“Whiteness is a public health crisis. It shortens life
expediencies, it pollutes air, it constricts equilibrium, it devastates
forests, it melts ice caps, it sparks (and funds) wars, it flattens
dialects, it infests consciousnesses, and it kills people . . . ”—Damon Young, New York Times contributor
“Over the past year, I have, of course, still had to interact
with white people on Zoom or watch them on television or worry about
whether they would succeed in reelecting a white-supremacist president.
But white people aren’t in my face all of the time. I can, more or less,
only deal with whiteness when I want to . . . White people haven’t
improved; I’ve just been able to limit my exposure to them.”—Elie Mystal, The Nation
Racism is the deductive bias against, and often hatred of, an entire
racial group. It is often birthed by dislike of particular individuals
of a given group that supposedly justifies, by extension, disliking or
indeed hating all of them. The popular reaction against this widespread
toxic pathology shown African Americans birthed the anti-slavery
movement, the Civil War, the resistance to Jim Crow, and the modern
Civil Rights movement.
But now there grows a strange new ahistorical “antiracism” racism.
One variety encourages holistic hatred, blaming all of one’s own
unhappiness, indeed all of the cosmic injustice in the manmade and
natural world—the very air, water, and earth—on a white racial
collective.
Another constructs a purported racial pathology to encourage
segregation and separation from all members of the white race, thereby
limiting all “exposure” to a toxic people.
These are not just the idle critical race theory rants of
intellectuals. They now are reified in racially segregated graduations
and dorms and in systemic racialist reeducation and confessional
workshops in government, the military, and private enterprise. In fact,
the new antiracism racism is flagrantly directed at “whiteness”—the
obsession of an America gone mad.
Barack Obama who, when a senator, filibustered the 2006 Supreme Court
nominee Samuel Alito now claims, falsely, the filibuster is a racist
relic of Jim Crow, which it predated by at least 30-40 years. On the
Senate floor, U.S. Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) vowed to block
confirmation of nominees based solely on their white skin color.
In violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment,
the mayor of Oakland just announced race-based grants of $500 per month
to be given only to poor “BIPOC” (“black, indigenous, and people of
color”) families, excluding the white poor.
The latest multibillion-dollar stimulus/farm aid bill is targeted for
all those in need—as long as they are not white. The latter are all
ineligible.
The new antiracism racism, whatever its original intentions,
unfortunately exhibits the historical telltale signs of its noxious
genre: an a priori negative stereotyping of all whites that can then be applied to individuals deemed undeserving because
they are white. It is a deductive doctrine used to justify racial bias
and racial preferences, to enhance careers and profits, and to excuse
and contextualize racist language and behavior.
Antiracism’s implicit defense is that the nonwhite have less power to
act out their biases than do whites, while it “rights” an historical
wrong. Therefore even crude antiracists cannot be harmful racists.
Consult the government data on hate crimes, however, and one learns some
non-white groups have a greater proportional tendency
to commit such crimes against others than so-called whites. And how has
a white lower-middle-class generation, born in the post-Civil Rights
movement and the age of affirmative action, continued to enjoy so-called
white privilege?
The Convenient Vocabularies of Whiteness
Notice how the term “white racism” began metamorphosing into “white
supremacy.” The latter is a linguistic means of stating, without
evidence, that “they” control everything and thus there is little need
for demonstrable examples of white racism.
But “supremacy” itself proves a problematic rubric. What does one do when Asian Americans as a group
make far more per capita than do whites? Or the 44th president of the
United States was black—as is the current vice president? Or both the
recent Democratic and Republican candidates for lieutenant governor in
South Carolina, the first slave state to secede from the Union, were
black?
After all, a true “Islamic supremacy” state such as Iran or Saudi
Arabia, does not allow a Christian or Jew access to such power in their
country. A racially supremacist nation such as we see in communist China
cannot allow a black or white immigrant to be premier—any more than can
North Korea. Even South Korea or Japan may not any day soon see a
Korean president or Japanese prime minister of Mexican or Irish
ancestry.
And yet “white supremacy” itself is devolving into “white privilege.”
The newer term no longer requires proof that all whites are always
supreme—only that they all, by use of the collective “white,” enjoyed innately unfair advantages over all others based solely on their race.
But finally “white privilege” will itself prove an unsustainable
rubric, given the clear privileges enjoyed by millions of non-white
Americans in business, politics, popular culture, sports, entertainment,
the professions, and among the elite. Surely one should not have to
argue that a white Dayton, Ohio tire-changer is innately blessed in a
way an unfortunate Eric Holder or Jay-Z purportedly is not?
So “white privilege” is now morphing into just “whiteness” in a
malignant stereotyping hauntingly reminiscent of the 1930 theories of
insidious “Jewishness,” a term denoting a mythical and underhanded power
that warped and “controlled” Western Europe—even as no believable
charge could be leveled against individual Jews.
Infectious “whiteness” supposedly is what explains why the privileged
Meghan Markle is unhappy with, or rather furious at, the royal family
and the psychodramatic injustices allegedly done to her—as the former
royal couple lecture the public on its sins from their $14 million
Montecito estate.
The “whiteness” conspiracy similarly explains why multibillionaire
Oprah Winfrey, who interviewed the couple from her nearby $90 million
estate, not long ago was—or so she complained—treated rudely by a clerk
in a Swiss boutique who committed the mortal sin of not recognizing
Oprah, and thus not purportedly retrieving a $38,000 crocodile bag out of its secure case quickly enough to Oprah’s liking.
“Whiteness” often towers over even 5’11” Michelle Obama. Even as
First Lady, when incognito in a Target store, she complained that a much
shorter white woman did not recognize her and asked her, a taller
stranger, to help lift down an item from an upper shelf—a phenomenon that millions of Americans encounter weekly.
Racist White Male Mass Shooters Everywhere?
It took the media and the Left about a nanosecond, and without any
evidence other than a grainy video, to falsely label the recent Colorado
mass shooter—later revealed as a Trump-hating Syrian-born Muslim—a
“white supremacist.”
And it only took a second for the online mob and media to use his now
falsely assumed identification to fuel a grand indictment against all
“white men” in general—in the same old, same old unapologetic Duke
lacrosse, Covington Catholic kids, and Jussie Smollett style.
Next, the Colorado mass murderer was immediately lumped in with the
recent Georgia mass killer—as if that monstrous shooter was,
unquestionably, a similar white supremacist. The two together proved a
“pattern” of systemic white violence, most notably against Asian
Americans.
All of these narratives, which are still floating around and widely accepted, are false.
It mattered little that the prior Georgia “white supremacist”
mass-murderer was a disturbed psychopath and sexual deviant. In an
initial questioning, the FBI found him unhinged rather than acting out a
racist agenda. Sexual deviance rather than racism
more likely fueled his attacks on massage parlors, where he killed six
Asian and two white women, and seriously wounded a Hispanic male.
As far as the deviant Atlanta shooter being illustrative of an epidemic of white-inspired, anti-Asian-American crimes, the majority of such hate crimes against Asians
have not been found, by a variety of metrics, to have been committed
inordinately by whites. Indeed, in many surveys, African American males
are proportionally more likely to commit such hate offenses against
Asians. Nor do whites commit hate crimes in general disproportionally. Nor in the case of mass shootings, are whites “overrepresented” in the data.
The First Stone
Barack Obama was also quick to inflame the dramas—in the fashion of
his unfortunate Trayvon Martin commentaries—by weighing in falsely that
racism was one of the Georgia shooter’s stimulants.
Meena Harris—a
Dr. Seuss canceller, Kamala Harris’s niece and campaign advisor, and
the would-be Harris family memorialist—before the Colorado shooter had
even been identified, immediately tweeted out: “The Atlanta shooting was
not even a week ago. Violent white men are the greatest terrorist
threat to our country”
Note the Harris logic: a suspect mows down ten innocents, and presto
“white men are the greatest terrorist threat to our country”—never mind
that the shooter turns out to have been a Syrian Muslim who emigrated to
America in the early 2000s. The subtext of Harris’ thoughtless comments
is something like “and we better do something about those white
people.”
Her later “apology” for her judge-jury-executioner disinformation
tweet proved far worse than her original libel: “I deleted a previous
tweet about the suspect in the Boulder shooting. I made an assumption
based on his being taken into custody alive and the fact that the
majority of mass shootings in the U.S. are carried out by white men.”
Aside from the fact that Harris offered no apology for her lie, and
had no compunction in stereotyping an entire group on the false
assumption that the murderer was white, she also was entirely
misinformed about her data. Again, according to most information on mass
murderers, there is no evidence that whites are more likely proportionally
to be the culprits than are members of other racial categories. In
terms of interracial violent crime, whites both proportionally and in
absolute numbers, are more likely, in comparison to both blacks and
Hispanics, to be victims than perpetrators.
Why have we given up on the dream of Martin Luther King, Jr, that
content of character rather than the color of our skins will arbitrate
how we treat other individual Americans in a multiracial United States?
And is the rejection of that vision the foundation of the new racism?
The Utility of Anti-Racism
What is driving this new antiracism racism? Cui bono? After
all, a number of ethnic groups enjoy higher per capita income than
whites. The number of white poor in absolute numbers is larger than any
other impoverished minority group. The two most common interracial marriage profiles are white and Hispanic, and white and Asian.
For one thing, the new antiracism racialism is driven mostly by
elite, white, progressive, careerists. Yet why, in white bastions like
Silicon Valley or Manhattan, is there an explosion of elite private
academies and a mass flight from the public schools? Is there real
integration inside the nation’s richest and bluest ZIP codes, where
support for public charter schools is low but high for teachers’ unions?
Medievalism offers some guidance. If a guilty party still wishes to
enter woke heaven—or more mundanely to get a promotion or avoid being
fired—but is reluctant to sacrifice his own privileged and tribal ways,
he can still find cosmic recompense through the abstract: our version of
a contractual endowment to the Church that once erased away usury or
profligacy.
In other words, very privileged, very wealthy white people virtue
signal anger over “white supremacy” as both a psychological and
practical way of squaring the circle of their own largely unbothered
separate and segregated lives. The irony is that by doing so, those with
privilege castigate those without it.
By dreaming up an ever-growing vocabulary of clingers, deplorables,
irredeemables, chumps, dregs, and Neanderthals for the white underclass,
the elite—both black and white—squares the circle of owning an estate
on the cliff above Martha’s Vineyard, or a D.C. mansion.
The Clintons, the Bidens, and the Obamas can live guilt-free and in
splendor on the metaphorical barricades, faced off against the less
virtuous, Bible-thumping, racist losers who never got with it and
learned to code or follow the fracking rigs. This morality offset credit
is the racial equivalent of the climate activist John Kerry’s
carbon-spewing private jet, so necessary to ferry him from one green
conference to another.
Call it exemption, penance, indulgence, or any other variety of medieval quid pro quo, but the white elite’s virtue signaling is as easy to spot as it is pretentious, opportunistic, and hypocritical.
Just as deploring whiteness or confessing to “unearned” privilege
exempts the concrete behavior of white elites, so too does it exempt
elite blacks from addressing existential crises in the black community
that transcend white racism.
Or is it more troublesome than that? Do elites claim that it is
racist to suggest the elite woke should at least channel some of their
outrage and concern to the mass killing of the urban young (so often
African American youth), the pandemic of fatherless black households and
illegitimacy, and inordinate rates of criminality? Meghan Markle, as
one of the new self-appointed voices of the oppressed, seems more
fixated on royal insensitivities than she does on the soaring murder
rate in Chicago.
There were other catalysts that shipwrecked the King dream and are
supplanting it with Balkans-style tribalism and intersectional hatred.
Under Barack Obama, the new idea of “diversity” came into its own. The
old binary of white/black and the ecumenical effort to heal the legacy
wounds of slavery, Jim Crow and de facto discrimination
suddenly invited in a host of new participants, many of them with little
record of discrimination, economic inequality, or historical grievance.
Diversity, in other words, redefined the victimized as those with a
claim on non-whiteness and on the basis of superficial appearance
expanded those with purported grievances from 12 percent of the
population to over 30 percent.
Suddenly the impoverished undocumented Oaxacan, subject to years of
maltreatment in his native Mexico, became a victim deserving American
reparatory consideration the moment he crossed by his own volition into
the United States.
So did the children of the multimillionaire Punjabi cardiologist, now
dubbed “Asian” as if Indians, too, were indistinguishable from Japanese
and Chinese-American who had experienced historical
discrimination inside the United States. The Brazilian aristocrat, the
one-third “this” and the one-eighth “that” brought millions into the
equation, including Elizabeth Warren, Rachel Dolezal, Ward Churchill,
Alec Baldwin’s wife, and legions of other socially constructed diverse
people.
Class: The Forgotten, Ecumenical Divide
The explosive gains in bicoastal wealth in tech, corporations,
entertainment, media, the professions, and sports increasingly rendered
less important the connections between class and race. A LeBron James,
by traditional class definitions, was a privileged near-billionaire
elite who often shilled for the Chinese government—not a victimized
truth-teller entrusted to lecture us about the pathologies of whiteness.
So as the nonwhite were now often elites, racial identity became more, not less emphasized, to avoid the perception that prior racial victims were now class beneficiaries or even oppressors.
Soon some minorities began questioning the racial fides of other, usually more conservative Latinos and blacks—inventing all sorts of philological categories such as “white Hispanic” and “multiracial whites.”
They were reminiscent of the old white racists of the past who had
strained to detect “white blacks” who successfully passed into white
society, and thereby threatened to expose the entire absurdity of racial
castes. After claiming that race was not a construct but immutable, the
Left began contextualizing and rebranding and re-cataloging
Trump-voting Cubans, George Zimmerman, and any who did not meet their
own benchmarks for racial authenticity.
Soon we were left with the silliness of multimillionaire CNN anchor Don Lemon pontificating, without evidence, that “the biggest terror threat in this country is white men,” or the far richer, Colin Kaepernick, of mixed ancestry, raised by two white parents, and previously fined for using the N-word on the playing field,
now scapegoating his athletic descent onto a white racist society that
ruined his career, even as “it” enriched him beyond the imagination of
329 million other Americans.
There are inequalities in the United States. Many of them dovetail
with racial differences. But 21st-century cause-and-effect remains
unclear. And the chief dividing line in the age of bicoastal globalism
is now class—the new-old word we dare not speak.
In truth, the Mexican American tractor driver in Gilroy has more in
common with the white auto-mechanic, and both with the black truck
driver, than any of the three has with the woke Jorge Ramos, Oprah
Winfrey, Mark Zuckerberg, or the Antifa and Black Lives Matter
hierarchy.
America is not a sinful racist mess, but a great experiment as the
only multiracial, self-reflecting, and self-critical democracy in
history that did not—yet—descend into tribal chaos and violence.
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