I loathe "identity politics" and leftwing groupthink. There is one race - homo sapiens - and that is a genetic fact. The notion that there is a "white" race and a "black" race and a "red" race and a "yellow" race, etc. is entirely cultural, and thus one of the roots of all evil that leads to many, if not all, conflicts, in both the macrocosm and the microcosm.
But as Nick Fury told Steve Rogers in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, "SHIELD takes the world as it is, not as we would like it to be." Sound, rational advice, that. And so, as the owner of Jimbo’s Deli in Flemington, New Jersey, soundly and rationally decided, if every other ethnicity and gender and sexuality under the sun gets its own "history month," why not crackers as well?:
Jim Boggess, proprietor of Jimbo’s Deli on Main at 22 Main St., says, “No matter what you are — Muslim, Jewish, black, white, gay, straight — you should be proud of what you are. I shouldn’t have to feel bad about being white.”
But a neighbor and former customer, Bhakti Curtis, who is bi-racial, doesn’t accept that. He said the sign, is “mocking Black History Month,” especially the way the T was crossed in “WHITE.” The cross piece was not right at the top, it was lower down, in a style used by the Ku Klux Klan and other white-power groups, Curtis said. That cross piece of the T has since been broadened to make it a more traditional, if top-heavy, capital T.
Detective Sergeant William Svard said Corporal Louis Hribik’s report indicates that Curtis said the sign is “racist,” that he felt harassed by it and wanted to know what would be done about it.
Let's put this in perspective, folks. A (half)black man rules this country. For five or six very recent months, Black Klan insurrectionists were disrupting and burning down entire communities and assaulting and murdering both cops and white civilians for no other reason than that they were cops and white people. And all of it triggered and fueled by the blatant smear of a white cop as a "racist killer" when he was, in fact, trying to defend himself against a black assailant that really was trying to murder him - and his entire local police department, now under official persecution by a black attorney-general.
Yet a white restauranteur simply puts up a "celebrate white history month" sign at his establishment, and a "mixed race" neighbor calls the cops on him. On charges of being white and thinking he has First Amendment rights, I suppose.
Tell me again who the racist is in this scenario?
Hribik went to Jimbo’s, looked at the sign, spoke with Boggess and decided that the sign wasn't derogatory or racist and that no further police action was needed.
Boggess agrees with that assessment and believes he’s lawfully exercising his right of free expression. He keeps a copy of the Bill of Rights in his establishment for ready reference.
I like this guy more and more, don't you?
Boggess said, “If there’s any racial discrimination going on, it’s by people who are objecting to his sign “because I’m white.”
Precisely. And precisely what his sign was no doubt intended to illustrate.
He said that while other groups have their own celebrations, “I just want to be included. Why is this such a big deal? I don’t get it.”
He said, “I love everybody and everybody should celebrate what they are.”
And that does not require disparagement of or hostility towards anybody else.
Or at least, it didn't used to.
But why let sound rationality, much less logic and science, spoil a good hatefest, right?
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