Liberals who have amounted to something in life through advanced study, hard work, deferral of gratification, self-control, accepting responsibility for their actions and the rest of the old-fashioned virtues are often strangely hesitant to preach these conservative virtues to those most in need of them. These liberals live Right and garner the benefits, but think Left.
They do not make excuses for themselves, but they do for others. And what has worked for them they do not think will work for others. Their attitude is curiously condescending. If we conservatives used 'racist' as loosely and irresponsibly as they do, we might even tag their attitude 'racist.'
It is the 'racism' of reduced expectations.
It is not enough to practice what you preach; you must also preach what you practice.
Law professors Amy Wax and and Larry Alexander have come under vicious fire for pointing out the obvious: many of our social problems are rooted in a collapse of middle-class cultural norms. But it is a good bet that the leftward-slouching liberals who attacked them live by, and owe their success to, those very same 'racist' norms. It is an equally good bet that they impose them on their children.
Now let me see if I understand this. The bourgeois values and norms are 'racist' because blacks are incapable of studying, working hard, deferring gratification, controlling their exuberance, respecting legitimate authority and the like? Is that it?
But surely blacks are capable of these things. So who are the 'racists' here? The conservatives who want to help blacks by teaching them values that are not specifically white, but universal in their usefulness, or the leftists who think blacks incapable of assimilating such values?
Or is it something like the opposite of 'cultural appropriation'? Is it that whites violate and destroy black 'culture' by imposing on blacks white values that blacks cannot appropriate and turn to use? But of course the values are not 'white' but universally efficacious.
Just as self-control helps keep me alive, self-control would have kept Trayvon Martin alive if had had any. And the same goes for Michael Brown of Ferguson.