This shitty summer’s events have really revealed with nauseating clarity the ugly secrets of the little people behind the curtain. They’re terrified of black people. I mean, wee always kind knew that. The whole “second amendment” thing was kind of a dead giveaway. But they never came out and said that.
But now when former Nixon speechwriter and Clear Eyes spokesman Ben Stein is willing to come out and say publicly that black men are armed simply by virtue of their big blackness, well hell, yeah, they’re admitting it pretty clearly: they’re just afraid. What we suspected is true.
Ben Stein, ladies and gentleman, is one of the great intellects of the Right. Ben motherfucking Stein. He is so certain that Trayvon Martin needed to be shot that he now remembers armed neighborhood watch vigilante George Zimmerman as being an actual policeman. It is nice to know that George Zimmerman isn’t the only one who had that fantasy.
Can we just admit that there really are two Americas? There is the America of those who are scared to death of African Americans, are armed to the teeth like Seal Team Six, who shoot first (and don’t ask any questions later, ever even), who always have an excuse why killing black folks is AOK. Their America is real scary. Too bad most of us have to live there! And there is the America of the rest of us who are (pick one) black, nor mentally ill, outraged, reality-based or all of the above. Sooner or later the cops will get sloppy and start pulling their shit on white people who don’t happen to be hippies or gheys or commie/liebrul/anarchist/hoodlums or dirt poor and homeless and suddenly Christian White and his family are going to notice- kind of the way crack and hip-hop suddenly became a problem the moment white kids discovered them…
“Liberal white guilt” is both real and a figment of the conservative projection complex. White liberals (like myself) tend to reject the tribal instinct that causes one to lump oneself in with conquistadors, slaveholders, and their ilk. And we know enough about other peoples to understand that white folks aren’t necessarily particularly “evil”, just the first to make guns and really big ships. Barbarism and cruelty are ingrained in our species, not just our race. Conservatives, on the other hand, see the rest of the world through the prism of whiteness. Race, to them, is about “us” and “them”. So when they see white liberals trying to help folks out of another color, it’s not the old “neighbors trying to help neighbors” I learned about in Unitarian Sunday School, it’s white people giving resources, money, food, what have you, to non-white people, and because empathy and human decency are beyond their capacity or understanding, they explain it using the only emotions they are capable of – fear and loathing. It MUST be guilt, because, to them, what else could it be? Guilt doesn’t always manifest itself through overcompensation, it depends a lot on who is feeling guilty. Some people try to drink the guilt away, snort or swallow the guilt away. Others try and convince themselves that everything that they feel guilty about is really okay. And THAT’S where black/white race relations take a particularly nasty turn.
Because white people owned black people as slaves, and because southern whites brought this country through a crippling and horrific civil war over their “rights” to keep doing so, the only way to make that okay is to commit yourself to the belief that black people – and by extension, all minorities – are really, on some fundamental level, less “human” than whites. This is why that Bundy buffoon started spouting off about how slavery was actually good for black people. This wasn’t the result of some random neuron firing in the mind of an old man who was losing his grip – this is a FUNDAMENTAL belief of conservatism, which comes from genuine white guilt.
