We’ve all heard the mantra from the left and groups like Black Lives Matter: the only good white person is a powerless white person. The fundamental basis for that canard is that Anglo-Saxons and other Euros, given their history and culture, are inherently evil while “people of color” are inherently good, oppressed, and thus deserve preferential treatment to make up for their hideous fate at the hands of whites.
If we look at that thinking it denies the basic humanity of people of color, denying them the same range of human action and morality we ascribe to other people. It classifies them as good little dolls to be put on an ideological shelf and admired, not flesh and blood humans capable of great good and also great evil.
The historical record also does not bear out the glorification of people of color over any other group. If Euros are such racial oppressors, then how does one explain the Wilberforce Patrols? If free market democratic America is such a haven for racists, then why did it spend untold treasure and much life in the 20th century fighting and defeating the greatest racists in the history of mankind, the German National Socialists and the Soviets?
If people of color, which assumes Euros/whites are not different shades of brown themselves- if not in Northern climes quite pink, are so morally perfect and thus must always be morally deified, them who instituted the Inquisition of Spain? Who sold Africans into slavery to white slavers? Did the crews of Boston slaver galleys traipse deep into darkest Africa to capture and transport many more than their own number back to their ships? Or did they have some logistical aid from the local inhabitants or Muslim middle men?
And what of slavery today in Libya and Sudan? What of the twisted quilt of dictatorships that range across Africa and Asia today? Does that show the inherent love of freedom and justice of non-Europeans? Oh, it’s all the fault of colonialism you say? Strangely enough, the United States was once a colony of Britain inhabitanted to a great extent by Euros and we didn’t fall into dictatorship as so many other British colonies in Africa and Asia did. Why is that? Though some other former colonies have become free nations. Have you an explanation for that as well?
It’s easy if you see all people, regardless of color or race, as humans. As people fallen, flawed, but capable of great nobility. But the courageous grace of true nobility does not spring from territory or pigment. If comes from the human character and soul.
It comes from decisions we make and roads we trod. And it comes to all individuals like that, no matter their color. Yes, no one is perfect and thus immune from criticism and no one is permanently evil, bereft of good.
Those who would deny that the human condition of good and evil, of decency and corruption, of great kindness and malice, are the dichotomies present in all, do not understand humanity and also, do not understand the equal justice they claim to crave.