This Is Why I'm Not Hot

All of us fall into the trap of me vs. the world. On a day when your boss unjustly yells at you, your suit comes back from the cleaners with a hole in your pants that you notice right after your wife takes the car, and your puppy gets diarrhea, you might find yourself tempted to think that the world is ganging up on you. Despite the painfully obvious fact that your puppy has never met your boss (and neither know what cleaners you frequent), both might become part of an amorphous "they" that's oppressing you. However, eventually the day ends, and you realize how ridiculous your thoughts were, or at least forget about them.

But you don't have a political movement continually reminding you to keep thinking that your puppy is in league with that rude Chinese lady. Blacks do. When the world is viewed through the lens of Power Narratives, slights by every "oppressor" and nearly every injustice one encounters that can't be directly attributed to a fellow victim are all connected by the Racist Power Structure. It matters not if you have never personally encountered a single specific instance of the racism that your forbears encountered daily--you know that they're just hiding it, and the proof is in your rotting neighborhood.

As I've discussed before, as difficult as it may be to believe, many injustices against blacks were rectified in the 1960's. Things weren't perfect, but a lot changed, and it became a crossroads for the black community.

I would compare this to the moment when a formerly abused child recognizes that it isn't his fault that his father abused him. After being victimized by forces beyond his control and taking the first steps to rectify that which he can, he can either heal the pain and take responsibility for his life, or he can remain bitter and make his father the permanent reason he can't succeed.

Freedom is both wonderful and horrifying, and as the War on Poverty failed to eliminate ghettos, it succeeded in altering the definitions of "freedom" and "justice." Things didn't seem to be getting better fast enough, and if you finally get the freedom you always wanted and still find yourself going nowhere, if you're not especially courageous it's perfectly natural to claim you're not really free yet.

At this juncture the Civil Rights establishment could have attempted to inspire its followers to appreciate their new found freedoms (which by definition contained some pitfalls and was always going to be far from perfect) but instead chose to make itself more indispensable through enumerating new needs. Gradually, the new grievances became more amorphous, and therefore more insurmountable.(for an in-depth discussion of this see Shelby Steele's White Guilt

As "racist" became a label almost nobody wants ascribed to them its definition changed. Since white people wrote the dictionary, simply viewing somebody as inferior because of their race no longer suffices. Racism is now either prejudice mixed with power or a system that keeps racial hierarchies in place. As blacks became less likely to point to specific incidents of racism, to keep the nightmare alive racism had to become something even more insidious, and something that can never be wiped out.

It's much easier to confront Don Imus is he's just an arrogant windbag. If you see him as landlord/cop/corporation/low-paycheck/expensive-groceries/doctor-bills he's a bit more formidable, and almost as bad as a slave driver.

Hence the new Power Narrative, only one more similar to the Vanguard of the Proletariat. People fail, and other people tell them that there's so much stacked up against them that failure is all but inevitable. Even those that succeed are reminded that they should not have had to have been so exceptional.

In one sense, this is true, but in another sense, it's most definitely not. In my next post I hope to contrast the liberal inability to distinguish between "should be" and "is" with the more productive conservative perspective.

Heroism, the only remedy to our predicament, can grow under either set of assumptions. However, only through conservative values can it spread.