Fruitlessly Fighting Racism

Hillary Clinton will not, in her words, "rest" until racism is eliminated from our nation and, since she is a total globalist, from the world (which to her are the same).

She is not resting anytime soon, I can assure you.  I dislike bearing what you would probably think of as bad news, but the "fight against racism" is a losing fight, no matter what Hillary or anyone else says.

Now, I'm certainly not calling racism a good thing; but I am calling it an inevitable thing that we can only hope to manage.  We can hope that we as humans will at least aspire to equality of opportunity for citizens of every race, in this country.  But we're still going to have racism to deal with.  And I will explain why.

Let us be sure that we distinguish "racism" from "hate."  As Donald Trump and Taylor Swift can tell you, it has become de rigeur to accuse someone of "hating" as easily as taking a breath anymore.  Hating has become what racism used to be, the worst thing you can do short of murder and rape.

But racism is a different animal.  Racism is simply a more injurious version of recognizing that people are different from each other in groups.  As anyone who spent a day in middle school and junior-high can attest, the earliest part of human maturation in the teen years is trying to make oneself look better than the person next to them, which is fundamentally related to our primal desire to attract the optimal mate.

We try to associate with the most popular peers, who are the most popular because of fundamental characteristics they tend to share.  In the same way, we try to disassociate -- and I'm still thinking junior-high here, because the example is perfect -- from people who are unattractive, or unpopular, or who have characteristics that allow us to differentiate ourselves from them.

In other words, if somehow racism would be eliminated with a finger-snap this afternoon, it would take only a few days before it were reintroduced by every ethnicity, height, weight, hair color and freckle count.  Racism is, after all, simply an innate human tendency to distinguish ourselves from our "competitors" in the continuation of the species, one that particularly relates to skin color and ethnicity.  It is not going away.

What we can do is to recognize its nature along with its inevitability, and ensure that we do not enshrine it into laws and court precedence, but do enshrine equality of opportunity.  We are going to distinguish ourselves; humans have always done that and ever will.  We need to make sure that distinction does not result in inequality of opportunity.

I know that doesn't sound like the most optimistic approach.  And I also know that "fighting racism" is going to be a perpetual effort of the left, precisely because it is the kind of windmill-tilt that they love to do.  They need to make sure there is no end of aggrieved classes needing big government solutions to protect them into voting Democrat.

But it is a reality.  And ultimately we need to have someone courageous enough to admit that, junior-high as it may be, racism is one of those diseases, more diabetes than chicken pox, that we simply control.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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