Thursday, May 01, 2014

Dealing with bigots

My kids have been interested in the Clippers controversy. The 15 year-old thinks Sterling should have either  been laughed off the planet or ignored. The 20 year-old is worried about the 'thought police' and privacy  issues. As awful as Sterling's sentiments are - and we are all staggered by them - does he have a right to express them privately? Do we all say things to family that we wouldn't say publicly? Programmes like Family Guy and The Simpsons, Little Britain and even Seven Days encourage politically incorrect humour. In our house we laugh about all sorts of things that accepted modern 'wisdom' would have us cringe at. Occasionally someone says something outrageous in the act of caricaturing a bigot. The next person will looked stunned momentarily then we'll fall about.

Joking aside - and Sterling wasn't - I can't resolve the issue of privacy invasion and when it is justified.

Anyway the following is a good column about how to deal with bigots. Readable and hard to argue with:

Statists have long taken libertarians to task for opposing mandatory integration laws and defending the right of bigoted owners of business establishments to discriminate against people on the basis of race. They inevitably accuse of libertarians of being racists themselves or supporting racial bigotry by virtue of libertarian opposition to mandatory integration laws.
What statists just don’t get, however, is: one, the importance of principle when it comes to individual liberty, and, two, that the free market, not governmental coercion, is the best way to deal with racial bigotry.
No better example of the libertarian position can be found than the current controversy surrounding Donald Sterling, the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers. Sterling was caught on tape making prejudicial remarks against blacks to his girlfriend, even exhorting her to not associate with blacks.
Yet, let’s notice something important here: Most of the Clipper team is composed of blacks!
How is that possible? Here you have an owner who is clearly prejudiced against blacks and who obviously does not want to associate with them. Why in the world does he have so many blacks on his basketball team? Why not instead hire mostly whites?
The answer is very simple: Sterling’s love of the color green trumps his dislike of the color black.

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3 comments:

JC said...

Personally I thought I was reading about a silly old man with a Black or Brown girlfriend on the side who was cavorting in public with Blacks and making him look foolish.. so he privately admonished her. He even told her he didn't mind if she slept with them so long as she was discrete.

Also bear in mind we only heard a selected part of the tape so we don't know if he was steered into the comments he made.

Yes, he probably was being racist but probably no more than so than millions of other Whites.

And just as important was the response from Obama and co.. they want a racial divide for political purposes. I read enough US press to know that much worse comment is directed on air and in print against Whites and nobody blinks.. that is bloody sick.

Now look at Hone making almost identical comments about Pakeha dating his daughters and thats OK for a politician? No complaints to the Race Relations people and no getting booted out of Parliament, no fines, no electoral consequences, still the leader of his party?

What about the racial moralty police.. Minto and Bradford?.. not a peep.

I'm reminded of a few years ago when California voted "No" to gay marriage.. Blacks were the main opposition. Suddenly White gays, the most liberal and tolerant of all Americans hit the blogs with thousands of N words.. no longer were Blacks part of the oppressed brotherhood of minorities.

I'm afraid racial tolerance in the West is only a political device with too many people.

JC

Jd said...

This is insight of the different drivers of racism in commercial as opposed to non-commercial spheres of life ...

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2014/04/donald_sterling.html

Anonymous said...

I believe that the *only* "court" to deal with racist comments should be the "court of public opinion".

Hate-speech laws *always* end up protecting ONLY certain "favoured" groups. You will almost *never* see them used to protect white people because that'd be un-PC.

Hate-speech laws are also used to shut down *perfectly factual* and valid criticism of (say) Islam. Geert Wilders' trial was proof of that. You can bet anything you like that he would not have been hauled before the court if he had been criticising *Christianity*. Muslims are a "protected group" - Christians aren't.