Racism, Racism, Racism, Racism, Racism, Racism, Racism, Racism, Racism, Racism, Racism, Racism, Racism, Racism, Racism, Racism, Racism, Racism, Racism, Racism, Racism, Racism, Racism, Racism, Racism, Racism, Racism, Racism, Racism, Racism, Racism, Racism, Racism, Racism, Racism, Racism, Racism, Racism, Racism!
There. I‘ve said it 39 times. I could say it another 39 times, and another, and another. And by then, it will have lost its meaning and its significance.
But wait. It already has, as far as I’m concerned.
Most recently, we have seen the legacy media, and the usual race hustlers insist that Harvard President Claudine Gay was forced out of her job because of racism—not because she refused to condemn campus protests that called for the genocide of Jews or that she has been accused of more than 50 instances of plagiarism in her woefully marginal academic publication history.
Oh no, it was racism, pure and simple. Wicked conservatives and implacable Jews ganged up on the first black woman to lead Harvard because she was (gasp!) black.
And therein is the problem with repeating something so often. It loses its meaning, and it becomes just another social mantra that anesthetized minds tune out.
“I’m getting so tired of hearing people scream “racism” every two minutes,” I hear people say. “Will it ever stop? It’s lost its meaning.”
It’s the same with “white privilege.”
What does THAT mean?
For some in our country who love to divide Americans into “hyphenated” identities, such as Asian-, African-, Jewish-, Latino- or White- and pit us against each other, it means that white people are “privileged” because of their (gasp!) “whiteness.”
It’s a bit like accusing Caucasians of having some terminal disease or disorder like leprosy or the bubonic plague because they have white skin.
Never mind that being born white is beyond our control, just as it is for those who are born black, brown, yellow, or red.
In the eyes of America’s race hustlers, the fact that you are born white automatically makes you an evil and privileged racist. And they don’t stop there. They are continuing to spread such scientifically fallacious ideas as “Critical Race Theory,” the bogus “1619 Project,” and the anarcho-syndicalist Black Lives Matter movement.
Sorry, white person, you are guilty by chromosomal and genomic association and therefore YOU are an inveterate and incurable racist.
Of course, those black, brown, yellow, or red folks don’t have that chromosomal and genomic defect, so they CAN NEVER be racists.
Right? Wrong!
Show me ANY racial or ethnic group and I will find racists in it. Having lived and worked all over the world as a foreign correspondent, I witnessed and experienced plenty of racism and discrimination. Believe me, this country doesn’t have a monopoly on bigotry and intolerance—and it never did.
To single out the United States as a nation rife with “systemic racism” is ludicrous. I can take you to plenty of countries where systemic racism is rampant.
It certainly isn’t here.
When I hear the hysterical and frenzied tirades from those who assert that systemic racism is pervasive and flourishing in America, I have to hoot.
If that’s the case, will you please explain to me why the United States remains a mighty magnet for hundreds of thousands of black, brown, yellow, red, and yes, even white people who are willing to pay thousands of dollars and risk long and treacherous journeys at the hands of vicious human smugglers to enter this country illegally?
Oh, I get it. They WANT to come to a nation rife with systemic racism. I see. I NEVER thought of that. I guess that’s why Prince Harry and wife Megan Markle (The Duchess of Sussex) decided to trade the modest racism of Great Britain for the more flagrant systemic racism that contaminates America.
By the way, during my career as a foreign correspondent I met and interviewed many hundreds of people in Asia and Latin America who were risking everything to come to America and you know what, not one of them told me the reason they were coming was so they could enjoy living in a nation flourishing with systemic racism and white privilege.
“White Privilege.” Now, THERE’S a term that pleads for clarification.
Let me see now. Okay, I was privileged to be born white. It was something that I decided I wanted to do while I was still just a splinter of an atom in the cosmos. As a privileged white racist, I selected my parents, making sure they, too, were white. That’s where I messed up. They weren’t wealthy or members of some royal family like the Windsor’s of Great Britain.
No, they were just Kansas farmers. Man, was THAT a mistake. But never mind, I was “privileged,” and I knew it.
I was “privileged” to get my social security card and to begin working at 14, sacking groceries at the Thriftway Market in Roeland Park, Kansas. Later, I was “privileged” to work 60-hour weeks in the summers harvesting wheat in Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota.
During the school year, I was “privileged” to deliver newspapers, sell pastries door to door, mow lawns, shovel snow from driveways, work as a stock boy at Montgomery Wards in Prairie Village, Kansas, bus tables at Waid’s Restaurant in Mission, Kansas, pump gas and change oil at the Fina Gas Station in Overland Park, raise hundreds of chickens, dispatch them, and sell them door to door and toss heavy alfalfa hay bales from freshly mowed pastures onto flatbed trailers.
Later I was “privileged” (and I do mean privileged) to serve four years of active duty in the U.S. Army—one of the best instances of “privilege” in my “privileged” life. As a reward for that service, I qualified for the G.I. Bill, which allowed me to enter the University of Kansas, where I was “privileged” to work my tail off to earn scholarships so I could afford to pay for my university education.
At this point, I had been married a year, and my white German wife, whom I met and married in Germany, was “privileged” to work 40 hours a week assembling cards at the Hallmark factory in Lawrence, Kansas. Between my wife’s job, the G.I. Bill, and the handful of scholarships I earned, we were “privileged” to wind up each Friday with about $5 to spend. Our choices typically were between buying a pizza and going to the local drive-in theater.
But as “privileged” as we were, we made it work, and when I graduated three years later, I was offered a job as a reporter at the Chicago Tribune, where I was “privileged” to work prolonged late-night hours covering the kinds of stories that big cities like Chicago are known for—murders, gang violence, suicides, fires, plane and train crashes, and other forms of mayhem.
In other words, I was “privileged” to pay my dues as a general assignment reporter so I could earn the opportunity to be a foreign correspondent.
Thank God for my “white privilege.” I could never have become successful at the Tribune based on my woefully negligible talent as a reporter.
What lessons have I learned from all of this? Well, if you have white skin, then you are a privileged oppressor. It doesn’t matter if your ancestors were southern tobacco farmers who never owned slaves, or Russians who fled the brutal communist tyranny of Lenin and Stalin, or German or Polish Jews who barely escaped the Holocaust of the 1930s and 1940s.
No, it doesn’t matter at all. You and your ancestors are guilty of being contaminated with “white privilege,” and therefore, you are automatically a racist, and the virtuous minority races must condemn you.
Never mind that members of this malevolent “privileged” class have no practical means of redeeming their immutable sins because, as far as I know, no one has yet been able to change one’s race or skin color effectively.
But that isn’t stopping the hysteria of critical race theory from oozing into all aspects of our national life to promote the sin of “whiteness.”
Now, the Democrat California Legislature is requiring Critical Race Theory and Ethnic Studies as a high school graduation requirement. That’s great. I guess our children haven’t been sufficiently confused by their “intersectional identities.”
The fact that most Americans don’t dare to openly criticize and oppose Critical Race Theory for the deceitful racist dogma it is demonstrates the corrosive nature of the solution. As a result, we are moving rapidly toward a repressive system of totalitarian socialism that Lenin, Mao, and Stalin would be proud of.
More important, however, is the fact that the imprudent and unchallenged embrace of these dishonest and specious theories leaves little room for open and thoughtful public discourse.
Our enemies, both external and internal, have long declared that the way to defeat a “mongrel nation” like America is to divide us and to destroy our shared American identity, which has long been the unifying feature of our nation.
When we divide our education, media, and legislation based on race and other immutable identities, we become more vulnerable to hatred and self-hate. When we create bickering tribes of distinct racial, ethnic, religious, social, and political populations, our nation withers and declines.
We must not fall into the treacherous traps that those who hate our Republic and our priceless freedoms have set for us. Those precious freedoms were won for us by countless thousands of men and women with their lives. We must not relinquish them so willingly to the America haters.
The Founders knew how important our unity was, which is why in 1782, they included our unofficial motto, “E Pluribus Unum”—“Out of Many, One” on the Great Seal.
Will we be the first Americans to remove it?
–30–
If you enjoyed this post, please consider subscribing to ForeignCorrespondent and tell your friends to subscribe. IT’S FREE! WHAT A DEAL! If you’ve received this from a friend and would like to be added to our distribution list for future blog posts, please enter your email address in the sign-up for notifications box at https://ronaldyatesbooks.com/category/foreign-correspondent.
You can also find my commentaries on Substack at https://ronyates.substack.com/ and the American Free News Network at https://afnn.us.
Please feel free to comment. WE LOVE COMMENTS!
