liberal blogger<\/a>.<\/p>\nGREETINGS, MN “PROGRESSIVE” PROJECT READERS:\u00a0 Great to have you here.\u00a0 Quick point of order, though; I don’t say racism is\u00a0“a liberal problem”.\u00a0 Merely that “Dog Gone’s” rationalization of her use of the term “Uncle Tom” is itself self-indulgent, illogical\u00a0and corrosively specious.\u00a0<\/p>\n
As she says it, racism is when “You do or say something racist when you make an unfounded claim about someone on the basis of a race or an attribute to race”.\u00a0 <\/em>That’s just wrong.\u00a0 It’s when you attribute any trait, positive or negative, to someone based on their race<\/em>.\u00a0 And Dog Gone’s judgment of whether something is or is not “unfounded” is the same precise logic redneck peckerwoods use when they say “N***er ain’t racist, cuz there’s black n***ers and there’s white n***ers”; in other words, the idea that using a a racist term to describe someone is ever “founded”.<\/p>\nAnd is someone going to seriously claim that the term “Uncle Tom” isn’t racist, whether you believe it’s “founded” or not?\u00a0\u00a0 Say what you will about Justice Thomas’ legal and personal history (liberals seem drawn to the fiction that he’s unqualified to be a SCOTUS justice, but Sonya Sotomayor is), but who out there can build a case that calling him “a slave who brown-noses his masters to curry favor” isn’t racist?\u00a0Unless your name is Tom and your siblings have kids, “Uncle Tom” has no other meaning<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\nAs to her constant claim that conservatism is racist?\u00a0 Leaving aside the fact that the claim is bigoted in and of itself, it’s also ideologically nonsense.\u00a0 While there are no doubt conservatives who, individually, are racist (just as there are racist liberals as well – indeed, the most gleefully racist person I’ve ever personally met was a mutual acquaintance of Dog Gone’s and mine who happened to be an east-side Saint Paul DFL ward heeler), one of the bedrock tenets real<\/em> conservatives observe is judging people as individuals, not by their class, gender or, yep, race.\u00a0<\/p>\nMartin Luther King was no conservative Republican, but he\u00a0dreamed that his children would be judged by the contents of their hearts, not their color – and that (hold the stereotypes most of you no doubt romp and frolic in) is a conservative ideal.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I’ve known Dog Gone for 20-odd years, more or less, and sincerely hope she’ll pull her mind out of the fever swamp sooner or later.\u00a0 She could <\/em>be better than that.<\/p>\nYour comments are welcome; I moderate everyone’s<\/em> first comment (to cut down on spam), but unless something is slander or pointlessly inflammatory, I approve everything, because unlike certain blogs I enjoy a vigorous discussion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: Even Black people agree that Blacks are more racist than Whites or Hispanics. Plainly, the poll itself, is racissssssss. Joe doakes Well, clearly.\u00a0 Because if you say you’re not racist, it means you are. And if you say, do or thing something racist, you’re a racist – unless, apparently, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ebony-and-ivory"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37262"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37262\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37352,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37262\/revisions\/37352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}