Race

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by Reid Fitzsimons

When we moved to South Alabama in 2008 we learned our new neighbor had a sophisticated sounding English surname. Based on this, we envisioned him to likely be a cultivated person, maybe a retired college professor. This image was quickly dispelled upon meeting him: he was an ignorant vestige from the Jim Crow/KKK days, an overt racist and, we later learned, an lifelong alcoholic with anger control issues; his pleasant wife certainly earned to title of “long-suffering.” In America today, of course, accusations of “racism” from people either trying to justify their privilege or victim status (or usually both) spew out like stomach contents at a drunken frat party, but I suspect there are very few people under 50 today who have actually met a real racist. This is because they have largely died off, like our bigoted and imbecilic neighbor of 10+ years ago.

Trevor Anderson of South Carolina, recently fired from his position as a middle school French teacher

More recently, Mr. Trevor Anderson was discharged from his position as a French teacher at a South Carolina middle-school. This was a blip in the news cycle seen at Foxnews.com (link below). In a prejudicial way, as with our Alabama neighbor, I immediately envisioned an educated and serious person, someone certainly able to control himself (I recall elementary school teachers in the 1960s admonishing us to “control yourselves”). It ended up, however, that Mr. Anderson has a avocation as an enraged pro-abortion activist. Apparently in response to pro-life demonstrators near his favorite abortion clinic, the gentleman in question grabbed a megaphone and generously shared his thoughts. Among his litany of passionate outrage were the following quotes: "I teach them French. I teach them that people like you are a piece of s---… I teach them that Christians are f---ing idiots...You're all f---ing idiots.” And, presumably in response to a black pro-lifer, he suggested "You do what all these White people tell you to do, you f---ing c--n. You f---ing j---- boo…Do a little dance for us like your masters want you to." And, to a pro-life woman, "You deserve to be called a c---, you deserve to be called a b----."

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by Reid Fitzsimons

The Roxborough High School football team in a post-scrimmage huddle just before they were ambushed; two stills of the "coon hunters" taken from a video of the deadly incident (full video at bottom)

I would venture to say most Americans have never met an actual, true believer racist white supremacist. I am not talking about someone who doesn’t subscribe to “climate justice” or voted for Trump. I’m referring to white people who truly hate black people and find satisfaction in the oppression, maiming, and even killing of them. I have known, or at least met, a handful of dyed-in-the-wool white supremacists; they are people who don’t believe in the American ideals of equality, justice for all, and E. Pluribus Unum (out of many-one). More to the point, they are deranged losers. In the mid-80s I worked in a Federal prison where there were a few Aryan Brotherhood types, but they were much more violent criminal entrepreneurs than ideologues. When we (my wife and I) lived in South Alabama 2008-2012 our neighbor was a pathetic guy, a lifelong drunk in his 80s, who loved to talk of the KKK glory days of the 1960s (“When niggers knew their place!”).  But it is a recent and tragic event in Philadelphia where several black high school football players were hunted down and shot, killing a 14 year-old boy and wounding several others, that got me to thinking about an honest to goodness white supremacist I came to know a little in the late 1970s.

The fantasies of a true Jim Crow racist

This verifiable racist I met in the 1970s was, curiously, a lawyer in Mississippi. His uncle was a long-serving Democrat Congressman, which might explain his admittance to the Mississippi bar. I recall him wearing camouflage clothing and talking about the joys “coon hunting” and “black topping,” the former meaning hunting down and shooting black people and the latter running over them with a car. I am pretty sure he never engaged in his fantasies, thank goodness. He was simply a hate-filled cowardly ass who happened to be born into social and economic privilege.

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By Reid Fitzsimons

I’ve posted a few commentaries previously about a financial and insurance company called USAA. It is a Fortune 500 enterprise that was founded 100 years ago to serve the insurance needs of military officers. In it’s day, USAA was perhaps the most respectable company of its kind: it was that prized auto mechanic, competent, always honest, and you never have to wonder if he’s trying to get over on you. Sadly, like so many corporate entities run by white and wealthy aristocrats, the CEO of USAA declared himself to have found “social justice” salvation, and became yet another tiresome former “sinner” who, were he a religious zealot, would have said he saw the light of Allah or Jesus or whatever and came to view non-coreligionists as soiled people, worthy of scorn and contempt: “I am so much more righteous than everyone else!”

Traditionally USAA was the financial and insurance ally of military service members and veterans, but as it moved to the extreme left they came to use abuse and exploit the prestige inherent to its member base to further their country club activism. Hence, when the integrity compromised CEO put out a Memorial Day message, I responded on the USAA member forum, then responded to a reply, as follows:

Empty Words From USAA

Black Lives Matter (BLM) is an amalgam of black racialist elites and the wealthy and largely white establishment aristocracy. BLM is a vocally and unapologetically anti-American organization. Its demands have been associated with the violent deaths of 1,000s of black people- this is not hyperbole but statistically evident- and the founders and leadership of BLM been repeatedly caught using donations to fund personal luxuries in crass forms of corruption. USAA unequivocally supports BLM and, as a representative of the USAA CEO (Wayne Peacock) told me in August 2020, USAA will never back away from that support.

Statistically, the majority of these increases were among black people
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by Reid Fitzsimons

The office of a Wisconsin pro-life organization firebombed
and vandalized

We respond to bad things, especially the suffering of others, in different ways, ways often meant to shield us from uncomfortable realities about ourselves. Ignorance, either woeful or willful, is effective, and denial and avoidance also work pretty well. There are those who thrive on the suffering of others, and indeed create it. Sometimes these people are referred to as evil. I guess there are degrees of evil, where at the extreme evil people view not just their victims as a hated enemy, but also those who stand up for those they prey upon.

One of the most profound and widely read books of the 19th century was an antebellum novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The author was abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the legend is that when she met Abraham Lincoln during the American Civil War, Lincoln said, “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war." I contend that people who consider themselves well educated and informed should read this book (though I was over 60 when I finally did, so I’m not sure how that reflects on me). The story is, of course, about slavery, but it’s not some monolithic sermon against slavery, but rather includes all the pitfalls of human nature mentioned above when people confront, or more correctly ignore, evil. The ultimate antagonist is the brutal slave owner Simon Legree, at whose hands Tom is ultimately beaten to death because he was protecting slaves who had run away from the plantation.

Slavery, regardless of where it existed is one of too many examples in history where life was devalued so as to allow malevolence to be tolerated, and where those who refused to accept the inhumanity of it were marginalized and essentially became the enemy of the institutional powers: slavery is evil in its own right, but to justify hatred of those opposed to it took evil to higher level.

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by Reid Fitzsimons (note: below are images of 12 very wealthy and powerful people who embrace "racial justice" and "diversity, equity, inclusion," yet all have a distinctive demographic quality).

The summer of 2020 was an intoxicating time for the elite and affluent: politicians, academics, celebrities, and corporate CEO’s. George Floyd had recently been killed and urban areas were filled with rioting and violence, and privileged liberals, those who lived in a world of materialism and money, could find meaning, and even adulation, in their otherwise superficial and vacuous lives. They could make grandiloquent pronouncements that they- especially those who never ventured outside their white privilege- were not just opposed to racism, but outraged by it, contrasting themselves with the ignorant masses who, whether realized or not, were all bigots and racists. Yes, the gilded members of the elite class would hop on that bandwagon, declaring Black Lives Matter! and, like the titled aristocrats and feudal lords of centuries ago, believed they could obtain salvation by words and gestures: even better than the of corrupt class of centuries ago, they didn’t actually have to pay for indulgences to pave their way to heaven. The acolytes of this new enlightenment- that America and tens of millions of its citizens were vile and disgusting racists- merely had to repeat trite and predictable slogans, and their white privilege could remain intact at no cost to them.

  • Adam Silver, NBA Commissioner
  • Jeff Bezos, CEO Amazon
  • Bob Chapek, Disney CEO

Going on two years later, what exactly did they get for their sophomoric and pandering rhetoric and support of BLM? First, BLM vilified the police and demanded they be “defunded.” So how did that work out? From 2019 to 2020 we witnessed the largest single increase in the murder rate in all the years it’s been recorded, about 30%, and it apparently didn’t level off in 2021. As always, a hugely disproportionate number of victims were black people and, contrary to the coveted narrative that police enjoy hunting down and killing black people, or that some nefarious “white supremacists” were responsible, the overwhelming majority of the killers were black, and they put an awful lot- 100’s- of truly innocent and beautiful black children caught in the cross-fire in the grave. A price the insulated virtue signalers were more than willing to pay for feeling warm and fuzzy and meaningful.

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Sometimes there is little diversity among diversity-equity-inclusion activists

Note: The previous posting discussed the Salvation Army jumping on the “woke” train, so to speak. I sent the link to the heads of the Salvation Army administrative office closest to us, that being in Scranton, PA. I quickly received a friendly and brief reply (below at bottom) from Major Bob Schmig (they use military ranks in the Salvation Army hierarchy. Maj. Schmig offered no comment regarding the topic at hand, and I composed and sent him a follow-up e-mail/letter, which is the main text of this posting. Note that the term Pharisees is used, which defies simple definition but were basically a group of learned Jews around the time of Jesus that formed somewhat of a social/political class and emphasized adherence to the Laws of Moses and oral tradition. They tended to be privileged and numbered perhaps in the 1,000s. They received the animosity of Jesus because he perceived then as hypocrites in the “do as I say, not as I do” realm. In today’s terms, they might be referred in the political world as the Establishment, or more invectively, “the Swamp.”

Greetings Major Schmig:

Thank you for your prompt reply to my e-mail from several days ago, and I appreciate your taking the time to read my article, “The Salvation Army: Let’s Talk About Elitism.” You might have noted I mentioned a time as a volunteer medical director at a remote clinic in Kenya- this was in the early 2000’s and at the peak of the African AIDS crisis. It was a rare day in which a tragedy did not present itself, and I want to describe one so that you might better understand my perspective.

One horrible day we received word that 3 or 4 children were ill because they had eaten rotten fish that had been laced with insecticide and laid about in hopes of poisoning rabid dogs. I dispatched a vehicle but by the time it arrived all but one of the children had died. The one girl that returned, perhaps 7-years-old, was terrified, having witnessed truly miserable deaths of her younger siblings, and we couldn’t determine if she too had consumed the poisoned rotten fish. Nevertheless, though there was no protocol on how to treat such a thing, I empirically induced vomiting (if I recall) and had her drink slurry of charcoal through her tears and sobbing. Ultimately I assumed she hadn’t consumed the insecticide because I don’t think she would have survived regardless of treatment, and thankfully she was okay. Maybe you’ve witnessed and experienced similar events, but having seen so many children die during my time there, I developed a particular revulsion to children dying, perhaps especially black kids.

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The current Salvation Army leadership, with the heads of their "International Social Justice" commission on the right

by Reid Fitzsimons

An interesting thing happened to the venerable and widely respected Salvation Army (SA): they were caught, so to speak, in the ether of political “wokeness,” and a lot of disappointment followed. Specifically, they posted on their website a “guide” entitled “Let’s Talk About Racism,” sometime in the Spring of 2021. This was outed, so to speak, by non-traditional media, specifically a group called Color Us United, in October 2021; the resulting publicity led the SA to delete the document in November. As part of their defense, they referred to it as a “study guide…for internal use,” and issued a rather acerbic and juvenile preamble on Nov. 25th: “This statement is in response to a politically motivated group that is trying to force The Salvation Army to conform to the group’s ideology of choice.” Here is a link to the full SA statement: https://www.salvationarmyusa.org/usn/story/the-salvation-armys-response-to-false-claims-on-the-topic-of-racism/

It’s never a good idea to take grandiloquent positions based on snippets from others so, after some difficulty, I did track down the deleted “Let’s Talk About Racism” document, and an associated study guide; it can be found at an internet archiving site called Wayback Machine (https://web.archive.org/). After reviewing the materials I, as a heretofore enthusiastic supporter of the SA, concluded the critics were correct, and that the apologetics issued by the SA were misleading and even self-righteous, and one of the terribly frustrating things about this controversy is that it was entirely unnecessary. So... Let’s Talk About Racism Elitism. 

To be a bit acerbic myself, Let’s Talk About Racism is less a thoughtful and serious paper than one written for extra credit by a sophomore college student in a sociology class (minus the Biblical references), a class where the professor is an ageing hippie who yearns to be pertinent while dreaming of the halcyon days from the 60’s of “free love,” i.e. easy sex without responsibility or consequence, days long before “#MeToo.” It is rife with the vocabulary of the progressive word salad, and indeed begins with a specious argument, presented as established fact, that “Race is a social construct.” For anyone unfamiliar with the phrase “social construct,” it a means to diminish or deny what until now has been generally accepted, and is often used in a pejorative, disdainful manner; it is most commonly seen in the world of “transgender” polemics: gender is merely a social construct, and to believe there is a factual or biologic basis for male and female means you are an ignorant moron.

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By Reid Fitzsimons (see the image gallery at the end of this article)

Many forces in our culture, which could properly be described as elite and privileged, have begun invoking a mantra- essentially an incantation with trappings of religiosity- consisting primarily of three words: diversity, equity, inclusion. These words especially emanate from the mouths and pens of the "woke" in academia, partisan political circles, corporate-financial-globalist interests, the celebrity world, university students, government bureaucracies at all levels and, increasingly, the military hierarchy. They are vacuous words, of course, used by people who shouldn’t have vacuous minds, but nevertheless tend to frame their thoughts with slogans and chants. I suspect if one of them were asked, for example, “What do you mean by ‘diversity?” the answer might be, ”People who don’t look like me. Diversity is our strength!” Does “equity” imply equality of opportunity or mandated outcomes, regardless of effort? Do those who demand “inclusion” embrace people who have contrary beliefs and opinions, or those they otherwise deplore?

This mantra has been incubating and evolving for many years, but its prominence greatly accelerated with the killing of George Floyd in May of 2020, and the many opportunities his death afforded, such as the power and money amassed by the elite black racialists of “Black Lives Matter.”  If a mantra can be considered to be underlying principles, so to speak, then associated slogans are often calls to action, for example, “No Justice! No Peace!” or “defund” the police!” While mantras and slogans can be emotionally satisfying, they really shouldn’t form a foundation for law and social policy, and certainly not by those who are given authority over such things, yet sadly, and often with horrific consequences, they do. With this in mind, let’s consider a sobering historical fact and how it is applicable to today.

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Jaslyn Adams and one of her killers

Note: USAA (United Services Automobile Association) is a membership based insurance company begun in the 1920s by a group of Army officers. Over the decades they grew considerably and branched out into financial services.  Some type of military association is required to be a member and they developed a deserved reputation for integrity and service. Sadly, their reputation has been slowly declining over the past few years to the point they traded quality and service for volume and greed; USAA is now indistinguishable from any quasi-legitimate financial or insurance conglomerate, and indeed fares poorly among the lower end of that spectrum. In June of 2020 the new CEO, the first one to have never served in the military, decided he wanted to offer up USAA to the gods of wokeness, so to speak. I posted an article at the time (https://conservativeproletariat.com/?p=603), and below is a follow-up that I posted on their in-house member’s community forum.

George Floyd was killed during an encounter with police in Minneapolis in May 2020. Floyd was a lifelong criminal, mostly petty and drug offenses but with a little bit of violence. Nevertheless, the events of that fateful day did not involve a running gun battle or anything of that sort, rather he was being arrested for another suspected petty offense, and was fully contained when a rather brutish police officer decided kneeling on his neck seemed like a good idea; this was the major contributing cause to his death. Pretty much anyone seeing the video could not feel disturbed, and for a brief moment we, as a nation, could have unified around this sad event, searched our consciences, and used what transpired for constructive change. This did not happen.

There were elements among the privileged that viewed the death of Floyd not as doleful and tragic, but as an opportunity, a chance for enhanced wealth and power. The main player was a group called “Black Lives Matter,” but many self-serving politicians and racialist activists/celebrities saw an opening for further profit and fame. In fact, there quickly developed a “social justice” bandwagon, and some of the wealthiest and most elite in the corporate world decided to hop on. This included Wayne Peacock, the CEO of USAA, and the ovine and avaricious Board of Directors. A month or so after Floyd’s death Peacock issued a manifesto of sorts, with an almost a religious tone, in which the sins of America were great, but he was among the handful of enlightened ones who could lead the USAA membership into the shiny new world of wokeness. His thoughts and observations were sophomoric at best, as if he cut and pasted clichés from a term paper of a privileged student at a private academy writing about personal angst associated with “white privilege.”

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T-shirt available at E-Bay for $19.95
by Reid Fitzsimons

The word “racism” is used in our current culture with impressive frequency, and often with frightening consequences. From a societal standpoint, it is tantamount to being called a “witch” during a time when Western governments were largely theocracies, and such accusations could lead to severe punishments with no real opportunity for defense against the undefined charge. Similar to those dark times, when those in control were not concerned with the betterment of the people under their rule, but interested only in maintaining their elite status, vague accusations were (and are) an effective means to obtain and wield power, a way to intimidate opposition into silence and compliance. At the present time, despite the ubiquitous (and even cultish) nature of the charges of “racism,” it is largely used generically, and often by very immature people, much more like a 4-year-old calling someone a “doo doo head” while having a tantrum than a reasoned adult. The premise of this article is to actually consider what “racism” means, if indeed it was exclaimed with any thought at all. For Part 1 of this article, click here: https://conservativeproletariat.com/?p=631

“They are all like that” racism: At one time I was well acquainted with a person, a former physician, who was living as a ex-patriot in Honduras (My wife and I have spent a number of years there running a small charity project). Often over the duration of our association, he would declare, “ALL Hondurans are VILE!” Not some, not many, not most, not just a handful, but ALL! There was, obviously, no basis for this other than his deranged feelings. In a way his worldview was fascinating, as if generic and immutable attributes could be applied to large numbers of people linked by whatever- race, nationality, ethnicity, religious traditions- with no allowance for individual variation.

In the US at the moment there are declarations made by racialists that ALL white people are racists- it is genetic, generic, and immutable. Like the concept of Original Sin in Christian theology, there is a stain among (white) people simply for being born, but unlike Christianity it applies only to one class of human, there is no option of redemption or forgiveness, and the intent is to see an entire race of people grovel in perpetuity. The irony here- that this in fact is racism in its most primitive form- should be obvious, and it probably is, but for some it is used as a means to power. Another irony is that the person mentioned above took great pride in the belief that he alone was the only white person who wasn’t a racist.

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