It has come to my attention that Colin Kaepernick has made a six part Netflix special entitled “Colin in Black and White” which highlights his tribulations as a Black man growing up in White America. In it a segment showing him at training camp trying to impress his NFL coaches suddenly morphs into a depiction of a slave auction, the implication clearly being that his tenure in the NFL was a form of slavery. In his 6 year career he apparently made 43 million dollars!
To repeat for the thousandth time: Of course there are White racists living among us. But without question, given the frailty of the species, this tendency to fear or loathe “the other” is common to every ethnic group on the planet. Indeed I would suggest that a good deal of what is being cultivated by the Left today among those deemed to be “oppressed” is xenophobic as opposed to rational in nature.
The notion that White Americans who have never entertained a hostile thought against any person of Color because of their race are nevertheless perpetrators of “systemic racism” is rooted in the intentional but utterly dishonest confusion of legitimate racial issues with the integrity of Ideas and Values that ultimately have nothing to do with race. Quite aside from the ludicrous Ibram X. Kendi, dozens of White “intellectuals” have opined that the teaching of logic, science and math in our schools is of no absolute value but merely the product of a Western Enlightenment bias. Absurdly, disgustingly, when those who have failed to apply those disciplines fall by the economic wayside, those same simpletons will blame Capitalism, another product of the European Enlightenment, as the cause of their demise.
One of those simpletons, as I have mentioned in previous blogs, is Canada’s John Ralston Saul who spends an entire chapter in “Voltaire’s Bastards” denigrating Western Man’s preoccupation with “efficiency.” Life is by definition fraught with random intangibles. While Capitalism is designed to reward the “merit” of those who have achieved, it can by no means guarantee that righteous outcome. This has led the contemporary Left to inveigh against the very idea of a meritocracy, rewards for “achievement” somehow being just another arbitrary White fixation. Hence the intersection of Socialism with the myth of “systemic racism,” Kaepernick, no longer able to make the NFL, equating those consigned to evaluate his “merit” as no better than White, 19th Century slave owners, the absurd implication being that his skills as a quarterback are somehow irrelevant!
His is a sense of entitlement, of immaturity, of irrationality, that has come to dominate our cultural climate. But of course as Obama has dutifully informed us, “cultural” issues are merely the obsession of the fanatical Right.