Ray Bradbury, Call Your Office!

     I have a huge personal library – approximately 12,000 physical volumes, and approximately another thousand eBooks. About a quarter of those books are non-fiction, divided irregularly among the several categories of my interests. If memory serves, only three of the authors are black:

• Thomas Sowell
• Walter Williams
• Larry Elder

     As for fiction, I’ve never inquired about the race of a writer whose fiction I enjoy. That having been said, apart from the late Frank Yerby, I don’t know of any black writers whose fiction I own.

     Apparently, that makes me a terrible person:

     Juan Vidal, a radical alt-left writer who contributes to deranged anti-Trump websites like The Daily Beast and Rolling Stone, published an article on NPR’s website demanding that white people “decolonize” their bookshelves by removing all books written by white people and requiring they be replaced with books that are written by people of color....

     Vidal: If you are white, take a moment to examine your bookshelf. What do you see? What books and authors have you allowed to influence your worldview, and how you process the issues of racism and prejudice toward the disenfranchised? Have you considered that, if you identify as white and read only the work of white authors, you are in some ways listening to an extension of your own voice on repeat?

     Vidal also goes on to say that white people need to “silence” themselves before actually consuming literature by people of color.

     This sort of activist makes it hard for me to restrain my, ah, tendency to express myself in my father’s favorite Navyisms. Oh hell, why not? Candidly, Vidal’s a lump of dogshit. And we already have a quite serviceable prescription for dogshit:

     Listen, punk. To me you're nothin' but dogshit, you understand? And a lot of things can happen to dogshit. It can be scraped up with a shovel off the ground. It can dry up and blow away in the wind. Or it can be stepped on and squashed. So take my advice and be careful where the dog shits ya!

     Yet Vidal’s attitude is becoming broadly characteristic of the “activism” practiced by “people of color” – or, in the original formulation, colored people. While there are surely many colored people who would cringe and turn away from such “activists” and their demands, they’re doing very little to restrain or repudiate them. Some colored people – Biden advisor Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is among the more prominent of them – are actually encouraging this sort of self-abnegation by whites. And of course, some whites are performing the demanded kowtows.

     Disgraceful and horrible.

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     Allow me to link together a few facts:

• Whites of European heritage built this country.
• A number of Negroes, sold to white slavers by Negro tribal kings, were brought to antebellum America to labor as slaves, predominantly on cotton plantations.
• The Civil War / War Between The States / Late Unpleasantness and the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution ended slavery as a legal institution in the U.S. There have been no legally recognized slaves since then.
• While there was a long period of legal distinctions, which varied from place to place, that partly or wholly disenfranchised Negroes, that came to an end in 1964: 56 years ago. Since then, more and more laws and programs have been enacted in the hope of redressing the inequities of the previous years.
• Today, the law actually confers preferential treatment on Negroes as regards education, housing, employment, and government contracting. Firms have been put out of business for hiring too few Negroes; no firm has ever been assailed for hiring too few whites.
• Whites of today bear no guilt for the enslavement of Negroes. Indeed, vanishingly few American whites are descended from a slaveholder.

     To top it all off, this Vidal fucknozzle is not a Negro. He’s Hispanic, and Hispanics cannot claim ever to have been enslaved by American whites, nor have the laws ever discriminated against them. For his cheek he deserves to be tarred, feathered, and dropped from an airplane over Caracas. (Perhaps we might provide him a parachute; I’m of two minds about that. But no skydiving lessons.)

     What’s that you say, Gentle Reader? I sound angry? Why, whatever gave you that idea?

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     “If I am offensive, you may take it that I am offended!” – Christopher Plummer as Sherlock Holmes, in Murder by Decree

     It is notable that while “black identity” and “the black experience” occupy a huge amount of our national discourse, any trace of pride in white identity is shouted down, and no discussion of the white experience – our achievements, our quest for justice, or our sacrifices of our own interests in pursuit of the phantasm of “equality” – is permitted whatsoever. Rather, whites and “whiteness” are perennially and mercilessly cast as “the problem:” that which must somehow be transcended or eliminated for “equality” to prevail.

     The “activists” describe America as a hellhole of bigotry and injustice. Yet colored people continue to stream over our borders by the thousands. Are they insane? Or might there be something just a wee bit inaccurate about that negative characterization of these United States?

     And now we have would-be book-burners. They seek to “decolonize” our bookshelves. They exhort us to “silence ourselves.” I don’t think Ray Bradbury anticipated the racial and ethnic angles of this campaign. But what they seek is every bit as terrifying as the firemen who were Guy Montag’s colleagues in Fahrenheit 451.

     Stand your ground, white America. You’ll have to do so anyway, as our backs are now against the wall, so brace up.