The quote of the day is from Steve, the Little Tiny Liar who loves his parrots and likes to cook:

The evil of racism isn’t that it results in the harsh treatment of minority members. Some individual minority members deserve that. The evil is that racism, like terrorism, punishes the innocent along with or even instead of the guilty. And the generalization quoted above is a textbook example.

The burden to prove that a person is of poor character shouldn’t be on the person himself. It should be on society. When you start with the premise that black people in general are “running wild,” you put every black child in a position where he has to prove he’s an exception. That isn’t just a type of racism; that’s the essence of racism. And that seems to be what’s going on here.

Despite Acidman’s being on my blogroll I don’t visit him regularly. Heck. With a four hundred-strong blogroll as mine I don’t visit all of them in the course of a day. I would have I missed this particular entry of his, if I didn’t drop by Kevin Aylward’s and seen him refer to it. Says Kevin: In the 24 hours since I first noticed the post I would have expected that someone somewhere would have had something to say. I was wrong…

I’m placing my bets on “apathetic.” Honestly the volume of garbage that one can encounter while surfing through blogrolls can be overwhelming and desensitizing. I wouldn’t have posted on anything about this garbage if not for Val Prieto, posting some poignant memories. I am lucky that the most fleetingly racist experiences I have had always involved kooky generalizations about “Asians,” and being called Chinese once (to which I took great umbrage).

Life isn’t a storybook, not a novel where the villain is always treated with sympathy by the author (a villain whose villainy is not explained nor revealed is only half as powerful). People are far more complex, and I have no idea how or why Acidman had to go down to such depths elucidating a concept that could have been explained in better words.

I’d like to close this rambling post by quoting Bill Whittle in his essay, Responsibility:

How much better, how much stronger and healthier are we, when we dare anyone to use whatever terms they chose, and rather than sitting as powerless victims, rise in angry and righteous indignation to fight the human filth that use words like nigger, spick, gook, mick, kike, dago, and all the rest? How much more secure, how much more inoculated, are we when we can hear these words knowing that those who use them are discredited and terrified infants so out of ideas and argument that they must resort to such childish tactics to reassure themselves? What words can hurt us when we refuse to be hurt by words? What simple and powerful wisdom is bound up in Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names can never hurt me?

Dear friends, the monsters in our closet remind us constantly of our contrasts with them.