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One difference between House Majority Whip James Clyburn and the virtuouso American pianist of the late 50′s and early 60′s, Van Cliburn, is that the former plays only the black keys.

We have written before about the archaic antics of the always reliable, utterly predictable and wholly unoriginal Mr. Clyburn. Well, never one to let an opportunity pass to foment racial division, the congressman is at it again.

When asked the other night by the fawning Keith Olbermann of MSNBC about whether there is still racism in this country this was his response:

Well, you know, I’ve always said that we are but the sum total of our experiences. And I think that if you have never experienced it, maybe you don’t recognize it when it’s there in front of you. But when you’ve been through this and you look into the eyes of people like we did on Saturday, you know that there’s something very much alive in the hearts and minds of a lot of people in this country.

Mr. Clyburn tells us with a straight face (and true to form the oily sycophant Olbermann accepts it without question), that he alone can tell who amongst us is a racist just by looking into his eyes.¹ And, by golly, we ought to take his word for it because, well, you know, he has experienced racism and we haven’t.

What a tragic figure this man has become. His entire life is still bound up in issues involving the pigment of his skin. I suppose, though, when your entire career is founded on the fact of racism, it would make you very wobbly indeed to admit that racism – and, therefore, your foundation - no longer exists.²

Clyburn, like most black liberal politicians of his generation, has a rich history of exploiting the historic travails of the negro race whenever he or his party is backed into a corner.

But this is the 21st century and I’m afraid his kind are passe. I suspect no black man under the age of fifty would be willing to buy into Clyburn’s tired, cowardly, and childish “black-man-abused-by-the-Man” shtick. It’s just so 1980.

James Enos Clyburn turns seventy this year.³ He made his bones, as did so many other members of the Congressional Black Caucus, during the civil rights movement of the 60′s. But what was once noble (seeing everything in terms of race was necessary in order to defeat racism) has now become ignoble (seeing everything in terms of race is racism).

Clyburn and race-hustlers like him suffer from an acute case of nostalgia. They long for a time when they were relevant, even if that time was one in which members of their race were treated as second-class citizens.

Robert Frost probably had someone like Clyburn in mind when he wrote the following line in his poem Provide:

 No memory of having starred atones for later disregard….

Mr. Clyburn longs for a past where playing the race card was enough to make frighty-whitey do his bidding. But today, homey don’t play that no more.

Footnotes:

¹ This guy is one talented son of a gun. Geez, I can’t even remember the color of peoples’ eyes, much less what those eyes say about the nature and extent of their prejudice.

² My guess is that Clyburn feels a lot like those Republican cold warriors felt when the Soviet Union collapsed. Both states of mind can be summed up by the rhetorical question, “who the hell do we demonize now?”

³ Thankfully, the only similarity between me and Clyburn is that our birthdays fall on July 21st.

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