“HOW CAN WE EVER GET ALONG?”
by Howard Rotberg, ©2020, NewEnglishReview.crg
(Jul. 15, 2020) — Have you noticed how various media are using the term “racialized” more often? Have you noticed that there is a lot of advocacy on the need to give special benefits, protections or privileges to “racialized” people? What does that mean?
And aren’t we supposed to act as individuals and judge people as individuals, not as part of a race or ethnicity? Don’t we in the west strive for a colour-blind society? And if we focus on the matters that divide us, how can we ever get along?
Webster-Merriam defines “racialized” as “the act or process of imbuing a person with a consciousness of race distinctions or of giving a racial character to something or making it serve racist ends”.
Does Black Lives Matter serve racist ends although it might seem a matter of racialized ends? Certainly when people are being disciplined at work for saying that All Lives Matter, we have become a racialized culture. Here is one example:
Leslie Neal-Boylan, the dean of the nursing school at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell, was allegedly fired after she received backlash from a student about an email to the campus community s for saying: “Recent events recall a tragic history of racism and bias that continue to thrive in this country. I despair for our future as a nation if we do not stand up against violence against anyone. BLACK LIVES MATTER, but also, EVERYONE’S LIFE MATTERS.”
“No one should have to live in fear that they will be targeted for how they look or what they believe,” the email continues, urging the nursing school students to “care for everyone regardless of race, creed, color, religion, ethnicity, ability or gender preference.”
A nursing student took issue with the dean’s choice of words and posted the email on twitter saying, “including the statement ‘all lives matter’ was uncalled for and shows the narrow minded people in lead positions.”
“Narrow minded” in my view describes the people who think that it is immoral to say that all lives matter and who think it is only permissable to care about Blacks. These people portray as “racists” anyone not willing to erase any parts of American history that offends them. They portray as “racists” those who oppose turning sporting events into political protests with separate anthems for whites and blacks or those who oppose political slogans on uniforms or who think all athletes should stand for the American anthem. (Will they be standing for the Black anthem and then sitting down when the American anthem starts?)
When we, like the nursing student mentioned above, seek to make even expressions of good will forbidden, in a quest to serve the racist ends of “Black Power,” we are racialized.
The irony is that Dean Neal-Boylan sees herself as promoting racialization and sadly wrote that she would not be pursuing legal action against the school because “I know this would fuel the conservative opposition to the BLM movement and that would be anathema to me.” So we see that even the most committed left-liberal Trumpophobes, are willing to fall on their swords if that will serve to hurt conservatives.
We see, in this context, that the use of words becomes ever more controversial and ever more meaningless. Black Lives Matter, so far an evolving group with an evolving policy platform, decided to pile on the one group that is far more persecuted than Blacks – the Jews. Their policy so far states: “The U.S. justifies and advances the global war on terror via its alliance with Israel and is complicit in the genocide taking place against the Palestinian people,” the activists wrote in the platform. They go on to call Israel an “apartheid state.”
Read the rest here.
Howard Rotberg is the author of four books on ideologies and values: The Second Catastrophe: A Novel about a Book and its Author; Exploring Vancouverism: The Political Culture of Canada’s Lotus Land; Tolerism: The Ideology Revealed; and The Ideological Path to Submission… and what we can do about it. He writes periodically for Frontpage Magazine, New English Review, Israel National News. Israpundit, Jewish Voice of New York and The National Telegraph, and has written for other newspapers such as the Vancouver Sun, the Vancouver Observer, the Waterloo Region Record, the Hamilton Spectator and others. He is president of Canada’s sole conservative values publishing house, Mantua Books, www.mantuabooks.com and lives in Hamilton, Ontario Canada.