Micro-racism. Hell, if they can make up micro-aggression, I can make up micro-racism. Micro-racism is when a member of a particular racial group complains that other groups cannot understand their plight because the skin color of the other group is different from theirs.

It is the most curious thing to see the same people who lectured our society for the past 50 years about inclusion and the evils of racism are now preaching self-segregation and racial isolation.

It isn’t about skin color. It is about culture. There is no doubt that a majority culture puts its imprint on the larger society. That is just what a majority does. It defines social mores and those mores define the paths for mobility and success. In the 50’s and 60’s, Martin Luther King fought for the rights of black Americans to be fairly included in those predominant mores.

I’m Caucasian. I grew up white and poor in the rural South as the Civil Rights moment was peaking, culminating in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. I saw a lot of black society in my youth and its social mores were modeled after the majority white society. Two parent homes, parents who understood that their children needed to get a proper education, respectful children who were dressed to the nines for social events, self-reliance, independence, a reverence for the elders in their extended family and a deep, family devotion to their church and God.

Life was no picnic but the vision of the home life of the black family in the 50’s and 60’s was modeled after the majority culture of white America, a culture that, while retaining a nostalgia for their beginnings (whatever their ethnic heritage), subjugated those beginnings to adapt to the majority to become Americans.

I think Martin Luther King saw that following the dominant social mores was the pattern for success for blacks – that is why he fought for inclusion and against segregation. Dr. King wanted to see a society who judged all people on the content of their character and not the color of their skin.

But somewhere along the way, things changed. The radical racists in the black community allied themselves with the white racists. The 60’s brought a sexual “revolution” aimed at breaking down the family structure. Radicals started pushing race as a primary identity instead of character. Of course, progressive politicians took advantage of these situations and instead of pointing out that the growing lack of inclusion was due to the deviation of black America away from the dominant culture, it was the fault of the dominant culture and that culture must subsidize the deviant behaviors in the name of diversity.

That’s what the War on Poverty was all about. Progressives said to the poor in our culture (both white and black) that they could just continue behaviors that were different from those of the dominant culture, that they could adopt divergent value systems and the dominant culture would send them a monthly check and create all sorts of government programs to support their desires to remain isolated – because, after all, what right does the dominant culture have to judge them or to even establish standards of success?

While clearly counter-intuitive, the idea that somehow creating more official discrimination (affirmative action) could end discrimination took hold. The idea that success should not be dependent on inclusion and adaptation to the majority culture and that race should achieve primacy over behavior and character became the conventional wisdom.

But as black American culture and social behaviors started to vector away from the trajectory of the dominant culture (which happens to be white), things didn’t work the way the progressives promised.

The same conditions exist in the white sub-cultures who mimic the behaviors approved by the progressive movement, those deviant from what the social mores of the dominant culture. Drugs, crime, destruction of the nuclear family, disrespect for education and separation from church and God have done exactly the same thing for whites as it has for blacks – it is just that the law of large numbers kicks in for white America. The dominant cultural system is large enough to absorb a greater degree of variation without disintegration or a drastic shift in the mean (average) behaviors.

I am not blaming blacks – I am blaming progressivism. Both Republican and Democrat progressives draw their power from the three D’s: division, discord and dystopia. No matter the cultural mix, deviation from the dominant culture punishes the deviant. There are costs associated with diverging

The current “Balkanization” of American culture is being nurtured by progressives for a purpose – power. In a classic example of inverted prog-speak, diversity is just another newspeak word for segregation. Inclusion now means “separate but equal” because we cannot demand that people actually be “included” without allowing them to retain their differences.

Progressivism is based on the communist ideal that there must always be a struggle – that one must always fight the dominant culture because it is evil simply because it is dominant.

By no stretch of the imagination am I saying that whites are superior – what I am saying is that whites have long moved with the current of a society of two parent homes, parents who understood that their children needed to get a proper education, respectful children, self-reliance, independence, a reverence for the elders in their extended family and a deep, family devotion to their church and God, all things that progressives have traditionally taught their acolytes are bad, that such a “Norman Rockwell” existence is both evil and unattainable for anyone except a white person.

It is not impossible to be successful in a Rockwell society and it doesn’t mean that a respect for one’s racial or ethnic heritage must be forgotten – I’ve pointed out nine current or former black American CEOs who are living proof of that. Herman Cain, Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams are other examples.

It isn’t about race or “white privilege”, it is just a fact that it is faster to swim with the current that it is to swim against it – and you can wear any style, color or type of swimsuit while you are doing it.

People can disagree – but I believe that white culture has made success easier, not because of its “whiteness” but because it models behaviors and mores that are beneficial to individuals in America and by extension, American society at large. I believe that Dr. King knew this. That is why he fought for inclusion and against separate but equal.