'When You're Accustomed to Privilege, Equality Feels Like Oppression'

[jberryhill]

1. Yep

For occasional amusement I read wingnut blogs, and I'm always fascinated by this idea that "Obama is divisive". That one has been a longstanding mystery to me.

But in a recent discussion among wingnuts, one of them was going on about how Obama has supposedly sown "division" and used, as an example, the circumstances leading up to the "beer summit" when Professor Gates was arrested for entering his own house on the basis of presumptions based on the color of his skin.

To them, making that incident part of our national discussion was an example of sowing or stirring up racial discord and resentment because, after all, that kind of thing certainly never puts a crimp in their day. So why all the fuss?

What I find fascinating in that perception is the default assumption that, to avoid sowing such discord, our society should simply accept things like being arrested for "going home while black" as the acceptable norm. To point out that the "acceptable norm" is not as it should be, is to be "divisive".

It is "divisive" to them if you recognize existing inequality for the purpose of attempting to eliminate a division that already exists, but which the privileged group does not want to change.