by Jack Hunter
The older I get the more I despise racism. Not the Left’s cartoon version, in which it is assumed that every conceivable human thought or action must contain some sort of prejudicial racial motive, but the genuine article in which knuckle dragging morons try to dehumanize their fellow man based on nothing more than the color of their skin. Life is too short for such needless hatred. Life is too special to diminish it to mere biology.
This is not to say that acknowledging race, discussing racial issues, or even holding certain attitudes about race is necessarily wrong. In fact, it’s unavoidable.
But there’s a world of difference between being merely politically incorrect and being racist. The greatest mistake made by hardcore racists and anti-racists alike is that both tend to believe that race must mean absolutely everything or it must mean absolutely nothing. Both positions are as extreme as they are absurd. Race unquestionably matters; it’s just not all that matters and rarely what matters most.
This is particularly worth noting when discussing the Civil War. My entire adult life I have defended the Old South and the Southern cause in America’s bloodiest war. Not because I support slavery or racism, but despite it. The positive parallels between what the Confederacy was fighting for in 1861 and what the American colonists fought for in 1776 are many and obvious—republican democracy, political and economic freedom, national independence, defense of one’s homeland. But these causes are never obvious to critics who can only see the other parallel—that both the Old South and the thirteen colonies were dependent upon, and protective of, the institution of slavery.
In the United States today, the very concepts of states’ rights, nullification, secession and other examples of Jeffersonian democracy are routinely dismissed as racist double speak, even in their modern forms. When a number of states declared in recent months that they might attempt to nullify Obamacare, critics immediately put more emphasis on the fact that there seemed to be a high degree of hostility toward America’s first black president. Of course, this was coupled with the establishment’s permanent narrative that allowing states to make their own decisions is what the Old South was all about, thus eternally making America two steps away from segregation if not slavery.
Rest here
The older I get the more I despise racism. Not the Left’s cartoon version, in which it is assumed that every conceivable human thought or action must contain some sort of prejudicial racial motive, but the genuine article in which knuckle dragging morons try to dehumanize their fellow man based on nothing more than the color of their skin. Life is too short for such needless hatred. Life is too special to diminish it to mere biology.
This is not to say that acknowledging race, discussing racial issues, or even holding certain attitudes about race is necessarily wrong. In fact, it’s unavoidable.
But there’s a world of difference between being merely politically incorrect and being racist. The greatest mistake made by hardcore racists and anti-racists alike is that both tend to believe that race must mean absolutely everything or it must mean absolutely nothing. Both positions are as extreme as they are absurd. Race unquestionably matters; it’s just not all that matters and rarely what matters most.
This is particularly worth noting when discussing the Civil War. My entire adult life I have defended the Old South and the Southern cause in America’s bloodiest war. Not because I support slavery or racism, but despite it. The positive parallels between what the Confederacy was fighting for in 1861 and what the American colonists fought for in 1776 are many and obvious—republican democracy, political and economic freedom, national independence, defense of one’s homeland. But these causes are never obvious to critics who can only see the other parallel—that both the Old South and the thirteen colonies were dependent upon, and protective of, the institution of slavery.
In the United States today, the very concepts of states’ rights, nullification, secession and other examples of Jeffersonian democracy are routinely dismissed as racist double speak, even in their modern forms. When a number of states declared in recent months that they might attempt to nullify Obamacare, critics immediately put more emphasis on the fact that there seemed to be a high degree of hostility toward America’s first black president. Of course, this was coupled with the establishment’s permanent narrative that allowing states to make their own decisions is what the Old South was all about, thus eternally making America two steps away from segregation if not slavery.
Rest here
