Your Part Of The Race Dialog Is Where You Agree With Me, Or Else

The statement goes something like “we need to have a dialog on race” and the reality is “we need to have a dialog on race where people who disagree with me are run out of town on a rail.” This is some meaning of dialog that I am unfamiliar with.

So Eric Holder says we’re cowards for not talking about race and Ken Nelson, president of the Richmond branch of the NAACP, agreed saying “. . . Holder’s remarks are relevant and I embrace the notion that people need to get past their personal hang ups and discuss race openly without being offensive or offended.”

Wow, what a reasonable and sensible approach. If only there were some sort of test case to see what happens when a matter of race comes up, say like when a political cartoonist uses a monkey when lampooning the stimulus package . . . oh wait, that’s already happened. Let’s see how the open discussions, where people try not to be offensive or offended, are going:

• The chairman of the NAACP, Julian Bond, spoke out about the cartoon on Saturday, and called for the firing of both the cartoonist and the editor-in-chief of the New York Post.
• [Reverend Al Sharpton], along with other local lawmakers, is also asking for the FCC to review the waiver extended to News Corp and Rupert Murdoch, which allows them to own more than one television station and newspaper in the same city.
• The Post was picketed and deluged with angry calls, with some of Thursday’s marchers carrying signs that said “Jail Billionaire N.Y. Post Owner Rupert Murdoch.”
• “We make them and we break them with our money, and we should shut it down,” said protester Angela Brown, who carried a glossy photo of Obama.

So it is cowardly not to discuss race but if you say something that people take as racist you should lose your job, your boss should lose his job, your company should be shut down, and your CEO should be put in jail. Yeah sure, only a coward wouldn’t risk their whole professional life to disagree with Eric Holder and his buddies.

Eric Holder, Al Sharpton, Julian Bond and the rest have no desire for any dialog about race: they just want to lecture people about it until everyone agrees with them and they aim to enforce this. Saying they want dialog is the sheep’s clothing for the wolf of enforced political correctness.

Freedom is Slavery
War Is Peace
Ignorance is Strength
Monologue Is Dialog

Hat tip to Michelle Malkin for here convenient summary of the reaction to the cartoon here and here.

Update: U.S. Common Sense makes some good points about how the “hate speech” tag is used to justify draconian reactions and strip the protections that free speech is afforded. They also made some points about the race “dialog” issue and why we don’t seem to seeing any dialog and why they found the cartoon objectionable in an earlier post.

However I disagree with the idea, put forth by Michelle Malkin and US Commonsense among others, that there is no grounds for anyone to be offended here. I agree that technically the chimpanzee would refer to Pelosi/Reid, not Obama, and I actually find the overall imagery to be much more apt than, for instance, US Common Sense does but I think we have to recognize that past uses of the chimp imagery in connection with blacks were racist and hateful.

You cannot necessarily expect people sensitized by these past experiences to process the cartoon the way white people will. This is why I have focused on the way people have reacted, i.e. “screw dialog, I want this guys head,” rather than the fact that they reacted in the first place.

Update 2: Sigmund Carl and Alfred also weighs in with a cartoon commentary that, in my opinion, repeats the Post’s error: it makes its point using imagery that, however intellectually appropriate to the message of the cartoon, is going to set people off due to past associations when the same imagery was used with hateful, racist intent.