Justifiable Bigotry

Yahoo has an article on Tarantino's new movie about slavery.  So what else can that mean other than that we can see lots of comments from bigots complaining about how bigoted black people are, as their big excuse for acting racist towards black people?

The angle here is that black people are supposedly still extremely upset about slavery, and use that as their excuse for being lazy, stupid, and hating white people.  Oddly, I guess I don't hang around many black people, as I have yet to hear them use slavery as a reason for what's keeping them down.  When I hear about the problems facing black people, it's more about poor education and discrimination; not slavery.

Yet there are apparently lots of white people who will insist that black people are blaming slavery for their problems, and since that's ludicrous, they use that to show how ludicrous all black people are.  And so you can read comments about how Jamie Fox is a black racist who hates white people, as evidenced by him agreeing to be in a white guy's movie involving slavery.  My theory, on the other hand, is that Jamie Fox is a bad ass who is superior to these racist morons in every way, and it bugs the hell out of them.  After all, Fox is a black man, which means he's supposed to be stupid and lazy.  How dare he use his stupid laziness to be such a huge success!

And what's so weird is that these people are conscious enough about the problems of racism that they know they can't be outright racist.  But...if they can convince themselves that black people were racist to them first, then it's completely ok to attack all black people for doing this to them; unaware that this is still racist on the first level of racism.

So they continue to make these completely racist attacks, all the while imagining themselves to be so clever as to have dodged them and act outraged when we call them bigots anyway.  And they're completely unaware that even the original racists justified their racism in this exact manner, by insisting that blacks were a scary inferior race that would destroy whitey if they could.  Some things never change.

Examples of Racism

Here's an example of some of these ridiculous comments, edited for offensive words, of course:

Oh, well.  Never mind.  I started re-reading the comments and couldn't find a representative one that didn't make my stomach hurt, and I just couldn't do that to my loyal readers.  If you're interested, you can click on the link and read them yourselves.  But I just can't stand to have that garbage here.

But if you do read the comments, what you'll find are a few people interested in the movie, a few people who say this is an interesting discussion, and quite a few people who insist that black people hate white people, are lazy, and are blaming slavery for their problems.  Yet, you'd think if black people were doing that, that you'd see an equal number of comments from black people attacking white people and blaming their problems on slavery.  But I guess the wily black man is up to his tricks again, as the only racists there are the white people attacking black racists and using that racism as an excuse to be racist.

And of course, the big irony is reading lots of bigots insisting that black people can't "move on" from slavery, yet they're entirely obsessed with the issue, while few black people wrote comments about it at all.  Likewise, they insist that all black people are blaming us for their problems, which is their excuse for blaming black people for their problems.

New Bigots, Same as the Old

But really, as much as these people imagine they've invented a clever new form of justified racism, it's really no different than the old racism.  Back in the day, bigots invented reasons to rationalize the enslavement of other races for their personal benefit.  After that became illegal, they invented rationalizations for denying other races equal treatment with themselves.  Now that that's illegal, they've invented rationalizations for treating other races badly, and it defies belief to imagine they wouldn't happily discriminate or enslave other races if given the opportunity.

And in the end, there can be no doubt what their game is.  Some people will always be discontent with their own lives unless they can tear down others to make themselves feel better.  For these people to be up, someone else has to be down, and if they're not getting ahead and being the awesome Master of the Universe they know they should be, then obviously somebody is holding them back.

For authoritarians like them, life is a zero-sum game, and if they are denied their god given right to oppress others for their personal benefit, then they'll use that as their excuse for wanting to oppress others for their personal benefit.  For these people, the concept of the win-win situation eludes them entirely, and so they wallow in their own disgusting world, as they refuse to build themselves up in a world that doesn't give them everything they want in the first place.