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Conservatives, on the other hand, have jumped hard on this bandwagon. For the first time in a long time, they have the opportunity to claim that THEY, not the liberals, are carrying on the work of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Junior. After all, didn't Martin call for racial neutrality...a color-blind society? The cleverly worded proposition 209, by avoiding loaded terminology like "affirmative action" or "racial setasides," manages to call for the very same thing. An initiative in Texas, failing to sidestep the very same pitfall...using the term "affirmative action," which carries a positive loading, especially among self proclaimed blacks and liberals...narrowly lost. My view of "affirmative action" is best summed up in another earlier column, Please give a poor dumb nigger a job..., September 9, 1996, which uses the case of Clarence Thomas to make my point...that Clarence Thomas isn't a member of the highest court in the land, but just another incompetent nigger who couldn't make it on his own...ask any liberal.

D'Souza really has but a single idea...but a wonderfully clear and simple idea best expressed as a question. How can we eliminate racial discrimination by discriminating by race? Like D'Souza, I too really have said almost everything I have to say on the subject of racism in the title of this column. But the damn issue just WON'T go away. There are still too many people whose careers depend upon the continuation of this horrible legacy of American slavery. African American liberal scholars are quick to "point out" that racism is about power, not prejudice. This was the definition...for that is all it is, a definition of the word "racism," even though, to most people, racism and prejudice are synonymous...that was used to argue that "black" people couldn't be racist, since they had no power. Well, that was certainly true during slavery and vestiges remain to this day of powerlessness traceable to color of skin. However, in this era of Colin Powell, Clarence Thomas, Willy Brown, et al, not to mention the embarrassing success of Asian Americans in all walks of life, it is getting increasingly difficult to make this dog hunt.

But, yet, if anything, the "problem" of racism is becoming MORE, not less, of an issue, the more numerous and powerful non-whites are becoming in our society. This seems contradictory, until you hark back to the "racism EQUALS power" equation.

It isn't that African Americans and Asian Americans haven't ALWAYS been as prejudiced as European Americans. It's just that, when they were sucking hind titty of the Nanny State, they lacked the power to be truly racist and had to keep their prejudices to themselves. Now, however, they suffer no such restraint. The major media LUST for controversial persons of all shades of skin color to come aboard and vent their racist blather. IT UPS RATINGS!

A similar thing has occurred in the feminist arena. Since women constitute a majority of this (and all) societies, feminism has never been about majority oppression or even genetics. It was always, and remains to this day, about POWER. When men and women had clearly defined roles...in the good old days worshipped by the religious right...it wasn't that the two genders weren't "equal in the eyes of the law"...they have been since women gained the right to vote...it's just that men were a "little more equal" than women. Society then viewed the man as "head of the household" in which "final decision making power" resided. Again, the gender reactionaries, represented most accurately these days by the Promise Keepers, would like to return to those "good old days," when everyone knew his or her place in the grand scheme of things.

As if! Just as the days of Jim Crow are over, the days of assumed male superiority are gone, gone, gone! With power becoming ever more distributed among men and women and people of all ethnic backgrounds...in the world as well as in the U.S....the arguments about prejudice are becoming ever more strident precisely because the formerly disadvantaged have a bigger slice of the pie. The bigots among those formerly disadvantaged groups now have free rein to vent their frustrations.

So, what's my recommendation? Well, if you are a non-white individual or feminine or both, by all means, use every advantage you can scrape up to get ahead. If it suits your temperament (and works for you), by all means shout "racism!" or "sexism!"...or both...every time someone tells an off color joke (pun intended) or casts aspersions on your anatomy. However, be prepared, as individuals, to get the SAME TREATMENT back from the formerly advantaged. Just as power frees you to exercise YOUR right to be bigoted and stupid, your exercising it sanctions the behavior of those who always had it...as their "birthright." The same goes for organizations who advocate the advancement of one group or another. Go to it! But, expect to get back exactly what you give...prejudice and discrimination.

As for the government, what can I say? The government is supposed to be a fair arbiter...a referee...not an advocate of any but UNIVERSALLY accepted truths. This is a very narrow mandate, crystallized in our constitution. Whenever it has mistakenly attempted to be an advocate, it has generally done a really horseshit job.

So, get your ass out of it, politicians. By hollering and fussing about the "racial problem," you are just making a bad situation worse. But, then, that's what you have always done, isn't it?

I wish to end with a little personal story. On of my sons is "mixed race," half "black," half "white." When he was ten years old, he lived with me in an entirely African American neighborhood in Washington, D.C.. I had taken him there precisely to get him in touch with his "black roots," in retrospect, a very, very stupid act on my part. For, he had a terrible time. He spoke no Ebonics. He was totally unaccustomed to black ghetto culture. He was heavily discriminated against by the other kids. When, after six months, I finally allowed him to return home to live with his mother again, he asked me plaintively, "Why am in black, instead of white?" Why, indeed?

Talk to you later...

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