05/11/2015
When I was a kid in the 1960s, blacks were constantly portrayed in the media as confidently innovating, moving forward, inventing new styles, trying out new roles.
Today, the media portrays blacks as timid, fearful, weighed down by the burdens of centuries, under the control of past ages’ injustices, living museum relics unable to move under their own volition, a race caught hopelessly in a malign web spun hundreds (but not thousands!) of years ago.
For example, NYT columnist Charles Blow writes:
Of Museums and Racial Relics MAY 11, 2015What a brilliant new idea! It’s too, too tragic that never until 2015 did it ever dawn on any museum to engage in outreach to today’s youth via the school system.Recently, Rush Limbaugh lambasted the first lady, Michelle Obama, for bringing up the idea of diversity among museum visitors at the opening of the new Whitney Museum in New York.
According to Limbaugh, the first lady said: “Museums and concert halls just don’t welcome nonwhite visitors — especially children — the way they welcome white people.”
What the first lady actually said was:
“You see, there are so many kids in this country who look at places like museums and concert halls and other cultural centers and they think to themselves, well, that’s not a place for me, for someone who looks like me, for someone who comes from my neighborhood. In fact, I guarantee you that right now, there are kids living less than a mile from here who would never in a million years dream that they would be welcome in this museum.”
Then, she went on to laud the Whitney for its efforts at inclusion and diversity: “And with this inaugural exhibition, the Whitney is really sending the same message to young people and to people of every background across this country. You’re telling them that their story is part of the American story, and that they deserve to be seen. And you’re sending that message not just with the art you display, but with the educational programming you run here. You’re reaching out to kids from all backgrounds, exposing them to the arts, showing them that they have something to contribute.”
… A 2010 report by the Center for the Future of Museums (an initiative of the American Association of Museums) found that:So, if I’m reading this right, it implies that our culture should try to desensitize African-Americans to perceptions of stereotypes and racism. But I must be reading this wrong because it sure sounds like the Great and the Good have been trying hard to do the opposite.“African-Americans and Latinos have notably lower rates of museum attendance than white Americans. Why is that so? In part, it is the legacy of historic discrimination. A summary study of S.P.P.A. [Survey of Public Participation in the Arts] data from the 1980s on white and black attendance at arts events concluded that the measurable difference in participation could be tied to ‘subtle forms of exclusion.’ “
The report cited data that shows “historic patterns of segregation and exclusion as one reason that fewer African-American families instill museum-going habits in their young children. More recent studies have identified a distinct cultural psychology among African-Americans, rooted in historical and social experience, which has produced heightened sensitivity to stereotypes and real or perceived racism.”
… And this isn’t only Limbaugh’s view. This is the view of many Americans, whether they tune in to Limbaugh or not.Obama’s sin, using this line of logic, is that he failed to undo the system of oppression that he had no hand in constructing. It is that 400 years of damage was not undone in two terms. It is that he didn’t encourage silence about inequity so that its benefactors could enjoy the cumulative fruit of centuries of racial graft without current-day guilt.
They wanted some mythical receipt of satisfaction of the debt. Let bygones be bygones. All is forgotten and forgiven. Clean slate. Fresh start.
If only it were that simple. But it’s not. This whole line of reasoning is racial claptrap.
… America must face the fact that the electorate is an of-the-moment entity, but racial oppression is an of-the-ages monstrosity. It is a resilient relic. And it was never within Obama’s capacity to dismantle it. This structure must be demolished by its architects.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.