Racism: It Isn’t Just For Americans

From the Office of Homeland Security: A post about racism in Canada and China.

In Canada, stores are selling a candy with a crude caricature of a black man on the label.

In China, rampant racism shows up on a popular Internet site during the visit of Condoleezza Rice to that country. Author Sylvia Yu notes:

They wrote that she was (and this is hard for me to repeat): “a black devil,” “a black pig,” “a black whore” and “a black female dog.” They said: “You’re not even as good as a black devil, a real waste of a life,” “Her brain is blacker than her skin,” “The ugliest woman in the world” and “She looks like an orangutan, and talks rubbish; send us a beautiful woman next time.”

The website is particularly popular among the urban elite and educated masses, and I remember reading these shocking words at the time. According to media reports, these comments were also gathered by Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, who was so disgusted by the awful remarks he felt compelled to write something about it.

Of course, Condoleezza Rice has been attacked in very nasty ways by American liberals and leftists. Madison talk show host John Sylvester called her an “Aunt Jemima.” But that was more motivated by his leftist politics than by racism — not that that’s any sort of adequate excuse.

We could add to the list the disgraceful treatment of a black American soccer player in Norway.

“I’ve experienced racism, but never anything like this,” said [Robbie] Russell, a native of Amherst, Mass., who played collegiately for Duke, told NRK, the state radio network.

Russell told NRK four or five Brann fans grabbed his jersey through the fence as he retrieved a ball that had gone out of touch about 27 minutes into the game. “A woman spit in my face,” he said. “The entire time a group of supporters were yelling racist things at me . . . Nothing entitles them to do that sort of thing to you.”

All of this raises the question: why, when one listens to the politically correct crowd, does one get the idea that America is some sort of uniquely racist society?

The reason, of course, is simple. A vast infrastructure — a whole Axis of Grievance — has a vested interest in the notion that racism is rampant in America. The university bureaucrats who specialize in “diversity,” the professors who teach victim studies courses, the lawyers and journalists who push racial grievances, the demagogues like Jessie Jackson, Andrew Young and Kwasi Mfume . . . all of them have a vested interest in this kind of anti-Americanism.