Having been raised by an Irish Catholic mother and a lapsed Jewish father, I have often referred to an immortal phrase I heard from a comedian whose name I no longer remember. “I know guilt and shame,” I’ve explained to many people with whom I’ve discussed family backgrounds. Oftentimes, I go further, explaining that while Irish and Jewish are the biggies, my family’s background is comprised of so many other ethnicities (Lithuanian, Brazilian and French/Creole to name a few) that being prejudiced is a dangerous enterprise: I could end up hating myself.

I bring this up because I’m getting sick to death with regard to what passes for “enlightened thinking” on the subject of race. There’s an old saying that no one is more annoying than a reformed drunk talking about the excesses of alcohol. I disagree. Progressives who believe they own the franchise on moral superiority – and thus the self-appointed and exclusive right to determine who is or isn’t racist – blow the doors off reformed drunks.

Hard as it is to believe, part of that superiority includes the latest effort, led by Atlantic Magazine’s Ta-Nehisi Coates, to once again demand reparations for “Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy.”

“Perhaps no number can fully capture the multi-century plunder of black people in America,” Coates writes. “Perhaps the number is so large that it can’t be imagined, let alone calculated and dispensed. But I believe that wrestling publicly with these questions matters as much as – if not more than – the specific answers that might be produced. An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future. More important than any single check cut to any African American, the payment of reparations would represent America’s maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders.”

Let me give you some other numbers, Mr. Coates. An 1866 report compiled under the direction of Provost Marshal General James B. Fry estimated that 279,689 men in the Union forces died during the Civil War. The toll was raised to 360,222 by the late 19th century, when widows and orphans brought forward information when applying for pensions and survivors’ benefits. By 1870, the Census Superintendent, Francis Amasa Walker, was arguing even that number was too low because many of those discharged died shortly after the war, as a result of war-related diseases and wounds. “Tens of thousands were discharged to die; tens of thousands died within the first few months after discharge,” he wrote. “Tens of thousands more lingered through the first or second year.” Walker concluded that “500,000 will surely be a moderate estimate for the direct losses among the Union armies.”

For those with an ongoing agenda, such numbers apparently have nothing to do with “America’s maturation,” but I’m guessing that more than a few descendants of people who gave their lives to re-constitute a slave-free union, might be a tad dismissive of a multi-generational shakedown. For me, it’s a much simpler issue: legions of Americans with no relationship whatsoever to slavery paying off people who were never victims of it, is absurd.

I’m guessing affirmative action, the vast re-distributionism of the Great Society, a safety net that has become a hammock, college admission quotas and racial set-asides in government contracts and hiring doesn’t mitigate such nonsense either. Perhaps it’s because too many whites are perceived as feeling insufficiently guilty or insufficiently kowtowed by the aforementioned doyens of moral superiority, many of whom make a damn good living or political career (a bit redundant, I know), keeping Americans at each other’s throats.

Hence the “check your privilege” scam being perpetrated at America’s Marxist finishing schools, more familiarly known as colleges. That’s the bit where one is supposed to feel inherently guilty and automatically privileged simply because one is Caucasian. One would think the monumental irony of such broad-brush painting would resonate with those who invariably claim to be victims of broad-brush painting. Unfortunately, introspection – which involves actual thinking, as opposed to the avalanche of hypersensitive feeling that has largely replaced it – brooks no such inconvenient intrusion. The depths of such nonsense were plumbed by MSNBC’s Touré, who tweeted that “white privilege” was the reason Holocaust survivors succeeded in life.

Courtesy of Mr. Touré, the foundation of modern-day racialist hucksterism is laid bare: be guilty, or be racist. There’s no third choice.

Thus, we have a confused soul like Dallas Maverick’s owner Mark Cuban, who conflates common sense with prejudice. “If I see a black kid in a hoodie and it’s late at night, I’m walking to the other side of the street,” he said, wading into the pool. “And if on that side of the street, there’s a guy that has tattoos all over his face – white guy, bald head, tattoos everywhere – I’m walking back to the other side of the street.” If that sounds familiar, it’s because Jesse Jackson said essentially the same thing over twenty years ago, insisting there is "nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery. Then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved….“

Cuban, who reportedly stands by his words, nevertheless felt compelled to apologize to the parents of Trayvon Martin, who has become the archetype for white prejudice, irrespective of the reality that he was killed by Hispanic George Zimmerman who was subsequently acquitted of murder charges by a jury. Thus, Cuban has both bases covered: for his remarks he is sufficiently racist, and for his apology, sufficiently guilty.

Guilt is the key here. Without the constant ginning up of that emotion, the hucksters face an uphill climb. No doubt they were shaken when reliably liberal comedian Jon Stewart did a bit in 2010 where, in the midst of corruption charges leveled at black Congress members Maxine Waters (D-CA) and Charles Rangel (D-NY), black comedian Larry Wilmore produced a credit card deemed to be the "race card.” When he attempted to run through a credit card machine he discovers it is "maxed out,“ and also "Void During a Black Presidency.”

As we know now, such humor was short-lived, and with good reason: if Americans learn to laugh when the hucksters attempt to work them over, the American left is in serious, if not fatal, trouble. Thus their ever reliable foot soldiers on both sides of the progressive color line must continually man the ramparts to ensure the racial divide remains as wide as ever.

Fortunately, they’re getting desperate. So desperate that Anthony G. Greenwald, professor of psychology at the University of Washington who has spent 20 years “studying bias,” has produced an “Implicit Association Test” designed to prove the overwhelming majority, if not all of us, are biased. The kicker? We don’t know we’re biased. “People who regard themselves as fair and unbiased nevertheless can engage in judgments and actions that are biased in ways that they don’t even recognize,” Greenwald contends.

Let the self-flagellation begin – if you’re gullible enough to conflate the myriad number of judgement calls you make about innumerable aspects of your life with innate and unconscious bias.

Me? I’m not buying such pyscho-babble garbage. There comes a point in life where you either know who you are, or you become a dedicated sap willing to be swayed by the latest b.s., and the eternal sense of guilt, anger, frustration and inadequacy that accompanies it. There will never be a perfectly racist-free society – on either side of the color line – any more than the fallen creature we call man will ever be perfected. What has always worked for me is a radical idea in comparison to today’s standards: do unto others as you would have others do unto you. It has stood me in good stead with anyone and everyone, save those who insist racial relations are more complicated than that.

No, they’re not. It only seems that way to those with a vested interest in keeping Americans divided. And despite the media- and academic-fueled nonsense that is currently in vogue, I’m betting their time is growing short. Despite our collective fallibilities, Americans remain an overwhelmingly decent people – of every persuasion. Perhaps I’m prejudiced for saying so, but I can live with it, “guilt” and all.

© 2014 The Patriot Post