BreakPoint Blog
|
Seeing people as people Topics: Arts & Media, Crime & Justice, Demographics, Politics & Government, Racial Issues, Worldview National Review's John Derbyshire was fired this weekend for publishing a racially incindiary column in another magazine -- a column in which he wrote, among other things, that he had taught his children to avoid helping or working for black people. NR's Andrew McCarthy, weighing in on the firing, did a good job explaining why it needed to happen: It is important that research be done, that conclusions not be rigged, and that we are at liberty to speak frankly about what it tells us. But that is not an argument for a priori conclusions about how individual persons ought to be treated in various situations -- or for calculating fear or friendship based on race alone.Elizabeth Scalia, though writing on a different subject altogether -- the Trayvon Martin killing and the inflammatory rhetoric of the press, including NBC's selective editing of the 911 tape -- suggests a solution for the kind of racist thinking Derbyshire displayed: . . . I wonder if part of the press’ problem is that they don’t see human beings, anymore, as individual persons before them; they see identity groups into which persons can be fitted and toward which narratives can be spun, but fixating on identifiers is like not seeing a tree, for the forest. It misses the fact that groups are just individual people, and people — more than anything else in the world — want to know that they — their individual, unique selves — matter; that their loveableness is seen by someone and appreciated. People like Mother Teresa know this instinctively; the rest of us often have to be reminded. . . . |
PRINT
RSS
Comments:
Aside from being distasteful it is illogical as everyone belongs to dozens of categories and so is both oppressed and oppressor.
But, as you say, Gina, I just named individuals.
Derb won a Pyrrhic victory, proving that "the talk" is acceptable only if it comes from a favored race. Primary, though, he showed the end result of godless materialism, how it destroys the cohesion a society needs.
The press, and the opportunistic "leadership" of the black community (who have done little to nothing to help their community, but have exploited them instead), are making the same mistake. They're mixing anecdotes and half-baked statistics in order to divide, for their own selfish purposes. A pity they won't also get fired.