Episode 8

1. 
   Keith Kelso permalink

   Great show, guys, but I especially enjoyed the segment on racism. When I was a kid I was told that civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. wanted the color of skin to be completely irrelevant. When I grew up I found that King’s legacy had been hijacked by people like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, who wanted nothing more than to make an issue out of the difference between the color of the skin of people in America.

   Today, it seems, minorities are often trained to be racially minded. That was made clear by “Gates-Gate”: Professor Gates immediately assumed that the police were questioning him because he was black. Because of this race mindset, they tend to vote in blocs based on race issues. (Now, I’m not saying minorities are stupid or can’t think for themselves: white people sometimes vote in blocs, too, but it is rarely based on race; thus, you don’t see data on election day regarding who got the “white vote.”) So they have this mindset that all good black people or all good Hispanic people vote Democrat (illustrated in the Sanchez comment you talked about). When a person breaks off from these groups and decides for himself that Democratic policies are actually hurting minorities, you might think he would be embraced for their courage to stand up for himself. But that is not the case: he will often be shunned by his race and called a traitor. This is the case for Justice Clarence Thomas. If you haven’t, you should read his autobiography My Grandfather’s Son. It has a lot to say about how he was treated as a conservative black person. You should also read this article , written by a conservative, black, junior college student.

   My ultimate point is that we need to move past race. But as long as we give demagogues like Jackson, Sharpton, and the like our attention, it will not happen.Obama was called the “post-racial” president. It is clear now that he is nothing of the sort. But we can rise above racemongers like Jackson, Sharpton, or Sanchez, and truly live as a “post-racial” America.

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