Most Americans do not favor treating people according to the color of their skin. We know this because they have said so in polls. In a 2016 Gallup poll, 70% of Americans disapprove of racial preference in college and university admissions, and 65% of Americans disapprove of Supreme Court decisions allowing racial preferences. While 9% of Americans thought that race and ethnicity should be a major factor in admissions, only 27% said it should be a minor factor, with 63% saying that race should not be a factor at all.
Even members of categories likely to benefit from racial preferences, African Americans and Hispanics, do not approve: 61% of Hispanics and 50% of African Americans say that admittance should be based on merit alone, and 65% and 63% respectively disagreed with the Supreme Court’s decisions allowing racial preferences.
Racial discrimination is treating people of different races differently based on their race. As is clear from attitudes toward racial preference in college admissions and toward Supreme Court decisions allowing it, Americans do not like racial discrimination. If racism is disliking people because of their race, most Americans are not racist. There are undoubted some people with racist tendencies in each racial category, but the evidence indicates that most Americans in every racial category are not racist.
Attitudes of Americans are positive and accepting about those of other races. This is clear from people’s decisions, for example, the huge increase in racially mixed marriages. The American reality is that Americans are racially tolerant, prefer to treat people as individuals, and do not like racism, do not teach their children to dislike others because of their race, and do not reward their children for being racist.
But there are some exceptions. There are a minuscule number of far-right Klan members and neo-Nazis who take pride in their racism against minorities, especially African Americans and Jews, along with religious bigotry against Catholics. In contrast, there is a large industry of race activists who regard it a moral crusade to attack people of white allegedly on behalf of people of color. The war against whites is being carried on in universities, businesses, in government, and in what was once the “mainstream” media. White people, who are the majority of American citizens, are vilified as “privileged” oppressors of black, brown, yellow, and red victims. Whiteness is now regarded as evil.
A well-known example is the opinion of Sarah Jeong, a member of the New York Times editorial board, who said, “The world could get by just fine with zero white people.” The reason is that, according to her assessment, white people have contributed nothing to the world, improved nothing, invented nothing: “Have you ever tried to figure out all the things that white people are allowed to do that aren’t cultural appropriation? There’s literally nothing.” Apparently Jeong never heard of science, the industrial revolution, parliamentary democracy, computers, and the internet, having suffered from inferior education at the University of California at Berkeley and Harvard Law School.
Of course, Jeong was far from the first to disparage whites and Western civilization. Earlier “intellectuals” with a weak understanding of world history condemned whites as the scourge of the world. Here is the “wisdom” of Susan Sontag: “The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballets, et al., don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone — its ideologies and inventions — which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.”
Not to be outdone, Cambridge University lecturer Priyamvada Gopal recently tweeted: “I’ll say it again. White Lives Don’t Matter. As white lives.” The response of the Cambridge authorities was to promote her to full Professor. If she had tweeted “Gas the Jews,” would Cambridge have promoted her to Chancellor?
As I reported earlier, on Christmas Eve 2016, Professor George Ciccariello of Drexel University in Philadelphia, “was” in the words of CNN “dreaming not of a white Christmas, but of a white massacre.” What were Professor Ciccariello’s words? “All I Want for Christmas is White Genocide.”
Some “progressive” jurisdictions have taken to heart these designations of whiteness as evil. The city of Seattle required all white employees only to attend an anti-racism session, but it turned out that anti-racism is anti-whiteness: the title of the session was “Interrupting Internalized Racial Superiority and Whiteness.” “White employees were told that their white qualities were offensive and unacceptable. Those qualities included perfectionism, objectivity, and individualism.” They were further told to drop those qualities and undertake “the work of undoing your own whiteness.”
Let’s think about these alleged, “offensive and unacceptable qualities of “whiteness.” How would we replace “perfectionism,” with “whateverism,” with “whocaresism”? Are we to aim at mediocrity as a value? Are those non-whites—Asians, Caribbean blacks, Nigerians–with great records of success in North America lacking in “perfectionism”? Or are they now (dis)honorary whites?
Shall we get rid of “objectivity,” and act on every subjective vision that anyone has? Would you like to fly in a plane guided by a pilot devoted to subjectivity about how to run an airplane and how to get to a destination? Are you ready to drive over bridges and in tunnels created by the subjective sensibilities of engineers? Shall you be happy about pharmaceuticals made in companies that did not care about objectivity?
“Individualism” is condemned because it requires individuals to take responsibility for themselves, their families and children? Is the idea to replace it with welfarism? Or is individualism too capitalistic, and should be replaced by the collectivism of socialism or communism? Would our greatly successful Asian, Caribbeans, and Nigerians be keen on that?
To these demands we might add one from Black Lives Matter, the elimination of the nuclear family. “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.”
In other words, the typical African American family, 70% being one-parent families, should be the model. Unfortunately, by any metric—children’s educational achievement, involvement in crime, violent death, incarceration—the single-parent family is a disaster. Black Lives Matter wishes to bring this disaster to the rest of the population. By the way, non-white Asians have the lowest percentage of single-parent families.
There are many successful middle class African American families. They did not become middle class and well to do by rejecting perfectionism, objectivity, and individualism, but by adhering to them. To reject these traits of success, not traits of whiteness, is to opt for failure.
Further, these white employees were ordered give up their “white privileges”:
- Comfort
- Spending time with their families
- Guaranteed physical safety
- Relationships with other white people
- Niceties from neighbors and colleagues
- The certainty of their job
Why should anyone give these circumstances up? Everyone, white, black, red, or yellow, deserves these. It is offensive to say that any category of people should do without these. Although, given Black Lives Matter’s policy of disbanding police, it is clear that their plan is that no one of any category should have “guaranteed physical safety,” just as we see in America’s urban centers today.
Among our elite institutions, the war against whites does not limit itself to anti-white indoctrination, but is manifested in outright racial discrimination. Governments, businesses, and educational institutions love to pat themselves on the back for their “inclusion,” never mentioning the exclusion that is entailed in inclusion.
When people of color, indigenous natives, females, and Muslims are by formal policy given preference in admissions, funding, jobs, and promotions, there is a determined exclusion of white people, males, Christians and Jews, all deemed “oppressors,” and, counter-intuitively, Asians, because they are too successful. This is personified in the many, expensive “diversity and inclusion” officers that enforce the exclusionary anti-white policy, including suppressing alternative or critical views of the “social justice” ideology that rationalizes reverse racism.
What do you call it when a racial or ethnic minority is maltreated? Oppression. What do you call it when the majority is vilified, marginalized, and maltreated? Tyranny.
Defund the Police? How About We Defund the Universities
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