I couldn’t help but take notice of Chris Matthews speaking on “behalf of all white people” the other day when foaming at the mouth over the last faux racial injustice that fuels the left-wing media establishment’s drive to polarize this country along the lines of race–while paradoxically pining for a “post-racial” America.
“I’m speaking now for all white people,” he said, “but especially for [those] who have had to try to change the last 50 or 60 years. And they, a lot of them have really tried to change and I’m sorry for this stuff. That’s all I’m saying.”
Well, that’s not really all he’s saying. I’ll get to that in a second.
First let’s consider the messenger. Matthews is typical of that self-righteous/self-loathing breed of liberal elites who preach diversity and viciously attack as haters and bigots anyone who hints they may not be in lock step with the political correctness army marching through the media and stifling any compelling and productive debate when it comes to race.
Yet where does Mr. Celebrate Diversity spend his time when not in the studio, at a swanky M Street suaret or five star Georgetown restaurant? He chooses to live the Black experience by retreating to his lavish home in Chevy Chase, MD, one of the richest communities in the country–it is also one of the whitest. How white? Try 86.7 percent white and only 4.8 percent black. Only 3 percent of all households are racially mixed.
I suppose that, since Matthews probably has few if any of his beloved minorities as neighbors he could at least frequent a Black-owned business in Chevy Chase to assuage his white guilt. But of the 1,266 business in his town, Black-owned is “>25” (too small to count exactly). It’s not like there aren’t more racially mixed areas around one of America’s most predominantly African-American cities for Matthews to choose from as a home in which to live the diversicrat dream. But he chooses to call others racist while living in the whitest of the white suburbs.
He’s apologizing for who again?
In his book, After America, Mark Steyn zeros in on another celebrate- diversity-in-words-only lefty journalist, Time Magazine’s Joe Klein. You remember Klein? Like Matthews he has been vicious in his condemnation of the Tea Party movement. Targeting what he calls Sarah Palin’s “nativism” he chides that her “Fantasy America is changing for the worse, overrun by ‘furriners’ of all sorts: Latinos, South Asians, East Asians, homosexuals … to say nothing of liberated uppity Blacks.”
He goes on to pat his inclusionist back by climbing upon his moral pedestal to announce his color-blind bona fides to the backwards white hordes trapped in 1956: “The things that scare the tea baggers–the renewed sense of public purpose and government activism, the burgeoning racial diversity, urbanity and cosmopolitanism–are among the things I find most precious and exhilarating about this country.”
Klein loves racial diversity so much that, after vilifying Palin and her racist cohorts from Wasilla, he hops on a northbound train in Grand Central Station and bids farewell to the melting pot by commuting to his home in the leafy New York suburb of Pelham. Pelham, Steyn points out, is 87.33 percent white. By contrast, Palin’s racist xenophobic hick town of Wasilla, Alaska, is 85.46 percent white.
As for Klein’s celebrated “uppity Blacks” as with his fellow diversity training officer/journalist Matthews’ town, Pelham is only 4.57 percent Black. Steyn observes: “Unlike Wasilla, which is a long way to go, Pelham is within reach of splendidly diverse, urbane, an cosmopolitan quartiers–The Bronx, for example–yet Joe Klein, Mister Diversity, chooses not to reside in any of them, and prefers to live uppity state of the uppity Blacks.”
I’ve got pages and pages of such examples. The white-guilted wealthy and cloistered liberal is so common an archetype–in media, academia, high finance–as to be cliché. They are wealthy and highly credentialed often with multiple degrees that qualify them in their world to cast aspersions on the toothless mob, even as their own racial hypocrisy never enters their minds. They really are the poster boys for the late Joseph Sobran’s observation that: “the purpose of a college education is to give you the correct view of minorities, and the means to live as far away from them as possible.”
I tell my kids to judge a man by his deeds not his words. Talk is cheap (or lucrative in Matthews’ case). As such, the lily-white zip codes of Matthews, Klein and so many other leftist journalists who preen themselves on what is apparently and entirely theoretical commitment to diversity, speaks more to the essence of who they are than any talking points.
Finally, as to what Matthews, the discredited messenger, actually said: I am white and he certainly doesn’t speak for me. And even if he did speak for all white people Matthews would have no standing to be a medium for George Zimmerman because, as the press continues to play down, Trayvon’s shooter is Hispanic. (Although kudos to the MSM for concocting a new phantom race called the “White-Hispanic.” Yet I never hear Obama referred to as a “White-African-American.” Go figure.)
Anyway, Matthews, in his self-appointed role of arbiter of the proper racial attitudes that make America good and Don Quixote against any mind-set that pre-dates Woodstock, is not so much color-blind as blinded by color. This translates into his wishing the nation to live under a suffocating blanket of white guilt. Guilt over slavery.
Forget the inconvenient truth that it was once practiced by every nation and race on the earth and considered so normal a fact of life to be blasé–that was until the very white British Navy drove the slave trade off the high seas in the 1840s and twenty years later some very white Northern American boys died to end it once and for all on North America. Guilt over Jim Crow. This was an ugly history, but long past and initiated by a generation basically dead now. Guilt over White economic advancement vis-a-vis Black. Fear not. This will change as the problems once the exclusive the property of minorities–an explosion of illegitimate births coupled with a stifling dependency on the welfare state–spills over into all racial categories as it is already.
Guilt over just being White it seems. That’s his problem, not mine. So he does not speak on my behalf as I have nothing to apologize for. None of these sins are mine. Sorry Chris. It doesn’t work that way. If Matthews wishes to cast about for something for White people to apologize for, I suggest he look not to where his one finger is pointed but rather consider the three fingers pointing back at him and others who brought us the welfare state and nanny government.
With its perverse incentivizing of socially destructive behavior and familial disintegration, with its crippling imposition of generational dependency upon government largess in place of individual initiative, and the epidemic of black-on-black violence habitually ignored by a cowardly media. All the pain and suffering and condemnation to a cycle of poverty and despair such liberal policies inflicted on an entire race of people is excused with the psychosis of a victimhood mentality. That is something to feel guilty about.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for any apologies from those with the arrogance to think they can apologize for me nonetheless. Blacks in America have real problems. Zimmerman is not one of them. Neither are white people long dead. But none of these problems will be solved by liberals like Matthews, Klein et. al. screaming at the rest of us with self-righteous haughtiness in rank hypocrisy from the roofs of their mansions in guilded lily-white neighborhoods.
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