Helping Yourself

Another piece I want to commend to your attention is this one by John McWhorter at The American Interest. In it he traces the rather bizarre turn that race relations has taken:

By the age of 50, you have lived long enough to remember being a mature adult in what is now a distant era. I recently recalled a conversation I had as a graduate student in 1991 that demonstrates a key change in America’s “conversation” on race over the past 30 years.

A white humanities graduate student was a member of a campus organization that had brought black activist and filmmaker Marlon Riggs to campus to give a talk. The student recounted that in his critique of racism, Riggs had leveled some potshots at the students themselves. This surprised and hurt her, as she had supposed that Riggs would consider her and her friends on his side in having invited him to speak.

Today, that same graduate student would be much less likely to take remarks like Riggs’s that way. Rather, today’s “woke,” educated white people would quite often lap up being apprised of the racism inside of them by a black speaker they paid, lodged, and fed. That speaker as often as not today is Ta-Nehisi Coates, who charismatically limns America as a cesspool of bigotry in his writing and in talks nationwide, and is joyously celebrated for it by the very people he is insulting.

Again, read the whole thing.

I don’t think that anyone under about the age of 70 can possibly appreciate quite how terrible things were in the United States, particularly in the Deep South, or how much race relations have improved over the years. Those who deny it are simply too young to remember. Perhaps we need a Shoah Project dedicated to race relations.

Over the period of the last 70 years we have passed through a number of phases but sometime in the 1980s I think things began to take a wrong turn. Now the exercises in self-flagellation, courses in white privilege and other like consciousness-raising exercises have ceased to be about improving the conditions for blacks in the United States so much as to demand recognition of how virtuous its white practitioners have become. It’s about recognition not about improvement. I don’t for a minute believe that 10 million or 50 million or 150 million white folk decrying their white privilege will do a darned thing to stop black kids from killing each other on the South Side of Chicago and I don’t see how anyone else can, either.

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