Tokenism

For John, BLUF:  We are not making progress when we assume every action from the other side is vile and low.

Thanks to a link from The Instapundit we can travel quickly to Legal Insurrection, where he is ranting about accusations of GOP tokenism and about Slate writer David Sirota.

The accusation of GOP tokenism was published in The New York Times, recently famous for their proposal to ban high capacity ammunition, whatever that means. But, Cornell Law School Associate Professor William A Jacobson did not limit himself in yesterday's post to mocking writers in The New York Times for bloviating about South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley appointing a "Black man", Representative Tim Scott, as US Senator to replace resigning Jim DeMint.  He then went on to other issues, keeping in the back of his mind the lack of diversity at The New York Times, the University of Pennsylvania Political Science Faculty and Salon's collection of writers.

In the blog post Professor Jacobson talks about Mr David Sirota and Mr Sirota's views about Caucasian Males:

“The issue with it will be, politically, I think; the profile is white men,” Sirota said. “That’s a profile that’s not, essentially, in America allowed to be profiled. That’s the one profile in America that’s not allowed to be profiled.”

I am sure that upon reflection Mr Sirota would have said Caucasian Males, at least to my face, since I don't think of myself as "white" although I do see myself as a Caucasian.  And, no, I don't see myself as an Anglo.  Notwithstanding my name, I am descended from Irish stock, not English or German—well, maybe a dash of English, but more Welsh than English.

At any rate, Mr Sirota gets wrapped up in the issue of "White Privilege".  I might be interested in this thesis if I hadn't spent part of my youth in an "all-white" town and seen that even there privilege existed and there was a pecking order.♠  It would be nice if we could move beyond race as defining who we are and recognize that there are people who have preferences and sometimes they cut across lines that divide us and sometimes follow lines that divide us.  We still have the ignorant with us, and given the history of the human race, probably will for a few more decades.

Our job is to try and overcome those prejudices, in ourselves, and to offer avenues of overcoming for others.  One way we could start is by not assuming all Republicans are racist.  I have never assumed all Democrats were racist, even when bunches of them were.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  Our Family was one of two renting our homes and living in a two family home.  We examined things from the bottom up, so to speak.