“You lie, boy!” These are the words that New York Times op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd heard escape Rep. Joe Wilson’s mouth during his disruption of President Obama’s September 10th address to Congress. Dowd’s interpretation characterized a string of similar columns produced by left-leaning news organizations (aka main stream media) that criticized the North Carolina Republican representative. Facetiously adding the word “boy,” Dowd expressed that Wilson’s outburst was a common exhibition of racial prejudice.
“Wilson clearly did not like being lectured and even rebuked by the brainy black president presiding over the majestic chamber,” wrote Dowd in her September 12th column. “I’ve been loath to admit that the shrieking lunacy of the summer — the frantic efforts to paint our first black president as the Other, a foreigner, socialist, fascist, Marxist, racist, Commie, Nazi; a cad who would snuff old people; a snake who would indoctrinate kids — had much to do with race.”
Dowd is not alone in her suspicion of a racial conspiracy directed at President Obama. During an NBC interview, former president Jimmy Carter insisted that “an overwhelming portion” of the opposition to Obama is racist.
After the joint session of Congress, Representative Hank Johnson D-Ga stated that he believed Wilson’s comment “instigated more racist sentiment feeling,” and also made the prediction that “we’ll probably have folks putting on white hoods and white uniforms again riding through the country side intimidating people.”
Of course there is no questioning that a level of racism exists in every society to some degree. But have the accusations of racism become far too overblown, specifically by journalism and political careerists, who stand to benefit the most from making racially invigorated sentiments?
On the front page of Newsweek last week featured a close up of a very innocent looking blue-eyed Caucasian toddler with the headline reading “Is your baby racist?” The article explores a study conducted by Phylis Katz that found that “babies will stare significantly longer at photographs of faces that are a different race from their parents.” From a social science perspective, the study discovered no intrinsic racism trait in babies, yet Katz somehow deduces that parents ought to work hard to ‘counter-program’ their children (even children under 6 months old) against racial stereotypes.
This sort of politically formulated aggrandized, race-based hysteria is disgustingly prevalent in American mass media today. While making racial allegations, it seems the temptation to be sensational outweighs the temptation to practice prudent deliberation. And this serves only to divide a country which currently faces more problems than the number of sand grains on its sea shores.
Public education does not shy away from divulging the atrocities of past government sanctioned slavery and segregation laws. And for good reason. But those who spread such material have the luxury of a few generations to distance them from any real form of prosecution. The same can be said of modern civil rights activists and leaders of race-centered suffrage movements. Their righteous actions cannot be equated with the righteous actions of those who truly did face prosecution for black liberty. And the lack of sacrifice, which is often a key ingredient in the advancement of civil liberty, allows opportunists to deliberately weaponize racism, using it as a tool for personal gain with absolutely zero negative consequences.
Most Americans understand the concept of racial opportunism, but few grasp the extent at which it has become regularly conducted in a racially supercharged post-segregation America. Should this sociological travesty continue to forebode the practice of truly innocent free speech, we may find ourselves traveling back in time, repeating an era in which the reality of racial prejudice sprouted a civil war.
