(opinion) Are We Desensitized to Racism?

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Written by Steven Allen Adams

Monday, 26 July 2010 12:28

It seems that every positive step we take towards having honest race discussions something happens that causes us as a nation and state to take two steps back. Steven Allen Adams writes about what needs to be done to get us to all hold hands and sing songs and stuff.

Last night before I went to bed I read an interesting blog post from Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi. In it, Taibbi writes about the obsession with race by both the political right and left.

"There are a hell of a lot of people in this country who enjoy talking about racism way, way too much. This applies to people on both sides of our burgeoning race war, an increasingly unavoidable drag of a phenomenon that is looking now like a very good bet to drench the next 5-10 years of domestic political discourse in cacophonous suckhood."

Taibbi scolds both the Tea Party movement and the NAACP for engaging in what is quickly becoming a really stupid battle over which side is more racist.

"Your average person doesn’t spending hours a day pondering his racial victimhood like this – not unless he enjoys it, and if he enjoys it, he’s an asshole! (Especially if he’s white. If he’s white, the scale of his assholedom is almost incalculable). The Tea Partiers and the Glenn Becks of the world are bad in this respect, but they obviously have some dance partners on the other side now. There’s the NAACP passing a resolution like the Tea Party’s white-whining epidemic is a national emergency, and now there is all this criticism of Obama for being silent on race, as if spending one’s time dealing with the Gulf disaster, two wars, and a financial collapse instead of validating some Fox-generated suburban angst is somehow political malpractice."

We really do obsess with race too much in this country, and no one - NO ONE - uses the term "racism" the way it is supposed to be used. According to the Webster's Dictionary of American English, racism is defined as "a belief or doctrine that one's own race is superior" or "hatred or intolerance of another race or other races."

Based on those above definitions no one that has used the charge of racism against another group has used the word properly. Just because President Obama is black does not mean that is the reason the Tea Party is so angry. There wasn't even a Tea Party until March 2009 when Rick Santelli made a random comment on CNN about how he was going to host a Tea Party. I have been amongst the Tea Parties and they are strange, sometimes scary people, but not racists.

On the other foot, the NAACP isn't being racist either. But I see where they are coming from, because while there are minorities in the Tea Party movement, they are just that: a minority. The Tea Party is a mostly white group and if I were black I'd assume they'd be acting out of racism as well.

Both sides are acting and reacting based on race, but it's not racism. Racism has been thrown around so much over the last two years that I wonder if we can truly pick out a racist. Sure, we can pick out extreme examples, such as the KKK or the original Black Panthers, but the problem is that charge is being thrown at everyday people and it's wrong. "Socialist" and "communist" are also terms thrown around without any real idea what those words means.

We live in an echo chamber disguised as a theater filled with people shouting fire. I fear we're at the point that if a real fire breaks out we'll continue to sit comfortably in our theater seats eating our pop corn complaining about how hot the theater is.

There are so many legitimate issues to criticize each other over. Leave the racism charge for those that truly deserve it.