This is remarkable and reveals 1) the depth of harm done by liberalsociety to ours, 2) how the significance of political theory gives wayto race and ethnicity…, and 3) the intractable nature of this mindset.
Yesterday I began watching Craig Bodeker’s DVD, A Conversation about Race (previously discussed here),but had to stop half way through due to technical problems. I had neverheard of Bodeker before the DVD came out. It is exceptional, andexactly what’s needed. It takes us into the heart of the contemporaryliberal psychology like nothing I’ve seen.
The moment that most strikesme so far is when a young, pretty white woman is asked to give anexample of the racism that according to her is everywhere in oursociety.
She says that sometimes when she is around black people whoare being loud, she thinks to herself that black people are loud. Butthen she realizes that her objection to loudness is just a part of the”white culture,” the white racist culture in which she has grown up andwhich she must battle against.When she said this, I felt I was hearing something new, or at leastunderstanding something familiar in a new light. It is of course astaple of modern liberalism that we must overcome our “stereotypes”about black people and other minorities. For example, if we think thatblacks are generally less intelligent or more disorderly or more loud,those are racist “stereotypes” that we must identify and root out ofour mind. But what this young woman was saying went beyond that. Shewas saying that the objection to loudness is itself a racist idea that she needs to root out of her mind.Her underlying reasoning goes like this: because she objects toloudness, and because blacks tend to be loud, the dislike of loudnessis a racist feeling and must be eliminated. Which further means that any common standard of white people, anynormal criterion of goodness or excellence in our society in whichblacks on average happen to be deficient, is by that very fact racistand to be spurned.