'Deflective Whiteness': The Latest Cockamamie Social Justice™ Race Hustle

A libbed-out white liberal arts professor named Hannah Noel has invented a whole new weapon for corporate diversity trainers and public school social workers to wield against their captive white audiences, which also conveniently serves as a tool for personal enrichment via her accompanying book, Deflective Whiteness: Co-opting Black and Latinx Identity Politics.

Via Berkshire Eagle:

Deflective whiteness is a two-step dialectic that I study in my book. It involves claims of white victimhood, followed by the appropriation of social justice rhetoric. I begin with talking about Nazi slogans. … [like] “Blut und Boden” which means blood and soil. I trace that in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 and the white supremacist march where mostly white cis[gender] men were carrying tiki torches at night. They were saying things like, “white lives matter,” “Jews will not replace us,” “our blood, our soil.” They were appropriating these claims. They were claiming victimhood. They were claiming this idea that whites were the aggrieved social status, that they were facing displacement because of demographic shifts or whatever. But in actuality, the reality that they were able to protest, not fear police violence, claim space, and do so in a relatively confrontational way, was demonstrating the privileges of their whiteness.

Let’s not pretend this played-out gibberish is worth parsing through. Coherence isn’t the point. Rabid race hate disguised as pseudo-enlightened academia is.

Noel has assessed correctly that if she uses enough impressive words then the stupid white liberals with too much disposable income whom she’s selling her book to will simply nod along and pretend whatever grand point they imagine she’s trying to make didn’t completely go over their head and that if they open their checkbooks they will assuage some of their inherent moral complicity in vaguely defined crimes of white supremacy.

It’s like an indulgence for the Catholic Church back in the day: cash donations to the high priests wash away one’s sins. That’s it; that’s the whole grift.

The (broadly defined) right’s reporting on the Social Justice™ machine’s frequent lexiconic inventions admittedly risks drawing more attention to them than they would otherwise garner if they went unchallenged (the Streisand Effect).

Nonetheless, today’s nonsense devised in some women’s and gender studies faculty lounge is tomorrow’s public school curriculum, which in turns forms the ideology of the next generations of Americans.

So unless we are willing to concede the future to postmodern Marxists, ignoring them and hoping they fizzle out on their own inertia would be a fool’s errand.