What even is satire anymore? At some point, reality will become so absurd that it will render satire an anachronistic relic of the before-times, when some semblance of societal sanity made satire possible.
We may have already crossed that Rubicon.
Exhibit A is the argument that waking up early is actually White Supremacy™.
Personally, I don’t spend much time on Medium these days since the platform kicked me off for either “COVID misinformation” or “transphobia” (I honestly don’t remember which anymore, but I got warnings for both of those things before they finally suspended my account permanently). However, this little ditty came my way recently from Anthony Bernardi, who “writes about social justice and cooking.”
Via Medium:
The notion of waking up early and starting your day with the rising sun is often associated with productivity, success, and a strong work ethic. However, this seemingly innocuous concept is not without its historical and cultural implications. In this article, we will explore the origins of the early-rising narrative and how it is rooted in white supremacy, contributing to the perpetuation of racial inequalities.
We’re already off to a losing start. I have lived in numerous countries throughout the world, each with its own distinctive culture and most of them non-white. In some cases, like Thailand, these are places that were never touched by European colonization.
One of my ex-girlfriends’ parents, quasi-farmers in the Central Thailand province of Phitsanulok, woke up at 4 a.m. every morning to tend to their greenhouse garden, cook mango sticky rice for sale at the local market, work on wood sculptures of the king, and other activities.
One reason, among many, that people wake up early in places like Thailand and other locales in close proximity to the Equator is that dawn and dusk are the coolest times of day. The mid-day sun is excruciatingly hot, so they learned thousands of years ago that the hardest work of the day was best reserved for sunup.
It should be clear on its face that my ex-girlfriend’s parents were not White Supremacists™. They were not white, had never been subjected to white supremacist ideology, nor had they “internalized” colonizers’ ethics or whatever this guy might say in response because there never were any colonizers in Thailand.
But let’s learn more about what this idiot thinks:
The early-rising ideology is not inherently racist; however, its connections to white supremacy can be seen when examining the broader historical and social contexts. During the era of European colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade, the concept of hard work and productivity became intertwined with race.
Enslaved Africans were forced to work tirelessly from sunrise to sunset, and their white oppressors often used the rhetoric of hard work and discipline to justify their inhumane treatment. This created a false narrative that Africans were inherently lazy and needed the “civilizing” influence of their white masters to teach them the value of work.
This stereotype has persisted and continues to be perpetuated in various forms, such as the “model minority” myth, which suggests that certain racial and ethnic groups are inherently more disciplined and successful than others.
I have written previously at PJ Media about this Social Justice™ “model minority myth narrative,” which I was first exposed to by a Women’s and Gender Studies professor at Valdosta State University in 2009 or so.
What the “model minority myth” narrative seeks to do is explain away the fact that certain racial groups (Indians, East Asians, etc.) actually outperform whites in terms of higher education levels, greater income, lower incarceration rates, etc. This clearly undermines the White Supremacy™ theory that’s central to their ideology, so they contend with it by claiming that Asian success is actually a manifestation of White Supremacy™, not the refutation of it that it obviously is to anyone honestly assessing the available data.
Via Learning For Justice:
The myth says that Asian Americans have played within the rules of the American system to their own group benefit. The success of some groups of Asian American immigrants is often held as an example toward which other groups should strive. It suggests that Asian Americans are doing well and that if other groups would only work harder, have stronger family bonds and get over their histories of oppression, they too would succeed.
When paired with racist myths about other ethnic or racial groups, the model minority myth is used as evidence to deny or downplay the impact of racism and discrimination on people of color in the United States. Given the history of that impact on Black Americans particularly, the myth is ultimately a means to perpetuate anti-Blackness.
The model minority myth pits people of color against one another and creates a hierarchy in which Asian people are often represented at the top. By putting people of color in competition with one another, the myth distracts us from striving together toward liberation for all.
To remedy the injustice, Asians are now racially discriminated against in college admissions policies in order to admit more fashionable Persons of Color™ for the sake of fighting White Supremacy™.
Make it make sense, please. The “waking up early is racist” Medium twat certainly didn’t.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member