In the wake of CBS's firing of shock talk jock Don Imus for calling members of the Rutgers womens' basketball team "nappy-headed hos," there have appeared a series of seemingly well intentioned op-eds, editorials and blog posts correctly noting his words of disrespect to the black women on the team pale in comparison to the sexist vitriol spewed by black rappers. Jason Whitlock wrote a widely-cited piece in the Kansas City Star. Constance L. Rice covered similar territory in the Los Angeles Times; as did S. Renee Mitchell in The Oregonian; Johnetta Rose Barras in the Washington Post; and Derrick Z. Jackson in The Boston Globe.

All well and good, up to a point. But an even greater and less easily challenged affront to African-Americans is the paternalistic liberal notion that society's machinery still comprises an oppressive force negating the power of free will and the individual, dooming many black children and families to dysfunction and failure. The forces of "white oppression" are under the microscope this week in Colorado Springs at the eighth annual White Privilege Conference.

What we really have here, now, is not racism or privilege.

It is an instrumental racialism.

That is, an enforced political orthodoxy advanced by a minority of race-hustling blacks and a larger cohort of guilty white liberals and public employee union members, which seeks to explain minority failings in education, income, crime and family cohesion in terms of "institutional racism" and "white privilege." This racialism is not merely rhetorical: it is rooted in a push for maintaining and building public employee union membership; painting modern-day American blacks as perpetual subjects of the clientized state, ministered to by variegated counsellors, intake workers, program managers, administrators and especially, "culturally competent" teachers bent on having little Arthur and Shanika rap and graffiti paint their way to a diploma. "Multiple intelligences," don'cha know?

Small wonder that recently the union representing Seattle public school teachers went Code Red on the state legislature - unsuccessfully, it seems - for failing to drop state reading and writing test requirements for high school graduation because said standards allegedly doomed minority students to failure, even with four retries guaranteed under state law.

In the aftermath of the predictably-played Imus affair, and the contemporaneous racialism of Seattle's school board and administrators, the real issue which emerges has little to do with Snoop Dogg or Fifty Cent and their blithely vituperative encomiums to hos in the hood. The central need is to dispel racialism, and stress black self-determination, which has a compelling history in America going back to the still-racist post-slavery decades and continuing up to and through the civil rights era, even as Great Society social welfare programs and racial quotas gradually proved the folly of double standards and low expectations.

Calling out the fraud of modern-day racialism in the U.S. is precisely where the post-Imus rap critics fall short.

Into this void lately have stepped a few, such as Bill Cosby and Juan Williams - and then, last weekend, Joe R. Hicks, former head of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Hick's Washington Post Sunday op-ed is simply titled, "Drop The Race Card," and should be required reading for all professing an interest in race, racism, or racialism in the U.S. today. Not so coincidentally, Hicks is Vice-President of Community Advocates, Inc., a Los Angeles-based organization with a refreshing and right-on approach to race relations.

Bearing in mind Imus' flaying and the press lynching of white Duke University lacrosse players finally absolved of race-driven charges of raping a black woman, Hicks observes:

...what links both cases is the rank racial opportunism in both Imus's firing and the Duke rape case, in which the Durham County district attorney shamelessly used race in an attempt to railroad three young men for his political purposes. Remember the Michael Richards episode? In that case, America's civil rights establishment -- led, as usual, by Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton -- mobilized in an effort to sell the premise that a down-on-his-luck comedian had somehow become a barometer for our nation's race relations.

What remains of the once-proud civil rights movement justifies its existence by contending -- despite widespread progress -- that black people continue to live marginalized and victimized lives. This oft-repeated theme was the base for the ugly stew that was the reaction to Imus's slur, and it was the operating theme for Nifong as he set about attempting to ruin the lives of three innocent men.

Several decades ago, when I was head of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, I would have joined with Jackson and Sharpton with little reservation to call for Imus's demise. But somewhere along the way since then, reality intervened and I began to reject the view that America is a racist, hostile environment for people with my skin color. Further, I began engaging in the unforgivable sin -- rejecting the orthodox civil rights view of blacks as victims.

...(there is) an agenda of racial opportunism that promotes the view that blacks are powerless victims of white racism. In this view, blacks are always in need of government intervention to save them from white hostility.

....As comedian Bill Cosby has observed: "There are people that want you to remain in a hole, and they rejoice in your hopelessness because they have jobs mismanaging you. However, your job is not becoming victims. We have to rise up and fight on all levels to succeed." Amen, brother Cosby.

Hicks saliently notes prosecuting attorney Mike Nifong's re-election campaign succeeed because he played to black constituents and white "progressives" appeased by his ultimately baseless rhetoric against the white Duke suspects. In a similar though less dramatic vein, everyday white progressives in places such as Seattle regularly condone violations of the dignity of blacks by silently letting pass the loud assertions that blacks are still victims needing special dispensations from society and government.

Our nation's liberal urban centers are still a long way from eschewing the cheap hustle that is racialism. But the tipping point now comes closer at a slow, steady pace.

TECHNORATI TAGS: RACE, RACIALISM, DON IMUS, SEATTLE SCHOOLS, JOE R. HICKS

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at April 17, 2007 07:08 PM

---

---

---