Who Are We?

My sister is a student at a public university, and her abnormal psychology professor gave her a dose of abnormal psychology recently. When my sister informed her professor that she had made a mistake in sourcing a paper and asked for a chance to correct it, her professor told her, "you white people are all the same...always looking for other people to clean up your messes".

Firstly, I take issue with the logic of this indictment. If white people are always looking for other people to clean up their messes, why was my sister asking for permission to clean up her own mess? She is a disgrace to white people everywhere, apparently. All joking aside, I wonder how it is that a person who felt it acceptable to say this to a student could possibly be employed by a public university.

There is no such thing as reverse racism, just as sure as our society harbors no sympathy for reverse murder or reverse rape. Racism is racism. When it is "reversed", none of its immorality is alleviated. My sister's professor made a blatanly racist and intellectually childish comment, and it got me to thinking how it is that I am far more outraged by this than my sister was.

If a white professor had started a sentence with, "you black people are all the same...", he would have been fired the same day, I imagine. I can also imgaine him on the front page of the local newspapers and as the crucible for a new push for sensitivity training, diversity awareness, and other assorted acts of moral masturbation in which young people congregate to apologize for living in such a rapacious and bigoted society.

I don't mean for one minute to underestimate the weight of the crimes that have been perpetrated by white men in my country against African-Americans. Neither do I intend to endorse the logic of these racist men, which I must do in order to buy into my sister's professor's world view. Racist whites see people as defined by their skin color. So do racist blacks, such as my sister's professor.

I am not proud to be a white man. I am proud to be a good man, and relatively proud to be an American, but I attach precisely no importance to my skin color. I fully understand that the overarching forces of society and economics mean that I will benefit to some degree by being born white, but that is different from defining myself as white, or allowing anyone else to do so. I don't define myself by my skin, my height, my name, or the shape of my ears, because I have no control over these attributes. I define myself by my actions.

If we accept the world view of my sister's professor, not only am I and my sister responsible for the various and well-documented sins of our great-great-great-great-second-step-cousins-twice-removed, but we are also to be credited with representative democracy, walking on the moon, are curing polio. And not only does my sister's professor share victimhood with the nameless millions of her ancestors who were enslaved by my ancestors, but she is just as responsible for those of her ancestors who kidnapped and sold her other ancestors to my ancestors. American armies did not pierce the heart of darkness with soldiers and cotton tycoons to enslave Africans; other Africans gladly sold their cousins to the Americans, with full knowledge of the destination.

I was in a train station in Munich a few years ago with my closest friend, and we were buying a ticket to Florence. "Before leaving Germany", said the man at the counter, "I suggest you visit Dresden. It's really quite beautiful.....or it was, until you destroyed it". Ah yes, the great destroyer of Dresden, born 35 years after the fact.

If I am responsible for destroying Dresden by virtue of my nationality, then I am also to be commended for rebuilding it. And if I am responsible for destroying Dresden, the ticket man is every bit as responsible for the war itself. For every life wasted, for every book burnt. I wondered why he was at work at the train station that day. Didn't he have Jews to kill? And since I'm an American of German descent, which side am I responsible for? Both? Sucks to be me.

The kind of conversation-ending intellectual infantilism cited above, which denies people their very identity as individual human beings and is designed to end conversations before they are allowed to become substantive, has no place in the hearts and minds of rational people. It will continue to exist, of course, but it must be relegated to people who sell train tickets, and exorcised from the ranks of those who teach our children.