The Content of Their Character

For John, BLUF:  We need to continuously fight to get beyond race and ethnicity and get to the content of one's character.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Law Professor Ann Althouse has an insightful Blog Post on the issue of race and the fact that some Republicans, wrongly, are prepared to abandon their colorblind position—"The conservatives' high ground on race is colorblindness, and they'd be fools to abandon it."  Her concern is that recent murders (Slain World War II vet Delbert Belton and Australian Christopher Lane) are going to raise questions as to why the use of Trayvon Martin is not being replayed "in the other direction".  Her point, and I hope the point of every right thinking American is that there is only one direction, and it is colorblind.

From Professor Althouse's blog:

Trayvon Martin — an individual human being — was used by demagogues to score points about the suffering of black people in America, but this is not a game, and it is delusion to imagine that there is a need to score points on some imagined other side.  This is not a game.  There is no score.  And we are all on the same side.

Put more starkly, the race baiting engaged in by the Left over the Treyvon Martin case does not justify Republican abandoning their very important position that the nation is best off when it works to be colorblind.  Getting down in the swamp of demagoguery is not what is going to fix our problems.  I remember listening to US Representative Shirley Chisholm, back in 1971, when she was giving a speech in her campaign for the Democrat Party nomination for President.  It was a talk at a college campus and a student brought up the ecology of the whales.  Ms Chisholm said that she was concerned about the ecology of children in inner cities and children in Appalachia.  No race defined.  Geography and cuture diverse.

Back to the Professor:

Conservatives have rested on the principle of colorblindness for a long time, and they've taken abuse for it.  Look at how left liberals abuse Chief Justice Roberts for writing, "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."  They consider that kind of talk naive (at best).  They push the perceived sophistication of what Justice Blackmun said back in the first affirmative action case:  "In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race.  There is no other way."

Let us continue to rest on the principle of colorblindness.  It doesn't mean we ignore problems, but it does mean we look for the underlying pathologies in humans, pathologies that are deeper than race.  That is something that New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg♠ has failed to do with his Fourth Amendment violating stop and frisk rules, which have been, thankfully, struck down by a Federal Judge.

The Reverend Martin Luther King, Junior, summed it up 50 years ago this coming week:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  Sadly, Mayor Bloomberg switch from the Democrat Party in 2001 and registered as a Republican and held that until 2007, when he became an Independent.  We are well rid of him.