How does one explain liberals’ relentless obsession with race? Democrats and left-wing activists clutch the notion of racism as America’s defining characteristic just as streetcorner drunks cling to their fifths of cheap booze. No matter what, neither community can unhand those bottles.
In fact, this debilitating liberal addiction deserves a name: raceaholism.
Raceaholics wear fact-proof vests, which facilitate their addiction.
Less than a month after becoming this country’s first black attorney general, Eric Holder harshly scolded the American people: “Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards,” Holder told Justice Department employees on February 18, 2009. He claimed that “we, average Americans, simply do not talk enough with each other about race.” He added, “If we are to make progress in this area, we must feel comfortable enough with one another, and tolerant enough of each other, to have frank conversations about the racial matters that continue to divide us.”
Holder’s comments echo those of then-President Bill Clinton, who, in June 1997, said he wanted to start a “national conversation on race.” Likewise, Mayor de Blasio, on ABC’s This Week last Sunday, said, “We have to have an honest conversation in this country about a history of racism.”
Have these men been fast asleep? When have Americans not conversed about race?
The national conversation on race began no later than 1787, when the Constitutional Convention debated the Three-Fifths Compromise. Abolitionists and slavers spent the first half of the 19th century conversing about the morality of white Americans’ owning black human beings as property. Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas famously debated this question as the United States slid toward disunion. America fought the blood-soaked Civil War, largely over this matter. The Emancipation Proclamation and the defeat of the Confederacy, which stirred millions of discussions, soon yielded to talk of Reconstruction, followed by the Democratic party’s obstruction of Republican efforts to protect recently freed slaves and integrate them as full citizens.
The national conversation on race soon turned to Jim Crow laws and segregation. It continued through the decades with Plessy v. Ferguson, anti-lynching efforts, D. W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation, President Truman’s desegregation of the U.S. military, Jackie Robinson, Brown v. Board of Education, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, President Eisenhower’s deployment of federal troops to integrate Little Rock’s schools, Motown Records, Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Watts riots, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, President Nixon’s creation of racial-preference programs, forced busing, President Reagan’s signing of the MLK national holiday into law, rap, the Clarence Thomas hearings, the Rodney King riots, O.J., the election of Obama as America’s first black president, and much, much more.
Americans have not stopped talking about race for at least 227 years. Yet the raceaholics consider Americans too weak and self-doubting to address the topic.
Absurd!
The raceaholics seem incapable of recognizing America’s tremendous progress in this area. Obama and Holder speak as if white-sheeted bigots are just yards away from grabbing them and burying them in a bog for being “uppity.” Never mind that those imaginary platoons of the prejudiced would have to slip past Secret Service agents to pry Obama from the Oval Office. They also would have to overcome the well-armed men and women who surround Holder as he leads the entire U.S. Department of Justice.
Senator Tim Scott (R., S.C.) just got elected with 61 percent of the vote and 84,000 more ballots than his Republican Palmetto State colleague, Senator Lindsey Graham. (In 2010, interestingly enough, Scott defeated the son of former segregationist Strom Thurmond in a Republican primary.) Utah’s Mia Love and Texas’s Will Hurd also are blackRepublicans just elected to Congress. The far-left Congressional Black Caucus boasts 43 members, all Democrats.
