By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--October 10, 2017
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Former Bears star and coach Mike Ditka, an adamant critic of National Football League players kneeling during the national anthem to protest racial discrimination, said Monday in a national radio interview that this country has been free of oppression for at least a century. “All of a sudden, it’s become a big deal now, about oppression,” Ditka told Jim Gray on Westwood One’s pregame show ahead of the Bears’ “Monday Night Football” loss to the Vikings. “There has been no oppression in the last 100 years that I know of. Now maybe I’m not watching it as carefully as other people.”Let's see: Jim Crow, segregation, Bull Connors, the baseball color line pre-Jackie Robinson, George Wallace barring the door, Megdar Evers, white/colored lunch counters and drinking fountains, housing discrmination . . . I could go on, but do I really need to? I have made no bones about my belief when it comes to racism circa 2017: It remains alive on the fringes of society. It's evil. Those who practice it deserve to be shunned and marginalized. What is not a constructive approach is what much of the left is doing these days, which is to expand the definition of racism to include every unintentional choice of words, every non-PC utterance and every unintentional result of "privilege" that has no malevolent intent behind it. If the left wants to attack real racism, the right will join the effort without reservation. If the left instead wants to point fingers at people who are not racist, claiming to hear "racist dog whistles" that the accused neither intend nor can even conceive of, well then we're just going to have a fight. It's too bad because it's one of the few things we should have no trouble agreeing on, but we can never seem to work together on it because one side insists on falsely accusing the other of being complicit in it.
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