When I was 12 years old, I played tennis at a certain public park in the Bronx. One day it got back to me that a black fellow at the courts, whose name I forget, said “Selwyn doesn’t like black people.” This raised my eyebrows. You see, I had never really thought about the man one way or the other. And what occupied my mind were forehands, backhands, topspin and volleys, not race. So the only thing I could figure was that I was probably in a funk one day and didn’t hear and acknowledge a greeting he might have extended.
Whatever the perceived slight, race was a factor. After all, imagine the reaction if he had been white. At worst he might have thought, “Selwyn is a self-absorbed brat,” which would have been closer to the truth. Or he might just have concluded that I was having a bad day (I was an aspiring player at the time, but, lamentably, had a lot of bad days). Instead, he saw bad intentions where none existed.
Of course, any time someone noticeably
different from us appears to slight us, it’s natural to wonder if it may be
because of those differences. But when
you consider what many black Americans believe, it’s clear something else is afoot. Just consider, for instance, that when Obama
pastor Jeremiah Wright accused white people of “inventing the HIV virus as a
means of genocide against people of color,” he was not expressing a new belief
in the black community. After Hurricane
Katrina, Louis Farrakhan claimed
that the breached levees had been blown-up by the government; Spike Lee said
that his theory wasn’t “far-fetched”; and even before Looney Louie had weighed
in, black residents on the street stated that the flooding was part of a
conspiracy to rid New Orleans
To illustrate the phenomenon causing people to believe such inanity, consider a woman in a bad marriage who hates her husband. She may see him through colored glasses, and then his trespasses are never just innocent mistakes, are they? Instead, much that he does will displease her – and all of it is part of an effort to upset her. “Why, that’s just the kind of thing he would do!” thinks she. Now, don’t get me wrong. He may be lacking or even a cad, and he may sometimes actually try to get her goat. But that isn’t the point. It is, rather, that whatever he is or isn’t, she won’t perceive it clearly through those colored glasses. Hatred is like darkness: the more there is, the less you can see.
And this is precisely the issue in the black community. Black minister and head of the Brotherhood Organization for a New Destiny Jesse Lee Peterson alluded to this when he said that the goal of racial hustlers such as Jesse Jackson is to keep black people angry so that they won’t be able to think clearly. Yet this “Jacksonizing” of youth is now endemic in the black community. Too many black children are weaned on ideas such as “The white man is keeping you down,” “The white man has oppressed you” and “A black man has no place in America.” They may hear such sentiments from their parents, from Reverend Wrights in churches, from friends, from music and popular culture – and even in school (read here). The result is that they view whites through colored glasses, seeing bad intentions and Caucasian conspiracies where none exist. Hey, that’s just the way white people are.
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Of course, this phenomenon isn’t unique to
black/white relations. It’s evident in
Palestinian/Jewish ones, Hutu/Tutsi ones, Turkish/Armenian ones and many others
as well; it’s something that has ever plagued man. And because it has such a long history and
can be easily understood, something can be said with confidence: black
grievance will never end.
Oh, “never” is a long time?
I’ll be more precise: the American republic
will end before black grievance will.
To place this in further perspective,
consider jihadist teaching. Would you
expect the next generation of Muslims to relinquish their grievances against
Jews when anti-Semitism is taught in tens of thousands of madrassahs worldwide
and presented as part of Islamic religion?
Well, consider that anti-white teaching is rife in the black community
and has been molded into a religion; it’s called Black Liberation Theology
(BLT) and teaches that God must assist in eradicating “the white enemy.” Then there is Critical Race Theory (CRT) – an
offshoot of Marxist critical theory – which states that “the [American] system
must be made unequal in order to compensate for the innate racism of
the white majority,” writes
Ben Shapiro. And don’t argue about it,
either. Many BLT and CRT adherents will aver
that white people are blind to their inherent bigotry and that “white
privilege” renders them oblivious to their “undeserved” benefits. So, you see, only non-whites can grasp their
dysfunction.
To make matters worse, in the way that
Islam is on the march as radicalism imbues ever more mosques, black grievance
only worsens, ironically, as we move further from the antebellum period. Why? Well,
just as 18th-century Muslims knew nothing of the Crusades (which
were a
response to Islamic aggression) until taught about them in 19th-century
English and French colonial schools, the teaching of black children is not what
it was back when the three Rs weren’t
racism, radicalism and revenge. Note
that BLT was only originated in 1966 and CRT in the late 1970s.
And this again speaks to the intractability
of black grievance. “As the twig is
bent, so grows the tree,” the saying goes; it’s hard to overcome what is
instilled during formative years. And
anger has its appeal. As a black woman
caller emphatically stated on a radio talk show I listened to some years ago,
“My hate keeps me going!” Yes, passion is
energizing and can be born of hate as well as love. And in keeping with Ben Franklin’s saying,
“You cannot reason a man out of a position he has not reasoned himself into,”
problems of misguided emotion cannot be remedied with intellectual appeals. Whatever whites are or are not, it won’t be
perceived clearly until the colored glasses come off.
And how are they removed? Whether you’re black, white, a Palestinian or
that hypothetical wife, the answer is always the same: forgiveness. When we forgive, the blinding anger
dissipates and we finally see the object of our wrath clearly. Then we often learn that he isn’t quite the
monster we once imagined.
Unless this were to happen, we shouldn’t
expect anything but what we have already witnessed: Attorney General Eric
Holder’s refusal to prosecute the Philadelphia Black Panthers, Barack Obama’s
stoking of racial anger, blacks’ assumption that every Trayvon Martin is an
innocent victim, and increasing
“retaliatory” attacks on whites by the children of BLT and CRT. And we shouldn’t be naïve enough to think
that pandering helps. You’re not going
to prove your good will to Jackson, Holder, Al Sharpton and their fellow
travelers by offering handouts, government programs and quotas. You won’t prove it by voting for a (half)
black president, which – especially when he is a BLT Marxist radical – is seen
just as license to extract more pounds of flesh. You won’t soothe their savage breasts by
taking it on the chin and then saying, “Thank you, sir; may I have
another?” For the Jeremiah Wrights of
the world are much like the Independence
Day alien who was
asked by the American president, “What is it you want us to do?”
His answer: “die.”
Only, because BLT babies can’t yet access
the firepower of Louis Farrakhan’s earth-orbiting mother ship,
“which will reign down destruction on white America