Racial Supremacy: A Color-Blind Problem

Tom Sheppard

5/23/2019

IN today's Deseret News there is an "in-depth" article asking "Are white supremacist attacks and hate crimes getting enough attention from federal law enforcement?"  In addition to the primary question, the author, Matthew Brown, posits another question, "why racially motivated violence is on the rise?"  Tellingly, the author points out that "the steady climb in the number of hate crimes in America pre-dates the Trump administration."

The plain admission that this increase pre-dates the Trump administration should be enough to allow any reasonable person to set aside any prejudice (or bias) against our current POTUS and look beyond his administration for answers to the questions raised.

My thoughts on this went away from the question of attention from the Feds and instead focused on exploring why racially motivated violence is on the rise.  Because the article specifically points to white supremacy, I will share my thoughts on this with the backdrop of white supremacy rather than focusing on any non-white related hate crimes.

Racial Supremacy Comes in All Flavors

Let me begin by stating that I categorically reject racism and racial supremacy.  I find racism an abhorrent exercise in ignorance, prejudice, and hatred.  Let me also be clear that I utterly reject the notion, injected into some or our middle school textbooks, that racism is only about whites being prejudiced.  It may sound a bit crazy to say it, but racism is color blind, it is not a whites-only crime.  To put a point on it, in World War II, the Japanese believed they were "the superior race."  They disdained, and institutionally treated as less than human, the Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos, Vietnamese, whites, blacks, and anyone who was not Japanese.  In that regard they were both a perfect and ironic partner with the Nazis of Germany who believed in the superiority of the Aryan race.  The unrealized reality of World War II is that had the Axis won, they would have eventually, inevitably, gone to war against each other.  The racial imperatives of their respective platforms would have forced it to happen.

Closer to home, the preaching of the likes of Malcolm X, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Jeremiah Wright, are by any rational measure both anti-white and black supremacist.

Al Sharpton

Jeremiah Wright

Mainstream Media Promotes Racial Supremacy

Psychology has very well documented the "fight or flight" autonomic response people have to threats.  The simple reason for a rise in racially motivated crimes is a rise in racial supremacists of all colors.  Add to this the media barrage against white males which has been going on at least since the days when Carrol O'Connor put forward the ignorant bigot Archie Bunker as the epitome of the white working-class man and a rise in "white supremacy" is bound to follow.  The white supremacists are feeling threatened by legal, societal, and media actions which undermine the perceived foundations of their legitimacy and threaten their ability to be taken seriously and heard in the public square.  While many will flee this conflict, at least for a while, an increasing number will feel their backs are against the wall and will feel compelled to take a stand, perhaps even a violent stand, against those who seem to trying not simply to un-empower them, but to wage a war of extinction on them.

Racial Violence is a Reaction to Racial Supremacy

The reality is that racial and hate crimes will continue to rise as long as two things are happening.  1) As long as racism is institutionally supported and 2) while racial supremacists are being widely heard.

Because of the 1st Amendment we cannot deny racial supremacists their place in the public forum.  However, we can continue to combat institutionalized racism.  Right now, the majority of institutionalized racism exists in Hollywood.  Movies and television shows for at least the last twenty years have typically portrayed the straight, white, male (Archie Bunker) as everything from a mere buffoon to an evil villain. Favorable portrayals of straight, white, males in sitcoms on national TV was limited to Tim Allen's Last Man Standing, which the major networks cancelled regardless of its ratings.

When you couple unrelenting media bias against straight, white, males with the unvarnished willingness of the mainstream media to lend credibility to racial supremacists who are attacking whites and trying to invoke misguided notions of racial guilt and racial shame it should be no surprise that the result sometimes is violence.

All Racial Supremacy is Founded on Lies

The problem with all this racial supremacy is that it is all founded on falsehoods.  The reality is that brown, black, white, red, yellow, pink, or otherwise, we are all one race.  We are the human race.  Whatever genetic anomalies have occurred over the millennia which created the diversity of our skin colors has not created multiple versions of the human race.  So, if we want to feel superior, let's revel in the superiority of the human race, and quit stressing over our skin colors, hair colors, eye colors, etc.

To justify their enslavement of Africans, for a time Europeans promoted the notion that Africans were actually a species of ape.  They promoted the notion that Africans were not of the human race, but were a simian race.  Not only has science put that silly notion to rest, it was never more than an attempt to rationalize the treatment of fellow human beings in an inhumane way by pretending they weren't actually human.  Even today, to succeed, racial supremacists must demonize their opponents, changing them from human beings into some incarnation of evil or vile stupidity.

Just Say "No!"

So, the next time you see a TV show, or someone in front of a crowd (in person or on Facebook), calling those who disagree with them "evil", "idiots", "brainless", "stupid", etc. take a pause and realize that the speaker is trying to dehumanize those who disagree and by doing that is directly promoting the sort of unreasoning hatred and disdain that leads to both the crimes of racism and genocide.

The answer, however, is not to respond with equal vitriol and insults.  Rather, it is to make calm, rational, fact-based responses and to disengage when others clearly lose their hold on sanity and devolve into foul-language riddled rants which are aimed to incite emotion rather than citing fact and appealing to reason.  As I have said elsewhere, learn to disagree without being disagreeable.

Tom Sheppard is a business consultant and coach to small business owners and individuals. He is a recognized author with dozens of titles in business and fiction to his credit. One of his endeavors is to help those who want to see their own book in print. He does this through his trademarked Book Whispering Process (TM). 

The author is not an official spokesperson for any organization or person mentioned herein. 

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Your comments are welcome... Please observe some ground rules. No profanity, vulgarity, or personal attacks. Profanity, vulgarity and personal attacks not only betray a lack of vocabulary and imagination, they also are the hallmarks of bigotry, and bigotry is the hallmark of someone who is fundamentally insecure in their views. Facts are always welcome.