Juan Williams Fires Back After "Go Back to the Porch" Slur
Infidel Rush Limbaugh Challenges the Gods of Race
By Rick Pearcey
Oct. 23, 2009 -- You may have noticed the stampede. Amid charges of racism -- or when fabricated quotes failed to stick, charges of “racial insensitivity” -- Rush Limbaugh was denied ownership of an NFL team. The dogs barked and the mighty NFL bolted like girly-bulls through the streets of El Dorado in a B movie western.
It is of course true that Rush Limbaugh is, in an important and positive way, “insensitive” and “divisive.” I have listened to his radio show since 1988 and can affirm unequivocally that he is pleasingly “guilty” on both counts. It is part of what makes him a "lovable little fuzzball."
In the heat of the current dust-up, Limbaugh reiterated in the Wall Street Journal his "belief in a colorblind society where every individual is treated as a precious human being without regard to his race.” In such a society “football players should earn as much as they can and keep as much as they can, regardless of race.”
Insensitive to What?
To what is he “insensitive” then? I would suggest: Not to race but to race idolatry. Not to Black or White is beautiful but to Black or White as deity -– as if the color of one’s skin is a kind of god, functioning as the ultimate and decisive factor in the life or thought of a person, group, or nation. Lost to race supremacists is the ability to appreciate the diversity of “I’m black and I’m proud” without falling into the reverse racism of castigating “white interlopers” in the neighborhood.
This is a good insensitivity. It respects the rainbow of human diversity gifted to mankind by our Creator. But it does not demean people by setting up skin color as a false god by which to evaluate (and devaluate) character, choices, cultures, ideas, or athletic performance. Or to redline offenders to outer darkness if they hue the wrong line. Nor does it submit to a relativistic absolute that excuses immorality, reverse racism, and urban thuggery for approved talking heads and community organizers who advance the skinematically correct line.
Limbaugh’s “divisiveness” is of a similar order. It pertains not to ethnicity but to liberty over against tyranny.
This is good divisiveness. It respects human freedom, creativity, and significance as unalienable endowments hardwired by the Creator into the ontological fabric of every human being in every human race. It rejects the notion that coloration and group identity overrule truth, facts, reason, speech, ethics, love, the content of character, and the vision of Martin Luther King. It insensitively refuses to bow the knee to a regressive violence that unleashes new colors of slavery and oppression to replace old ones now out of fashion and no longer useful to the ruling class.
Yes, race activists are upset. Again, and as expected. Pretend gods and their all-too-real priesthoods despise those who question religions of race and think beyond poll-tested slogans that summarize or, in turn, disguise liberal doctrine.
If you listen carefully, the tumult seems to have arrived on cue from certain quarters: from the money-changers in the temple of race, from not exactly righteous reverends, and from political power-grubbers who have a vested interest in pitting race against race, color against color, and class against class, lest a humanity under God rediscovers her unity, her freedom, her dignity. You see, that might emancipate her from race-based interlopers in her midst.
To care about the goodness of race diversity is to rage against the machine of race idolatry. Even if that machine is financially and politically lucrative. And Limbaugh is nothing if not a happy infidel against those who elevate “black” or “white” or “racial sensitivity” to the Godhead as a club to beat and domesticate the unfaithful. Those ill-blown balloons need to be popped, brought to ground, and their inflated con-artist frontmen charged with fraud. Whether in the NFL, the schoolyard, the White House, or the church, we should welcome the transformation that attends crossing the Red Sea of pigmentation oppression into the blazing artistry of a color-blind society in a promised land.
Juan Williams
Fires Back
For some, such talk smacks of heresy. Race traitor! Oreo! “Go back to the porch!,” a black guest told news analyst Juan Williams on the "O’Reilly Factor." “Instead of having a civil discussion, he decided to take a cheap shot at me,” Williams said on the Factor the next evening. “This guy told me to go back to the porch. That’s code for being an Uncle Tom, house negro, lazy, a tool of slave-owners. . . . Apparently, it’s OK to use these kinds of racial slurs as long as you’re defending what some consider the politically correct point of view.”
Speak out of turn, violate the “black” creed, and expect the new masters to apply the lash.
But we have a higher calling. America at her best and people everywhere at their best are wonderfully guilty of such transgressivity against the demands of a secularized establishment, even as it seeks to excommunicate a rebellious Mr. Limbaugh and his audience of millions for insensitive irrepressibility.
America herself was born out of such rebellion. King George was angered by our lack of sensitivity to his rule over us and sent Redcoats to explain the benefits of unity over divisiveness. He and his cannons barked. We held our ground.
America’s later growth also came from her divisiveness. Battlefields across states North and South are sanctified by the sacrifice of living souls who had before them a Declaration of Ethical Fact -- namely, that every human being is “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” They risked division of body from spirit to ensure separation of master from slave. It is an equality of individuality under God, a brilliance far exceeding that of old Greece, ancient Rome, or Chairman Mao (apparently an emerging hero of the Obama administration).
We have been told that an unapproved Rush is not fit for the NFL, which reflects poorly not on Limbaugh, but on professional football. That huge organization thereby declares itself too small-minded for a guy, a people, and an ethos bursting with freedom and dignity under God.
But whether large or small, for groups or egos, there is plenty of room for everyone in what is, after all, the historic mainstream of American identity. That stream is deep and wide and open to all, but entering into it takes a certain amount of courage. You have to want it and possess a backbone willing to surprise those who lack the vision of the Founders. The NFL and race-based enablers should man-up and get back in the game.
Related
How to Have a Race War
First They Came for Rush
Racism! Racism! And Oh by the Way: Racism!
David Limbaugh: This Isn't About Rush
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Rick Pearcey is editor and publisher of Pro-Existence and The Pearcey Report (archives).
