for The Bold Pursuit
There is a saying that applies to card games, which is that,
you must play the cards that you’re dealt.
You do not get to look through the deck and choose the cards you wish for. The cards are distributed randomly to each
player. Each player then does with those
cards the best he can, and oftentimes, the worst cards can win in the hands of
a skillful player. Were it not so,
people would flip coins instead of going through the bother of learning the
rules and strategy of card games.
This principle does not, however, apply to the real life
game of racial politics. Not everyone
can get the race card. Even so, one can
play it regardless.
I witnessed an eerie example of this recently. I was participating in a low cost card
tournament. The fellow in front of me,
waiting for a seat assignment, was a very dark-skinned American of African
descent (there, did I say that with the requisite political correctness?).
Before he got his ticket, he had a complaint to make, which
he addressed to a beige-colored clerk who had absolutely no discretionary power
in the tournament. She simply issued the
seating assignments at random from a machine.
The complaint was that in a prior tournament, although there
had been only three black contestants, out of a total of fifty players, all
three of them had been assigned to the same table.
The very same table!
How could that possibly happen, except by a deliberate policy of racial
segregation?
Oh. It seems that
anyone who understands the mathematics of probability and statistics (two vital
skills for any serious card player), those kinds of things do indeed happen
with far more regularity than one might at first imagine.
Furthermore, the seating arrangement did virtually nothing
to disadvantage the black players. One
might argue that it reduced the chances of all three black players making the
top three scores, but at the same time, it increased the chances of one black
player making the top score. In any
case, the net effect was at or near zero.
Never mind. None of
that matters in the meta-game called racial politics. What matters is not whether there is actual
discrimination (which in this case there certainly was not— the ticket machine
has no information about the race of players).
What matters is whether one can find evidence, however tenuous, of
discrimination. If not, then one can
always imagine it. If there is no race
card in the deck, one can manufacture his own.
One does this simply by assuming that every unequal outcome is the
unfair result of racism— even when the outcome itself is neutral.
To be sure, on the whole, black Americans do not get a fair
deal of society’s cards in the game of economics and power. This is because a great many of them have the
abject misfortune of living in urban areas governed by liberal politicians who
deny black children the opportunity to get a decent education. Instead, the very liberal teacher unions are given
political ownership of the public schools, and those schools under-educate and
even mis-educate those children.
Those schools teach black children that they are not the
ones to blame for the crimes they commit, for the children they produce out of
wedlock, for the drugs they ingest, for their disinterest in books, and for
their lack of skills concerning managing what little money they do have. According to liberal politicians, those
failures are all the fault of white people.
At no point, according to the liberal establishment, does it
become the responsibility of black people to remedy these problems, other than
for showing up at demonstrations blaming white people, and voting for more
Democrats to perpetuate the racist policies of liberals.
Black people are often treated badly, even sometimes
unjustly killed, by white policemen.
True, but this problem, as serious as it is, (and it is very serious),
is dwarfed by the murders of thousands of black people by other black
people. It seems that virtually no
effort is made to solve that problem.
Even to merely mention it is considered racist by some. Ironically, even black conservatives who call
attention to the problem are accused of racism.
Sometimes the frustration tempts people like me, white
conservative males, to simply give up. I
am always reminded, however, that I have an obligation to speak truth, not only
to the powerful, but also to the powerless— and to expect no thanks for doing
it.
.