The racial self-loathing of white liberals is one bit of evidence that points to the Donald Trump phenomenon. The Los Angeles Times published a breast-beating self-denunciation – Two Minutes of Self-Hate? – by author Jim Grimsley, who insisted against the black president and all other evidence that “I have found that black people are all too aware that progress on racial issues has hardly moved forward at all, while white people are nearly as blind to their racism as ever.”
The headline for this episode of racial climate-change denial was “White Americans are nearly as blind to their racism as ever before.”
White people tell Grimsley other white people are still the racists, and “More than simple anecdotes, these are symptoms of the insanity of white culture and our refusal to understand that racism is part of our makeup — each and every one of us, north, south, east and west — from cradle to grave.”
Racism is apparently the secular version of original sin for white people. The stain cannot be removed. It only be acknowledged. So much for Grimsley, who just last year was celebrated by NPR in a segment titled "How Jim Grimsley Shed His 'Racist' Skin."
This op-ed is a real laboratory specimen of liberalism’s brain on drugs:
White liberals - and I am one - are adept at using these naming and shaming tactics to avoid looking inward. Comfortable in our beliefs, we ignore the fact that we sit inside an ideology of white superiority that gives us enormous advantages even when we mouth the right opinions, trade memes about the awful racist act that one of us committed, and pat ourselves on the back for our sensitivity.
Surrounded by a world that makes it clear that white people are only a minority part of the picture, we nevertheless go on making movies in which nearly everybody is white; we go on nominating white people to win all the best prizes - this year's Oscar nominations offer a glaring case in point - and we continue to write textbooks and develop educational curricula that surround white heroes with halos that throw the achievements of all other people into ghostly relief.
We set aside a month - this month - to oblige ourselves to pay lip service to black history, but what that means for white people is that we take a vacation from history - black history events are for black people, aren't they? The racists are the ones who burn crosses and lynch black people, aren't they?
During one interview on a radio talk show, a two-hour marathon of hard questions about my assertion that a great deal of racism is unconscious and unintended, the host of the show laid into me, stating that, since the system of racism in our country operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week, without mercy or letup, affecting every single black person alive in our country, how could it possibly be unconscious?
I had no answer to offer him, and I understood that once again I had failed to understand the racism that, after decades of awareness, probing and trying to change on my part, is still present in me, active in me and blinding me to its reality.
