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David McElroy

An Alien Sent to Observe the Human Race

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Political attitudes about race prove we’re still living in a tribal world

By David McElroy · October 15, 2012

When actress Stacey Dash posted an endorsement of Mitt Romney on Twitter last week, it should have been no big deal. But because Dash is a minority (black and Latino), she was attacked by other blacks for not supporting Barack Obama. The strong implication is that blacks have an obligation to stick together to support a fellow minority.

Dash’s experience prompted some articles asking whether it’s racist for blacks to support Obama in such high percentages, just because he’s black. (Here’s a conservative black woman writing about the issue.)

Is it racist for black to support Obama for being black? Well, duh. Of course it is. Is it racists for whites to oppose him because he’s black? Duh. Of course it is.

The photo above was taken Friday at a Romney rally in Ohio. A charitable interpretation of the shirt might be that the wearer just happens to support Romney for policy reasons, but the shirt is just a humorous attempt to show his support for his candidate, who happens to be white.

But does any sane and honest person believe that?

I don’t see a lot of difference between the two candidates when you look past their rhetoric, but some people do. For a large chunk of those people, it’s the party label that means the most. Many whites would honestly still support the Team Red candidate even if he were black and the Blue candidate were white. And many blacks would support the Team Blue candidate even if the Red candidate were black.

But there are a lot of people — on both sides of the racial divide — for whom race is clearly an issue.

I’ve listened to groups of blacks discussing the election and it’s been clear to me that they supported “Barrack” — they all seem to know him by first name when I listen in — because he’s “one of us.” Because he’s black. And I’ve been among groups of white people who clearly hate Obama because he’s black. They might disagree with a white candidate who holds exactly the same positions, but they have special hatred for Obama, because he’s “one of them.”

Human beings are tribal. We split into groups based on whatever differences we can find. We fight over stupid things. It seems to be wired into our genes.

I’ve talked before about the fact that we don’t live in the “post-racial” fantasy world that so many people want. I don’t think we ever will be, because many people will always find an excuse to hate someone else. If our skin color were uniform around the world, they’d just choose some other factor. The issue isn’t skin color. The issue is “us vs. them.” The issue is finding a way to force “those people” — whoever they are — to live the way we believe they ought to live.

I hate the racist attitudes that I see from both blacks and whites in politics, but I have trouble getting as indignant as some people do, because I don’t think it’s a part of human nature that can change. We’re tribal beings who are going to find reasons to hate each other and fight each other. We’re going to justify our hatred of one another, by “proving” that the “other side” is wrong and evil.

But that’s just justification. The truth is that humans just want to hate others and fight other groups and try to control one another.

It might be a depressing way to look at humanity, but I think it’s a realistic thing to understand about a fallen world. This is just who we are. The best we can hope for is for some of us to decide that we don’t have to live that way. Sadly, I think those of us who refuse to engage in the tribalism of the day — whether it’s skin color or language or religion or whatever — are always going to be in the minority.

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I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

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