The mass murder of nine innocent black Americans attending a Bible study in a Charleston church by a drug-addled, racist, terrorist thug was as close to universally condemned as anything can be in a country like America. Expressions of sorrow over what happened and loathing for the killer are everywhere. Moreover, the shooter was quickly apprehended and the governor of South Carolina has already called for the death penalty. Hopefully, she’ll get her wish.
Supposedly, the shooter had the same lunatic dream as Charles Manson did back in 1969: he was hoping to start a race war.
That won’t work any better today than it did back in the sixties.
However, what this evil piece of human debris did manage to do is sow a little more hatred and division between Americans. There are already enough people doing that.
We always have ghouls who gleefully try to exploit every tragedy for their own political ends and there are more of them than ever before. They’re trying to tie this into their campaigns against police, trying to whip up voter registration, trying to convince black Americans that white people in general and conservative whites in particular hate their guts.
It would be nice to just shrug that off, but it has become so easy for people to talk past each other in today’s social-media-driven environment where every molehill is blown up and repeated and intensified until it’s made to look like a mountain. So, I want to try to cut through the clutter.
I think of myself as a typical white Tea Party conservative. I’m pro-cop, tough on crime, anti-Affirmative Action and I can’t stand Obama. In fact, if you put pretty much any black liberal (or for that matter, any liberal) and me in a room, we probably wouldn’t agree on ANYTHING political.
There are liberals who will tell you all day long that people like me are racist, that we hate black Americans and we secretly send “dog whistles” to each other about it all day long. If you believe them, you’d think people like me don’t care about black Americans at best and want to see them suffer at worst.
Now, here’s the truth about me and people like me.
I support the policies I do because I think they’re good for all Americans, including black Americans.
I think tough policing benefits black Americans more than anyone because they’re most likely to be the victims of crime. I think Affirmative Action undercuts the accomplishments of deserving black Americans by making people wonder if they earned their achievements. I think Obama has been a disaster not just for America as a whole, but for black Americans in particular. Given the fact that liberal policies have been failing black Americans for fifty years, I think I can make a good case for what I’m saying.
Of course, if you look at it a different way, I understand that, but since I can give you a coherent, intellectual explanation for why I think the way I do, you should at least give me the benefit of the doubt when I tell you I don’t hate you.
The words “racism” and “bigotry” get tossed around so quickly and easily these days that they’ve lost a lot of their meaning. So, rather than talking about those words, let me just say this: I don’t think anyone is inferior because of his skin color. I think black Americans are just as capable as white Americans. In fact, I think people should be judged by merit and the content of their character, not skin color. People are just people.
So, we may disagree. In fact, if you’re a black Democrat, we probably disagree on a lot of things. But, I want you to know that people like me don’t hate you. We may oppose you and we may support policies you don’t like, but it’s not out of hatred. It’s because we love our country and because we want as many Americans as possible to be successful and have good lives. Disagree with us all day long, but no matter what anyone tells you, we don’t hate you.