The politics of black outrage

It should be said that all people enjoy fashioning themselves as the truly aggrieved. The idea that black people have cornered the market on something as ancient and human as playing the victim is laughable. I am thinking of Preston Brooks beating down Charles Sumner for insulting the honor of South Carolina--and then getting a hero's welcome back home. I'm thinking of the Cuban-Americans and Elian Gonzales, or folks who organize their whole identities around flags of treason. One way of coping with the very human, and very distasteful, penchant for playing the victim is to claim that only the blacks do it--or that the blacks do it the most, or that they do it so much that it's become a culture. Not like those true stand-up Americans who've given themselves as martyrs in the War On Christmas.

That said, I don't get the uproar over this. Yeah, it's dead wrong, but on the list of things shortening the life-span of my kid, it doesn't rank. Plus racist art is ultimately bad art, and bad art tells me a lot about its consumers. The worst thing in the world would be for these idiots to go underground. No. I like them right here, caught in the shine of their own high beams. Right here. Right where I can see them.

UPDATE: This is a great point, " Lots of little kids who wouldn't otherwise encounter this (particular) crap are exposed to it in a context that is "mainstream." After all, WalMart are the schmucks who force entertainers to issue special sanitized versions of their CDs. "