THE TYRANNY OF IGNORANCE

Earlier this month, Dallas County Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield (who happens to be white) ended up in hot water because he complained that the central collections office had become a black hole, where paperwork often seemed to vanish. Black colleagues, Commissioner John Wiley Price and Judge Thomas Jones, immediately pounced on the unfortunate Mr. Mayfield, objecting to the term "black hole" and demanding an apology for the "racially insensitive" comment.

I don't know about you, but if I were as illiterate as Commissioner Price and Judge Jones, the very last thing I'd want to do is open my mouth and let people know it!

Yet it seems there's no lack of ignoramuses ready and willing to make public spectacles of themselves.

For years, certain people have made lucrative careers out of exploiting such ignorance and promoting racial turmoil in this country. Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Jeremiah Wright spring immediately to mind.

Ironically, such men exploit racial issues under the guise of working for civil rights and racial equality.

Men like Jackson, Sharpton and Wright have exploited everything from an employer not having as many blacks on his payroll as they think is appropriate (I think we've all heard about Jesse Jackson's shakedowns.), to deliberately misdefining perfectly appropriate English vocabulary words, to accusing the United States government of "creating the AIDS virus" in order to kill blacks.

Why? To keep their own careers afloat and make sure the issue of race is never laid to rest in this country.

The Don Imus incident is an excellent example of such exploitation. Last year, Imus was canned for referring to the Rutgers women's basketball team as "nappy-headed ho's".

Certainly, the remark was tasteless and no one in their right mind would commend Imus, but very few people would even have heard the remark had it simply been shrugged off as the nonsensical gibber of a shock jock. However, thanks to the conscientious efforts of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, Imus' remarks were broadcast to the entire nation and his radio show canceled—after Sharpton and Jackson met with CBS President/CEO Les Moonves. Coincidence? I don't think so.

Such deliberate exploitation of racial slurs, both real and imagined, has resulted in a thought-police mentality. We labor under the burden of political correctness and have been forced to choose our words ever-so-carefully—not to more adequately express our thoughts and ideas, but so as not to offend the ignoramuses among us.

Such tyranny is directly responsible for the incident that took place in Dallas and an earlier incident in Washington, DC.

The DC mayor's unfortunate aide, David Howard, was forced to resign after he used the word "niggardly" in a discussion over budget problems. Do you remember that one? Marshall Brown, one of Howard's coworkers, in an amazing display of ignorance, objected to the use of the word "niggardly", insisting that it was a racial slur.

Wouldn't it have been refreshing if, rather than accept his aide's resignation, the mayor would have grown a pair and gifted the ignorant Mr. Brown with a dictionary of the English language?

Alas, such an appropriate response to such obvious ignorance is only the stuff of daydreams.

This nation will never move past the race issue as long as people like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Jeremiah Wright make careers out of exploiting such gross ignorance.

© 2008 by Libbi Adams. All rights reserved.