Why do we need to talk more about race, if race only means skin color? (And it does.)
Holder even admitted in that speech that racial discrimination in America is almost dead. “As a nation we have done a pretty good job in melding the races in the workplace,” he told DOJ employees on the occasion of black history month. “We work with one another, lunch together and, when the event is at the workplace during work hours or shortly thereafter, we socialize with one another fairly well, irrespective of race.”
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That doesn’t sound like cowardice to any rational person. It sounds like harmony. So what’s the big deal, then? What’s with the “nation of cowards” remark?
The civil rights movement to radicals like Holder had little to do with ending discrimination and a lot more to do with using race-baiting as a means of centralizing political power. That explains how Holder can tell DOJ employees that the current racial harmony is nothing more than a “polite, restrained mixing that now passes as meaningful interaction but that accomplishes little.”
Accomplishes “little”?
Yep, that pretty much sums up Holder’s view of the civil rights movement. It accomplished little, Holder says, unless we agitate for a “very legitimate debate about the question of affirmative action.” We’re “cowards,” Holder says, because most Americans are content with equality under the law and racial harmony. And he called on DOJ employees to use “the artificial device that is Black History month [that] is a perfect vehicle for the beginnings of such a dialogue” to agitate on race.
The hook on which Holder hangs his racial agitation agenda is the fact that most people — black and white — still choose to live in neighborhoods where the mean skin pigmentation is similar to their own. He says of the civil rights movement in the 1960s that “it is hard for me to accept that the result of those efforts was to create an America that is more prosperous, more positively race conscious and yet is voluntarily socially segregated.”
Holder gins up the agitators with the assumption that it’s necessarily discriminatory for African-Americans to decide to live in a community that is majority African-American (and for whites to do the same).
The publicly stated purpose of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s was for African-Americans to be able to eat, work, and live wherever they wanted for whatever reason they wanted. They wanted freedom and equality under the law. But not everyone involved with the civil rights movement supported these goals. Manning Johnson was a participant in the civil rights movement as well as a 10-year member of the Communist Party, USA, which attempted to exploit and misdirect the civil rights movement as a means of agitating and dividing the American people. Johnson, an African-American, broke with the Communist Party and its agitation and noted that the goal of Moscow was to divide on the basis of race as a means of seizing political power.
Johnson stressed in his classic book on civil rights, Color, Communism and Common Sense, that having people of a certain ethnic group settle together is not necessarily racist:
Some people describe New York City as a “melting pot.” At best, this is only wishful thinking. The numerous racial and national groups are as easily identified today as ever. The geographical areas where each group settled or resettled remains. Thus, there are in New York German sections, Italian sections, Irish sections, Jewish sections, Puerto Rican sections, Chinese sections, Negro sections, etc. In short, there may be found as many sections as there are national groups or races. National, social, cultural, linguistic, religious and other common factors effect this sectional cleavage. Parades and gala affairs in national costumes are not uncommon. The same may be said of every part of our country. Though these national, racial and religious differences divide them like five fingers on the hand, yet they are one solid fist as Americans…. Negroes band together in sections like other races and national groups much for the same reasons. Like other racial and national groups, they can buy land, build communities, settle in any section of the country. Like other racial and national groups, they can make their sections as nice and attractive as possible. The maximum business, cultural, sanitary and social services are within their reach as with other groups.
The Communists, through propaganda, have sold a number of Negro intellectuals the idea that the Negro section is a ghetto; that white Americans created it, set its geographical boundaries; that it is the product of race hate and the inhumanity of white Americans. Therefore, it is a struggle of Negro against “white oppressors” for emancipation.
Naturally, those holding such views have no community pride, no interest in doing anything to improve its services because that would be aiding and abetting ‘segregation’ and maintenance of the ‘ghetto.’”
The view expressed by Holder represents the latest “seedy undercurrent” of this distorted view of civil rights, which has nothing to do with true freedom equality under the law. His agitation would lead to less racial harmony, more excuses for individuals of all racial groups not to improve their neighborhoods and personal lives, and a much more powerful government.
Photo: AP Images
