Sultan Knish
Ever since the Civil Rights movement became a "Grand Myth", the 20th
Century equivalent of wagon trains headed West and the Minutemen at
Concord, an activity so redolent of national values that it becomes a
metaphor for what being American is, every generation has been given its
marching orders to fight for a new equality.
Fighting against inequality requires inequality in the same way that Manifest Destiny needed land
area to work. It becomes harder to spread out once you've hit the
Pacific Ocean. Fighting for civil rights becomes a struggle when
everyone has the right to vote, drink from water fountains and do
everything else.
After that it's all imaginary territory. You aren't really expanding the
borders; you're just paving over swamps, slopping split level housing
all over them and pretending that the next lawsuit over racial profiling
or the article over pay inequities is just like those people in the
black-and-white photos marching at Selma.
Racism is a resource and like every other resource, it's in danger of
running out. We hit Peak Racism decades ago. Peak Sexism peaked even
earlier. Even Peak Homophobia peaked a while back. The cool kids are
trying to push Islamophobia while peddling worn copies of Edward Said's
Orientalism that the campus book store refuses to buy back at more than
10% of the sale price, but once you get past the keffiyahs and a 10
year-old photo of what looks like a guy in black Klanwear in Iraq,
(which looks like the world's most confusing hate crime), the calm waves
of the Pacific Ocean are there telling you that maybe it's time to put
away that thesis on "Othering in The Simpsons" and enjoy your job as
Director of Sensitivity Innovations in the Department of Human
Resources.
Fighting for equality stopped making sense when everyone became legally
equal. Bringing back the word for a battle over gay marriage was
refreshing after it had to be buried for so long during the long march
through affirmative action and all sorts of positive discrimination
gimmicks. But that's just a blip on the radar.
Equality stopped being the issue before most of the people fighting
inequality today on a professional basis were even born. Instead the
issue became carving out niches of inequality that would preserve
"inequality safaris" for the edification and lawsuits of future
generations.
Bigotry is too prized a resource to just watch it drain away in some
communal pool of brotherhood and sisterhood. The only thing to do is to
find ways to dam it up and create national parks of bigotry that will
allow future generations of civil rights warriors to rough it by camping
out under the burning crosses while admiring themselves for their
artificial courage in defense of a manufactured cause.
So instead of equality, there's diversity that opens up a door for a
select few while closing the door for everyone else. Instead of merit
hiring, there's quota hiring. That means one black guy in the boardroom,
one Asian woman at the meeting and one Latino guy in the White House.
(And the GOP, knowing the stats, and having missed out on the black guy,
wants it to be their guy.) And that's all you get.
The quota can be increased. There can be two of each in the boardroom.
Or four of each. The numbers don't really matter. What matters is that
there's a quota. Instead of bringing in people because they can do the
job; they are brought in as representatives of their race, sex and
creed.
Affirmative action doesn't combat the glass ceiling. It is the glass
ceiling. Once the quota has been met, it's been met. The great goddess
of diversity on her pedestal of Made-in-China plastic has been appeased
with an offering of a multiracial photo that represents the fabric of
diversity. Next year there will be another offering, but that's it for
now. And it's all white guys from here on in.
The white guys will talk about diversity and the importance of bringing
in new voices and points of view. They'll even hire someone to help them
fill the quotas, whose primary purpose is to keep other white guy
competitors out of the boardroom. But when the quotas are full, then
they are full.
Diversity creates a wonderful snafu in which there can be a black guy in
the White House and double digit unemployment for other black guys.
Sorry guys, the quota has been filled. There can only be one Obama.
Everyone else is out of luck.
The double vision isn't accidental. It looks equal, but it's not. The
game is rigged and diversity rigged it. And there's plenty to be angry
about for everyone because in a rigged game everyone has just cause to
be angry; except the people on whose behalf the game has been rigged.
And those people aren't white people or black people. They are the
people that the system uses to perpetuate itself.
The system isn't white power or black power. It's just the system. It's a
bunch of white guys who despise the South and wish they had a black
friend, deciding which black guy to use for their diversity quota.
They're doing it for the same reason that they display books they never
read and invite interesting people over for boring dinner parties.
Because it makes them seem smart. Because it makes them feel like
something more than the overseers of the same repressive dreary system
that exists to implement unfairness for the benefit of a few.
Black people are interesting, the white guys think, Asians aren't.
Besides the Asians are more threatening because they can compete with
all those white kids in retro black framed glasses. They are what the
Jews were a few generations ago. And the quota stick is good for them
too. But everyone gets hit with the quota stick by the system. Except
those who are truly inside the system.
So the system can fight endlessly for equality without ever coming close
to achieving it because the struggle is the thing that is in the way.
Generations of liberals defined themselves by civil rights and visit a
civil rights theme park called the Federal Government to let them
re-experience the sense of meaningful activity that they can otherwise
only derive from kicking some money over to Microfinance after reading
inspirational stories about poverty in India. And they created racism
reservations that let them experience it over and over again.
Previous American generations wondered what they would do at the passing
of the generation of the Founding Fathers. (It took a while considering
that Jefferson and Adams died in 1826.) But by then there was a new
generation of heroes who exemplified the courage and perseverance of the
American spirit. And when the British sailed away for the last time and
the Indians settled down building skyscrapers and casinos and the sun
set on the Pacific Ocean, those virtues became harder to recapture.
Modern American liberals never really have this worry. Civil rights
marches are never going anywhere. Neither are sloppy disorganized
concerts full of overrated bands. Or essays blaming everything wrong
with society on your parents.
The Sixties are never going away. They are the establishment. The people
responsible for that mess run everything and arranged society so that
you can experience their social failure over and over again. Racism and
the fight against it is one of the things that they want you to
experience, so you will experience it again and again, as they create
and destroy racism like some strange racist gods.
Bigotry is always a problem. The problem is maintained so that it can be
fought endlessly in the Creation Myth of the New America. Imagine if
the Redcoats were kept around in Boston just so that people could throw
things at them or the Sioux were paid to ride out scalping every few
years. But we don't have that. Instead we have Jesse Jackson or Al
Sharpton showing up to protest against something or other, while the
NAACP compares Struggle X to the Civil Rights movement.
Congressman John Lewis, who on the day when he can no longer stumble
forth to mumble something about his time fighting for civil rights, will
have to be stuffed as a mummy and wheeled around to meetings organized
by white guys in retro glasses who want to experience what their
grandfathers felt when marching along the street in Alabama or
Mississippi, serves the same purpose as Buffalo Bill's traveling
exhibition did. He's there to remind us all of something that no longer
exists.
Finding bigotry to fight takes work. The tar sands of bigotry have to be
mined in an exhausting process to uncover new forms of bigotry. Bigotry
is no longer a fact, but an attitude. It is proven not by its presence,
but its absence. The lack of diversity is proof of bigotry. The
presence of diversity is proof of white privilege. Everything has to be
unpacked and peered at under a microscope to find that precious element
of hate that fuels the liberal machine.
Bigotry is no longer about what you do, but how other people feel about
it. Discrimination is not about opportunity, but about feelings. Finally
it is revealed that bigotry is present everywhere. It is a quality that
pervades every economic and interpersonal interaction. As some
feminists insisted that all heterosexual sex is rape, so the new
theorists of white privilege insist that any interracial interaction is
inherently racist.
And when racism and sexism alone aren't enough, there are always new
discriminated groups being discovered by the post-apocalyptic civil
rights warriors of tomorrow. If Jesse Jackson bleating sonorously about
the time someone stole his sandwich bores you, try gay rights. Put an
equal sign on your Facebook profile and you're a civil rights hero. And
if old gay men stage-kissing for the front page of your
soon-to-be-out-of-business local weekly bores you, try trannies. Men who
pretend to be women persecuted by refusing to take their pretense
seriously. It's just like Selma, if Martin Luther King had been more
like J. Edgar Hoover. And there's always your friendly neighborhood
Muslim who gets unfriendly stares at the airport when he begins
screaming "Allah Akbar" when asked if he's visiting from Pakistan on
business or pleasure.
And when not a smidgen of bigotry exists to be colonized, there's always the imaginary territory.
There's a reason that Science Fiction and comic books began to really
take off as a generation weaned on cowboy role grasped that the West was
gone. The cowboy movie lingered on, but then it went away and what
replaced it are big shiny spectacles full of other worlds and
superpowers. Who needs to be a cowboy when you can fly to other galaxies
or see through walls. And who needs to fight real racism when you can
expose the inherent stereotypes in Oklahoma (either the musical or the
state will do) in your latest biting blog post about racism, patriarchy
and heteronormatism/marchy.
The civil rights movement is dead. In place of any real urge for
equality is a determination to perpetuate inequality in order to keep
the movement going. It's as if everyone wanted to keep the great feeling
of winning WW2 alive by landing at Normandy, shelling random tourists
and then invading Paris to liberate it from the Nazis while refusing to
listen to the Parisians when they insist that the Nazi armies are long
gone and all that's left are a bunch of skinheads listening to bad
music.
Inequality in the name of equality has become an institution. It has
become the institution that justifies all the other institutions of
government and academia. If discrimination ever disappeared beyond the
ability of modern eight-wave bigotry researchers to discover it in
episodes of classic television shows and random interracial
interactions, then the entire modern state would simply collapse.
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