Unacknowledged intentions and unconscious driving forces

Or,
Wanting to feel good by feeling bad

The cumulative effect of a string of yearly Hollywood successes that assail white people for the history of slavery and then of discrimination in this country--Hairspray, Precious, The Help, The Butler, 12 Years a Slave, Selma...is to convince white people that not only were they bad but they are still are bad.  And, ergo, that black people are right.

Which would explain why when speaking to so many African-Americans, it's as if I'm speaking to an iron wall.  They are always right, you can't change their mind, their mind is made up, and you are, by definition--even though I'm not even white myself--wrong.

(Try, for instance, to offer a slightly different point of view or interpretation of the events in Ferguson, MO to one of the demonstrators).

This had lead to a situation perhaps unparalleled in the history of the modern world where the majority--87% of the population have willingly given up power to a minority (13%).

You have the president of the United States, the highest law enforcement officer in the land (Attorney General), the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the chief editor of the New York Times and so on down the line all African-Americans.  (The most prominent professional athletes and a battery of the biggest Hollywood movie stars are also as well).

Not only this, but white people in this country giving up power to blacks--someone would say to less qualified people--in the name of rectifying past injustices seems to me an abdication of responsibility by (liberal) white people.

"We've messed things badly the past 250 years, particularly for African-Americans, so we ought to let them take the turn at running things in this country."

"Let them call the shots in this country, they've been so badly treated and powerless for so long.  We deserve to take second-banana status. if not actually be mistreated, and 'reverse the roles' (slave/master)."

"Let the sins of the fathers be meted on the sons."

"We can share things 50/50 with them from now on (even if we're four times as many).  We can even thrown in a Hispanic or Asian for good measure, too."

"I'm only a stupid white boy.  What would I know, anyway?"

There is something masochistic, in my opinion, about all this.

Do we need all the important posts in our government and civil society to be headed by African-Americans?   Is there room for another minority (particularly, Hispanic or Asian)?

How representative of democracy would such an arrangement be?

Alas, this seems to be the overwhelming present current of American life.  Those who question such a largely unacknowledged unconscious tendency tend to get excoriated and labelled as "racists."  So they keep a discreet silence, almost always.*



* I recall how Geraldine Ferraro was roundly and shrilly condemned in many if not most quarters of the Democratic Party in 2007 when she asserted that "Obama would not have gotten the nomination if he had not been black."

** It also led to a situation, rather humorous in retrospect, in the summer of 2011 when on the one day the temperature reached 104 degrees F., I was on a public bus without the air conditioning turned on, but no one was willing to ask the driver to turn it on.  The bus was packed (all Caucasians), the windows were open, but it was still unbearably hot.  The driver was a young African-American man.  I looked around and decided, too, that if no one else dared to ask, well, then, I, too, should just shut up and put up.