Helen, in a sense I agree with you. “Reverse racism” should simply be called “racism”. I think the term “reverse racism” is used in response to the idea that people of color cannot be racists by definition. That they cannot engage in racism. Of course they can! Racism is racism, period, and it’s ALL ugly.

I taught high school math in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley for seven years, in a city more than 90% Hispanic. There were few to no black people, but my school had one black football coach.

This coach upon his arrival was attempting to rent an apartment and could not find one. He was suspicious at one rental community that he liked. A fellow Hispanic coach returned with him, and the Hispanic coach inquired about a rental and was led to and allowed to view several nice properties. He sat down to fill out the paperwork and was assured there would be no problem.

He stopped midway through, said “I’ll be right back”, and brought his fellow (Black) coach in, and said, “Actually I can’t rent the apartment, but my friend here can. Please bring him the paperwork.”

The Hispanic rental agent was absolutely FURIOUS. She was beside herself at the thought that this Black man was going to be allowed to live in an apartment that she controlled. The Hispanic coach eventually made it very clear that she had no choice, and he spelled out the legal ramifications. He got the apartment.

Now, this is just one story. However, I spent a great deal of time among Hispanic families, and this friendly football coach represents the rare exception in my experience. And I do mean RARE. I heard so many epithets hurled at black people in general; I experienced what can only be described as a broad, pervasive racial hatred from nearly the entire Hispanic community down there against all blacks.

That was 1986. I see from the Texas results that Barack Obama got about 30% of the vote in the Valley this year, so there remains hope. Things are changing. I’d be interested in seeing a breakdown of voting exit polls by race/heritage and age in the Valley, and especially in Brownsville, where I taught and lived for seven years.

Perhaps I’ve moved off topic, but if the incident I described above isn’t racism, then what is it? If “people of color” cannot be racist, then how would you describe such incidents?

I like to believe that I’m not racist in any way, shape, or form, but who can say? I think I’m not racist. I’d befriend ANYONE whose value system is reasonably close to my own. Yet I reject cultures that I find harmful; I’m no tolerant multiculturalist that seeks EQUAL value from all cultures. I find much of what is considered “current Black culture” to be very harmful.

I’m also gay, but I find nearly all of “current gay culture” to be incredibly harmful, especially to gays themselves. Does that make me an anti-gay bigot? I don’t think so. But there are those who refuse to differentiate between culture and race, or culture and “identity”. I prefer the conceptual differentiation to be between culture and characteristic, not “identity”, a word which has been poisoned by the pervasive use of identity politics.

A few words about Obama’s pastor. I don’t reject him categorically 100%. He can raise a point about the Tuskegee Airmen and the fact that the government deliberately diseased them with syphilis. He’s correct.

But I’d have to point out that the military, after exploding atom bombs in the Nevada Testing Grounds, would deliberately march its soldiers into the fallout to determine the effects. And the Tuskegee Airmen were in the military. It is not as if the civilian population were given syphilis. However, the pastor remains correct: Not one white soldier was deliberately given syphilis, and in that action can clearly be seen racism in its worst sense.

The pastor also says that our Founding Fathers said “all men are created equal”, but what they meant was “all WHITE men are created equal”. As a general statement, he is again correct.

It’s not fair to imply, however, that the American Apartheid against black people was a 100% phenomenon. There were dissidents from the very beginning, and the abolitionist movement contained many whites who even went so far as to participate in the Underground Railroad in resistance to the slavery and the Apartheid.

I could accept the pastor’s “GOD DAMN AMERICA” if each such statement were balanced by an equal statement extolling its virtues; this would make it clear that he was identifying those situations, and those people, who at specific times engaged in the form of evil we call racism.

However, this pastor has NEVER, not even once, as far as I can tell, engaged in any statements or rhetoric that praises America and its people. Never. Due to this, and due to Michelle Obama’s corroborating statements, we can draw conclusions.

No, it isn’t situational ethics.

Take for example, the Mexican view of the day of the Day. It is true in their culture. They do communicate with those ancestors. Can I, in the same way? Probably not.

It is relativistic epistemology and metaphysics. What is real or true depends upon what a person grew up believing. Because you didn’t grew up that way, you can never truly believe in it. But you don’t have to believe in something when you believe that truth is based upon not upon free will and desire for it, but upon how one grew up.

It isn’t also limited just to saying that you can’t pray to their ancestors the way they pray to their ancestors. It is the entire construction of cultural, ethnic, and race experiences that are somehow unique to the point that nobody else can adopt that culture as their own. The new guy will forever be alien because he didn’t grow up that way.

But as long as we invent silly terms like reverse racism, we work against equality based on opportunity.

Jesse Jackson’s support of Affirmative Action can not really be called “a silly term”. Although he is working against equality based upon the opportunity of suffering good and bad consequences of the choices you made of your own free will.

What you and I desire is based on “valu[ing] one another for our human qualities.”

That in itself will never solve the problem of other human beings who use their understanding for malicious purposes. You can understand your neighbors all you want, but it takes force, violence, and active resistance to take care of the problem of people who don’t think like you and don’t want to think like you. I suppose you can understand those that want to see your death, and perhaps can even sympathize with it, but you’re not going to stop it just by understanding it.

Nothing is neutral.

Not even pacifism when it comes between defender and the aggressor.

If we pretend that we are culture free

Pretending cosmopolitanism is a bad thing. Actually doing what it takes to become cosmopolitan, however, is something the human race would benefit a lot from.

And that diversity matters to someone.

Division doesn’t benefit anyone except Lucifer and the God of War’s henchmen.

As for white majority month culture, this is predicated upon the assumption that culture is what you grew up with. In America, culture is what you have chosen to embrace. And this applies to the majority as well as to the minorities. When there is liberty, people can choose amongst many things, even the specific culture that they will call their own.

The breaking point here is that if you believe culture is what you were brought up in, and nobody else can understand it the way you do, then you setup what is known as “inferiority complexes” amongst minorities. This also sets up superiority complexes amongst the majority, the whites in helen’s words.

Neither are particularly intrinsically good or productive for human beings to have. Superiority complexes bred “white man is smarter than black men”, “Europeans are are advanced than the American Colonial Heathens”, and “white man’s burden”. Inferiority complexes produced the Holocaust, Socialist revolutions resulting in the deaths of many millions of individuals to feed the hunger for superiority, and petty as well as federal crimes galore. Harriet Tubman made a couple of remarks concerning how often the people she tried to convince to flee were shackled to slavery, not by the white man’s power, but by the mental beliefs of the slave. The mental belief of the slave that he is indeed inferior and thus needs the protection of the “Master”, so obviously running away would not be good for the slave. This is another form of the inferiority complex. The Islamic world has the same complex, they just used violence to express it. But regardless, the same consequence is that inferiority complexes keep a people chained and oppressed.

If you can’t, really can’t, choose the group or culture you belong to, then this makes people very susceptible to inferiority and superiority complexes. Would the white man’s burden people feel as arrogant if they knew it was true that the black man can be just as superior as the white man, if the black man was given the choice? Would slaves feel that they were truly inferior if they knew that simply by choosing differently, they can become the equal of their owners if not more so?

The belief that culture restricts people to their little cubby holes is what divides human beings, and it is division and strife that feeds the fires of war and utter devastation.

America’s solution to this was liberty. To allow and to ensure that people can choose what they believe to be their best path in life. This includes laws, social groups, and yes, culture.

When people from different cultures combine in one location to work together for the good of all, what you get is a meta-culture. A culture above all other cultures, because it is the only culture that people chose as their own. People wouldn’t choose to belong to this culture if they didn’t feel a benefit to it.

Sometimes this gives rise to conflicted loyalties. Like in Africa where natives from India came to Ghana and lived there. The father from India grew up in a caste system so he didn’t want his daughter to marry someone from Ghana. The daughter said that she isn’t from India, she is a part of Ghana. Her friends are in Ghana, she grew up in Ghana, and she went through school in Ghana. So why shouldn’t she marry a boy from Ghana as well? The father said no, he’s a different caste and castes can’t mix, you’re culture is Indian and so you should respect your roots.

This, then, is an example of the conflict of loyalties. Which are you more loyal to, the culture you were born to or the culture you have chosen? And what happens if the culture you were born to and the culture you have chosen are the same culture? Many people can’t choose their culture because they are never given a choice, they are never provided opportunities. When your choice is between A and A, do you really have a choice about it?

Here in America we also have immigrants that have to find a way to reconcile their loyalty to their roots and ancestors to their loyalty to their chosen country, a country with a meta-culture of their own.

Here in the US, with so many different cultures to choose from and call your own, people have the ability to decide for themselves what they want. Do they want traditional Chinese? If so, they can shop at Chinatown and learn Chinese. Do people want the Civil War culture? If so they can do re-enactments and belong to the Society of Creative Anachronism. People have a choice because there are so many to choose from and they are not penalized or executed for choosing a choice others disagree with.

Will people in Chinatown look weirdly on the white man speaking Chinese and acting Asian? Yes, but every culture is not the same. Some cultures are more inclusive, others are more exclusive. The Chinese culture normally looks down on blacks as being inferior to whites, for example. If you don’t like that, don’t learn to become Chinese or ignore that part of Chinese culture. Most cosmopolitan Asians won’t say to a person trying to learn about Vietnam, Japan, and China that “you have to be born Asian to understand”.

No, you don’t. It’s an advantage, maybe, but human comprehension is not limited to what we were “born as”. Down that road lies slavery.

And so when people talk about limiting folks to the cultures that they were born with and “best understand”, what are we really talking about? We are really talking about putting people back in the bad old days when your choice was between A and… A. It wasn’t even between bad and worse, just bad and bad. You ain’t even got a choice between bad and worse back in the day.

Remember inter-racial relationships? Even if whites or blacks wanted to “step across”, their buddies would swoop in and grab them back to their natural culture. Got to keep these folks chained and in their place, you know. Can’t be having white people act black and black people act white, that’d be… fake.

it’s seeing the world through different eyes, because I choose to try to understand other people.

There is nothing wrong in trying to understand other people. What is wrong is setting artificial limits on what people can understand, from some kind of “central authority” that knows best.

When people say “you can’t know my experience, you were never born black or Native American”, what they are really saying is “I’ve been in this village all my life, you foreign speaking folks are strange and will never be accepted as one of our own, so better git on out before we hang ya”.

America should not be going backwards in human history but forwards. The secret of American power is not exploitation, stealing resources, slavery, capitalism, or even the democracy/republic. It is people willing to combine together, regardless of what or who they were born as, for the good of all. It is the people and their ability to decide for themselves their fate, that is the secret of American success and people. Anything that limits the ability of people to choose, anything that says “you were born this way and so shall you remain this way”, is a blight upon human progress for a better world.

Take for example, the Mexican view of the day of the Day. It is true in their culture. They do communicate with those ancestors. Can I, in the same way? Probably not. It isn’t something I grew up believing. But will it enrich my own faith to see what they believe? Inly if I want it to. This isn’t situation ethics; it’s seeing the world through different eyes, because I choose to try to understand other people.

I think this is part of the reason people from the middle East are hard to understand (Muslims for example). Americans don’t think the way they do.

By “if we pretend that we are culture free, our actions scream, ‘white is right.”" I mean, that for years in the US, whiteness has been a given. Since white people have been in the majority since 1776, we have presumed that culture meant “white culture.” In fact, we assumed it so well that sometimes we feel culture-less. By that I mean, we scream, Why do we need Black History month? We don’t we have White History Month? Because all non-designated months are majority months. That’s why. Whiteness is a given, unless otherwise stated. We are not culture-free, even if other ethnic cultures, fairs, religions, museums, etc. are more showy.

You might not agree, but I hope I’ve explained what I mean.

And would you please explain what on earth you mean by: If we pretend that we are culture free, our actions scream, “white is right.”

Everyone comes from somewhere. Nobody got to where he/she is without help. No one “happens to be white.” I am white because my father and mother were also white. No one “happens to be Christian.” I am Christian because I made choice to be based on how my parents raised me. Babies are born naked and relatively helpless. In that, we start equal. So we all have people to defend or react against (or usually both). It’s silly to pretend we are islands and not a part of the continent. We are not culture free. Nothing is neutral. If we pretend that we are culture free, our actions scream, “white is right.” Otherwise, we admit the US is filled with diversity. And that diversity matters to someone.

Can people set differences aside? Yes. But why would we want to? I like being the individual I am. And I hope others will feel likewise.