Color-(Pur)blind whiteboys

Samuel Schneider photo

By

Mark W. Jones

‘We shall treat all of our citizens in a colorblind manner.’ This had some appeal to me and it has a spurious public appeal; it seemed to me something Left and Right could agree upon, the uniform application of the Constitution, which is is exactly the public appeal the conservaNazi seizes upon and propagates; ‘we have always treated our Negroes and Chicanos like every other citizen.’ This wallpapers the bare conscience of the average Moron or Sapien with the notion that America is a country that applies justice equally by race as individuals, and if the non-whiteboy Masses cannot succeed financially it is the fault of the Masses.

But this is more than legal fiction; it is the Pathological Lie of conservaNazis, who state that assisting an individual or group of people because of an inherent trait is racist, collectivist and smacks of treating people as tribes, not as individuals. Yet it is not the profoundest of statements to say that Americans, whether politicians and citizens, have never treated minorities in the same manner as whites. It is absurd to request blacks to defer to history because America’s evolution was born of slavery, Reconstruction and Jim Crow and full constitutional rights were not extended to blacks, and then only ostensibly, until the 1960s; or the American Indian, who was hunted down and exterminated like pests to open the American West for the whiteboys. After they killed the fiercest warriors, the government then concocted a scheme in which Indian children were taken away from their parents, tutored in the Superstitionist virtues of Christianity and taught to read and write: this displaced the aboriginal with the upright Christian and effectuated the desired consequences of destroying American Indian culture.

But what is this conviction that every American citizen must (and indeed does!) start out on an equal footing, with no subsidy to the poor nor special deferment to the rich and powerful? This conviction derives from the misperception that being white is not its own entitlement. This explains much of the history of the behavior of American whiteboys; from the clearing of the West, to slavery, Jim Crow, the Bakke decision, to today’s voter disenfranchisement and the Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United decision; whiteboys believe that because they are the majority they are destined to run governments and corporations and even have a duty for whiteboys to do so lest the world goes to hell (and the government go to the Democrats).

The whiteboys and their allies, the conservaNazis, cannot answer the question of why blacks have lower birth rates, mortality rates at birth, earn less than the average whiteboy by $600,000 over a lifetime, have more and serious health problems and die earlier. The Morons and Ideologues of the ReThugliNazi Party blame gov’ment and then advocate more freedom, i.e. Laissez Faire. This is a problem; Laissez-Faire is a projection of the whiteboy’s sense of entitlement, the right of the Rugged Individualist to not be bothered by social problems and be left alone to create his own empire and fantasize that he is the architect Roark. But the average ReThugliNazi whiteboy is an obtuse Moron, thus it does not occur to him that these problems began with slavery and after more than two hundred and thirty years, Laissez-Faire policies have exacerbated the problem; the ReThugliNazi Laissez-Faire policies, constructed for the Rugged Individualist and the Heroic Investor Class, defies social organization except by economics, and as a self enclosed outlook, for it is not a philosophy, is indifferent if not rancorously hostile to real-world suffering because it smashes the conservaNazi belief that Laissez-Faire is not the most moral of all secular human practices.

Please, oh please, let us hear once more from the conservaNazis that the Negro slave must have been better off in South Carolina than in his homeland, he must have been treated better than cattle because he was worth more (the economistic apologetics of conservaNazi Bill Buckley); and the equally patronizing and racist argument from the Reich that subsidies to blacks is tacit acknowledgment of inferiority, which conflates race with the fact of being poor, and prompts whiteboy fear that they will be beaten out of jobs and taxes by those who are takers, who produce nothing and suck up resources. It is the conserverNazi Flock that wishes to suborn the regimen of constitutional rights, replacing it with an economistic “governance” of meritocracy, in which most minorities, blacks the worst, can’t compete in because of lower salaries and lack of wealth accumulation. This is the obvious, transparent and unvarnished truth, which is why the ReThugliNazis cannot comprehend it.

ReThugliNazis will claim that there economistic Laissez-Faire policies are not motivated by racism. Take the ReThugliNazi at his word (!), true, Laissez-Faire is not a racial policy targeted at minorities like apartheid or the Holocaust, it is not an active evil; but in its Rugged Individualist, “let them do” pseudo-ethic Laissez-Faire, like color-blindness, is ahistorical, and must ignore sociological circumstances in order to claim its efficacy. It is the most fun for the Liberal to have when the Rugged Individualist defends Laissez-Faire against racial disparity and classist exclusivity, because this is when you’ll hear the rancor against blacks; from the outright racism of stereotyping blacks as being of low intelligence to a little more nuanced dismissive sneer that the Rugged Individualist wants everyone to join the country club, and if blacks can’t achieve financial success individually or as a group, it is their fault. Both viewpoints demonstrate racial animosity; if this is not racism, it is racism’s neighbor, cousin, brother, twin.

While Laissez-Faire is not outright racist, the ReThugliNazis use it as a tool of racial resentment, which is why the species called conservative has long died out and the ReThugliNazis rampage and scavenge through the landscape searching for other victims to blame and hold up as an example of takers, who suck on the teat of gov’ment and who somehow thwart the creative spirit of the Rugged Individualist. This is because the conservaNazi Rugged Individualist feels extremely proprietary toward the system of Laissez-Faire because deep in his viscera he believes that Laissez-Faire is as close to human perfection as it gets: Don’t Mess with My Heaven. Those who can’t hack it are inferior beings of weak character, no matter who they are.

It just so happens that large numbers of those the ReThugliNazis deem as weak of character are blacks and other minorities; or, to show the obverse side, few blacks and Chicanos have achieved high income brackets as a percentage of population; indeed, both median incomes fall below whiteboys. What the ReThugliNazis are trying to sell the country is the belief (tacit, of course, just as this proposition is unspoken) that blacks and other minorities, the Masses, are indeed less intelligent and this is why they cannot compete in the regimen of Laissez-Faire. If this is not the ReThugliNazi rationale what is the alternative? That poverty and poor living conditions affect the whole of an individual’s life? No, the ReThugliNazi couldn’t believe that, that would be based on fact and data… That would be… Liberal! No, it’s with a nasty indifference that isn’t indifference at all because it is constantly tended to; Laissez-Faire is the Klan hood ReThugliNazi’s use if they are forced to talk about race.

Mark W. Jones

I was born in Detroit, Mich., in 1956 and have resided in Colo. since 1976. I have written one novel, Mr. Green Goes to Town, and am writing a second novel. My short stories and article have appeared in various magazines such as F.O.C. Review, Welter, Dan River Stories, Re:al, in the “Overtime” series chapbook of Workers Write! and, most recently, in several iterations of Conceit. My short story, “Under the Weather,” was selected for inclusion in 2016’s Best New Writing.