Would everyone believing that the current popular wave of social justice initiatives is working please raise their hand and yell “Hooray?”
Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘Sounds of Silence’ might be appropriate background music.
If something is not working, or even worse, making things worse, it’s time to reset the paradigm and rethink the idea that what’s comfortable is also productive.
Racial equity in certainly not an exception – and unfortunately the on-going pursuit of this legitimate mission has become systemically flawed.
Here’s how—
Hidden Agendas
The old adage “follow the money” is a reliable truism. A deeper maxim is that money almost always follows power.
A casual glance at the vast majority of longer-term elected national officials who grow rich in office reveals serious flaws in our governance model.
In any society where the money–power equation gets too far ahead of morality, integrity, and fidelity, bad things happen. Again, the pursuit of racial equality is not an exception.
Money-power enthusiasts favor the constructs of image over substance, motion over action, and cronyism over principle. To the extent that nothing good is easy, each of these approaches guarantees some version of failure.
At all levels of our society, the worthy agenda of racial equality has largely been abandoned for the hollow realities of reverse racism, ill-conceived, unrealistic, and unfunded reparation plans, and the weaponization of race as a means to dividing us and ensuring the political money–power equation game continues.
Everyone loses while this hidden agenda festers – and it festers in Asheville and Buncombe County as surely as it festers anywhere.
Glorified Sympathies
One of the better ways to satisfy personal vanity is to embrace a cause and lionize it. It feels really good to be part of something that is right and to serve as a champion for that something.
Problems arise when ego, self-service, habit, and shallow thinking support the glorification of our beliefs, values, and sympathies into a rock that we can use to beat our opposition to death.
Equity – as in the pursuit of social justice and fairness – is a solid agenda. Equity – as a special interest country club – is a corrupt agenda.
We live in a time where change agents attempting to correct the wrongs of the past have found a way to self-justify and rationalize a new set of wrongs to replace the old ones.
Making people who never owned slaves give money to people who never were slaves is wrong-headed thinking. Attempting to alter historic white racism with new black racism is wrong-headed thinking. Raising millions of dollars for a BLM movement and spending eighty-percent of that money on homes, cars, and security for that group’s leadership is wrong-headed thinking. Teaching our young that they can follow an angry–entitled–victim script and be an equal at the same time is wrong headed thinking.
Being sympathetic to the pain of our fellow man is a mark of character. Glorifying that sympathy to justify bad means is a mark of the opposite.
Constitutional Indifference
One of the better ways to evaluate the character of any justice movement is to assess that movement’s dedication to the rule of law versus the rule of power, personal preference, personalities, or profit.
Asheville City government, Buncombe County Government, our school systems, associated agencies and others who spend taxpayer-funded money are using that money to support racial agendas.
Spending taxpayer money on the basis of race is a violation of federal law.
Everyone is free to do that. No one is free to do that and pretend they (1) are being true to their oath of office (2) are echoing the forgotten voices of those who pioneered the racial justice movement or (3) are immune from consequences for that insincerity. Though their mission holds merit, their method leaks like a rotten boat.
Thus, the mission of WNC Citizens for Racial Equality — (1) to challenge racially motivated misdeeds in our community and (2) to apply the rule of law through our judicial system.
We welcome your help…
Racism [ rey-siz-uhm ]noun – Discrimination or prejudice based on color…
