Liberals and progressives tend to act as they are above claims of racism, and always have been. The truth is, liberals of the nineteenth century embraced the confederacy, and excused slavery. As they morphed and intertwined with progressives, they openly proclaimed whites as genetically superior. Accordingly, President Wilson segregated government, and praised the KKK. Later, Roosevelt refused to swim with blacks, and kept an arms length from attempts to address lynchings in the south. President Johnson. after protesting the Voting Rights Act and opposing anti-lynching legislation, changed his tune when the votes of blacks in the south started to count. Crusading for black American votes, he carefully crafted his own civil rights legislation. His was not a change of heart, but a change in tactics. His was a new patronizing form of racism. One that took hold of the Democratic Party, and has wreaked more havoc than their openly racist ancestors ever could.

President Obama was in an historic position to change the direction of his party, and to heal divisions his party had exploited. Unfortunately, he choose to make matters worse. Labeling America a “racist nation,” he poured gasoline on smoldering resentments. Instead of embracing the idea of we are all Americans, he took the route of their being many Americas, each pitted against the other. Instead of healing wounds, he laid them bare, and added salt for good measure. Further poisoning the landscape, he made future attempts to bring the nation together all that much harder.

Truthfully, liberals do not see it this way, but their actions speak louder than words ever could. Today, the American left is fixated on race beyond any point of reason. Painting over the real issues facing people in poverty, they use racism as a catch all. It seems there is nothing that they can’t put a racial spin on. Along the way, they inspire hate and despair among those in most need of hope. The truth is, racism will always exist, but it can be minimized. The first step in fighting racism is to stop making everything about race. This is especially true when it comes to poverty and related social ills.

Being poor in the United States, and even most of the world, is not connected to race. Social issues are not racial either. Studies have shown, family breakdown creates similar results among all peoples. Corrected for this one factor, crime statistics between communities become very similar. Strengthening families, and better interdiction programs for kids, would go a long way towards, helping crime ravaged communities recover. Job skill programs, like what is being pioneered by the Koch brother in Texas, are helpful as well. In contrast, painting poor communities, regardless of their makeup, with blanket assumptions of racism only serves to hide the real issues.

It is easy to see poor schools, high crime rates, and a large police presence and holler racism. It is much more difficult to look at root causes by examining the people being effected. The vendetta politics of social justice creates victims, but not solutions. Labeling all racism avoids having to see people as groups of individuals, and facing their problems head on. It also serves political ends, as the blind fury such rhetoric inspires can be harnessed by the demagogues that stoked it in the first place.

Truth is, black lives do matter, as do the lives of all Americans. To address issues effecting black communities, and others as well, it is necessary to move beyond labels. Instead of kneeling for the national anthem, standing for it in unity. African-Americans, Asian-Americans and other hyphenized sub classes of citizenship have no place in the U.S. One nation and one people, with a shared destiny, addressing problems together, that is the only way out of this mess. Once the cloak of identity politics is removed, people can see the issues facing each other are not unique, nor are the solutions. Education, family, and the hope for a better future is not a black issue, or a white one; the color of skin has no more relevance then eye color or height when it comes to the things that count.

It is time to move beyond identity politics, and blaming problems on whole groups, regardless of evidence to the contrary. Justice can never be social, it can only be divvied out one person at a time. In contrast, solutions are rarely unique. Lack of family support, education, job skills, etc, have the same effect on those living in a small Midwestern town, as they do in the inner city. Strategies for combating these problems also are also not unique; they are independent of the place they originate, to skin color, ethnicity, or the religion of those involved. People are people, and it is time to recognize this fact. Unity, not division, will solve the issues facing Americans. In contrast, accusations of racism, claims of oppression, and seeking retribution, reparations or redistribution is bound to exasperate the very problems those pushing them say they want to to solve. Time to come together, as a people, and see we are all the same after all.

“The Conservative Mind”

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