It's just that the definition of racist changed when you weren't looking. A school board in Oregon, that last diehard bastion of Jim Crow, has been gracious enough to explain:
Every year the Gresham-Barlow school district, like many others across the state, sends teachers and administrators to a week-long “Coaching for Educational Equity” conference in Cottage Grove, Oregon. The Conference is presented by a private non-profit organization called the Oregon Center for Educational Equity (OCEE).
The event is based on the concept of “white privilege,” which is the idea that all white people are racists, whether they realize it or not, and that racism permeates American society and the nation’s education system.
Now your first reaction is that this is nonsense. Modern America is one of the most racially tolerant societies in human history. A slew of legal and social preferences aid blacks in their climb up the slopes of American meritocracy. There is certainly no shortage of talented blacks who have succeeded well beyond the dreams of many of their white peers. All this is true but misses the point. The words "racism" and "white" and "privilege" don't mean what you think they mean. Again our friends in the great state of Oregon are kind enough to explain:
The “white privilege” crowd claims that fundamental ideals of American society, like hard work for personal gain and personal ownership of property, are products of white culture and completely foreign to black students.
That means schools that try to prepare black children for success in the American free market economy are spinning their wheels, because black culture is collectivist in nature. The obvious political message is that black kids will only thrive in a socialist economy.
Just so there is no misunderstanding a manual given to school administrators hammers this home:
White culture....there is one
-Promoting independence, self expression, personal choice, individual thinking and achievement (vs. adherence to norms, respect for authority/elders, interdependence, and group consensus and success).
-Egalitarian relationships, flexible roles and upward mobility (vs. stable, hierarchical roles - dependent on gender, background, age)
-Understanding the physical world apart from its meaning for human life (vs. in relation to human life)
-Private property and individual ownership (vs. shared)
So being white is being American. If you accept the basic principles that have underwritten America's success for the last two and a half centuries, you are adopting white culture. Except it isn't white culture. Most of the white majority nations on earth don't fully subscribe to these ideals. Take Russia, about as white a nation as exists, and yet its collectivist and authoritarian culture is far more in tune with what OCEE thinks is black culture.
Beneath the racial rhetoric we can see the real meaning behind OCEE's understanding of black and white culture: collectivism versus individualism. This is what the educrats of Oregon are really peddling to their teachers and administrators. Under the guise of fighting racism they are espousing the intellectual wellspring of all forms of bigotry: Collectivism.
When examining an absurdity don't waste too much time taking it apart, instead ask what it accomplishes from a practical standpoint. The notion that individualism is exclusively the preserve of whites is historical nonsense. There are millions of American blacks far more individualistic in view of life than the vast majority of white people in the world. Even modern American black culture expresses a greater respect of individual achievement, albeit often only in the narrow worlds of sport and music, than most of the cultures in all of human history.
Who is the OCEE to say what is and what is not authentically black?
The practical benefits of such rhetoric, aside from giving steady employment to the otherwise unemployable, is that it intellectual disarms the defenders of the traditional American way of life. This is not new. For the last century the Left has made repeated assaults on the founding principles of the American Republic. This is just their latest tactic.
At first the Left claimed to embrace the Founders and their vision, except that they wanted to reject market capitalism as the primary source of wealth generation and distribution. They wanted to "democratize" economics and bring down the economic royalists like Rockefeller and Morgan. They claimed that their sole aim was to complete the American revolution, by destroying capitalism. This was, of course, deeply ahistorical and disingenuous. Capitalism is as much a part of the American experiment as the First Amendment and democratic elections.
This attack, labelled the New Deal, was partially successful and left us with the welfare state. Yet American capitalism persisted. It survive through the assaults of the Great Society and lived long enough to be partially revived by the Reagan Revolution. The Left had failed in its real goal to reorganize society along collectivist lines. Economics had simply been the pretext and starting point. Having failed to make Americans entirely socialist, they changed tactics and focused on the environment.
The global warming hysteria was the Left changing from socialism direct to socialism indirect. Instead of directly controlling industries they would gradually regulate industrial civilization out of existence. A society of prosperous middle class workers is hard to control. A society of pre-industrial peasants is far easier to control. This tactic has certainly wrecked a considerable amount of damage but it still failed. Americans love their cars and their big homes too much. The spirit of individualism, even if only at the material level, was too strong.
Having failed by preaching pseudo-economics and then pseudo-science, the Left has changed tactics again. They have identified the one great weakness of the American psyche: White guilty over the mistreatment of American blacks. The history does not have to be revisited here. Slavery was a sin and Jim Crow a moral crime. The mistreatment of American blacks and Indians is the great stain on an otherwise remarkable and heroic history. The Left knows this and is going straight for the jugular.
Collectivism, however, is not the future, it's the past. The dead hand of the past trying to seize away the prospects of the future. It is the old lie of hereditary aristocracy, rent-seeking oligarchy and communist subordination that has plagued mankind since the beginning. The promise of individualism extends to every man, woman and child on this globe. It is a universal promise that will long out live the peddlers of this neo-racism called white privilege.
To borrow from Patrick Henry: If individualism is racism, then make the most of it.
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