Last week saw an awful amount of attention drawn to a thing known as “whiteness.”
At the BET Awards Sunday, actor Jesse Williams gave a speech on the always contentious issue of race. Williams argued that blacks are routinely mistreated and murdered by police in a way whites aren’t, which is due to African-Americans’ lack of real freedom in this country.
He went on to demand that any critics of Black Lives Matter “sit down” because they, for the most part, don’t believe African-Americans deserve equal rights. The BLM-supporting entertainer concluded his speech with a fiery spiel on the evils of “whiteness” and how it exploits black people. (RELATED: Jesse Williams: Try Telling Dead Black People That Racism Is Over)
“We’ve been floating this country on credit for centuries, yo, and we’re done watching and waiting while this invention called whiteness uses and abuses us, burying black people out of sight and out of mind while extracting our culture, our dollars, our entertainment like oil – black gold, ghettoizing and demeaning our creations then stealing them, gentrifying our genius and then trying us on like costumes before discarding our bodies like rinds of strange fruit. The thing is though… the thing is that just because we’re magic doesn’t mean we’re not real,” Williams exclaimed.
The speech instantly went viral and was championed as a “powerful” broadside against racism by the usual suspects in the press. The content was par the course for BLM rhetoric, with its attacks on alleged police discrimination and accusations of white cultural appropriation. What made it stand out to its fans was its presentation by a television star at at live event.
What makes it stand out to its skeptics is its focus on whiteness as the ultimate problem in race relations.
Williams called whiteness an “invention,” which places his rant in on the side that claims race is a social construct — even though he uses “us” and “our” in relation to African-Americans in the same sentence. Overlooking the heavy hypocrisy that comes with this position in viewing different racial categories, the conclusion of Williams’ speech is abundantly clear: white people are at the root of injustice.
Sadly, the contempt for whiteness/white people has become the all-too frequent line for the Left to explain various problems in the world today.
As liberals reeled from the earth-shattering dismay of Brexit succeeding, targets were sought for the opprobrium of the elite classes who couldn’t believe people would pick national sovereignty over arrogant technocracy. Slate’s Jamelle Bouie blamed Brexit on whiteness, particularly something known as “embattled whiteness.”
According to Bouie, white Britons who voted to leave the European Union were swayed in part by their fear of immigration and British Muslims, and evil politicians like UKIP’s Nigel Farage exploited these anxieties for political gain. The Slate writer goes on to claim that Donald Trump works with similar material in the United States and embodies the supposed reactionary attitudes among American whites.
“[T]he success of Brexit demonstrates the degree to which ‘Trumpism’—the anger and resentment stemming from a mixture of xenophobia, racism, and economic dislocation—is a global phenomenon, and one that won’t subside even if he loses in November. That toxic stew will still simmer,” he writes.
To Bouie, these outbursts of voter anger represent whites lashing out against the loss of their countries’ traditional “racial hierarchy.” But fortunately, in his opinion, America won’t have a Brexit-like situation because there are fewer white voters here and minorities act as “a firewall for liberalism—an indispensable barrier to this surge of ethno-nationalism.”
While measured in its tone, Bouie seeks to condemn white voters supporting a political goal that liberals hate by casting the pall of bigotry over them. It’s the favorite way for the Left to silence and diminish their opponents.
And blaming the evils of the world on whiteness can go all the way to kindergarten. According to the curriculum of one of America’s most prestigious grade schools, it also makes all Caucasians racist at birth.
Kids at New York City’s Bank Street School for Children are segregated in exercises based on their race: one space for students deemed “white,” the other space for “kids of color.” The lessons teachers want to impart on Caucasian students is that their European heritage is irrevocably tied to their privilege and most of their success in life will be due to that unjust privilege. (RELATED: K-8 School Segregates White Students To Educate Them About White Privilege)
One of the students even said in a video obtained by the New York Post, “I feel guilty for having a privilege I don’t deserve.” The curriculum appears to be working, and parents are understandably livid by the anti-white rhetoric their children have to endure.
“One hundred percent of the curriculum is what whites have done to other races,” said one anonymous Bank Street parent. “They offer nothing that would balance the story.”
There is no need to balance the story though when you have such a great scapegoat to blame for all social ills. Of course it pollutes political discourse, terminates reasoned debate and encourages divisive tribalism, but those fail to measure up to the rewards leftists reap by deploying it. Nothing wins a debate quite like calling the other side racist.
Yet it is a bit disconcerting that leftists are so emphatic in denouncing racialized thinking when they engage in it more than any other group in the public forum.
All the vitriol against whiteness and Caucasians does nothing in the way of uniting people. All it does is create a new racial hierarchy to replace the white supremacist one of the past. People of color are “magical” and moral because of their melanin count, while whites are inherent racists because of theirs in our new system.
No healthy society teaches children to hate who they are based on the color of their skin, and bringing this insidious indoctrination should not be tolerated.
Shamefully though, our leaders will likely continue down this dark path unless something radically changes their way of thinking. We can only hope that happens before the damage becomes too deep to repair.