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| Holder’s “Nation of cowards” |
| 2009-03-07 |
| Attorney General Eric Holder caused a small stir by telling us we are a nation of cowards, afraid to talk about race. You could almost hear the collective groan rise from Americans of all kinds. Who on earth wants to talk about race? Well, college-educated black intellectuals like Holder do. It sometimes seems, in fact, that college-educated black intellectuals want to talk about little else. The rest of us would rather just get on with life. If we are afraid to talk about race, it’s with good reason. For white people, at least, talking openly about race is a sure way to get yourself in trouble. The only white people who are willing to speak frankly on this topic are those who are old enough and/or financially secure enough not to give a damn — Pat Buchanan, for instance. For an ordinary white middle-class Joe, with a family to feed and a job to hold on to, by far the wisest strategy is just to keep his mouth shut, parrot a few multi-culti catch-phrases if the topic comes up, rent a couple of good action movies to see him through the Martin Luther King holiday, and take a crossword puzzle along to keep himself awake through those Diversity Awareness seminars his company makes him attend once a year in hopes of insulating the firm against nuisance “discrimination” lawsuits. My private suspicion is that Holder was trying to pull off a “Hundred Flowers” strategy. In 1956 Mao Tse-tung launched a movement under the slogan “Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend.” The idea was to encourage intellectuals and ordinary people to offer criticisms of state policy and the Communist Party — to have a conversation, you might say. People who took up the call, making open criticisms, ended up in slave-labor camps, or dead. It is widely believed (though the case is still argued) that the entire movement was intended from the start to flush out “enemies of the people” so that they could be hustled away to the camps. Stories leaked out from Mao’s inner circle that he afterwards boasted of having pulled of a yang-mou. That’s a play on words. Yin and yang are the contrasting principles in Chinese philosophy, yin standing for darkness and shadow (among other things), yang for brightness, openness, and so on. The usual word for a plot is yin-mou, “shadowy scheme.” Mao was boasting of having pulled off a wide-open scheme, like a robbery in broad daylight. |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |
| #6 AH9418 - if you get a chance listen to Dave Alvin & The Guilty Men's song "Andersonville". Excellent and haunting /full disclosure: Dave's a fave of mine from Downey, CA. |
| Posted by: Frank G 2009-03-07 17:57 |
| #5 I only discuss race with the denizens of the Union cemeteries at Gettysburg, Andersonville, etc. I haven't told them about the "Nation of Cowards" remark yet. |
| Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418 2009-03-07 16:58 |
| #4 A white South African made the same point to me several years ago: It was easier to talk about race in supposedly racist South Africa (this was still during Apartheid) than in the US. I made the point that speaking frankly about race in America was a guaranteed career ending move, and could even be considered illegal (if that person had hire/fire authority). As long as that's true we will never have an honest discussion of race in America. |
| Posted by: Frozen Al 2009-03-07 14:35 |
| #3 Holder should resign. If he doesn't he should be fired just like Ag Secretary Butz was during the Nixon administration for making "insensitive" remarks. Cowards? Excuse me? I'm insulted. I'm outraged. You wanna talk about cowards? Who's afraid to try to make it through life without Affirmative Action? Who's afraid to stand on their own two feet and make an honest assessment of their own lives and the lives of their fellow blacks in this country...to be responsible for their own lives and their own actions? Not me. |
| Posted by: Abu Uluque 2009-03-07 13:02 |
| #2 Holder threw down the card early. Barry and Michelle threw it down with plastic helos to evil former white colonialist Brown. We'll see more of it in days to come as the chrominium flies off the shiny objects that have been elevated to power. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2009-03-07 09:11 |
| #1 You know, I might be a touch paranoid, but I wonder of Derb isn't correct about it being a stunt to flush out fodder for discrimination lawsuit fodder... Or it could just be another example of the Obama administrations breathtaking ineptitude, now that they are where the buck stops. I know, I know - never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity, but still... |
| Posted by: Sgt. Mom 2009-03-07 08:57 |