"The End of My White Guilt"
That's the title of the latest masterpiece from the Daily Caller, which may have been an alternate headline chosen after "I'm Done Pretending I'm Not Racist" was deemed too blatant. The latter would seem more representative after reading the opening line.
My white guilt died on Good Friday, April 6, 2012. That was the day my bike got stolen.
It's obvious where this is going, isn't it?
When I got home I vented to my friends. I told them I was going to scour those neighborhoods until I found the bike. In reply, a liberal friend gave me a lecture about profiling and told me to just forget about the bike. “That person needs our prayers and help,” she said. “They haven’t had the advantages we have.”
That’s when I lost it. I had been carefully educated by liberal parents that we are all, black and white, the same. My favorite movie growing up was “In the Heat of the Night.” Yet that often meant not treating everyone the same. It meant treating blacks with a mixture of patronizing condescension and obsequious genuflecting to their Absolute Moral Authority gained from centuries of suffering. It meant not treating everyone the same.
It meant leaving valuable things like a bike in a vulnerable position in a black part of town because you didn’t want to admit that the crime is worse in poor black neighborhoods.
[...]
It felt good to say it: Black pain is no different than white pain. I’m tired of people using the moral authority of past generations for their own personal gain and self-aggrandizement. Soledad O’Brien, a Harvard graduate, acts like she just stepped off the Amistad.
Because author Mark Judge's bike was stolen, which may or may not have been at the hands of a black person (he admits he can't know for sure), he finally has an excuse to stop pretending he isn't racist.
Because his bike was stolen, he finally has an excuse to stop caring about "centuries of suffering" perpetrated by men much like himself.
Because his bike was stolen, he believes he now has the moral authority to downplay the suffering of those whose entire lives have been disparaged for no reason other than the color of their skin, because their pain is no different than his pain. Their trauma, for being racially profiled and condescended, is no different than his trauma following the loss of his "sharp silver-blue hybrid from L.L. Bean."
And that's not hyperbole. The majority of the column is spent daydreaming and fantasizing about riding his bike on Easter weekend, only to have his dreams dashed by someone who may or may not have been black. Only to have everything he was taught by his parents come crashing down around him as his beloved bicycle vanished. Stolen by a black man. Maybe. Who knows?
I cannot fathom how astonishingly coddled, sheltered, and privileged you would have to be to not be utterly embarrassed for publishing this 800 word black-guy-stole-my-bike joke, filled with I-scabbed-my-knee belly-aching. All in the name of justifying racial insensitivity and willful ignorance. Because affluent white guys are victims too!
Disgraceful.