This is How to Fight Racism

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

This is How to Fight Racism

There has been a whole lot of racial crap going on recently in the mainstream. I have not talked too much about it because, to me, in my life, this is a non-issue.

My two sons have black blood in them as their mother is of mixed race. I was once in love with a black woman and we lived together for almost a year. I am white, but I have some Cherokee in me.

Whoop-de-do!

Like I said, non-issue in my private life. That's because none of this touches my heart except as a mild curiosity and a sense of wonder at the charming variety nature has provided humans. In my heart, I find the differences to be cool. I really do. It's all good to me.

By my upbringing, I shouldn't feel that way. I grew up around racist hillbillies who, when I was six, moved out of the hills and coal-mining country on up to Northern Virginia and into the middle class. They toned their racism down, but it never went away when I was still growing up. It's a lot better now.

The best way I have found to combat racism has been to walk away from racist discussions and live my life as far from it as I can manage. Hell, I even moved to Brazil for 32 years and one of the reasons was to get away from racism. I literally put a continent and decades between me and that.

On returning to the USA, I see racial hatred has been kept alive by the "grievance industry" and it has gotten worse since Obama got elected. I'm not sure that's his fault, but one aspect of it is. One of the most common tactics used by those of his political leanings is victimization and that's all they're doing in the mainstream these days.

But I still feel the only way to combat this is to walk away from the discussion. One of the best ways to do that is to pivot and make it about a different dichotomy--about universal individual rights as opposed to collective entitlements based on ethnicity.

This is why I really like the video below by Elbert Guillory. True, he uses race, but he uses it as a backdrop for his pro-freedom pro-capitalism message. In other words, race is not the point he is preaching. Freedom is.

That, to me, is the best way to fight racism, i.e, make the fight about something far nobler than collectives. Make it about universal rights and truths for the individual.

Michael

[Robert Baratheon]

The victim mentality is the most destructive human force on this planet. It can lay waste to entire countries and turn vast potential into a cultural rot.

My wife is in a doctoral cohort with some black principals from Montgomery County, MD. These women hold six-figure leadership positions in the richest county of the richest country in the world. Despite their successes (given it's a liberal county of Maryland, affirmative action most certainly played a role), everything with them is "racist" this and "oppression" that, and they spend all their energy bemoaning how blacks "can't get ahead" in America. They're all doing their dissertations on white patriarchy, institutional racism in schools, and similar hate-peddling racialist crap. There is such a deep distrust and resentment in them, calcified over so many years in their victimhood echo chambers, that I doubt it can ever be overcome at this point. It sounds terrible to say, but I think the only way racial conflict will end in this country is when such deeply damaged individuals finally age and die off, taking their destructive attitudes with them.

[BaalChatzaf]

"racist" attitudes are implanted in early childhood. They are almost impossible to expunge.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[anthony]

It sounds terrible to say, but I think the only way racial conflict will end in this country is when such deeply damaged individuals finally age and die off, taking their destructive attitudes with them.

Say it.

It's about what I think too about our self-enriched "Struggle Heroes" here. Only - their anti-racist racism and resentment is being passed down to the young. I see no quick end to it.

On a brighter note, a man whom I'm reminded of by Guillory is Herman Mashaba, a black businessman who started a cosmetic empire in RSA, beginning as a kid in the apartheid time, from the humblest beginnings. And looked for no favors from bureaucrats in either State during his rise.

He is an inspiring man who has often openly professed capitalism - most unpopularly with the ANC.

In two weeks he'll be speaking at the S.A. Free Market Foundation in Jhb, co-hosting with a US guest, Tom Palmer, a Senior Fellow of the Cato Institute.

Palmer's topic: "The Morality of Capitalism". Heh.

Mashaba's topics: The Road to Real Freedom; Free to Choose; Jobs for All; Colour-Blind Society.

(Like rain in the Namib Desert in this Social Kleptocracy). I'll have to go hear them.

[caroljane]

""You.ve got to be carefully untaught"

-Southeast Pacific

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Here is one of the best discussions of racism I have come across in a long time.

Setting aside Glenn Beck's religiosity, his message is that you choose to be racist or not when you choose to view the world in collectivist terms or individual ones, you choose reason or something else as your fundamental standard of knowledge, and you choose going after power or not as one of your primary values.

You make all those choices with morality. And that's on you.

If you grew up in a racist environment, you can choose--at any time in your life--not to be racist.

I speak from experience. And if I can do it, anyone can.

It starts a little heavy on the Martin-Zimmerman issue, which is the first video. But that's to get the discussion going. Then, with the second video, it gets into the nitty-gritty.

Michael

[BaalChatzaf]

One can choose to dispense with one's bigotry, but it is not necessarily and easy choice.

Some habits get worked in pretty deep during childhood.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I just rewatched this from Glenn as an afterthought to his Anatomy of a Racist discussion.

Glenn takes Oprah Winfrey to task and wipes the floor with her on something she said that she should be ashamed of. She said that Trayvon Martin and Emmett Till (the cases) were the same thing in her mind.

I wonder if Oprah knows the story of Emmett Till at all, other than the cultural mythology.

Glenn knows. He admitted he had to brush up to get it right. You won't get that kind of admission from race-baiters and fuzzy thinkers who just spout off what they hear.

Glenn tells the story of Emmett Till in the video below.

And man, does he tell it.

What a storyteller!

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I used to not like CNN's Don Lemon because, in my perception, he always wore the racial angle on his sleeve in his reporting.

 

However, some kind of epiphany must have hit him because recently he has been talking some serious sense.

 

See for yourself:

 

 

I got this on a TheBlaze article here.

 

Michael

 

 

[BaalChatzaf]

He is a good man who makes sense. By the way, the Muslims who make sense are those who identify the True Jihad. The True Jihad is overcoming one's own weakness and self indulgence. Righteous folk everywhere know this is the target to aim for. Ameen!

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Even Oprah is race-baiting. Fer Pete's sake!

First the racist BS while plugging the new movie she acts in (The Butler):

Oprah on Being a Recent Victim of Racism

By RAPHAEL CHESTANG

August 5, 2013

Entertainment Tonight (ET)

Her desired reaction happened:

Oprah Winfrey gets apology from Switzerland after she alleges racism over $38,000 handbag

August 9, 2013

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

But then, strangely enough, push-back:

SWISS SALES ASSISTANT ACCUSED BY OPRAH OF BEING RACIST FIGHTS BACK: ‘THIS IS NOT TRUE, THIS IS ABSURD’

by Jason Howerton

Aug. 12, 2013

TheBlaze

And finally the boomerang:

PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE OPRAH Gives BS Apology for Switzerland Racist Flap

8/13/2013

BY TMZ STAFF

TMZ

It's funny because you don't even need to read the stories or watch the videos. The headlines say it all.

Oprah should stick to her New Age shtick. She might be a billionaire and celebrity and all, but she ain't no Al Sharpton.

Her attempt at race-baiting makes her look more like a dingbat than a bigot.

She's being silly and making up shit to boot.

It's sad to see this, too, because, in my humble opinion, she is better than that.

Michael

[caroljane]

Oprah is hugely admirable in what she has accomplished, but in my limited viewings of her she is boring. Also I don't see why if she is gay she does not just say so. It didn't hurt |Ellen or Rosie.