June 2, 2006

Let's see, there's Shakespeare, Plato, Chaucer, Aquinas...and Maya Angelou.

Betsy Newmark quotes from a Seattle School district "definition" of racism (since taken down from their web site, and replaced by more subtle racism)...

Cultural Racism:
Those aspects of society that overtly and covertly attribute value and normality to white people and Whiteness, and devalue, stereotype, and label people of color as “other”, different, less than, or render them invisible. Examples of these norms include defining white skin tones as nude or flesh colored, having a future time orientation, emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology, defining one form of English as standard, and identifying only Whites as great writers or composers...

There are so many things wrong (and racist) about this that it would be beating on the obvious to point them out. (Andrew will miss the points, but the rest of you won't.) But it is especially fascinating to me as an example, more glaring than the many others we see every day, of the way leftists try to pretend we are still in their glory days of the Civil Rights Era and Vietnam Era. We're forever stuck on Selma, even it that requires re-defining racism as "having a future time orientation."

And it's also an good example of the fantasy, indulged in since the time of Karl Marx, that various poor or disadvantaged or folksy groups would prefer a "collective ideology" over individualism. It's been WRONG EVERY TIME, but that doesn't keep the fantasy from popping up again. It was wrong for European workers, Latin American peasants, Appalachian coal miners, migrant farm workers...

Also, when you are told that the Left has a Jesus-like concern for the poor, remember that there's a teensy little difference. Jesus wasn't hoping the poor would stay poor (and Democrat, and "collective," and without that horrid "future time orientation").

Posted by John Weidner at June 2, 2006 8:01 AM
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