Written by JM Ashby and reposted from BobCesca.com.
“The End of My White Guilt”
That’s the title of the latest masterpiece from the Daily Caller, which may have been an alternate headline chosen after “I’m Done Pretending I’m Not Racist” was deemed too blatant. The latter would seem more representative after reading the opening line.
My white guilt died on Good Friday, April 6, 2012. That was the day my bike got stolen.
It’s obvious where this is going, isn’t it?
When I got home I vented to my friends. I told them I was going to scour those neighborhoods until I found the bike. In reply, a liberal friend gave me a lecture about profiling and told me to just forget about the bike. “That person needs our prayers and help,” she said. “They haven’t had the advantages we have.”
That’s when I lost it. I had been carefully educated by liberal parents that we are all, black and white, the same. My favorite movie growing up was “In the Heat of the Night.” Yet that often meant not treating everyone the same. It meant treating blacks with a mixture of patronizing condescension and obsequious genuflecting to their Absolute Moral Authority gained from centuries of suffering. It meant not treating everyone the same.
It meant leaving valuable things like a bike in a vulnerable position in a black part of town because you didn’t want to admit that the crime is worse in poor black neighborhoods.
[...]
It felt good to say it: Black pain is no different than white pain. I’m tired of people using the moral authority of past generations for their own personal gain and self-aggrandizement. Soledad O’Brien, a Harvard graduate, acts like she just stepped off the Amistad.
Because author Mark Judge’s bike was stolen, which may or may not have been at the hands of a black person (he admits he can’t know for sure), he finally has an excuse to stop pretending he isn’t racist.
Because his bike was stolen, he finally has an excuse to stop caring about “centuries of suffering” perpetrated by men much like himself.
Because his bike was stolen, he believes he now has the moral authority to downplay the suffering of those whose entire lives have been disparaged for no reason other than the color of their skin, because their pain is no different his pain. Their trauma, for being racially profiled and condescended, is no different than his trauma following the loss of his “sharp silver-blue hybrid from L.L. Bean.”
And that’s not hyperbole. The majority of the column is spent daydreaming and fantasizing about riding his bike on Easter weekend, only to have his dreams dashed by someone who may or may not have been black. Only to have everything he was taught by his parents come crashing down around him as his beloved bicycle vanished. Stolen by a black man. Maybe. Who knows?
I cannot fathom how astonishingly coddled, sheltered, and privileged you would have to be to not be utterly embarrassed for publishing this 800 word black-guy-stole-my-bike joke, filled with I-scabbed-my-knee belly-aching. All in the name of justifying racial insensitivity and willful ignorance. Becauseaffluent white guys are victims too!
Disgraceful.
I count myself as about as liberals they come…I have not only had my bike stolen, I have had my house broken into while I was there, asleep, twice, and each time the trespasser was a black man. Finaly I was raped, and again the rapist was a black male. I burned under a coat of race hatred for a few years, and only a little therapy has helped to shake that. Currently I live in a run down apt. Complex that is predominantly Hispanic and black. I am always cautious about disclosing info about my wealth, possessions, etc. Whatlittle I have, but that is to everyone. Any mature discussion about race in our nation has to take a sober look at culture. I don’t believe that black automatically comes with criminality, but poverty does. In our natio, crime goes with poverty goes with black goes with Latino, and any program that actually does something to lessen crime rates will have to address this issue. Furthermore it is not solely the responsibility of ‘white’ America to face this problem, it belongs to ‘black’ America too.
We need to take a mature stand on this issue, one that does not embrace either radical hatred or denial of a real problem.
Alice,
You hit the nail on the head. I am sick to death of people yelling about how minorities commit more crime then whites do. They are spending every day fighting for their very lives! They are poor and most have had terrible educations due to the education system of the wealthier areas getting more funding than poor areas. They see no way out of their existence. I work with inner-city kids and see the despair in their eyes. Eventually that will turn to frustration and then to anger. The racism in this country did not decrease it would seem, it was just shoved under the rug. Now that we have a black president, those same racists will do ANYTHING to take the power away from those “uppity N******”. The hate is growing and it seems to me it is out of fear on the part of those racists who see things changing. Well, too bad! We will not stand for racism in our country! Liberals need to work together. The right does it all the time, now we need to be united in taking back America for ALL Americans.
I am very very sorry for what you have gone through. I can’t imagine, but I would like to point out one more commonality that your attacker and robbers had, they were all men. Do you have the same feelings toward men in general or just black men in general? I’m sure there were other things they had in common as well.
I’m not going to smugly say that I wouldn’t have the same fears, given your circumstances, but I also live in a mixed neighborhood. I have seen just as many suspicious looking white people as black. You mention poverty. It is the responsibility of all of America to address poverty, and it won’t be done as long as Americans have the prevailing attitude that we are all in it for ourselves. We aren’t. No matter what someone’s economic circumstances, they must have access to healthy food, clean water, healthcare and a good education. Until those needs are met, poverty will remain a generational problem. The reason there is a poverty/crime connection in African American communities is because they inherited it with few chances to get out of it.