A valid argument can be made that the political left has been flagrantly racist for decades. The sad part is those on the right have been busy playing nice in the schoolyard and been very fearful of calling them out on it. The so-called progressive left in this country has become a master at hiding their racism under the name of identity politics. As well, they cloak their position as an aid to disenfranchised minorities, whom they claim are victims of white privilege.
On the surface, their cause sounds fair and moral. How can helping minorities be a bad thing? However, what they have done is to encourage a kind of racism among minorities that would never be acceptable by whites.
A mountain of examples could be given, but let us consider a recent case in point: Robert Lee Ahn, a Korean-American who is running for Congress in California. Los Angeles Times expressed surprise that Ahn is performing so strongly in a heavily Latino area:
Instead, it’s shaping up to be a contest between the powerful group of Latinos who make up a majority of the district’s voters and the small but politically potent Korean American community, as Assemblyman Jimmy Gomez and former city planning Commissioner Robert Lee Ahn grabbed the runoff spots that will determine L.A.’s next member of Congress.
“This is really ethnic politics 101,” said Matt Barreto, a UCLA professor of political science who helps run the polling firm Latino Decisions.
Evidently, they expect Latinos to vote based purely on race, and as such all their views will be the same. “Takeu Lee, Professor of politics and law at UC Berkeley, explains that Ahn’s success comes because “Korean-Americans in South-California have been hungry for political representation for a very long time,” reports the Times.
But why? Why is it so important for an individual that someone of his race represents him in Congress? What exactly does a conservative Korean-American have in common with a communist Korean-American other than race? Wouldn’t it be far more natural for an individual to vote for the candidate who represents their ideology, opinions, and values, regardless of race?
Apparently not.
Imagine what would have happened if a white Christian conservative averred the same sentiment towards a black candidate? Outrage of galactic proportions would have erupted, and rightfully so. Non-whites can wallow in as much in racism as their heart's desire, under the guise of identity politics. When white people do it, they are called every racist epithet in the books.
This brings us to an uncomfortable fact about the world -- just like slavery was endemic all over the world, until European Christians abolished it, so was racism. And it still is.
In other cultures, racism has simply never been a major topic. It is taken as a fact of life. Only in the West have people argued vociferously against racism that it has become an everyday political topic and social ill to be fought. The fact is, Western nations, including the United States, are the least racist in the world.
This may come as a surprise to people who have been educated in leftist propaganda, but the World Values Survey confirms the racial tolerance of Western societies, according to (of all publications!) the Washington Post. (Click to enlarge)
In the survey, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa figured as the most racist regions of the world.
According to former leader and founding father of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, democracy in a multiracial society usually devolves into ethnic conflict and civil war. In fact, Singapore was born out of precisely such a racialized civil war in Malaysia in 1965. He observed:
In multiracial societies, you don't vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion. Supposing I'd run their system here, Malays would vote for Muslims, Indians would vote for Indians, Chinese would vote for Chinese.
Lee strongly warned against identity politics, because he had seen its ravaging effects in his native Malaysia during his formative years. Today, Singapore is one world’s most successful multiracial nations, thanks in part to its total rejection of identity politics.
America should heed Lee’s warning and learn from the ingredients Singapore employed to create a harmonious multiracial society: a ferociously meritocratic society, not fostering a victimhood mentality with a corresponding welfare state and delivering an emphatic no to identity politics.
