NYT Misses Point about Immigration

A Few Simple Truths on Immigration

By the Editorial Board, July 30 2016 (LINK to editorial)

As usual, the Editorial Board is missing the main point about immigration, which is the way in which it is changing America's ethnic composition from once overwhelmingly white to ever-increasingly non-white.

I can almost hear the moderator drawing in his or her breath as they read this, because it is an issue that is only supposed to be of importance to bigots, xenophobes and racists. What does it matter what colour, i.e. race or ethnicity, Americans are?

Does it not matter that the Chinese LOOK Chinese? Or that Europeans LOOK European? According to the NYT's logic, clearly not.

I'm reminded of a demonstration I once saw of post-hypnotic suggestion, where an individual was put into a hypnotic state and told that when awoken they would not be aware of something, and they weren't, until the suggestion implanted in their brain was removed.

A form of collective post-hypnotic suggestion, it seems to me, has occurred in the West in respect to race and ethnicity. In overreaction to Nazism and the Holocaust, which was blamed on "prejudice" towards a particular ethnic group, a taboo was made of attributing any social or political importance to them.

In an editorial response to the Islamist terror attacks in Paris last November, The Price of Fear, the Editorial Board warned its readers,

“In the reaction and overreaction to terrorism [evil] comes the risk that society will lose its way.”

This, I suggest, is what happened, resulting in a form of collective post-hypnotic suggestion, blinding some, very influential people, especially in academia, to the importance, even the very existence, of race, which was elevated to a moral imperative, academics being modern heirs and counterparts of the priesthood of earlier times.

"Colour-blindness" became a measure of moral authority, which politicians quickly latched on to as a way of promoting their own authority and POWER.

Race is real and important. Not in the way that racial supremacists, like the Nazis, believe it is, but because central to any deep and meaningful sense of both personal and group identity, and thus, socially and politically.

See BLOG in which I elaborate on these ideas.