Michael Moore: What's It Like to Be Black in America?

I watched Michael Moore on Larry King Live last week.

It was a troubling, even disgusting, experience. It's not as though I should be surprised at Moore's outrageous views, given his socialism. But when he spoke of Jeremiah Wright, and particularly of "what it's like to be black in America" today, my jaw just about hit the floor.

Here's the interview clip, via YouTube:

I've long been convinced that racial victimology is the scourge of the American black future. When we teach our kids that white racism is the cause for their problems, we absolve responsibility from the individual to the society.

Note Dennis Prager's powerful rebuttal on left-wing racial politics, where he touches on Moore's Larry King performance:

It is with no pleasure that I put in writing what I have long believed: Though many individual liberals have only goodwill toward black Americans, the liberal world since the late 1960s (i.e., after the major civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s) has done incalculable damage to black America and to race relations in this country. Whether out of guilt or because of its own racist views (i.e., the unspoken but regularly implied belief in the inferiority of African-Americans), the left-of-center's general attitude toward black Americans has been that they cannot be judged by the same standards as others.

From lowering standards of admission to universities to blaming the high number of black men in prison for violent crimes on white racism to decades of cultivating black victimhood and the subsequent Wright-like rage against America, liberals and their party, the Democrats, have immeasurably hurt African-Americans and America.

Should a non-black oppose race-based lowered standards or blame black criminals rather than white racism for their criminality, the liberal world dismisses that individual as a racist; and should a black express these views, he is dismissed as an "Uncle Tom," a "traitor to his race."

In just the past week, two prominent men of the left provided examples.

Appearing on "Larry King Live," Michael Moore, the adored hero of the 2004 Democratic Convention, explained the Rev. Wright's anger and racism this way:

"I'm a white guy. And I think I've got to tell you something. If you were black in this country, especially if you are of his age, of his era or even times before that or even kids today, when you look at the situation in our inner city schools, I mean, you have to ask yourself, Larry, what's it like to be black in America? And what kind of rage would you feel? And if you did feel that rage, what kind of things would you say that, at times, would be outrageous, crazy even, because you've had to live through this for so long?

"And I do not believe, as a white guy, that I am in any position to judge a black man who has had to live through that" (italics added).

To the liberal world, the black American is so oppressed that his rage against whites specifically and America generally is completely understandable, and therefore no white has the right to judge black outrage and its subsequent expressions. Blacks are not to be judged by the moral standards one judges others.

Note Prager's warning that to just raise these issues is to be opened up to charges of racism. It happened to me recently, in response to my post, "Will the Real MLK Please Stand Up?", but Dr. King didn't put his life on the line for generations of blacks to descend to racial separation and victimology.

In 2006, I received a death threat in my comments when I posted on Heather MacDonald's analysis of New York's Sean Bell incident, "No, the Cops Didn’t Murder Sean Bell."

That's the kind of reaction from someone's who's whole identity is consumed by the sense of enormous, irredeemable evil in the United States.

People like this, over forty years after King's "I Have a Dream" speech, have rejected the fundamental reality of America as the very embodiment of King's calling.

Do we have problems? Sure, but Jim Crow's a thing of the past, the black middle class is thriving, and a black or a woman will raise the standard of the Democratic Party in the fall. These facts are widely recognized among Americans who acknowledge the gains we've made, but are willing to work toward even greater advancement for all Americans, irrespective of race, and without grievance politics.

But for the Michael Moores of the left, the investment in racial victimology is on the scale of crack addiction in its destructive power.

Until that scourge is beaten, there won't be further racial progress in America.