Racism - it's everywhere!

Or so the NAACP would like you to believe.

Now, I'm a fan of many things that the NAACP has done and continues to do. But its existence, much like the careers of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, seems to have become largely dependent on finding racism in as many places as possible ... Thus you end up with a vast network of people who may be much more invested in perpetuating th sense of a problem than finding real ways to address the problem - and therefore causing themselves, or at least their current way of operating, to become obsolete.

The latest example of this race-mongering is this dratted New York Post cartoon. The furor over this is driving me crazy, because the response of so much of the "black establishment" is textbook: cry racism and demand apologies first, have rational or thoughtful dialogue about the matter much, much later - if at all. It's far more politically profitable to raise a fuss insisting that this cartoon was about President Obama being a monkey and getting shot by racist police than to explore the notion that this cartoon didn't have anything to do with race, and maybe we all need to dial down our offendable sensitivities just a tad.

Because it wasn't a cartoon about race; it was a cartoon expressing frustration about the stimulus bill, using a local event as a vehicle for commentary. The monkey being shot was an actual monkey (a chimpanzee, technically) who had gone on a little rampage in Stamford, CT and had to be taken out by local police. The connection between monkeys and the stimulus bill was not because Obama is black, and therefore chimp-like; it was an allusion to many varieties of jokes about monkeys at typewriters spewing out gibberish, but over time being able to produce coherent language inadvertently. The "monkeys at typwriters" in question could be construed to include President Obama as one of the originators of the priorities of the bill, but the group toward which the anger is directed is primarily composed of the bill's authors: Congressional Democrats and their aides, the vast majority of whom are white.

I understand the long history of insulting comparisons between people of African descent and monkeys, and the resulting sensitivity among the African-American community. But one's sensitivity to other people's past injurious actions doesn't automatically justify outrage at a completely different person's present actions, which may have a superficial similarity to the past but are not at all alike in intent or meaning. Robert Downey Jr.'s role in Tropic Thunder as a white actor who gets plastic surgery to be able to play a black character isn't about ridiculing black people and perpetuating awful stereotypes (the goal of "blackface" actors in the early 20th century); it's about ridiculing popular stereotypes of black people, with the apt foil of an actual black actor in the movie who comments on the nonsensical portrayal. The use of blackface as a medium to undermine everything that blackface was about isn't insulting, it's brilliant (not to mention insanely funny).

Understanding such nuances is critical to properly responding to the situations we confront as individuals and a society; but the current era of political so-called leaders who are up in arms about this cartoon would rather go for controversial and attention-grabbing soundbites than actual understanding that would advance our dialogues about the lingering issues of race in this country. Why do the hard work of sifting through the complex layers of racial stereotyping and misunderstanding in which we all participate, when you can get just as much airtime with far less effort by calling everyone who gets your dander up a racist?

The ultimate problem is that we still do have very difficult and damaging race (and class) issues to deal with in this country, and this kind of tempest over nothing takes away resources from the hard work that needs to be done. It also makes it far more difficult to call out actual incidents of racism; like the boy who cried wolf, if we call everything that upsets us racism, then we won't be believed or paid attention to when something serious and truly problematic comes along. The race-mongers may secure their jobs for a time while raising constant alarms and continuing not to create meaningful solutions ... But the time will come when people get tired of being told to constantly be angry and afraid, and their false "leadership" will be exposed for the fraud that it is.