“I am calling bullshit on the fact that the same people that are stretching red tape across bureaucratic processes such as child-support modifications, and family reunification, and section 8 vouchers, and long-term affordable housing, and health-care benefits, and expungements are the same people that are drawing white chalk marks around young black bodies. I am calling bullshit on the irrelevance of life, impoverished life, black life, lowborn lives. I will not be your scapegoat, and my brothers and sisters and sons and uncles will not be the kid in your basement. “
Rumpus contributor Melissa Chadburnhas a very powerful essay at Dame Magazine in response to the “Stand Your Ground” law, Jerry Seinfeld’s post-racial America, the cost of privilege, the murders of innocent black youth, and what it means to leave Omelas.
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Of course “racial neutrality” is a myth! Critics of angry, race-on-the-brain resentment-vendors like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Al Sharpton, Eric Holder, and now Melissa Chadburn, have long known that the self-appointed mandarins of the identity-politics grievance industry cannot ever afford to surrender their shopworn raisons d’etre, and that occasional paeans to post-racial harmony were never anything but lip service from those who wallow in perpetual-victimhood pathologies and batten on oppression-theory sanctimony. The shouts of “racial injustice” grow ever more reflexive and shrill as objective racism-based justifications for those complaints grow ever more remote in the wake of fifty years of concerted ameliorative Great Society outreach and an America in 2014 that simply does not tolerate invidious racism.
Sadly for all Americans, most of the fruits of modern America’s profound social, cultural, and political progress have been squandered by irresponsible civil-rights “leaders” and their establishment-progressive enablers, with their own vested interests in convincing especially young men of color that a sinister, corrupted “system” continues to conspire against them just for the sake of it. The predictable results are widespread anomie, nihilism, and self-righteously anti-social behavior, before legitimate opportunity is ever tested. Worst of all is the perversely self-defeating rejection of traditional educational, familial, and vocational accountability as somehow irrelevant and inauthentic for tragically put-upon members of “oppressed” victim-classes. In 2014, unlike in 1964, most of the wounds suffered by communities of color are self-inflicted.
I humbly accept my previous comment’s deletion in the service of conformist progressive public morality. I realize now that when a Rumpus writer says she is “calling bullshit” on those with whom she angrily disagrees on important social and political issues, we have us a “powerful essay”. When a member of the political opposition calls bullshit on her, on the other hand, and absent the anger, we apparently have us an impermissibly “mean, destructive or harassing” comment, per The Rumpus’ comments-deletion policy.
It is my own fault that I sometimes take words at face value. “The Rumpus is a place where people come to be themselves through their writing”, this site’s front-page welcome message breathlessly announces. Contributors and commenters come here to “speak their minds” with “passion”, and in the most “authentic way they know how”. I should have known, and it should go without saying, that the foregoing should only apply to the comments of Decent People, to wit, those who toe the doctrinaire liberal line.
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