CSotD: Same old same old is getting really old
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Keith Knight addresses the plight of the Oppressed White Man, deprived of his civil rights by, well, the rise of civil rights over the past half-century.
Which is to say most of the whiners weren't even born when their right to be ignorant was revoked.
Or at least watered-down by being shared. Today, thanks to the progress we've made as a society, there are ignorant people of all races in America, and your right to be a damn fool is not restricted by race, creed or color.
But here's the deal: The emerging white ignoranti not only, as Keefe points out, still enjoy plenty of race-based advantages in society, but, as I'm pointing out, have a lot more celebrity trolls to stir up their sense of entitlement.
You can kind of tell this by the fact that they invariably cite the Rev. Al Sharpton, who is certainly a fame vampire, and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who has been pretty quiet of late.
After pulling out that one obvious active over-reacher and that one who is only being dragged in because they know his name, they pretty much run out of prominent black people to whine about. Beyond B. Hussein Obama, of course, but they're pretty careful to keep their public complaints about him centered on his Muslim communist beliefs and not the fact that the new sheriff is a ni …
Unless you consider the comments section of any website "public," in which case his race and his wife's race are not only fair game but a deliberate insult to white people that must be redressed. Let's get back to that in a minute.
I liked Keefe's commentary today in part because I can identify in a small way with the daily injustices and petty insults of being in a target group: For a brief period 40 years ago, the way I dressed and wore my hair meant that I could pass 200 people on the street with no hassle, but the 201st would call me a dirty name and ruin the day.
And while most law enforcement officers were professional, there were some fools who would pull you over for a ridiculous infraction or hassle you on the street for being on the street.
And, yes, I knew long-haired people who were jailed, beaten and, in one case, murdered for petty misdemeanors and violations or for no offenses at all beyond the way they looked.
The difference was, if we cut our hair, it pretty much ended the abuse.
This is not a solution available to those endowed by their creator with an abundance of melanin, and no matter how clean-cut and respectable they are, they still face the same-old-same-old.
For instance, in 2006, a soft-spoken, six-year veteran of the Houston Texans got pulled over by police, Tasered and arrested. Charges were later dropped when the judge ruled there had been no probable cause, but someone with less self-discipline might not have made the judge's ruling so easy.
And Texans fans were infuriated again when another Texans player was stopped by police three years later and held at gunpoint for not having his insurance card.
What these young men had in common that was relevant to their situations was not that they played football for the Houston Texans. That was just the thing they had in common that got them apologies.
Yes, people with resources know how to get results. For instance, Denny's paid a hefty fine for failure to notice that the six black men they were mistreating happened to be Secret Service officers who not only knew the law but knew how to file an effective complaint.
And the family referred to in the final panel of Knight's cartoon, while they weren't prominent NFL players or Secret Service operatives, at least took their complaint to Facebook where corporate stonewalling isn't quite as easy.
How many times does this happen to people who are not NFL players or law officers or at least resourceful enough to get the kind of attention required to get an apology?
And why should "getting an apology" be the goal?
It's not. And if you think having charges dropped or winning a lawsuit or getting an apology fixes the situation, you just don't get it.
Which is the point of the cartoon. The whining by Oppressed White Men is offensive, because it isn't even marginally sincere, unless they are as stupid as they sound.
And nobody could be as stupid as they sound.
But let's get back to that point about the half-shielded racist comments on news sites, the ones that talk about "Obummer" and make racist comments about him and his wife, as well as the ones that bring up purported racial grievances and wonder aloud why Al Sharpton doesn't protest black-on-white violence.
They speak with the same reasonable, polite, stilted faux-dignity of drunken talk show callers, but for all their pose of being logical and analytical, they never come up with an actual example in which a black person killed a white person and was not charged or even investigated beyond a few questions, which is what the Trayvon Martin case was about.
Or they explain away that failure to investigate by resurrecting the time a quarter century ago that Sharpton and others were dragged into the case of a girl who made up a story to avoid a beating from her abusive stepfather, but conveniently forget all the other well-publicized cases in which race prejudice was used in hoaxes, either to cover up murders or simply to provide alibis, and the imaginary perpetrators were black.
Or they simply are racists and happy to use the shelter of Internet anonymity to spew their idiot toxin.
The fact that overtly racist websites exist is a price we pay for a free press, and, disgusting as they may be, the cure would be worse than the disease.
But there's no reason for major news organizations to allow this garbage to appear on their sites, even if they do wash their hands like Pilate, all the time weeping over how hard it is to keep comments responsible and civil.
Their negligence and complicity perpetuates the daily drip-drip-drip of hostile racism that keeps our society polluted and encourages the worst behavior of our worst members.
And leaves talented cartoonists like Keith Knight addressing an issue that should not exist, instead of providing laffs over the less destructive aspects of life.
And, along those same lines, here's Cory Thomas's damn cartoon again. Gosh, its humor never goes out of date!
And I won't stop posting it until it does.
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