Blind To Beauty
The racialist scolds of our current moment are blind to any beauty that does not stare back at them from their own bathroom mirror.
I posted this meme earlier this week. It's a humorous take on the extent to which our moral vision is 20/20 when analyzing other people, but closer to the myopia of Mr. Magoo in regard to ourselves. The left, in particular, sees the faults of our predecessors much more readily than they see their own.
One of the irksome things about the racialist drama queens who are braying into the media microphone at present - this includes the likes of Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo and a surprising clown parade of trendy Evangelical pastors - is their propensity for looking at historical events and being entirely blind to the beauty that is staring them in the face. When presented with beauty, they see only ugliness. They're like pinched and provincial germaphobes at the Louvre: having been given an opportunity to gaze at the Mona Lisa, they see only the dust on the baseboards near the floor.
How else to explain their perverse and distorted perspective on American history?
What makes America's history unique, and the history of the west generally, is not the fact that once-upon-a-time there was slavery, but that western culture embraced a wholesale rejection of slavery and, ultimately, rejected the kind of racialist discrimination now being insisted upon by the CRT crowd. Both the slave trade and practice of slavery were renounced- largely on the moral basis that flowed out of a Judeo-Christian understanding of humanity. Even then it wasn't easy. It was done late and imperfectly. But that it was done at all, and at the cost of hundreds of thousands of American lives, is a beautiful, if painful, thing.
In the 20th century, what made Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King successful was their shrewd understanding that the residual dregs of discriminatory thinking in the west were fundamentally at odds with the entire moral framework there. Gandhi and King succeeded, not by trying to overturn the moral framework, but by appealing to it. This is also a beautiful thing. It is beautiful that the moral framework was in place to begin with, and it is a beautiful thing that the hearts of the people were eventually persuaded to bring their own lives into closer conformity with the moral principles on which much of their culture had been built.
The American constitution is beautiful, in part, because it lit the fuse that made the elimination of slavery in America virtually inevitable. By contrast, even at this late date in human history, slavery persists all over north Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. The fact that we hear not a single word from the CRT crowd about this reality tells us most of what we need to know about the sincerity of their intentions. The racialist scolds of our current moment have apparently never outgrown the inflated egos of their adolescence. They seem congenitally blind to any beauty that does not stare back at them from their own bathroom mirror.
When Ibram X. Kendi tweeted that cross-racial adoption was an act of "white colonization", and nothing more than a calculated effort by white parents to inoculate themselves against charges of racism, he told us most of what we needed to know about the ugliness of his mind. The hearts of Kendi and his ilk have become so deformed that they are able to look at beautiful pictures of familial love and see only the color of skin mixed with political calculation.
The racialist obsessions of the Kendi clan blind them to the beauty all around them. We should act without any illusions regarding what they are, and the harm that they mean to do.