Race Bureaucrat Worries About Obama

The chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission in Britain has created a firestorm by writing that the candidacy of Barack Obama postpones the racial healing of America.  Trevor Phillips, a Caribbean black, writes that for whites

A vote for Obama is a pain-free negation of their own racism.

With Obama, whites can say, OK.  Now we voted for a black.  Let’s call an end to the stain of slavery and the politics of guilt and get on with a post-racial America.   I’ve talked to white friends, and we agree.  Obama represents a chance to escape from the racial politics of the last generation.  We are fed up to the back teeth with having race rammed down our throats by the race-relations industry, what you might call Big Race.  We don’t feel guilty.  We are proud that in two hundred years the west has moved from the universal, immemorial acceptance of slavery to the present situation where all racial inequality is scandalous.

But for Phillips this is far too easy. (Well, of course, he’s made his career out of the politics of liberal white guilt.)  You don’t understand race until you

grasp how profoundly race shapes everyday encounters in the US.

The idea that black problems can be swept under the rug and conveniently assigned to cultural failure “downplays the impact of globalisation on poor communities.”

Of course, Phillips has it all wrong.  It is not “race that shapes everyday encounters in the US.”  It is liberal political power that forces race to the center of national life. 

That is because liberal political power depends upon keeping race as a festering sore.  If we wound up the race laws—the welfare programs, the quota programs, the human rights commissions—but fiercely enforced laws on color-blindness then blacks would get to work and whites would lose their guilt.

There would be a huge sigh of relief.  Right now whites live with the reality that any encounter with a black person could lead to disaster.  You never know when you might say something or do something wrong and be hauled up before some liberal tribunal and stripped of your job, your career, and your reputation.  The safest thing is to avoid black people and say nothing when you are around them.

Imagine an America without the stain of liberal race persecution!

It would mark the true beginning of post-racial America.

But liberals like Trevor Phillips would lose their power. And we can’t have that.