Inigo Montoya Strikes Again!

An interesting thing to come out of the lively discussion around whether the USA is actually post-racial is how few people seem to understand what the word systemic means.

It doesn't mean that racism is a specific, well-defined part of a system, like once existed in the South to suppress blacks.  My guess is that IS how a lot of the conservative pundits & politicos who insist our country is way past those days define it.  (The same ones who insist that the post-2010 wave of voter restrictions have nothing to do with suppressing any particular voting demographic.)  

As the great Inigo Montoya would say...

 

I do not think that the people who ballyhoo America as beyond our racial strife have a clue that systemic is a biological, not a political, term.  It refers to when something isn't localized in the body, but invades an entire system.  A systemic problem is pervasive, hard to pinpoint, massively difficult to resolve.  "Something that is spread throughout, system-wide, affecting a group or system, such as a body, economy, market or society as a whole."

When Bill O'Reilly claims on the one hand that "most Americans, no matter what color they are, are decent fair-minded people," then adds "there are problems in the African-American precincts, especially in the inner city," it's pretty clear he's having an Inigo Montoya moment. When he adds that a "corrosive culture" is responsible for those problems, that they "have little to do with white people, that "it's not white-on-black crime that's the problem, it's black-on-black" - the moment becomes supreme.

This whole situation is beginning to remind me of an interesting family dynamic I've had to deal with all my life.  One of my parents & most of my siblings just don't process what I'm saying in the way I mean.  They tend to hear the opposite.  It doesn't matter how I try to adjust, the outcome is always the same - I say UP & they hear DOWN, I say GREEN & they hear RED.  It's just a reality of life.

That same dynamic seems to dominate our current so-called discussion on race in America.  It can never be an actual discussion, because we are using the same terms but don't mean the same thing by them.  Not through any rancor, but because we just don't infuse the words terms concepts with the same meaning.  Because we are working from utterly different memes.

If Bill O'Reilly were writing this post, he could be looking at what I think about race in America & asking the same things about me that I have of him.  Which is what makes the situation so dangerous.  It's not that we refuse to get on the same page, but that our mindsets, the memes from which we draw our understanding, are opposite but the words we use to describe them are the same.

Progressives & radical centrists like yours truly tend to be able to see the other side, as well as our own.  That's one reason a Jon Stewart & a Stephen Colbert are so devastatingly effective in their humor - if they only saw one side, there wouldn't be any laughs.  But they do see the other side, do have a clue about where Bill O'Reilly or Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh are coming from.  How different things might be if those gentlemen could do the same.  

Bill O'Reilly blasts liberals for claiming America isn't post-racial, then goes on to illustrate just how systemic prejudiced thinking is in his own mind.  Last night, on The Factor,  instead of acknowledging where Fox News clearly went a tad off the rails, he literally threw down the gauntlet - "Fox News is attacked when we report the truth?” You want a war? You got a war! I’m not going to sit here and take this garbage any longer. People who lie and run the country down, and who are racists themselves, are going to be called out on ‘The Factor'."

Up is down, green is red.  

• How long did Fox News refuse to suggest that the Charleston murders of eight church members & their pastor was anything but a crime directed against Christians, killings they laid at the feet of President Obama for the disrespect he shows Christians through the ACA.
• Where Steve Doocy found it “extraordinary” the murders could be called a hate crime  
• Where Kevin Jackson labeled calls to take down the Confederate flag "a red herring that takes away from the real issue that liberals created this kid that shot up this church." 
• Where Megyn Kelly shredded a 15-year old African-American girl in the McKinney, TX pool ruckus as "no saint either," which she somehow miraculously knew. to excuse the white policeman who'd made her lay flat on the ground, then held her down with his knee on her back
• Where Rick Santorum has a pulpit for preaching that the killings were anti-Christian, where Lindsey Graham proudly proclaims that the Confederate flag is "part of who we are," where Trayvon Martin is the bad guy & George Zimmerman was a welcomed guest.

Bill O'Reilly believes that racism is no longer systemic in America.  I think the word does not mean what he thinks it means.  I'd suggest he watch a full day of Fox News to get a clue, but hey - up is down, red is green.  He'd never see it.