Trayvon Martin and the Race Industry

The Trayvon Martin episode has unleashed the furies, emanating from the dark underside of racial politics and grievance in America; and it is not a pretty sight.  It revolves around a simple narrative that is the essence of a vast and elaborate racial industry that has grown, divided, and multiplied through the decades.

The narrative is as plain as it is destructive: and it is that America is racist to the core, institutionally and categorically, and no matter what progress the nation makes, no matter the multitude of unparalleled triumphs blacks enjoy, the stain and moral culpability will never be erased. 

It does not matter, for example, that blacks occupy the highest echelons of American power, wealth, and influence in the country, even the Presidency, the Attorney General's office, the halls of Congress, governors' mansions, city halls, in the media, the Academy, Hollywood, the music and entertainment world, sports, business, fashion, medicine, and law. 

Nor does it matter that a vast maze of diversity programs, appointments, set asides, quotas, contracts, gerrymandered districts, anti-discrimination laws, voting rights, and wealth transfers have been instituted on behalf of blacks, or that a web of bureaucracies and organizations at all levels of society have been brought into existence to protect and cater to the needs of blacks.   

Nor does it matter that blacks, black achievement, and black culture are embraced, that blacks receive wide preferential treatment, incentives, and subsidies, or that an overwhelming political/media/legal broadside is triggered for virtually any perceived racial slight or slur to defend black sensitivities. 

Nor does it matter that the United States is bar none the single greatest place in the world for a young black to live and grow. 

The narrative will not go away, for the race industry will not allow it; it has too much to lose, too much lucre and power to forfeit; it exists to ensure that the race catechism is never forgotten, and brandished as a sharp sword at a moment's notice.

We have seen this before.  George Zimmerman is only the latest foil.  The episodes of prior racial industry clampdowns are well known.  Bernard Goetz, Crown Heights, Tawana Brawley, the Jena 6, Henry Louis Gates, Duke-Lacrosse, and now Zimmerman, all saw the race industry in full attack mode, unleashing the power of its divisions, the integrated machinery of media, politicians, unions, activists, hucksters, protesters, administrators, academicians, lawyers, civil rights groups, bureaucracies and organizations, radical and otherwise, unwinding themselves on the national stage, targeting victims, wrecking lives, making threats, filing lawsuits, and, most importantly, reinforcing the crucial race narrative upon which their careers and livelihoods depend. 

The guilt or innocence of the protagonists hardly matters.  No one knows at this time if Zimmerman even committed a crime.  But that is immaterial.  Zimmerman’s offense was not legal but political. 

If the man who pulled the trigger had been named Sanchez or had been a black, it would have been a non-story having failed the race template, hence of no consequence, no different than the thousands of blacks killed every year by other blacks that are ignored and unreported.  But once it appeared that a story could be cobbled together depicting white racism, the race machine went into warp-drive, force-feeding the race catechism on a weary public. 

That he was Hispanic disturbed the tidy narrative of white racism though and placed dueling liberal pieties at odds; but by then it was too late, and so a new hybrid ethnicity was quickly announced: the white Hispanic. 

But the Hispanic dimension is troubling for the race crowd – and must be handled delicately.  Future demographics are not favorable for blacks: in a word - it is George Zimmerman.  Hispanic Americans, when their numbers are great enough and they wield sufficient power, will discard the temporary alliance they may have with blacks; they will not be patient with black demands and black victimhood.  Having had nothing to do with slavery and also being members of an “oppressed minority,” there will be no pool of white guilt from which to extract wealth transfers or preferential treatment of any kind. 

Indeed, the window for blacks is closing quickly and the future is grim.  The last fifty years since the civil rights days of the sixties have been the optimal time for blacks in this country to get ahead when the public, rightfully or wrongfully, granted them every preference and advantage to better themselves, eager to right prior social wrongs.  But the golden era of affirmative action is ending.

Instead of seeking liberty, accomplishment, and full integration into American society, blacks have followed the victim admonitions of the race industry, to their own deepening despair and detriment.  They have accepted liberalism's nostrums for black dysfunction, embraced liberalism's assumptions of their inability to compete and requirement for ever expanding government largesse; furthermore they have learned to resent their country, the white, patriarchal oligarchy, and to believe that the cards are stacked against them. 

One would be hard pressed to devise a more damaging and disabling ideology than this, and yet this represents the core of liberalism’s message to blacks: you cannot compete; you require government assistance; and racism courses through the veins of the country and is the cause of all your troubles.

Most blacks will not overcome such a creed.  They will not understand that their prospects in America are far superior to that of blacks anywhere else in the world, nor will they examine the steadily deteriorating conditions in which many find themselves; they will not recognize that they have been led by the nose down a blind alley into a ghetto of cultural breakdown, criminality, unemployment, and poverty. 

But liberalism and the race industry thrive on failure.  The more the better.  Collapsing societies require government intervention along with steady diets of class warfare, wealth redistribution, and racial division, all leftist staples. That liberalism's policies are the cause of the failure is immaterial.  That liberalism’s strategies cannot possibly succeed and ignore all laws of economics and human nature is equally unimportant.  The centralization of power and control by leftist masterminds in the delerious pursuit of an affirmative action utopia for everyone is all that matters.

At some point the race industry will recognize that its ability to extort power and money will vanish.  It may be when the money simply runs out as in Europe or when Hispanics and whites and perhaps even blacks reject the race canon out of hand.       

Until then, the race machine will grind on, mining blacks for votes and money based on a cocktail of white guilt, black failure, and a pernicious narrative of American racism.