Why whites are blamed for nonwhite crime

Konstantin D. writes:

The shooting incident in Binghamton, NY and the subsequent response of the mass media, which has a tenor of blaming white Americans for making life hard for the immigrant by being discriminatory to him, highlights an oxymoron which liberals follow but apparently don’t think about. On the one side, many liberals tell us that we (the majority population) should treat all nationalities, ethnic-, racial- or religious groups equally without discrimination. Do the liberals telling it practice their intentions in real-world?

As you have repeatedly stated in the past, those liberals will never blame the nonwhite immigrants for any of their actions that end up in tragedy for either the immigrants or Americans. The pattern is known, I just want to bring it up one more time: If an American commits a crime, Americans as a whole are blamed for it because of their weapon-oriented culture among other things. If an immigrant commits a crime, Americans are blamed for having done something wrong to the immigrant, whether directly or indirectly. Now, what can one notice in this pattern? I’d say, this is discrimination and unequal treatment. That means, the liberals who constantly remind us of the need to practice equal treatment and anti-discrimination violate those intentions on a regular basis by always blaming the majority population for incidents caused by either the majority group or minority groups—like in Binghamton.

If everyone would be indeed treated equally as aspired by liberals, then the culprit would be blamed for what he did, no matter to which group he belongs. But as it turned out, the racial and ethnic background of the perpetuator did matter to the liberal media, since special attention was given to him, which again shows that the liberal media doesn’t treat everyone equally.

LA replies:

You write:

“…this is discrimination and unequal treatment. That means, the liberals who constantly remind us of the need to practice equal treatment and anti-discrimination violate those intentions on a regular basis by always blaming the majority population for incidents caused by either the majority group or minority groups…”

The true equality to which you are appealing really means equal justice. But there are two, radically opposed concepts of equal justice: the classic concept of equal justice, “to each his due,” in which a single standard is applied equally to everyone and it’s understood that some people will do better according to that standard and others will do worse; and the leftist or modern-liberal concept of equal justice, “equal outcomes for everyone,” which requires giving undeserved advantages to those who are worse off, and undeserved disadvantages to those who are better off, in order to make everyone equal.

Since under modern liberalism whites are always assumed to be better off, they must be treated worse, and since nonwhites are always assumed to be worse off, they must be treated better. This applies to crime as to other areas. To make whites and nonwhites equal when it comes to responsibility for crime, crimes committed by nonwhites must be—whether directly or indirectly, whether explicitly or implicitly—blamed on whites.

So your criticism of liberalism will fall on deaf ears, since the liberals don’t believe in the classic concept of justice to which you are appealing. They believe in the leftist or modern-liberal concept of justice. Conservatives constantly make the mistake of thinking that showing liberals that they are violating their own, classic liberalism with the modern-liberal double standard will get them to stop practicing that double standard. But the terrible reality is that liberals do not believe in classic liberalism, and are not practicing a double standard that violates it. They believe in modern liberalism, and are practicing a single standard that fulfills it. And that single standard is: whatever degrades white Western Christian civilization, and particularly white men, is good.

So the horrible truth is that liberals do not share a common ground with us to which we can appeal. Liberals are our enemies, subscribing to ideas that must lead to the destruction of everything we believe and everything we are.

In this brief account I’ve necessarily left out nuances, such as the normal adjustments that non-leftist individuals and societies make to avoid the overly harsh outcomes that sometimes result from pure justice, such as the fact that some liberals still have some adherence to classic notions of justice. I’ve described the two principles in stark terms, in order to show the fundamental thrust of modern liberalism.

(I develop this idea at more length in my article, How to Oppose Liberal Intolerance.)

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Gintas writes:

You said:

So the horrible truth is that liberals do not share a common ground with us to which we can appeal. Liberals are our enemies, subscribing to ideas that must lead to the destruction of everything we believe and everything we are.

and in the FrontPage article:

Therefore the real debate that we conservatives must seek to join with our “liberal” adversaries is not between their alleged support for equality and tolerance and our alleged bigotry and hatred. The real debate is between their desire to dismantle our traditional morality, institutions, and culture, and our desire to preserve our traditional morality, institutions, and culture—indeed our very freedom and existence as a people.

I’ve been taking this approach in dealing with liberals. I think my epiphany came from Sam Francis’s essay “Equality as a Political Weapon.” After reading it, whenever I would run into what Francis had described, I didn’t cringe or grovel before all the words we have been trained to grovel before—“fairness,” “civil rights,” “equality”—but saw their use as a direct attack on our traditional Western life, exactly as you say. When this happens we know it’s time to draw the sword and counter-attack.

LA replies:

Gintas is exactly right. What do the liberals really mean by “equality”? When will they feel that society has attained enough equality, enough inclusion, enough diversity? When will they stop believing that our society is guilty?

In other words, what is their bottom line?

And the answer is that, so long as American and Western society exist in recognizable form, there is no point at which the liberals’ demand for equality and non-discrimination will have been satisfied, because so long as our society is recognizably what it is, it will be distinct from, and whiter than, non-Western societies, and therefore the condition of equality and non-discrimination will not have been reached, and therefore America will still be guilty. Which shows that the demand for equality is not a finite and reasonable demand aimed at curing a finite and curable wrong, but an unlimiated demand, a demand that our society cease to exist in its historical form and become a different society.

“Conservatives” never ask liberals to spell out their bottom line and their ultimate goals in order to know when enough will be enough. They never say, “What would a society look like that would be ok by you, a society that wasn’t racist, nasty, and bigoted?” To ask that question would be to open the door to the truth about liberalism, which is that liberalism has no finite or rational endpoint where the various grievances can be satisfied, but that liberalism will keep moving forward until it has destroyed everything. For the conservatives to realize this about liberalism, would force them to oppose liberalism, not just to oppose liberalism on this or that issue, but to oppose liberalism itself. And since liberalism is the ruling philosophy of our society, to oppose liberalism itself means becoming a dissident and pariah in our society. So “conservatives” will never ask where liberalism is ultimately going and what its ultimate demands are.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 05, 2009 03:32 PM | Send