Just like I recently searched for everything I’ve written about Trump on Facebook, I then did the same for things I’ve said over the years on the topic of race and racism. I certainly could have missed a post that touches on this general topic (much harder to search than simply the name “Trump”, but I did a few different searches with different terms to gather this list).
But for any posts or conversations I missed, the content would be substantially the same as the below: that I think racism is an evil. (As an aside, I exempted any that also included Trump, since I already posted those in the Trump list).
- I defended my father from accusations of racism (because he doesn’t have a racist bone in his body).
- Nine days before I posted a Kickstarter update in which people interpreted a silly rhyme as racist, I happened to take Harvard’s implicit bias test (the gold standard), and posted the results– that I’m in the 18 percent of people who has no racial bias/preference between white and blacks.
- I also support FAIR, an amazing civil liberties organization that explicitly promotes anti-racism.
- I noted I was thankful I don’t seem to know anyone racist or bigoted in a FB post in 2016.
- In June 2020 I reposted a FB post from the president of my church utterly denouncing racism.
- In this post here I implored people to not prejudge anyone and openly asked “do you really, actually, want to make racism extinct as I do?” And then suggested a path.
- In this post here, I quote a blogger who suggests we should allow racists to self-identify as a public service (so we can know who they are!).
- In this post here, I note that racist people exist, but we shouldn’t automatically assume everyone is racist.
- On the 4th of July two years ago I posted a blog post regarding my view that ultimately the Civil War was fought to end slavery, which I regard as an exceptional evil.
- And that blog post came out of comments on another post of mine, in which I stated I have no real problems removing Confederate statues, but I’m not keen on removing the statues of Churchill who is the greatest anti-fascist and of General Grant who crushed the Ku Klux Klan, and who was instrumental in abolishing slavery in the US.
- I specifically said a year ago in a FB comment that “I love the Chinese people” (in the context of a lengthy discussion in which I maintained one can criticize the Chinese government, while not criticizing the Chinese people – just as one can criticize Trump and the government of the US, without criticizing Americans, and can criticize Hitler, without saying anything about German people).
- I criticized the BLM organization (not the concept) while suggesting people support Campaign Zero, which has the same goals as BLM, but has shown actual successes from their work.
- I criticized the BLM organization due to their opposition to free speech and expression.
- I praised Biden for denouncing violence in race-related protests.
- I re-shared a post from a friend sharing viewpoints held by my church over the decades (including that our founder was anti-slavery).
- I was surprised to see a (patently illegal) push for segregation by race in a school in Atlanta.
- I shared a venn diagram equating Jim Crow laws with minimum wage (because both discriminate immorally)
- I shared a page from the book I was reading, “The Comanche Empire” that included the note that the Spanish colonizers officially outlawed slavery, but still practiced it under a different name.
- I shared a joke from the Babylon Bee about anti-racism corporate training (solution: don’t judge people based on their skin color!)
- I shared a video from a black woman about racism.
- I shared an article titled “Diversity Nonsense Cost Tens of Thousands of Lives” while decrying that partisan politics shouldn’t trump people’s lives.
- I shared a scary thought experiment asking how you would know you wouldn’t be racist if you lived in historically racist times of the past.
- I shared a news article about COVID-19’s origins while noting a criticism of the CCP is NOT a racial slur against ethnic Chinese.
- I shared a hilarious Youtube video displaying many equivalences between “wokism” with “racism.”
- I shared a video titled “Is Harvard Racist?”
- I shared a video titled “Black, Millennial, Female and…Conservative”
What do I think about racism? It’s a terrible feature of humanity.
My final thought is drawn from Martin Luther King’s underappreciated Letter from Birmingham Jail. MLK unequivocally states that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Indeed. He further teaches that the great stumbling block to true justice is the “shallow understanding from people of good will [rather] than [the] absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.” One form of that shallow understanding is the absurd substitution of illogical and often contradictory neo definitions of racism. Fancy semantics can never explode his timeless admonition (from the “I Have a Dream” speech) that “[people should] not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” By substituting that concept for the shallow and foolish new conceptualization of racism, we risk falling into MLK’s admonition (again from the Letter) that we must “[not prefer] a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.” Racism is unjust. We eliminate it with true justice, not neo forms of further injustice.