What would we make of someone who publicly proclaimed that “being a black person” is akin to “being an alcoholic” because of ingrained “black” behavioral tendencies; that black people are bodily “embedded” with evil thoughts; that they have a corrupt “racial identity”; and that black teachers cannot teach white students “nearly as well” as white teachers can?

Of course we would morally condemn that person as a racist. The media and the public would excoriate the person—as they did Donald Sterling—and, if he had a business, many consumers would justly boycott it.

Why, then, do many journalists and pundits ignore (if not actively promote) individuals who make comparable racist remarks regarding people with different skin tones? Consider what Kim Radersma (a former teacher) said at a “White Privilege Conference” in Madison earlier this year:

Being a white person who does anti-racist work is like being an alcoholic. I will never be recovered by my alcoholism, to use the metaphor. I have to everyday wake up and acknowledge that I am so deeply imbedded with racist thoughts and notions and actions in my body that I have to choose everyday to do anti-racist work and think in an anti-racist way. . . . [T]o realize I carry within me these dark, horrible thoughts and perceptions is hard to admit. . . . Who's at fault? My white body is at fault. My racial identity, as a white person who believes that I am somehow better or more deserving, is the problem. . . . I can't teach students of color nearly as well as a person of color can.

No doubt Radersma is correct that she is a racist as well as a horrible teacher, and she may or may not recognize that she spouts explicitly racist theories in the name of fighting racism. But apparently she is unaware of the fact that she has free will and can choose to be a racist or not.

Martin Luther King, Jr. rightly called on people to judge others not “by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Radersma is a racist, not because of the color of her skin, but because of the corrupt ideas she chooses to embrace and the malicious words she chooses to speak.

Let every rational person declare what today’s leftist leaders refuse to acknowledge: Radersma and her ilk are racists by choice, and they deserve to be condemned accordingly.

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