The Racism Trap Defined

Kyle-Anne Shiver
Sat, 08 Aug 2009 21:00:00 -0700
Opinion

I received a number of emails vociferously attacking my character on the basis of the column I wrote for American Thinker, "The Obama We Knew, but Denied." I was called a "racist," a "race-baiter" and a "white elite."

Since I don't live in a "nation of cowards," as Attorney General Eric Holder has suggested, I generally face all such charges head-on with individualistic fervor.

I will state boldly and for the record that I am no racist. Some of the most rhetorically bloody battles I've ever fought were in defense of equal opportunities for blacks in the days when the civil rights movement was being battled over every dinner table, at every social gathering and in every church in the South.

I have had friends of many races, have worshipped hand in hand with all races and consider it to be a sin against God of the highest gravity to harbor racist feelings or thoughts. If I ever have a racist thought, I cast it out quickly with disgust, asking forgiveness. This is the Christian way.

Racism is absolutely indefensible to God, the Creator of all souls in His image. Each unique human being has perfectly identical value to God. Period. This is in adherence to both Judaism and Christianity, and no man can claim to follow either while knowingly enabling his own racist thoughts, words or deeds. To entertain and harbor racist thoughts is an act of hatred against God, one's fellow humans and oneself, and if done on a habitual basis, has the power to cut one off from God entirely.

Now, as to my own definition of racism. Racism, defined by Webster's Dictionary, is "a belief that by nature some races are superior to others," or "discrimination based on such belief."

Racism cuts all ways, between all races, and any individual of any race can be equally guilty of this sin. Racism is no more a singularly white sin than is say, drunkenness or gluttony or laziness. People are people are people; sin is sin is sin.

This godly belief was at the heart of Dr. Martin Luther King's struggle for a colorblind America. Many groups vied for King's ear and tried to dissuade him from this mission, saying he should demand more, should clamor for not only equality but payback for the hundreds of years of white-on-black racism, including slavery and Jim Crow in the South. King resisted these efforts; I regard the man as a saint. He may have yielded some, but in the whole of his life, he was a true Christian minister (though sinful, as we all are), who disdained the calls for human vengeance against white oppressors and held firmly to the dogma of nonviolence and forgiveness, seeking only a coming down of the walls and a restoration of equal civil rights.

Unfortunately, after King's assassination, black liberation theologians (like James H. Cone) and Black Panthers, Black Muslims and other splinter groups hijacked King's movement and turned it upside down and inside out, adopting the vengeance-violence model. Even after the post-King-assassination wholesale riots and killing sprees ended, these groups adopted socialist revolutionary tactics (those designed by Saul Alinsky and others), which have perpetuated the battle — turned racism into a black-on-white sin more than the other way around — and have demanded more and more as just retribution and penance for the sin of white racism in the past.

This movement has had very little to do with mending relations between the races and everything to do with gaining power for the leaders of the revolution. This movement has had very little to do with wanting achievement for individual black children and everything to do with developing a large class of people loyal to the "gifts" of politicians.

It is the most duplicitous and diabolical twisting of King's original intentions I have ever witnessed in wholesale fashion, performing its evil upon nearly the whole of our black population and holding them in shackles to a different kind of slavery, the kind we have seen emerge in post-colonial Africa. Individual blacks have economically enslaved whole generations of their own race in this quest for wealth, power and dominance.

In this, we have seen perhaps the best evidence of the fact that underneath our skins we are all alike. The human soul in a black skin is just as tempted and likely to give in to the thirst for power as any white soul. Just as likely to use other human beings for personal profit and just as likely to be damned for his sins.

I am no racist, and I will vehemently defend myself on any charge to the contrary. I do not care what any other person thinks of me. I live to serve God alone. No man can grant me eternal life. To serve the interests of other men is nothing more than to be a slave.

We are not a nation of cowards, as Holder has suggested. But many of us are indeed bound by a slavery worse than any material shackles or abuse. It is a slavery of our own making, which holds us bound and gagged by the false charges of "racism" where none exists.

I am a free woman; I shall not be bound by other men or women.