Why whites allow blacks to get away with the racial double standard

President Obama has launched an “African-Americans for Obama” organization to garner black support for his re-election campaign. About which, Laura Wood writes at The Thinking Housewife:

IN A PREVIOUS entry , a reader wrote about a friend who said that all racial consciousness is wrong. Skin color means nothing, her friend said, and anyone who thinks it does is petty. Another reader wrote to me to say that racial identity has caused too many problems in history and should be suppressed.

The problem is, as I pointed out, those who make these arguments typically do not protest the explicit racial consciousness of non-whites. They are unlikely to be offended, for example, by this recent speech by Barack Obama in which he launched his African Americans for Obama 2012 campaign.

“We are far stronger together than we could ever be on our own,” Obama said. He said that if blacks do not stick together they will not get a “fair shot” economically.

It would be inconceivable for a white politician to make similar statements. His career would end forever.

Why is it permissible for a black to speak this way and not a white person? If whites are truly desirous of an end to racial sensitivity, why don’t they protest?

The answer to Laura’s question is that whites are either brain-dead or silenced by fear. Let’s leave aside the fear explanation for the moment, because whites do complain about various manifestations of the double standard all the time, so it would appear that they’re not afraid to criticize the double standard. The problem is that they don’t criticize it effectively. If whites had been alert to defending a single standard for all Americans, then from the first moment—forty and more years ago—when blacks began behaving race-consciously in public and receiving race-conscious recognition from the government and other institutions, whites would have said something like this:

This is completely unacceptable. The rule that we all subscribed to coming out of the Civil Rights movement was that Americans must practice race-blindness and avoid race-conscious speech and behavior, at least in the public square. Whites have followed this rule religiously: they never speak about the collective interests of whites or make negative generalizations about people of other races. And when an occasional white person breaks that rule, he is instantly fired or otherwise ostracized. Yet blacks openly speak about the collective interests of blacks, and collectively blame whites for blacks’ problems. Blacks such as Cornel West address each other as “brother” in public settings where there are both whites and blacks, thus using an in-group identifier of a type that is totally forbidden to whites. Blacks have formed innumerable black-only professional organizations, which whites wouldn’t dream of doing. The government has created “African-American History Month,” and a vast system of special group recognition of blacks as blacks. And now President Obama forms a race-conscious black political organization to help in his election. And he does this, even while piously declaring that he supports an America where we “all play by the same rules”! And, by the way, that “we all play by the same rules” America is an America where (according to the Weekly Standard) blacks are admitted into elite colleges with SAT scores a standard deviation lower than those of whites and Asians.

Blacks cannot have it both ways: they cannot demand that whites be race-blind and race-neutral, while blacks continue to be aggressively race-conscious themselves and gain massive favors and privileges in this society by a race-conscious, pro-black double standard. Since blacks (along with their elite liberal facilitators) do not feel themselves bound by the race-blindness rule, then whites should no longer bound by it either.

That’s what whites would say, if they were awake and alive. But they’re not awake and alive. Like sleepwalkers, they continue devotedly to believe in, practice, and enforce (on deviant whites) the race-blind rule, even as nonwhite groups (and the mainstream liberal institutions that collectively empower them) flamboyantly violate it every day in every way all across this country. Why do the whites decline to expose the systematic violation of a supposedly sacred principle? For the reason I just gave. They believe that race-blindness is moral and race-consciousness is evil. To make the points I’ve suggested, to expose the pro-black, anti-white double standard accurately and tellingly, they would have to speak of themselves as white and speak of the unjustice that is being done collectively to whites. But whites believe that it is immoral and disgusting to speak of themselves as white, or even to think of themselves as white. Whites are thus incapable of pointing out nonwhites’ violation of the race-blind rule which the whites themselves religiously follow. In order to protect the race-blind rule which for whites is the highest principle of America, the whites must silently allow blacks to transgress the race-blind rule.

Here is another way of putting the problem: right-liberalism, defined as the white belief in treating people of all races and backgrounds as individuals and not as members of a group, no matter how different that group is from whites, leads instantly and inevitably to left-liberalism, defined as the unconditional surrender of whites as a group to nonwhites as groups.

- end of initial entry -

Thomas S. writes:

Deftly put: “Whites are thus incapable of even pointing out nonwhites’ violation of the race-blind rule which the whites themselves religiously follow.”

Race-blind to the lack of race-blindness equals double-blinded. The modern DWL (Paul Kersey’s “Disingenuous White Liberal”) is double-race blinded. The elitist liberal justification of this would be this pretzel (Warning: the following is strong stuff, a “liberal mantra” of sorts, you may be convinced just a bit):

Hey, don’t be so hard on the blacks, let them have their benefits. If you are truly a strong, magnanimous white, you would be generous enough to just let those weaker than you have their special help. Don’t worry about what the blacks are doing, just worry about yourself. They were unjustly persecuted and discriminated against for decades, ever since slavery. Of course it is not fair right now, but given their history of suffering from discrimination and injustice, it is fair in the long arc of history. The long arc of history bends towards justice, which the blacks until now have been denied. It is because of racism from people like you, and you, that blacks have been held back and are stuck where they are. The least we could do is give them a helping hand, even a leg up, to let them get a foothold on our American ideal. Of course many blacks are going to stay stuck in poverty and crime. Even if blacks are less intelligent as a whole, you still cannot speak of them as a group like that. Racism is a human imperfection, which we in America must always fight. That is just part of living in this country, and doing business here, you simply cannot talk about group stereotypes and generalizations.

We all want blacks to advance, and the moment citizens like yourself start be openly racist again, there will be two consequences: First of all, while you personally may not hate blacks, you will cause many other whites to hate blacks. If you want an idea of what happens when the masses adopt an idea, just see the French Revolution, or the Ku Klux Klan in the South. Now I know you think that your exposure of the problems with blacks as a whole is good, but the problem is that it will be adopted in a simplistic fashion by the masses. The masses of whites will simply become racist again. See “The Crowd” to understand how the current propaganda may not be ideal, but it might be the only thing that works on the masses.

Second of all, once whites are openly racist against blacks again, they will have the excuse not to achieve again. You “race realists” claim to hate the black excuse of racism, but what if you give them a genuine reason to have that excuse? If blacks were not victimized by racism, then they would have a level playing field, and have no excuse not to achieve.

Every month is White History month. Every political organization is a white-run organization. This whole country is dominated by whites. The crux is here: If you are such a smart white, why don’t you just go achieve, and stop worrying about what the blacks do? If you are so worried about the blacks, and being hard on them, you must be unsuccessful yourself. You probably live in a trailer park, and think you can’t get a job because of affirmative action. Well, I did well myself, despite your bogeymen of “reverse racism” and “BRA” (Paul Kersey’s “Black Run America”). Sure, maybe some of what you talk about it true. In our country, though, we have to keep our ideals of equality of opportunity and success, and with racism from people like you, the cause is not helped.”

Did anyone fall for this? I’m sure someone did, and if you did, then you ran into the strong points of liberal elitism. If you want to get ahead in America, especially in New York or at a “Diversity, Inc.” company, this is the attitude you need to keep. Or at least pay lip service to.

To the liberal elite, the strong white is like the strong but unassuming uncle, who can take the mean but funny jokes from his nephews, the kicks in his sturdy shins. He is like the father who is so successful in his job that he doesn’t care if people make fun of him as square and unfun. This is the psychology which allows liberal elitism to flourish. If you care about “reverse racism,” you must be so weak as to be vulnerable to blacks. Ha, you trailer trash. This is why anti-racism is a status symbol.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 20, 2012 08:05 PM | Send