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‘Racist’
Democrats loudly called Bush 41 “racist” for reusing Al Gore’s Willie Horton attack on Dukakis which had the net effect of telling an even wider audience that Dukakis was probably soft on crime. Calling Nixon “racist” for promoting measures to curtail epidemic rates of street crime helped him win twice. Calling Trump “racist” for saying what the vast majority of Americans actually think about the execrable ladies of the “Squad” is probably just as politically effective for Democrats as those past “racist” attacks.
For the record, I was not offended by Trump’s remarks. Like most Americans, I am now used to his stylings, bombast, excesses, and disregard for the linguistic rules of our oversensitive age (or any age, for that matter). And I admit I often rather enjoy his indifference to the faux outrage he generates. In this instance, I took him to mean that if you hate America that much, why not just leave? And in Omar’s case, rescued as she was from the hellhole that is Somalia and having received incalculable benefits from America, “how dare you, you vile ingrate?”
I think this issue resonated because there is much more going on than an issue of good manners. There is an overt campaign to silence, disempower, and destroy normal Americans; being more deferential to our attackers at moments and instances of their choosing is not a solution. I do not believe that if only the Jews had been even more polite to the SS there would have been no death camps. Those who claim the manufactured high ground of “sensitivity” don’t give a rat’s hind about the substance or the moral, political, and cultural antecedents of good manners, legal equality or tolerance and we should demand they stop pretending they do.
The recent chorus of liberal lemming MSM columnists who are just now noticing the ugly reality (and likely electoral downside) of hard leftism is amusing. They thought they could shame the likes of Romney, Bush, or McCain into abandoning conservative principles with measured misuse of “racist” or “insensitive” but did not realize that once those verbal demons were unleashed, less decorous, less well-intentioned persons could command them as well.
On a more personal note, the silly and promiscuous use of the term “racist” is an insult to those who endured that reality and who sacrificed to defeat actual racism. I remember my mother’s anxiety each time my father left to go back to work on desegregating rural counties Mississippi and Tennessee as an attorney with the USDOJ Civil Rights Division. I have had the privilege of knowing an African-American attorney who needed courage just to show up for the bar exam (that he knew would likely be rigged) in Montgomery, AL. I listened in person to Martin Luther King and to George Wallace a half-century ago. The idea that America is presently a racist hotbed is asinine and perverse.
Similarly, the abuse of the terms “Nazi” and “fascist” is intolerable.
Polite, substantive discourse, factual evidence, goodwill, tolerance, and equal protection under the law is precisely the state of affairs that the left seeks to destroy. Deference to the pretense that the Left conducts public discourse in a manner consonant with those values has to end. And the vitriolic spittle-fest that Trump has brought about on the left has provided unexpected but welcome clarity. The crudest President since perhaps Andrew Jackson has managed to get our enemies to reveal “racial sensitivity” for what it really is.
Published in General
Yes, this sounds like what I was listening to! I see that they are not Women of Color…I mean, I guess one self-identified. But it was pretty awesome to watch them just turn it right back on the “journalist” when things didn’t go as that reporter had planned for it to go.
It turns out, as a matter of polling data, that there is little more than single digit support for Rule#1. It does not actually fly in even the strongest Democrat political precinct.
Yet.
Quoting this so I can “like” it a 2nd time.
Do these words have a specific definition at all any longer? Or do they simply mean whatever the Leftist that is currently hurling them wants them to mean?
Not even that… the term has become an insult or pejorative, with no meaning beyond that.
And by all means, apply the Scientific Method and do an experiment. Next time you get called a racist you can ask them to elucidate on their specific criticisms.
(“Be more constructive with your feedback, please.” – Flight of the Conchords)
The upshot is to not take the accusation seriously, and get all dizzy looking for what you did that could possibly be interpreted as racist.
(…Which is another reason it’s used as a weapon.)
And just as weird as the fact that many white people on the Left hate other white people, is how they go about advocating for various issues.
Countless people I know have advocated for reparations. Because they go the trouble of advocating for reparations, they seem to feel their duty is done: we who don’t advocate for reparations will certainly have those reparations demanded of us, should that situation ever come about legally. But they feel that their acquiescing to that cause eliminates the need for them to particpate in doling out money an possessions to others.
Then they wonder why some of us call them Elitists.
I think Trump’s “if you hate it here so much, why don’t you leave?” message is a winner, but wasn’t that crowd (mob?) screaming “send her back” a little over the top chilling? Trump does well when he says the things ordinary people are thinking. But he hurts himself when he crosses the line into bullying (or anything that looks uncomfortably like a Nuremberg rally). Ordinary people recoil at that.
Why are some of you using this phrase, “women of color”? What is this, Dungeons & Dragons? Are we in Middle Earth?
All you’re really saying is “colored women,” so just say colored women. Or call them minorities, or whatever. Just stop going along with this left-wing language policing stuff. The Left keeps changing the terminology, to create the illusion that they’re the ones who care, and they’re the ones who know how to talk about this stuff. Please stop giving them that power.
I will never forget the first time I heard the phrase. I was a young lawyer at a large firm and me and a few others were tasked with taking out a couple of our new hires for a fancy first day welcome lunch. One of the new hires was a woman of Asian descent. I thought nothing of it until, mid-lunch conversation, she uttered the phrase “speaking as a woman of color . . . .” in response to something or other. I did a spit take and said “a what???”
Funny you should mention that. I just came across it in book from 1993. That’s the earliest I’ve seen it.
I had a similar reaction. I was wondering why it was suddenly okay to call people colored again.
I also remember when Corretta Scott King (Queen of the Race Hustlers) decreed that we are to call black people “african American” from now on. No one elected her, but she declared it.
My story is from 1994 or 1995 I think.
I thought it was Jessie Jackson.
Some women of color object to the term “women of color.”
You get interesting reactions if you refer to a woman as a “person of gender”.
Perhaps. My first recollection was a hearing or some sort of testimony, I believe before Congress or something, where she made the pronouncement. Such is my memory.
For girls of color who have considered suicide . . .
The level of self abnegation that the left requires of white people is obscene.
I’m not so sure. White women with black men are the devils who lured away their black men. See OJ Simpson trial for an example.
Too smart.
I am left wondering if we whites will end up being called “people of non-color” or perhaps: “non-people.”
Already it seems like the only people who are white and who are also in TV commercials are us older geezers in Depends commercials.