The entire premise for the existence of the woke left is that racism has indelibly scarred our country, and the business of politicians is to un-do it as quickly and radically as possible. Indeed, without this assumption, the left would have no agenda, no purpose or raison d’etre.
But this isn’t true. Racism, in fact, is a myth. It may be true that some people instinctively don’t like people of color, but you can’t convince me that these people are in the majority in America, or even close to it. If anything, they constitute a supremely small segment of our population.
Look, there are always going to be some people who hate on certain groups. Some people don’t like fat people. Some people don’t like Gay people. Some people don’t like the rich, and some people don’t like the poor. Some people don’t like Jews, while others don’t like Muslims. I personally don’t like criminals. Resentment based on national origin is as old as time. As the Kingston Trio sang, “The French hate the Germans, the Germans hate the Poles. Italians hate Yugoslavs, South Africans hate the Dutch…”.
One of the signs of maturity, of mental health, is the realization that sometimes people won’t like you, and there’s nothing you can do about it. You can whine and complain and shake your fist at the gods, but in the end, all you can do is accept it and move on. Besides, who cares? If somebody doesn’t like me, it’s their loss.
And yet we’ve had generations of people of color, especially Black people, who have been told since birth that their fellow countrymen hate them because of their skin color, and that therefore they must struggle for liberation and use “any means necessary” to clobber racism back into its hole. Young people, being naïve, often believe this. They’re told by their political leaders, favorite musicians, pastors, the media and influencers that, if they don’t succeed in getting everything they want, it has to be the fault of racism. This belief is ingrained in the Black community. When a belief turns into an obsession, unchallengeable by argument or fact, then the believer tends to find proof of it everywhere he looks. Didn’t get that promotion at work? Must be racism. Bad grade in school? Racism. This attitude exists even at the most subconcious level, in the form of the paranoid belief in so-called “microaggressions.” The person walking toward me on the sidewalk suddenly crosses the street? It’s a microaggression. The lady in the bus gets up to leave as soon as I sit down next to her? Microaggression. Pile enough perceived microaggressions on top of each other, every single day, and there’s little wonder that resentment and a sense of victimhood are so prevalent in the Black community.
This prevalent attitude is what fuels the political careers of race mongers such as Pamela Price and Carroll Fife. They know opportunity when they see it. They know that hustlers like themselves get elected to powerful positions by appealing to these resentments. It is to their political and financial advantage that the Black community remains mired in a false sense of victimhood.
I myself have never perceived people in terms of their race. As a child of an unhappy family, I was love-starved; I wanted to be friends with everybody. More personally, I experienced more than my fair share of abuse: I was a small boy-man when everyone in America liked tall men. I was gay—the ultimate outsider, ostracized even among my fellow Jews. Believe me, I knew what it was like to be discriminated against. All I wanted was for everybody to get along. That’s what I still want. But it will only happen when the Black community abandons its crazy belief that racism is everywhere. It’s not. Crying “racism” all the time just ends up alienating people who otherwise would like to be your friend.
Steve Heimoff