Here’s Morgan Freeman on 60 Minutes:
“Mike Wallace: How are we going to get rid of racism?”
“Morgan Freeman: Stop talking about it.”
Morgan Freeman, the famous Black actor, makes a wise point. Racism--or the perception of it--will never go away as long as people keep obsessing on it, because we see what we want to see.
Many Black people and White liberals refer to what they call systemic, or structural, racism, which they perceive everywhere. They maintain that, until systemic racism is dismantled, there can be no improvement in the lives of Black people, or only marginal improvement. There are many interpretations on how to end systemic racism, to the extent it exists. But in general the progressive answer is to pump money into the Black community by redistributing wealth from, primarily, the White community. We have only to look at our own government in Oakland to see how people like Carroll Fife, Nikki Bas, Sheng Thao, Rebecca Kaplan and the others take this approach—for instance, by trying to defund the Police Department (which they believe is racist) and by keeping it understaffed, and by taking money from other sources (property and business taxes, government grants) and siphoning it into “the community,” through direct payments, anti-violence bureaucracies, homeless services, new racism and equity mandates, and the like.
This gets us back to Morgan Freeman’s“Stop talking about it.” Progressives would respond that we can’t stop talking about racism because that would be like stopping talking about some fatal disease that’s raging through the community. If we don’t talk about it (the way, say, Republicans refused to talk about AIDS in the 1980s), that doesn’t mean the disease goes away. In fact, it rages on unchecked. But “racism” is unlike AIDS. AIDS was and is a scientific reality. Racism is a theory. Yes, there are entire groups—Blacks, Gays, Muslims, Mexicans—that are resented by (primarily) White Christians, but I don’t believe these haters constitute the majority of Americans. Nowhere close. Yet, to hear the racism-mongerers, you’d think that racism is pandemic in America.
Racism-mongering has unintended consequences. For one thing, it irritates a lot of White people. They get tired of being told they’re racist. This leads, understandably, to backlash. People resent the lecturing, the moral posturing. They think, “Wait a minute, I’m not a racist.” But then the progressives tell them they’re racists even if they think they aren’t because of—yes—structural racism. White people, the theory goes, are the problem by dint of the color of their skin. In this reverse racism, they’re guilty due to the unavoidable fact of being born Caucasian. Carroll Fife, Cat Brooks and the others keep reminding them of their collective guilt and of the need to hold them accountable.
There’s another unfortunate consequence of racism-mongering: It convinces some Black Americans that anything bad that happens to them must be due to racism. If a woman is fired from her job, she can always claim it was due to racism. If a bad tenant is evicted, it was due to racism. If a customer feels a store clerk disrespected her, it’s micro-aggression, a subtle form of racism. And on and on. And this, I think, is another reason why Morgan Freeman said “Stop talking about it.”
It all comes down to whether or not you believe in the fundamental decency of most people. I do. I think that, if left alone, people will figure out how to get along together, just as you and I do every day in our neighborhoods and town squares. It’s basic human nature. And in a town like Oakland, where there’s great understanding of how a multi-racial, multi-ethnic community can work, we, the people, can do it. But, for some weird reason, we keep electing these virtue signalers of the Left, who keep stirring things up by telling us that the “root cause” of all of Oakland’s problems is structural racism. Not potholes and decaying infrastructure, not the need for more housing and police, not piles of garbage, not sideshows, not rampant crime, not businesses shutting down, not the middle class fleeing, not dishonest politicians, not the misappropriation of taxpayer dollars, not uncivil individual behavior, not individual responsibility, but structural racism!
Racism-mongering is thus like picking at a scab that wants to heal. But it can’t repair itself, because of the picking. The wound festers on, when the simple reality is that, if the person stopped picking at it, it would heal.
This is what drives so many White people (and Asians) nuts. It’s why the Hills voted for Loren Taylor. People get pissed off and defensive when they’re wrongly accused of being racists. The solution is to stop accusing them. Or, as Morgan Freeman said, “Stop talking about it.”
Sadly, the progressives can’t stop talking about it. But the rest of us can stop listening.
Steve Heimoff