George Rebane
Racialism – the ideology, based on a heightened consciousness of the race of others, that promotes racial divisions and strife to hasten the breakdown of large sovereign nation-states on the road to a unified global world order.
In America there should be as little room for racism as for racialism. We Americans should equally reject racism and racialism. In recent years racialism has been on the rise, and is now the new rallying cry for those who want to fundamentally transform America. In a land as large as ours there will always be some few who will exhibit their racism. But our overall progress toward racial equality in the last decades has been under-reported as author and Manhattan Institute fellow Jason Riley recently highlighted (here) to counter the current spate of racialist events and lamestream hysteria (see also ‘Kneeing Our National Anthem’).
Most people agree on the various definitions of racism as including “a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human racial groups determine cultural or individual achievement”. (more here)
But racialism is a useful term the definition of which is still in flux. Many/most dictionaries take the lazy way out and define racism and racialism as being synonymous, thus wasting the label for a useful semantic in our language. Thoughtful authors have attempted to distinguish between the two words without making much headway. An example of this in a 2015 issue of HuffPost is Peter Schuck’s ‘Racism and Racialism Are Different’. Therein he does the best he can with the “widespread confusion between racism, which is hostility to blacks based on their supposed inferiority, and what I call racialism, which is a heightened consciousness of the race of others.”
With my own more robust definition of racialism, I hope to avoid ambiguity and inform my readers of how I will use the term.
Those who keep up with America’s changing socio-political landscape know well that the case against racism has been well made between our shores, yet the case against racialism is muted and has been suppressed. Actually, more than that; there are prominent political factions for whom racialism is a fundamental component of their political toolkit.
I am of the school that holds former President Barack Obama to be the pre-eminent racialist of our times, a job at which he excels and still champions. As cultural Marxists (q.v.), he and his already realized at the turn of the millennium that racialism had been a fallow field that needed cultivation. The history of Obama’s rising to the occasion in the ascent of his own career is meticulously detailed in the recently published dispassionate biography – Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama – by Pulitzer Prize winning historian David Garrow which is competently reviewed (here) by H.A. Scott Trask in the October 2017 issue of Chronicles. Therein Garrow recounts and documents Obama’s own racial sensitivities in his early desire to be seen as a racially uncompromised black, even to the point of shedding his first true love – Sheila Myoshi, a multi-racial lady deemed too white to support his auto-identified “destiny” to become America’s first ‘black president’. Obama’s subsequent hitching with Michelle, who in her own words is “as black as it gets”, gave him the needed optics to climb the South Chicago political ladder. (“If I’m going out with a white woman, I have no standing here.”)
As Obama was well on his way to the Democratic candidacy and then on to be elected in 2008, prominent politicians of both parties opined that the man’s success was based on the careful nurture of his race and his racialism. (Democrat Gerraldine Ferraro, a Clinton backer, paid with her political life for stating the obvious, “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.”)
That racialism is now the political tool of choice for the Left is also evident on the grassroots level if we can use the recorded sentiments of local liberals. When I recently brought up Obama’s race-based ascent to the presidency, using the SBA set-aside Section 8 metaphor, I was immediately branded as a racist for that argument in another comment thread debating the qualifications of recent presidents. A casual perusal of these pages quickly reveals that most leftwing RR readers are racialists, furiously gleaning the ideological harvests for any remnant of potential racial bias, thereby alleging non-existent schisms in the face of the obvious chasm which separates our widely disparate views about the coming world order.
As a coda, I want to point my readers to an excellent Other Voices commentary on racialism – ‘Deliberate Turmoil and Chaos at Every Turn’ – by Frank Chuck in the 30sep17 Union. The man does a good job reflecting the political sentiments of many of us in this community, and, I suspect, more multitudes across our country.
