Is Black Identity Threatened with Extinction?
“They’re trying to write us out of history,” said the curator of the South Dakota African American History Museum in Sioux Falls. Porter Williams said that enough was enough when it comes to white liberal control of all things relating to his race, even including terms like Negro. “Negro to black people is not offensive. We’re Negro people, black people. Negro means black.” Time to tell the puppet masters to back off?
Apparently white liberals in the paternalistic 2009 South Dakota Legislature wouldn’t settle for anything other than a name like “African-American” with Indians being given a similar hyphenated designation, while whites themselves had the freedom of no hyphenation, as if by default.
The liberal establishment seems to be out to erase blackness from American culture. Look at blacks on commercials and television dramas these days: the spitting image of white liberals with no trace of the black personalty, as if being “Negro” is somehow inferior. Isn’t the president the apotheosis of White Liberal America?
It began in California when black voters broke with their white overseers over making gay sex the same as being part of the Civil Rights Movement. No, you don’t own us, they seemed to say. More recently the poet Maya Angelou, much lionized on the college circuit (yes, universities are controlled by white liberals), decided that she would protect herself and family with a handgun.
In his essay “The Leftist Hijacking of Black Identity,” Daniel Greenfield say that “Liberalism has not only become identified with racial politics, it has swallowed racial politics so completely that they no longer exist on a national level. National racial politics is just liberalism misspelled and when an MSNBC anchor equates IRS with a racial slur, it becomes clear that there is no longer any race in racism. Racism in politics has become so abstract that it no longer has anything to do with black people.”
Greenfield would agree with South Dakota’s Porter Williams about the White Liberal Establishment (both parties) wanting to expunge black identity, at least anything that doesn’t attempt to remake blacks into their own image:
The left played the black community, bribed their leaders, tossed a few trinkets to the masses and then plundered their heritage and history. The economic potential of the black community was destroyed to leave them with few options but to serve as the cannon fodder of big government. Black history and politics have been so thoroughly hijacked that a media personality on the propaganda channel of big government can claim with a straight face that IRS is a racial slur.
