Birth of a Racist
By Sally ZelikovskyI didn't do it to myself. I've always been sensitive to race. I don't support racism or racists. I've never considered myself racist and don't think others would consider me a racist. How could I be one now?
I never enslaved anyone, prevented them from working or voting or living in my neighborhood or joining my clubs. I don't think there was any proof that George Zimmerman did either.
But now I know if I ever cross or injure a black person -- no matter how justified my actions might be -- there is a presumption that I am a racist.
I don't like it at all. It isn't true. But here I am, non-racist me trapped inside this new racist body I've been assigned. My actions and beliefs are irrelevant. Society has decreed this is who I am.
Like alien pods taking control over our slumbering bodies, unstoppable forces have gradually been redirecting our programming as a society so that any time a minority is harmed or disliked by a white person, the precipitating cause of the harm or dislike is ipso facto racism.
After the Zimmerman verdict, many white people woke up just like me, realizing that we will be deemed haters whenever we interact with non-whites and something goes wrong -- no matter what our motivation or innermost thoughts are.
Most of us didn't grow up this way. Quite the opposite. I was taught never to hate and only to judge people by their actions and not by their color, race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, etc. Didn't Martin Luther King say we should judge a man by "the content of his character, not by his color of his skin"?
Use of racism to implement an agenda or get one's way, has been building over years. This isn't news to any of you. Anytime you fire someone who is a minority, you must have documentation backing up your non-racist justifications. Even if you have pages and testimony to bolster your decision, you still could be confronted with an unpleasant lawsuit identifying you as a "discriminator."
Even though we are supposed to be a color-blind, post-racial society, groups and individuals force us to think about race all the time. We have become a hyper-racial society. Furthermore, since very few of us want to be labeled with anything as odious as "racist," we will do anything -- including keeping incompetents in our employ -- to avoid the moniker.
Nevertheless, as careful as many whites are to avoid doing anything that would saddle us with such epithets, time and time again it is thrust upon us with the goal of serving someone else's purpose -- regardless how we actually conduct ourselves.
- If you don't like your black neighbor because you have a personality clash, you are a racist.
- If you complain about a black clerk in a store because she wasn't helpful, you are a racist.
- If you oppose affirmative action, you are a racist.
- If you disagree with a black President's ideology and disapprove of his policies, you most definitely are a racist.
- If you are a juror in the Trayvon Martin case and find George Zimmerman not guilty, you must be a racist. Heck, the entire system that acquitted Zimmerman is racist. Those shots were fired not out of self-defense but because of racism. And we know that, because Trayvon was black and Zimmerman white.
Whether or not he did or did not provoke the confrontation with Trayvon, it's hard to believe the wimpy George Zimmerman's last thoughts were "I'm going to kill a black man because I don't like blacks" as opposed to "This guy is bashing my head in and I better do something before I lose consciousness."
In trials like this -- where you have one-on-one action with little else to go on -- and you want to prove racism, you are either forced to (1) look at surrounding evidence, statements and circumstances and try to re-construct what you think the state of mind or intent of the accused was, or (2) intuit what the accused was thinking, in other words, jump into his mind and make the leap from assumption to assumption.
While there was a credible eye witness who saw Trayvon beating up Zimmerman, if hate is to be the crime on trial, then we are compelled to examine the thoughts of the perpetrator and the victim, even though we have no way of ever knowing what they really were. Until we can read someone's thoughts as if they were files on a computer, we are treading into dangerous territory.
These are the kind of cases that try men's souls. For lawyers, judges and jurors, they are the hardest to prove, preside over and cast a verdict on. Because we are a system that errs on the side of innocence, requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt and lays that burden on the accuser, these cases usually don't result in warm comfort for anyone -- especially the family of either the accused or the victim. No one really wins; everyone feels like they lost; the victim's family doesn't get closure; the accused can never live in peace in a hyper-racial society; and the public is unsettled because any one of us, at any time, of any color, could be either Trayvon Martin or George Zimmerman.
On top of all this, some in the public -- MSNBC, loonies on the left, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and the minions they have summoned to protest -- want us to further restrict the self-defense laws that protect all of us in these situations.
This means it would be even harder for you to shoot an intruder or rapist or pedophile when protecting yourself or your family. This means people will hesitate before coming to the aid of a neighbor or being a Good Samaritan. This means when someone robs your store at gunpoint, you have to succumb to injury or death. This means when your daughter or son is raped, they must yield and never fight back because self-defense will no longer be available to them.
This would be a return to the lawlessness of the Wild West where anything goes and your only justice is revenge. Call it feudal, barbaric, mob rule or lawlessness: either way, it is the unraveling of the criminal justice system in America and a giant step back for mankind.
Do we really want to throw the self-defense baby out with the racism bathwater?
Most of these cases are admittedly hard to prove -- that's why our system errs on the side of innocence. It's better to let a guilty man go free than incarcerate an innocent one. If you were the accused, believe me, this would be your mantra.
I wonder if the race industry has any idea what they are clamoring for by restricting the claim of self-defense. Black-on-black crime is the overwhelming source of crime against blacks in America. If the Zimmerman protesters have their way and a black intruder breaks into the home of a black family and is shot dead by the homeowner, the homeowner will more likely be the criminal on trial than the perp, as we have seen in the Ron Dixon case in Brooklyn, where a Jamaican family man killed an intruder (whose race isn't clear in the reports) and was shockingly sentenced to jail for illegally possessing a gun.
We will be cutting off our self-defense noses to spite our racial anger faces. This all stems from intense vitriol for past sins most of us had nothing to do with and would never condone. The sins of America's past are being visited upon America's present and future regardless of the sensibility of doing so. My heart breaks that slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, the KKK, lynching, and discrimination ever existed. Every reasonable human being feels this way. But this continued pay back has to stop.
This is not exclusive to race. Gay activists have hijacked the black plight for their own purposes. Gay students are given special consideration in the college application process to right the wrongs visited upon previous generations of homosexuals. If you dislike a person who happens to be gay, you are homophobic. If you disapprove of redefining marriage, you are homophobic. If the thought of same-sex sexual conduct makes you feel uncomfortable, you are homophobic. If you think AIDS is a gay disease brought on by lifestyle, you are homophobic. If you fire anyone who is gay, you are homophobic.
If a gay man tries to rape a straight man and the straight man accidentally kills the gay man while trying to ward off the rape, he must be homophobic. There is no room for self-defense if the perp-turned-victim is gay and the accused is not. (See the case of Steven Nary.)
And, as we have seen in the media's reaction to the Zimmerman case, for many, there is no room for self-defense if the puncher-turned-victim is black and the accused is white.
Now that I am a racist, I see things more clearly and realize all of this can trickle into every aspect of our lives. White people will be increasingly afraid to speak their minds and will be concerned that their interactions with other races might come back to haunt them one day because, anything we do that negatively impacts a minority must be rooted in hate. Thus:
- If a Hispanic man cuts me off on the highway and I flip him the bird, I flipped him off because he is Hispanic, not because he was a jerk and cut me off -- making me a racist.
- If an Asian waitress has a lousy attitude, provides rotten service and I decide not to tip her, I withheld her tip because she's Asian, not a lousy waitress who didn't earn her tip -- making me a racist.
- If a black doctor amputates the wrong limb on my body and I sue him for malpractice, I targeted him because he is black, not because he is an incompetent doctor who harmed me -- making me a racist.
- If a Native American breaks into my house and puts my family in fear for our lives and I whack him on the head with a vase and he dies, I killed him because he is a Native American, not because he put our lives in jeopardy and I acted in self-defense -- making me a racist.
Is this the future we have to look forward to? Where every move we make has to be weighed against the ethnicity, race, religion or sexual orientation of the other guy?
To add more fuel to the fire, pundits like MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell reported that one of the six Zimmerman jurors seems to be pulling back on her decision now that she's been out of sequestration and has been exposed to the uproar over this case. If she hadn't been sequestered, she might have rendered a very different verdict.
But this is precisely why we sequester juries. The public often acts emotionally, irrationally and like a mob -- motivated and reacting to concerns and agendas that go beyond justice and fairness. We intentionally sequester juries so they are not influenced by the mob but, rather, render a verdict based on the facts and evidence presented at trial, following a system of laws that are equally applied to us all, creating reliability and consistency in outcomes.
As we are forced to introduce race into the verdict calculation, I wonder if the black men who said "This is for Trayvon" and beat up a white jogger, will be charged and prosecuted for a hate crime and be tarred as racists in the press and court of public opinion? How will the Sharpton minions insist on treating the black man who pounded a white woman in the face when, confronted with a mob of protesters, she rolled down her window to ask them to let her car pass as they needed to get her granddaughter to the hospital?
I understand that I am a racist. But, aren't we all racists now?
