How To Be A Racist

Race essentialism - the antithesis of what Dr. King dreamt of - rears its ugly head again.

As reported in Newsweek (hardly a right-wing rag), '[t]he Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture recently unveiled guidelines for talking about race.'

Are you sitting down?

Among fundamental elements of "white dominant culture, or whiteness** (emphasis theirs)" are:

• Individualism, especially the 'rugged' kind.

• Self-reliance, independence, autonomy, and acceptance that you have some control over your outcomes.

• The nuclear family.

• Objective, rational, linear thinking.

• Cause and effect relationships.

• Hard work is the key to success.

• Christianity is "white" (don't tell that to the 83% of blacks that are Christian).

• Planning for the future, delaying gratification, time is a commodity.

There's a lot of trite and hackneyed disparagement of whites in those guidelines, as well, but save that for another day.

That list, intended to disparage and discourage, implies that blacks should, instead:

• Deny their individuality in favor of a collective identity that subordinates them to authority.

• Embrace dependence on others.

• Men should abandon their baby-mamas and eschew supporting their offspring.

• Make up whatever shit suits them in the moment, rather than acknowledging reality and using logic.

• Assume that bad consequences are never their fault.

• Embrace laziness.

• Abandon their preferred faiths for... what? Strictly African-original religions?

• Living like Aesop's grasshopper, with no care for tomorrow.

Ponder the logic chain that would lead a writer to concoct such a wantonly destructive narrative. I see two possibilities: That there's an irrational hatred of "white" at the root of it all, in which case the writer is a racist, or that there's an intent to subjugate, infantilize, and sink into eternal dependence the black community, in which case the writer is a racist.

It's mind-boggling, and can only be the product of extremely cocooned echo-chambers, where realities of the world are not permitted to intrude.

If we follow that chain along, we come to the generalization that certain behaviors are Bad simply because people of a particular skin color are considered to expound them. Declare that certain viewpoints and philosophies are Bad because they were first crafted by people of a particular skin color.

Sounds like textbook racism to me.

By that logic, slavery must be a good thing, since it was white European men who first figured out it was bad to own other humans (see: the Enlightenment).

But, let's be honest. Logic has nothing to do with this line of drivel. Whoever came up with this almost certainly falls into the Marquise de Merteuil's assessment.

Or Orwell's, for that matter.

Were I to encounter this in an unsourced forum, I'd declare Poe's Law:

Unfortunately, its provenance tells us its authors are dead serious. We would do ourselves and our society a great justice in dismissing these dunderheads' nonsense outright. And with extreme prejudice.