A few words on “reverse racism”

I’ve been watching all this crazy shit with the cop and the cranky professor and waiting for it to blow over and so far, I haven’t had any luck. On and on it goes…

And I’ve watched the clip-jobs of the various dopes, mostly on Fox News, making a big noise about “reverse racism” and it gave me pause.

What if they’re right, I thought? Even though they’re on Fox News and the subject is civil liberties?

On the Broken Clock theory, I decided to give it a little bit of honest consideration.

And what I decided was, what the right-wingers are calling ‘reverse racism’ looks more to me like justifiable resentment and a reasonable level of paranoia that proceeds directly from several hundred years of black human beings being bought and sold like livestock in this country followed by another hundred-plus of winking Jim Crow civil rights abuses. America didn’t get serious about Reconstruction until the nineteen-sixties for God’s sake! A hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation that was supposed to have freed them.

Hey hey, LBJ, how many dreams did you fulfill today? And it still cost his party the South for two generations...

And that was only 40 years ago, when progress actually began (based on my awareness of teacher Pete Dixon as a mentor figure on “Room 222” in 1969), measured against 400 or so preceding years of institutional, codified slavery. Relative to the amount of time the black man has spent under the white man’s thumb, really, their journey to full equality is only just beginning. And Professor Gates is old enough to remember a time before MLK and LBJ, when ‘equal justice for all’ was just a phrase they carved into courthouse walls and nickel souvenirs.

To accept the theory of reverse racism as proposed on Fox, one would have to be ignorant of or shrug off the entire back-story of civil rights in America and assume that when we woke up this morning, black people and white people were on an equal playing field and always had been.

But the sad truth that this latest incident illustrates is that in America today, even with an African-American in the White House, a black man confronted in his own house by a white cop still has damned reasonable grounds to fear for his safety. Prof. Gates should have had more sense than to backtalk the cop, oh yes. I’m a middle-aged, law-abiding white male and if I found a cop in my house, day or night, the last thing I’d do would be to get all up in his face. But the professor had locked himself out of his own damned house; if you’ve ever done that, you know how hot under the collar he must have been. Not an excuse, but it should have been a consideration, especially to a responding cop who specialized in racial sensitivity training. The irate, feeble old fart giving him shit was clearly not a threat to anything more than this officer’s ego. How was he to know this particular uppity negro was personal pals with the Prez?

I agree with the conventional wisdom that it was a “my-bad” situation on the part of both gentlemen, the perfect example of two wrongs once again failing to make a right. But those are just the details, not really the issue.

The issue as I see it is, by flogging the notion of ‘reverse racism,’ its proponents seem to be asserting that there is only one proper kind of racism; that it runs only in one direction, from white to black, and as a white man myself, I find this construct outrageous and insulting on its face! Since when did the American White Person get the exclusive franchise on racism? The term – reverse racism – in itself is racist.

Racism, like the gay pride flag, comes in all colors. If you hate somebody else solely based of the color of their skin or their ethnic heritage or religious affiliation or sexual orientation, you’re a Goddamned racist whether you’re white, black, yellow, red or pin-striped. There’s nothing reverse about it except the screwed-up direction of your thinking.