A letter popped up the other day. I will reproduce it in toto and verbatim:
Mr. Nordlinger,
Read your comment about racism being dead in this country. Sir you are delusional and out of touch with reality, at best.
What was this strange fellow, or gal (wasn’t clear), talking about? I will tell you, if you’re interested.
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Last March, on the day “Obamacare” was passed, I received a letter from a reader. He said he had been struck by two stories in the national news. First, a man in the crowd at an anti-Obamacare rally had used a racial slur — allegedly. Second, a 16-year-old kid had been arrested for making a bizarre racial comment over a Wal-Mart PA system — something about how all black people had to leave the store.
Our reader wrote,
That these things are even remotely newsworthy leads me to one conclusion: Racism in America is dead. We had slavery, then we had Jim Crow — and now we have the occasional public utterance of a bad word. Real racism has been reduced to de minimis levels, while charges of racism seem to increase. I’ll vote for the first politician with the brass to say that “racism” should be dropped from our national dialogue. We’re a good nation, among the least racist on earth . . .
I published that letter at the Corner, our group blog here at National Review Online. I publish a good many letters. And a lot of people didn’t like the one about the Wal-Mart incident, etc.
Keith Olbermann read excerpts from the letter on his television show. He had the words from the letter on the screen. And under the words, the viewer saw, “Jay Nordlinger, National Review.” Broadcast journalism at its finest. Olbermann said to his guest, James E. Clyburn, a black congressman from South Carolina, “Do people say this you suppose because they’ve never been personally the victims of racism? Do they say it to reassure racists that they’re not really racist?”
As I commented later, “If you can think and talk like that, you too can have a show on MSNBC, evidently.”
Clarence Page, the veteran columnist for the Chicago Tribune, got in on the act too. He quoted the reader’s letter. And he referred to its contents as “the Nordlinger thesis.” Swell that they give high perches to such people, right?
I wrote about all this for National Review, in an essay found here. Let me quote myself (obnoxious activity), if you don’t mind:
Racism will never die, of course, until the human animal is dead. But our letter-writing reader had a point: If an alleged N-word at a rally and an adolescent prank at a Wal-Mart are national news, haven’t we achieved some victory? Can we acknowledge racial progress when we see it? Are we terrified of complacency, so terrified that we can never put our racial dukes down? Are we too devoted to America the Racist — a concept drilled into us (many of us) from the cradle — to give it up?
That essay is called “Worst People,” by the way: “Worst People: Some notes on racism and anti-racism in America.” Why “Worst People”? After President Obama gave his State of the Union address last January, I had a long series of observations about him and that speech. One of them was, “Obama looks arrogant, whether he’s arrogant or not. I don’t think he can help it: It’s the upturned chin. When actors want to preen and so on, they turn that chin upward. Yikes.”
For that, Olbermann named me one of “The Worst People in the World.” My statement, you see, had been racist. More accurately, it had been “racist.” This country is plain bonkers. Certainly as represented by Olbermann, it is.
To be a conservative is to be called a racist, sooner or later. It’s written in stone; it’s baked in the cake. If you support colorblindness — if you like the old motto E pluribus unum, “Out of many, one” — you will be called a racist. Because race-consciousness is where it’s at, baby. The great Charlie Rangel called tax cuts racist, remember.
I have a feeling this is especially hard for David Horowitz, Linda Chavez, Abby Thernstrom — people like that. Good old liberals and lefties who crossed over to the conservative side, while retaining, of course, their racial liberalism (and much other liberalism). But because they’re associated with the “Right,” they’re made to wear the scarlet “R” — not for “Right” but for “Racist.”
A few years ago, Al Franken called Horowitz a racist. David popped him but good:
As it happens I marched in my first civil rights protest in 1948 before Al Franken was born. For more than fifty years I have supported minorities and defended their civil rights in public word and deed, and raised millions of dollars to help inner city minorities whom racism has scarred. In fact there is no single cause — except America’s wars against totalitarian foes — to which I have devoted myself more consistently than that of racial equality.
