White Supremacy, Black Supremacy … It’s All the Same

White supremacy — today’s rally in Charlottesville, VA — and black supremacy — Black Lives Matter — are based on the precise same error: The idea that race is supreme.

My idea of race is the bridge of the Star Trek Enterprise, from the original series. People are of different races … but nobody notices. Or cares. That’s how it ought to be. We’ve yet to get there in America.

That was the high point of race relations in America. The low points came before that, during the era of slavery and later the era of Jim Crow, laws imposed by local governments on private parties in America’s Deep South. The other low point is today, with Black Lives Matter calling for the execution of white police officers and federally-funded universities endorsing segregated social activities and graduations. On top of that, we have open censorship of conservative thinkers on college campuses despite state and federal dollars funding these schools.

The media will not draw the right conclusions from today’s white nationalist protests in Charlottesville, VA. They will say the same old thing: Racism is bad, and it’s all the fault of conservatives who want to repeal Obamacare and annihilate North Korea and Iran. Of course racism is bad. But the definition of racism is not whites hating blacks, or blacks hating whites. Those two things are symptoms of racism. Racism happens when you elevate race to the highest or most important characteristic of the human individual.

How do you know if you’re a racist? It all depends on how you view individuals. If you recognize people for their individuality alone, then you’re not a racist. Race is either a non-existent factor, or a marginal one, in your appraisal of people in everyday life. If someone is your doctor, you care about what kind of doctor he or she is, not the race. If someone is your car mechanic or electrician, it’s the same. If someone is your friend or spouse, it’s the same. People are appreciated or disparaged for the presence or lack of character, personality traits or competence. When this is how you view the world, then you’re no longer (or never were) a racist.

It’s not human nature to be racist. It’s actually human nature to wish to survive. When focusing on survival and (once that’s settled) enjoyment of life, it does not serve one’s interest to practice racism. People only fall into the trap of racism or irrational discrimination when they started out in the trap of viewing people as members of collectives, rather than individuals. Individualism liberates human beings from the mentality of tribalism, and it’s only individualism that will extinguish racism.

President Trump, in response to today’s rallies, decried hatred coming from “all sides”. This will get him labeled a racist. So what else is new? But he’s right, and he’s in a position to know. The real haters today are not the white nationalists we’re seeing in Charlottesville. Of course they’re haters, and of course they’re truly deplorable. But the haters with the power are the ones in federally funded academia and hopelessly biased Big Media, whose advocacy of socialism and all things anti-liberty/anti-freedom seems to know no boundaries.

White nationalists, while vicious and wrong, are yesterday’s deplorables. Today’s deplorables are the progressives who seek to turn us all into little Communists obedient to their idea of the State. They don’t hate white nationalists because they seek to control others. They hate white nationalists because they want to be the ones in control. Fascists are fascists, regardless of skin color. Don’t you forget it!