Why Ordering Black Coffee May be Racist – A Redux Part 2

By Patrick Hall

When everything and every event can be slapped with the racist label, the term has lost creditable meaning.  Let’s restate the obvious.  Language about race in Post 1970s America has been set completely adrift, if not neutered, by Liberal Progressives and their primary constituencies, including blacks from all social classes.  Blacks and other groups, who have taken up the moniker of “perpetually aggrieved minority”, had made it almost impossible to have their so-called frank discussion about race.  The biggest impediment fostering a true conversation about race has not been the Klan, Republicans, institutional constructs, or Donald Trump.  It has been blacks, and the growing list of groups and socio-political movements wedded to the Sirens’ call of victimology.

 As a sidebar, a growing segment of the LGBTQ+ Community, or what I like to call the “Victim Chic Posse,” has successfully branded themselves a new oppressed class or “black-folks-lite.”

 The political class, academics within the social sciences, and many liberals who now call themselves Progressives have no incentive nor awareness to change. Racism has been a highly effective political aphrodisiac that has garnered over 90% of the black vote and has made headway into other groups who have discovered the advantages of employing the Persons of Color moniker.
 
Regarding the blacks specifically, they have been misled, if not betrayed, by the very leadership representing them.  For example, the temporal exegesis of the Congressional Black Caucus and the NAACP see blacks as victims. As a people who can only be aided from the outside.  The Great Society Programs of the 1960s began this journey into the cul-de-sac of government dependency and victimology.

Unfortunately, the 1964 Civil Rights Bill became a two-edged sword for many in the Black community. While it delivered more freedom to Black Americans, it did not inculcate attitudes, human capital, and the skills necessary to thrive in freedom.  As pointed out years ago by the late Milton Friedman, freedom is messy, difficult, stressful, and many times capricious.  In his seminal work, Fear and Trembling: The Sickness unto Death, Soren Kierkegaard insinuates that freedom can be a “burden,” if not downright scary.  Up until the 1950s, blacks had very little experience with real freedom.  

Demonstrating the worst historical timing possible, Black leadership after Martin Luther King Jr, pushed an agenda that maximized the victim and or race card, along with the welfare state. It was the low-hanging fruit or soft target of blaming the “other.” In this case, it was the perniciousness of systemic racism. This tragedy established itself within a large segment of the black underclass, poor whites, Latinos, gender feminists, the LGBTQ community, and sadly in certain segments, the newer immigrant populace. What the Democratic Party fully understands and chooses to exploit, and nitwit Republicans still don’t grasp, is this.  Public policy is or has become unimportant in modern-day politics. Many Democrats, especially beginning with the election of the First Black President, clearly understood that public policy was too remote and complicated to create a connection between leaders and the led. What liberal black organizations like the NAACP and Congressional Black Caucus, as well as the militant and very loud in-your-face “Victim Chic Posse” within the LGBTQ+ movement, is that “identity and tribal affiliations matter the most.”

 Values like individual responsibility, delayed gratification, and self-interested hard work are not viewed as the first strategy for improving one’s self.  The concurrent exponential growth in the welfare state since the 1970s made poverty, mediocrity, and wallowing in class envy far too comfortable.  Of course, the political class sold all this under the banner of compassion, social justice, and the Marxist concept of “equity.” Today the socio-political largess and monies maintaining the victim culture blind not only blacks but other groups from seizing the “opportunities” that our culture affords all of its people. In retrospect, the 1964 Civil Rights Bill represented a cultural nexus for black America and other groups.  The political left represented by today’s Democratic/Mediacrat Party chose the road of identity politics and other socio-cultural shiny objects, which continues to impair our ability to see beyond blinders of race or gender.   DEI, CRT, as well as militant LGBTQ+ constituencies are euphemisms for naked, invidious discrimination, deliberately shafting some people based on their skin color, sex, or sexuality. It is nothing more than group-based revenge!