by Jack Frost
Given the general Christian insistence on regarding all souls as “equal in the eyes of God,” cognitive dissonance without doubt has had a lot to do with the evolution of anti-racism throughout what used to be called Christendom.
For example, the discomfort (i.e., cognitive dissonance) of the Founding Fathers with regard to race-based slavery conflicting with their worldview is palpable when you read their writings. Some, like the deeply religious Benjamin Franklin, became abolitionists, and freed their own slaves (n.b., but only after using them for most of their lives). The descendants of those same slaves no doubt are still preying on whites even today. How many murders, rapes, and robberies of white people have been the result of Franklin’s act of Christian generosity? How many shattered, ruined lives?
We’ll never know. Given the prevailing worldview, the question is uninteresting, just as the ongoing genocide of whites in South Africa is uninteresting. Eventually, of course, other abolitionists even fomented America’s Civil War over the issue, and their descendants, such as the founders of the NAACP, worked sedulously to make the negro the white man’s equal in law. Nearly all of these abolitionists were Christian fanatics who framed their objections to slavery in moral terms. Confronting such people with evidence they are wrong will usually only increase their fanaticism.
This being the case, could it be that efforts at “education” are not only fruitless, but counter-productive? This would explain much about the racial right’s long history of failure.