I found this post linked on another friend's Facebook page: Charlottesville UVA White Nationalist Rally Proves America Is Racist. Like many articles from a leftist perspective, it refers to America's fundamental character as racist.
This country was built on systemic racism
It's comforting to insist that racial hatred is not who Americans are...
So yes, racism absolutely is American...
We have a president with a long and clear history of racism: His family company was once investigated for refusing to rent property to black Americans.
The article is a condemnation of America as such on the basis that racists exist in America. True but not particularly convincing.
It also indicates the election of president Trump as some kind of compelling evidence as if the election wasn't a reduction of the lesser of two very bad choices. I feel the need to remind everyone that he was running against Clinton, one of the least electable and most polarizing "most-qualified" candidates the Democratic party has ever put forth.
Sorry, I'm still not convinced that America was racist when we had two very bad choices.
Declaring America racist is a sort of declaration that the racists have already won and that we just have to admit it so that we can start to change like so many delusional alcoholics. But only white people have to admit it apparently because they're the only delusional alcoholics.
They need "Racists Anonymous". The rest of us can just carry on.
Racist by What Measure?
What does it take to qualify? An act of racism? A dozen? A single statue?
I don't have any criteria on which I can draw a line between a country that is racist and one that is not. I suspect that means this is a meaningless concept designed to foist guilt and shame upon all of the people in the country until we all capitulate and submit to our Politically Correct Overseers. Sorry, not all of us... just "white people".
Here's what I know. The Declaration of Independence, America's philosophical document, makes to mention of an ethno-state. It is not an identitarian document.
It declares that all mankind is equal endowed with rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. There is nothing racist about it.
What Federal, State, and Local governments do should always be held to this standard. And the LEFT are as guilty as the RIGHT when it comes to giving up the core principles of the United States.
If the leftists want to call America Racist, they also have to accept their part of the blame for letting government run rampant in flagrant disregard to America's original principles.
None of these actions which disregard the principles diminishes the truth of them. They are mere bits of dirt and disease in a long-lived organism with an immune system.
Mental Hygiene, An Individual Process
The article clearly thinks that delusional alcoholic racists (whites) need to confess their racism. It's like some kind of weird alcoholics anonymous thing where in order to give up your addiction you have to confess your helplessness to it. I don't get how that helps personally.
Here's what I see.
Racism is a symptom sickness of the mind, but it's not the disease. The core disease is irrationality: ideas that don't comport with reality. Unless you're a doctor or a scientist making a study of disease, you don't make disease your primary focus. For most of us, we merely focus on how to keep our health, which is to say, how to incorporate hygiene into our lives.
To make avoiding disease our primary focus is to give it undue attention. The focus of every human being should be to organize one's own thinking and life so that one can thrive.
As pertains to healthy thinking, the analogy to hygiene is exact. A good mental practice leads to clean thinking and a lack of practice leads to unclear thinking: mistaken notions, bad logic, and ideas that do not comport with reality (such as racism or any kind of supremacism).
There is no racial input into mental hygiene. Every person of every race has to figure this out or pay the price, which is to act from bad ideas that don't comport with reality.
There is no way to prevent a person who is unwilling to be responsible for his/her own thinking from holding bad ideas. The final arbiter is each person him or herself. And thus, individual responsibility is a fundamental moral requirement of mental hygiene.
Vision vs. Virtue Signaling
Here's the bottom line.
Calling America Racist isn't going to change my behavior (or the behavior of anyone who is already rational) because I'm already doing the hard work of clear thinking. (And, in any case, as I'm not white, the article already excluded me.)
Calling America Racist won't affect the actions of any supremacists (no matter what the color or ethnicity) because they are not moved by reason or facts as far as I can tell. And they will certainly not be moved by poorly supported arguments of the wrong variety.
So let's be real okay? The only thing the author of the cited article is achieving by calling America Racist is virtue signaling. Like masturbating, virtue signaling is designed to feel good without achieving very much.
Dear Author: Grow the fuck up.
Wanna lead America to a better place? Start with a vision that stands for all time like the principles in the Declaration for Independence.
