They've Warped the Playing Field--So Do We Play?

The final comment in my last post was somewhat ironic (I made the number up), but I do think that conservatives have been awful at getting their message out to the black community. The black community has by and large followed the likes of Jesse Jackson, so I'm not absolving it of responsibility, but conservatives have let certain problems go unaddressed. The left has addressed these problems, poorly, but when somebody feels beaten down, he'll pay attention to the guy who seems to sympathize and ignore the one who doesn't seem to understand anything other than that he needs to get his act together.

To the right, sympathy and understanding are beside the point. To the left, sympathy and understanding are the point.

I would argue that assessing all the stumbling blocks in one's way are perfectly healthy if it's done for the purpose of transcending the blocks. I'm sure that psychologists disagree as to the necessity of confronting such issues, but whether or not it's useful to do so, it certainly feels good, or at least pretty comfortable.

However, analyzing the difficulties on one's path can all too easily become its own point, as we see with the numerous African-American studies departments that exist only to list grievances, claiming that no progress can be made until damn near every single historical injustic has been addressed and rectified. Although there are movements within the black community that focus on taking responsibility for one's own actions, there is a perfectly human tendency to want to shift blame for despair. We don't want to blame ourselves, and the left continuously tells us we shouldn't have to.

Yet most of us on the right know that this blame shifting makes progress more difficult, if not impossible. But as it stands now, the black community sees the right as the voice of get over it. Of course, getting over it is the best way to get past it, but they'll never listen to us as long as they think we have no idea what it is.

The left obviously understands the plight of the black community; the right does not. Regardless of whether or not there's an objective connection between understanding societal ills and being able to do anything about them, an apparent connection is firmly embedded in most of our minds.

Perhaps this connection should not be there, but if vasts swaths of our people think it's there, we have to recognize that reality to have any hopes of changing it.

It's usually the left that brings up descriptions of the evils of slavery or Jim Crow, followed by an excuse for ineffective behavior on the part of poor blacks or a call for more economic redistribution. This has helped to cement a connection in most people's minds between the acknowledgement of some very ugly realities with leftist/socialist victim culture.

On the right, we don't bring up that stuff very often for two basic reasons. First, we believe that regardless of how badly somebody's great-great-grandfater was beaten (or even father, for that matter), the point is what one does with his or her life today. Second, we too have heard the citing of past grievances so frequently followed by more leftist claptrap that we sometimes inadvertently also assume that the very connection the left wants us to believe in is much stronger than may actually be.

There is a case to be made that the very fact that we're still ennumerating racial grievances means that some of us would rather shift blame than improve our lives. To this I reply only that I agree.

Nevertheless, the left has been so successful at getting folks to believe that we need to "heal the past" in order to create a decent future that when we talk about individual initiative, it seems like we're skipping a step. As artificial as that step may be, it's there and has taken on a life of its own.

So, by not overtly referencing the injustices felt by blacks, are we taking a principled stance against victim culture, or are we giving the left free rein in the black community? If black America continues to suffer from victim culture, obviously black America bears ultimate responsibility. However, are those of us who understand the greatness of America adequately presenting our case to our own people?

Is there a conservative, principled, healthy, way to address racial injustice, and if so, how do we proceed?