Like most, if not all, other causes, race has degenerated into a racket. It is very easy to imagine this very speech being given by a future Glenn 50 years from now, because perpetuating racism, or the idea of racism, is advantageous to a great many people. It helps those people sell books, it gives them political power, it puts them on a media platform. They have no incentive to listen to, let alone agree, with anything in this speech and every incentive to do the opposite.
This is how activism works. Its role is not to solve issues; it is to perpetuate them for as long as possible. The idea that life for minorities today is unchanged from, say, the 1940s is patently offensive and also insulting to the people who lived in those times. When a person who has no concept of what it was like to live in the "colored only" era acts as if life is unchanged, that person's attempt at drawing equivalency between now and then deserves ridicule, not head-nodding.
The word "racism" itself has been cheapened to the point of being worthless. This was most recently evidenced by the SCOTUS nomination hearings for Ms. Jackson, during which we were told that the only possible opposition was based on skin color. This fails, epically, on two counts: first, many of the people making that declaration were around for the Kavanaugh hearings, when a white man was accused of being a serial rapist with zero evidence. Second, the support for Ms. Jackson was based in large part on her being black and a woman. None of the supporters could tell you a think about her judicial background; on the contrary, they ran from any questions about her record. Because she is black and that's enough. Tell me again which group is more closely aligned with racist behavior.
This is from Booker T. Washington at the turn of the previous century:
"I am afraid that there is a certain class of race-problem solvers who don’t want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public."
It was true over 100 yrs ago and is true today: there is a disaffected intellectual class (which now stretches out to an enormous complex of foundations, programs, and large swatches of media and academia) that exist to constantly demonize society for its various shortcomings, to shriek and whine about how tired they are and how America is no better than apartheid South Africa, that our entire country exists solely to oppress black bodies etc, and they do this because it earns them attention and a nice lifestyle while at the same time allowing them to portray themselves as righteous rebels spreading the truth and fighting the Man (even if the Man is doing all the funding.)
It will not be ending anytime soon because White Guilt is one of the richest (in all senses of the word) veins to mine for money and attention, it is more or less an inexhaustible natural resource, and because it is the foundation of so much of our elite discourse and elite morality.
Like most, if not all, other causes, race has degenerated into a racket. It is very easy to imagine this very speech being given by a future Glenn 50 years from now, because perpetuating racism, or the idea of racism, is advantageous to a great many people. It helps those people sell books, it gives them political power, it puts them on a media platform. They have no incentive to listen to, let alone agree, with anything in this speech and every incentive to do the opposite.
This is how activism works. Its role is not to solve issues; it is to perpetuate them for as long as possible. The idea that life for minorities today is unchanged from, say, the 1940s is patently offensive and also insulting to the people who lived in those times. When a person who has no concept of what it was like to live in the "colored only" era acts as if life is unchanged, that person's attempt at drawing equivalency between now and then deserves ridicule, not head-nodding.
The word "racism" itself has been cheapened to the point of being worthless. This was most recently evidenced by the SCOTUS nomination hearings for Ms. Jackson, during which we were told that the only possible opposition was based on skin color. This fails, epically, on two counts: first, many of the people making that declaration were around for the Kavanaugh hearings, when a white man was accused of being a serial rapist with zero evidence. Second, the support for Ms. Jackson was based in large part on her being black and a woman. None of the supporters could tell you a think about her judicial background; on the contrary, they ran from any questions about her record. Because she is black and that's enough. Tell me again which group is more closely aligned with racist behavior.
This is from Booker T. Washington at the turn of the previous century:
"I am afraid that there is a certain class of race-problem solvers who don’t want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public."
It was true over 100 yrs ago and is true today: there is a disaffected intellectual class (which now stretches out to an enormous complex of foundations, programs, and large swatches of media and academia) that exist to constantly demonize society for its various shortcomings, to shriek and whine about how tired they are and how America is no better than apartheid South Africa, that our entire country exists solely to oppress black bodies etc, and they do this because it earns them attention and a nice lifestyle while at the same time allowing them to portray themselves as righteous rebels spreading the truth and fighting the Man (even if the Man is doing all the funding.)
It will not be ending anytime soon because White Guilt is one of the richest (in all senses of the word) veins to mine for money and attention, it is more or less an inexhaustible natural resource, and because it is the foundation of so much of our elite discourse and elite morality.