Leonard Pitts is a syndicated liberal columnist. In a recent column he asserts what has become conventional idiocy on the left — that conservatives have been “shameless” in their “attempts in recent years to co-opt the language of the civil rights movement as a weapon against affirmative action.”
Let me see if I’ve got this right. In its various incarnations from the 1830s through the 1960s what we came to call the civil rights movement argued that it was wrong and even immoral to treat people differently based on the color of their skin. During that long period civil rights advocates were the truest believers in what Gunnar Myrdal called “the American Creed,” the principle that people should be treated “without regard” to race, creed, or color.
Since the late 1960s, however, under the guise of “affirmative action” the new “civil rights movement” has advocated exactly the opposite principle, i.e., that now people should be treated differently based on the color of their skin.
The “civil rights movement” did not and does not own a copyright on the language of equality. Thus people who continue to believe in the principle that the “civil rights movement” (and let’s not forget their fellow travelers in the Democratic Party and, in Michigan, the leaders of the Republican Party) abandoned are not “co-opting” the language of equality. They are using it the way it was meant to be used.
On the contrary, rather than those of us who believe in colorblind equality “co-opting” the language of the civil rights movement (though, as I said, it never belonged to them), what is actually going on is the civil rights movement “copping out” on its former priniciples.
To cop out evolved to refer to making a full confession of some crime or misdemeanour, usually but not necessarily to the police. . . ; in the 1960s it developed still further to mean that a person was evading an issue by making excuses or taking the easy way out.
In parallel with this, [the] noun form, a cop-out, developed from the late 1950s onwards until it, too, became nationally known in the mid-1960s (and quickly spread to Britain and other countries, too) to mean an excuse, a pretext, a going back on your responsibilities to avoid trouble, a cowardly or feeble evasion.
Yes indeed.
