcolm X autobiography about how white people were bred from dogs by an evil black genius called Dr Yakub.

To be blunt, I think that since the first moments of colonisation blacks have struggled to come to terms with the implications of our existence for them in ways we do not fully understand. Blacks may impinge on the lives of individual people in the West, but before we arrived in Africa most blacks must have felt inherently and unquestionably the master of their own world, the centre of their own universe. Is this the case any more—anywhere? Our influence in their world and lives is everywhere. We have become the yardstick by which they measure their own failure. Michelle Obama talks of whites “raising the bar,” but in truth we ARE the bar. We are the central, inescapable fact of their consciousness, even down to the weather. Who can deny after seeing Reverend Wright that they have made us into the central plank of a black religion, an inverse of the Nazi master race?

LA replies:

“We have become the yardstick by which they measure their own failure.”

Powerfully stated.

“We are the central, inescapable fact of their consciousness, even down to the weather.”

Yes. So when Toni Morrison says, absurdly, that blacks are the unacknowledged central focus of whites’ consciousness, that everything whites think and so is really a response to their secret obsession with blacks, she’s just projecting the black condition onto whites.

What a mess, or so it seems. But my approach is, I’m not centrally concerned about how blacks feel. Because I know that they have this profound resentment for us and that nothing we do can ever make them feel better toward us, at least in terms of their current demands or the demands of white liberalism. That’s why I say that we need to arrange things for our life and survival.

And that fits with my idea of restoring the white majority culture of America and the West. If whites confidently assert themselves again as the leaders of this society, then blacks will adjust to that. Further, with the possibility of the white guilt hustle forever removed from them, I think blacks may even be happier. But, again, that is not my primary concern. My primary concern is that the black “culture” with its endemic hostility to America be removed from the center of American life and thus disempowered.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 31, 2008 02:05 AM | Send