'Accidental Racist' Feels Like a Symptom of Munchausen Syndrome
I'm not going to waste any time critiquing the lyrics of "Accidental Racist", the controversial new song performed by singers Brad Paisley and LL Cool J. The mainstream media clearly has a fascination with the duo's awkward attempt to begin another national dialogue on racism, but I honestly find stuff like this to be sophomoric and pointless.
What does interest me, however, is the reason that people like Paisley and LL feel compelled to engage in such a project. It seems to stem from something similar to Munchausen syndrome by proxy (MSbP), a psychiatric disorder in which sufferers cause, fabricate, or exaggerate health symptoms in someone else (usually a child) in order to draw attention or sympathy to themselves.
In the case of "Accidental Racist", a song about racial awareness, the disease in question is racism.
Now, before anyone gets worked up over what I just wrote, let me assure you that I'm not saying that racism isn't real. Of course it's real. It's real, it's ugly, it's a nasty part of our country's history, and it still exists in our country today.
What isn't real is the popular notion spread by the media that racism has gotten worse in reaction to the country's first black president. It hasn't. The only thing that's gotten worse - and it's gotten much worse - is the race-baiting.
There has been a cultural effect created by the liberal media's obsessive use of race, both as a mechanism for marginalizing opposition to far left policies, and as a method for re-fighting a civil-rights movement that they missed the first time around. It has spawned a belief by the less politically-sophisticated among us that we really do have a growing problem with racism in this country.
People like Chris Matthews and the other nuts in the media who regularly engage in racial slander are like the people who suffer from MSbP. They're diagnosing the American public with a phony epidemic, and people like Brad Paisley and LL Cool J are the well-intentioned believers of that epidemic. I guess they think a song will help with our racial healing.
For those of us who see through the nonsense and want real racism to continue its steady disintegration from our society, the perpetuation of this false diagnosis is incredibly frustrating. It prolongs racial tension in our society.
In fact, I would argue that at this point in time, the single most hindering element of true racial progress in this country is modern-day liberal activism. I'm talking about the people who viewed the election of President Obama as a historically-significant testimonial to how far we've come as a nation... for about five minutes. After that, they eagerly began using our president's skin color as a political weapon to silence dissent.
It's also discouraging to observe the people I used to admire, in part due to their mature views on race, now throw in with hysterical liberals on the topic.
Actor Morgan Freeman is one of those people. In 2009, he voiced irritation, in an interview with Mike Wallace, with society’s habit of identifying individuals by their race. When Wallace asked him, “How are we going to get rid of racism?” Freeman pointedly answered, “We stop talking about it.”
Is that what we've done? Stopped talking about it? Clearly not. For many in the media, that's all they talk about. And in 2011 (just two years after the Wallace interview), Freeman seemed to join in with their chorus. In an interview with Piers Morgan, he lobbed baseless accusations of racism at the Tea Party, Mitch McConnell, and pretty much everyone anyone else who stood in opposition to President Obama's policies.
It was a very sad thing to listen to, and over the past year, Bill Cosby and Colin Powell have followed suit.
The truth is that when it comes to race relations, America hasn't regressed. The media has. The American public has just become the true victim of Munchausen syndrome by proxy: The sick little child who don't realize that they're being poisoned.