Racism Run Amuck

My CRT rants of late dredged up an old memory that I felt was a perfect example of our current racial impasse, a no-win situation where everything is perceived as racism.  An incident told to me by a close friend, a practicing facial surgeon:  

“Back in my surgical training days, the residents got ahold of a young black female patient who was dissatisfied with her appearance.  She was what they call in the realm of facial analysis bimaxillary protrusive, meaning her jaws were skeletally situated forward in the facial plane. She also had a component of vertical maxillary excess whereby the upper jaw is taller, creating a high smile line, a high palatal vault, and a narrow nasal base, often with a prominent dorsal hump and a recessive chin. (pardon the medical jargon, but it's his storytelling). This results in a “gummy” smile where the patient shows a great deal of gum tissue above the upper teeth when they smile.  They also tend to be lip incompetent, so when the teeth are together, the lips do not meet when relaxed, and teeth show even at rest. Can you fix that? Sure.  Off to surgery, she went to move her jaws into a flatter facial profile and shorten the vertical height of the upper jaw, so she showed less teeth at rest and produced less of a gummy smile. The surgery accomplished those goals, although one could argue that using standardized norms of facial structure measurements as a guide, one could argue that it “Caucasianized” her facial features to a degree. It was, however, the patient’s choice to alter her facial appearance to her ideal aesthetic. 

But I digress. An unfortunate component of vertically impacting the upper jaw is that it can lift the nasal tip and broaden the nasal base, thus making the nose wider and rounding up the nasal openings, much like the effect kids get when they pull up their nasal tip to make a “pig face.” There are steps that can be taken to minimize this complication, but they were apparently not employed sufficiently, or they were ineffective in this case and resulted in a nose appearance the patient was not happy with.  So once again, the unhappy patient was whisked off to surgery, this time for a rhinoplasty, to narrow the nasal base, reduce the nasal tip lift and essentially restore her nose more to the pre-operative appearance.  Here’s where things get interesting.

Recall, the patient is unhappy with the appearance of her nose after jaw surgery altered it and wants something that more closely resembled her original nose appearance.  Got it?  I stopped by the OR on my surgical rounds. I had not scrubbed in, but as the senior fellow, I had reviewed the case and had an academic interest in the procedure. The surgeon, the surgical assistant, and the anesthesiologist were white, and the two nurses, the scrub and the circulator, were both black.  The patient was asleep on the table and was being prepped and draped for the procedure.  The attending surgeon saw me and gestured me over, maneuvering the nose to show me what he had in mind.  He stepped back and asked me what I thought of the plan, and what I would do to correct the nose.  What do you think of the appearance, he asked?  “It looks like a two-car garage,” I quipped, referencing the post-operative change in appearance after the first surgery.  “The nasal base has been widened, and the nasal tip lifted, making the case passages  big and round, an unnatural appearance on her face.”  “Yup,” he said, nodding in agreement.  We continued to banter casually about the incisions and the surgical procedure.  I wished them luck and excused myself to complete my rounds.

The next day, the attending surgeon told me, “we have a problem. The two black nurses in the room said my comments about the patient’s nose were racist.” “How’s that exactly,” I asked.  “They felt you were criticizing her ethnically black nose,” he said.  “That’s absurd,” I retorted.  “That’s not even her nose. The patient had elected to completely alter her facial appearance, and when the surgery resulted in an unfortunate change in the appearance of her nose, she herself had chosen to have that altered so as to resemble her original appearance.  So, in essence, the nose I was criticizing was not even her original ethnic nose (which I thought from pre-surgical photographs was fine, to begin with) rather, it was a nose that had been distorted by surgery so much so that the patient didn’t like its appearance.   So let me get this straight: I am being accused of racism for being critical of a surgically altered nose, not her natural nose, but one that the patient doesn’t like either?  That’s ridiculous.”  He thought about it for a moment and appeared confused by logic.  Then, he blurted out, “Well, they still think it’s racist.”

And there you have it: the impasse.  The circular argument. Why is it racist? Because I think it is racist.  But what makes it racist. Because I am an oppressed person of color, and I think it’s racist. End of discussion.  So we have reached the stage where proof is no longer required, merely perception. The supplanting of reason with “lived experience” so popular with the left. The goal is not to reason; the goal is to make declarations and not to open the floor for discussion. Therefore everything is now perceived as racism, from mathematics to menthol. It was recently declared that white people cannot text images or memes that feature black people because it is a form of digital racism. It has even been suggested that white people shouldn’t smile at black people because smiling is an overcompensation that covers for their innate racial bias.  Apparently, there is now a Neo-Nazi or a white supremacist lurking under every rock.  Even Whoopi Goldberg, recently mired in controversy for racial generalizations and historical misrepresentation, lamented that there should be a handbook of sorts telling you what you can and cannot say.

University departments of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion have become bloated bureaucracies that must continue to promote the narrative of widespread racism as a raison d’etre. As Andrew Doyle articulated in his book The New Puritans, academia appears to have lost its purpose when there exists a university that boasts 95 members of its DEI department yet has only 13 history professors. It leads to Ph.D. dissertations such as “Whiteness Interrupted,” by Marcus Bell of Syracuse University, who asks “what it means to be white,”…… a fundamental question at the heart of critical whiteness studies….. (CWS) upends traditional approaches to the study of race and racial inequality by averting the gaze from racially subordinate groups and focusing it upon the racially dominant group.”  Critical Whiteness Studies?  How preposterous.  There are a lot of studies out there that are actually critical, but studying “color of your skin-ness” is not one of them. This is just more ruminations from activists, opportunists, and self-anointed experts in the fields of “whiteness studies” the way paved by author Robin DiAngelo , who in her landmark book “White Fragility,” seems more intent on projecting her own racial bias onto all of White America.  Yet the only measurable statistic most often held up to scrutiny is that of generational wealth, despite the overwhelming examples of success in sports, entertainment, business, medicine, and political control of urban enclaves that members of the black community, a mere 13% of the US population, enjoy.  We had a black president who certainly didn’t get voted into office by just the tally of votes from the black population alone. If white America is so inherently racist, exactly how could that have come to pass? Does racism exist?  Sure it does. Bias will always exist between people that don’t look alike, that don’t speak the same language, and that don’t have the same values. Witness ethnic enclaves worldwide where people that share the same culture, the same religion, the same ethnicity, bind together. We all may have as a survival instinct deep within our genome the same fears of otherness. But as Doyle astutely points out, despite our cosmetic differences, the human genome is remarkably consistent throughout all ethnicities. We are indeed biologically the same on the inside, and we need to be reminded. And despite the stain of slavery, one that America seems to bear alone despite a majority of enslaved Africans landing on other shores, this abrupt veering away from the teaching of the Reverend Martin Luther King into seeing color above all else, disregarding the content of one's character, this replacement of meritocracy with race-based quotas, is not ultimately going to be a unifying principle. Division and demagoguery are not the path to a unified America.