The Damaging Political Legacy Of Addressing The Race Issue
By Frank Salvato
March 21, 2008
Barack Obama recently issued another of his linguistic masterpieces in addressing the issues of racism, hate-speech and his spiritual mentor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. His speech was pretty. It was eloquent. It was impassioned. It attempted to approach the true issue in danger of being overshadowed by a sensationalistic mainstream news media; racism in the total of American society, including the Black community. It even included a condemnation of specific statements by Wright, a man Obama says, "...has been like family to me." But Obama's speech fell short in answering some important ideological questions about his belief system and in doing so exposed the Achilles heel of the Progressive-Left where race is concerned: The Progressive-Left, in its quest for a multicultural utopia, simply can't have racial harmony.
One of the biggest buzz-words used by the Progressive-Left -- America's Fifth Column -- is "diversity." They used the idea of advancing diversity as a means to achieving what they hoped -- what they "knew" -- would be a racially and culturally symbiotic utopia where "all men are created equal." The problem with this line of thought is that celebrating diversity factionalizes people; it does not help to bring people together under a commonality. By exposing the great racial and cultural divides that exist in the United States -- within all racial and ethnic communities -- Barack Obama is forcing an examination of the ideology of multiculturalism versus e pluribus unum (out of many one), much to the chagrin of the Progressive-Left.
By its very definition, multiculturalism encourages the promotion of individual cultures within a society rather than in only one common culture. Since the "cultural revolution" of the 1960s and 1970s, our society -- guided by the counter-cultural elites -- has embraced the ideology of multiculturalism. In doing so it became "politically incorrect" to identify oneself as simply "an American." To do so was to identify with "the establishment." Instead, mainstream Americans began to refer to themselves as hyphenated Americans: Italian-Americans, African-Americans, Jewish-Americans, Mexican-Americans and so on. In that single vestige of multiculturalism the American Fifth Column achieved two things: they marginalized the importance of identifying ourselves as Americans while culturally mandating the reconfiguration of our identities to emphasize ancestral origin.
In placing the emphasis on ancestral origin, the American Fifth Column encouraged the Balkanization of the United States. The American-Black community rallied around organizations and individuals that championed their African heritage. The American-Mexican community united around organizations and individuals that championed their Mexican heritage. The American-Italians gravitated toward their Italian heritage, and so on. This established individual and separate communities not just in the physical sense, within geographic locations, but in the cultural fabric of our nation. We, as a people, encouraged by the American Fifth Column and manipulated by their false-promise of a racial and cultural utopia, abandoned our American ideology for multiculturalism. We stopped being Americans, although that's the way the rest of the world identified us (and still does), and became an association of different cultures that needs to employ "tolerance" towards other cultures in order to function as a cohesive nation.
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