Are you a racist? What would a celebrity say?

Andrew Klavan explores racism, American culture and the current form of dominant liberalism.

Liberals have not been the same since the sixties, a decade of profound social changes. And putting aside the sad story linked, have you ever wondered why there is so much nepotism in Hollywood today? Don't they believe in Equal Opportunity in Hollywood?

On a more somber note, VDH laments the fact that the word "racism" has been devalued by frequent misapplication. And he believes that, ironically, President Obama's election has increased racial polarization:

As I wrote often, the election of the “healer” Barack Obama, I felt, would make racial relations worse, despite the bipartisan appreciation of his historical candidacy. Why? Obama had, by his voting record, proven the most partisan Senator in Congress. His career in Chicago was predicated on racial-identity politics. His 20-year membership in the racist Rev. Wright’s pulpit was predicated on the need for establishing street credibility and racialist credentials. I was not convinced by Michelle Obama’s campaign rhetoric that I was in error.

And his offhand remarks on race—more calls for victimization studies in the schools, calls for reparation (withdrawn when the media publicized them), and unfortunate slips, from the Pennsylvania stereotyping to “the typical white person” flippant, second-nature remark—did not disabuse me of that initial impression. Nor did Chris Matthews’ tingle or Newsweek’s “A god.”

In other words, I thought it would be very difficult for a candidate who had seen problems in terms of racial identity to transcend his past, however elegant and moving the rhetoric. In contrast, there are dozens of major black political figures, and, I believe, the vast majority of Americans of all races, who see race as incidental rather than essential to their personas.

Again, nothing these past nine months have persuaded me that my fears were misplaced. And now we witness a new development in which the serious and once legitimate word “racist/racism” tragically has lost all currency (despite the continual presence of racists and racism). In political discourse, it means nothing other than a tactical move to obtain political or careerist advantage. (By the same token, “Nazi” means nothing now either. It too has devolved from a descriptive term of a nightmarish philosophy that engineered the murder of 6 million and started a war that led to 50 million dead to a debating tool to end debate entirely).