Stating that black people are inherently inferior to white people is racist. Even if you don’t say it in those words but dance around the idea, you’re still positing a racist attitude. Overlooking the white power structure’s responsibility in creating or maintaining an unfair advantage for whites is ignorant at best. Maybe lots of white guys don’t understand the advantage they have for merely being born white. Maybe it’s because in your own worlds, you don’t feel powerful, not like those CEOs and politicians, the vast majority of whom are white guys. You don’t identify with them, so you can’t understand why all non-white men and women are pointing out your complicity. Now that blacks and other minorities and women are using the same system that gave the advantage to white men to force a more even hand, you cry foul and make disparaging remarks. You can’t see it as an attempt to make the game fair. You can’t even admit that the game is skewed in your favor. Maybe you personally haven’t benefited from the dominant white power structure (although, I’d venture to guess that you don’t face the same obstacles that non-whites and women face).
This is not to say that some white groups haven’t faced discrimination. Used to be when the Irish were discouraged from applying for jobs (“No Irish need apply” signs – circa the late 1800’s, 1900’s). But the Irish have been integrated into the larger predominant culture, so now they aren’t “Irish” so much as “white.” Who can even think of a police force or firefighters without assuming a majority of them is Irish? Even in predominantly black or Hispanic or Asian neighborhoods?
Who, today, can think of the Polish and immediately think, “rocket scientist”? Not the first reaction, hmm? I live in a Polish neighborhood in Brooklyn where an immigrant from Poland could have arrived as a child twenty-five, thirty years ago and still not speak English fluently if he or she didn’t stray far. And it’s really easy to laugh at the dumb things that I’ve found here. A book of matches, for instance, from the God Bless Deli that came without a strike bar. Full book of matches and nowhere to strike. It was hard not to say, “Of course! Polish neighborhood!” And, yeah, I miss my old neighborhood in Bushwick ONLY because the Asian laundry lady knew how to fold my clothes. In this neighborhood, the Polish laundry lady rolls all my clothes – ROLLS ‘em – as if I need to stuff ‘em into a knapsack and escape over the border on a moment’s notice. And my landlord the plumber... beautiful apartment but there’s no counter, none, next to the kitchen sink so the floor gets wet when I wash dishes and have to put them on the counter behind me, and the only problem we had with the apartment is that the bathtub drain kept stopping up. Is it because of some stupidity gene of the Polish?
MAYBE.
Except that the best carpenter I hired for my new business was Polish. Well, Polish-American. And the God Bless Deli owners (or the counter guys) are middle eastern, and the matches were from Winston, not Warsaw.
I didn’t see anyone who was accused of being a lefty or liberal suggest or even hint that black Americans don’t have opportunities now that they didn’t before the ‘60s and that they shouldn’t use their intelligence and ambition and strength of character to succeed as opposed to (as has been suggested by those accusing others of being liberals) taking the “easy” road to the high life of welfare and lining their pockets with white people’s tax monies (suggesting that every black person receiving government subsidies was a lazy, shiftless bonehead while, not articulated but implied by tone, the white people on welfare had fallen temporarily on hard times).
I believe that every American should advance by virtue of their good efforts and determination and ambition. But what often happens is that people are rewarded for their ability to schmooze and bamboozle. Why are ineffectual CEOs, for instance, whose companies lose millions of dollars under their command, rewarded with outrageous salaries and bonuses? Look at the news. White men in suits. They LOOK respectable – affluent and responsible and hard-working.
How can they do it? They work the system. Now minorities, smartening up to the game, are working the system. Sometimes righteously, sometimes maliciously, sometimes out of pure greed. Just like the majority.
No one here can convince me that white Americans are a pure and saintly people whose self-interest is superseded by their loftier desires for a system fair to everyone and who are being taken advantage of by “those people” (fill in whatever group du jour tops your irritation list).
As for someone else’s assertion that he couldn’t trust a black man or a woman’s competence because they probably got a job they didn’t deserve, I will say that some prominent black leaders have expressed the same concern from the other side of the Affirmative Action coin, that black people (and women) may be dogged by the suspicion that they got a job or a promotion because of a quota rather than merit. It is a problematic issue. But there are probably more incompetent white men in powerful positions, jobs they got because they are white and male, than competent blacks and women in powerful positions. Just look at the Business section, because news about CEOs’ mishandling of company funds or abuse of position or plain incompetence often doesn’t make the headlines.
