About Race

Here is one thing I have learned over 35 years in business: winners do not think of themselves as white or black, male or female, gay or straight, disabled or able.  Here is another: losers are obsessed with such things.

That is what’s wrong with liberals’ pre-occupation with race, gender, and class – they are teaching another generation of young people to think like losers, talk like losers, and act like losers.  When these young people grow up to be losers, it will be held up as evidence of more racism and sexism, and the government will subsidize the victimhood industry into perperuity.  

In the private sector, we have no time for such self-indulgent foolishness. 

We are rewarded and punished for our decisions and actions by the market - a market that is color-blind and gender-neutral.  Its judgments are swift and final; our choice is to please it or disappear. We win or we lose; it is a beautiful thing – pure.  No wonder free markets terrify people who expect a hug for simply showing up.    

What matters in business is competence, confidence, character, and trust.  These are not traits bestowed upon any specific race or gender; they are leadership characteristics that are found in individual persons. Winners have developed these characteristics, and losers have not.    

Winners act and learn, while losers hope and blame.  Losers hope for good things to happen to them, rather than making good things happen.  They blame others for their circumstances, and exaggerate every slight and injustice, real or imagined.     

In business, we teach our young leaders to recognize winners and losers by the language they use.  Losers will announce themselves with the “three F’s”:  – it’s not Fair, it’s not my Fault, and it’s not mine to Fix.  Waiting for someone else to cure one’s circumstances is the loser’s signature move.   

We should speak plainly about these matters.  Race is a cop-out.  Gender is a cop-out.  Orientation is a cop-out.  Disability is a cop-out. 

We are what we are, and none of us chose it; recognizing that fact is about as much thought as these subjects deserve.  What is important is who we have become, what we have made of ourselves.  The making of a self is an individual pursuit.

Over the past 35 years, I have worked with, worked for, supervised, promoted, and dismissed people of every age, race, gender, orientation, and physical ability.  The winners win and the losers lose, without regard to their skin color or reproductive equipment. It has everything to do with what they have made of themselves, and how well they apply themselves to the job at hand.   

And I will also say this: over those 35 years, I have witnessed more corruption, intolerance, harassment, favoritism, and overtly racist and sexist acts from the government employees who regulate us than I have from those of us who supposedly need to be regulated. Here’s the difference: in the private sector we fire our dipsticks, we don’t promote them to GS13 and send them to a class. 

I know many successful black, Hispanic, gay, and disabled men and women; I enjoy being in their company, working with them, competing against or cooperating with them as the case may be.  We don’t talk about their EEO status; we talk about their accomplishments, values, family, faith, philosophy, relationships, strategies, and dreams for the future.  Their dreams come true because the refuse to be defined by their skin or their genitalia.  They refuse to be defined, period; they define themselves.    

And I also know plenty of pathetic white male losers that blame their failure on preferences given to blacks, Hispanics, females, disabled, or veterans by government.  You want to have a dialog on race and gender?  That is all they talk about. Their preoccupation condemns them to a life of perpetual irrelevance just as surely as it does the minority teen whose head has been filled with the lie that she can’t succeed without government benevolence.      

The difference between the first (winners) and second (losers) set of acquaintances is not the color of their ears, or the loops that adorn them, or which side hosts the piercing. The difference is what is going on between those ears.  

Each of us has a brain of our own, a heart of our own, and our Creator’s emancipating endowment of free will.  We are not Leggo pieces to be sorted into neat piles by color and shape so that social engineers can more easily construct a society that pleases them.  

Rev. Jesse Jackson had it exactly right with “I am somebody”; singular, not plural.  It should all just stop right there.          

  

“Moment Of Clarity” is a weekly commentary by Libertarian writer and speaker Tim Nerenz, Ph.D.  Visit Tim’s website www.timnerenz.com to find your moment and order his new book, “Tooth Fairy Government.”