White liberals sincerely judge themselves to be morally superior to conservatives, and they base this judgment on what they consider to be an undeniable fact, namely, that they themselves are free of anti-black racism while conservatives are drenched in racist feelings.
Anti-black racism, liberals hold, is the greatest of all American sins. It is America’s Original Sin. It is a greater national sin than drunkenness or thievery or adultery or political corruption or anything else you can name. Racism, more than anything, has kept the United States from being the ideal society that conservatives stupidly imagine it to be. Why do conservatives imagine this? Because, being chronic racists, they avert their eyes from the ugly truth of American social and historical reality. Since white liberals are racism-free, it follows that they are morally superior to conservatives.
However, it’s not that white liberals claim to be 100 percent free of racism. Racist feelings and beliefs are so deeply rooted in the white American soul that even they, the least racist whites, very probably have remnants of anti-black racism lurking in their unconscious minds. And so it is a never-ending battle. It is not enough for liberals to fight against the obvious racism found in other Americans — external racism, so to speak. They must also fight against internal racism, the unconscious racism that dwells, they greatly fear, in the deep dark caves of their own unconscious and all-too-American minds.
If you’re a white liberal you fight this internal, unconscious racism in a number of ways. For example:
I fully concede that white liberals are — by subjective intention — more non-racist than other Americans; more non-racist, for example, than myself. But let’s make a distinction between two kinds of racism, subjective and objective. You can be subjectively non-racist while at the same time being objectively racist. That is, you can abound in pro-black sentiment while at the same time supporting policies and customs that are profoundly harmful to blacks. And that, I contend, is exactly the status of white liberals: they are objectively racist while being subjectively non-racist. Consider a few of the anti-black policies and customs supported by the typical white liberal:
Objectively speaking (though not subjectively), white liberals are America’s most dangerous racists.