MLK's Example

Something I did not know about Goldwater and about MLK:

The ‘Racism’ Wrecking Ball | National Review Online: "Kevin D. Williamson points out in the latest issue of National Review, the Reverend Martin Luther King was always careful with accusations of racism. “He often pointed out that Barry Goldwater was not himself a racist,” even though he voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Williamson notes. King had been told that Goldwater had worked hard to desegregate the Air National Guard in Arizona and had donated his own money for a lawsuit to desegregate a Phoenix high school. “Another reason that MLK did not call Senator Goldwater a racist is that he did not wish to look like a fool,” Williamson writes."

Now there seems to be no disincentive to making accusations of racism.

Instead of this constant whinging about being owed an apology for this or that off-hand comment, let the penalty for making false or unsupportable accusations of racism of prejudice being made to look like a fool. But of course, that would require some more Republicans and conservatives with the courage to risk being called racists themselves.

Earlier in the article Fund mentions the Duck Dynasty patriarch's comments about never personally observing any mistreatment of blacks growing up in Louisiana. Why is that absurd? A system of oppression, if it is really effective, doesn't have to be rude or openly cruel on a day to day basis. Indeed, that may be the real horror of the Jim Crow South, the acceptance of it as natural by both the oppressors and the oppressed.

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