Yes, these people are most certainly beyond parody. An actual headline in Thursday’s Los Angeles Times informs us that “White drivers are polluting the air breathed by L.A.’s people of color.” So now Whitey, whose perfidy simply knows no bounds, is breathing free and easy and leaving the poor people of color gasping for breath. Oh, when will the racism end?
L.A. Times staff writer Sammy Roth, who penned this nonsense, still proudly sports a mask in his Twitter photo, heedless of the fact that even Old Joe Biden’s COVID-19 czar has conceded that masks don’t do anything but make their wearers feel virtuous. Roth still feels guilty, however, because he is white, and thus “couldn’t help but consider [his] own complicity while reading a new study from USC researchers, finding that Angelenos who drive more tend to be exposed to less air pollution — and Angelenos who drive less tend to be exposed to more pollution.”
Yes, that seems counterintuitive, as anyone can attest who has ever been on the Los Angeles freeways, creeping along in the traffic and breathing in the exhaust fumes. But Roth is serious: “It may sound like a paradox, but it’s not. It’s a function of the racism that shaped this city and its suburbs, and continues to influence our daily lives — and a stark reminder of the need for climate solutions that benefit everyone.”
Okay. So people who drive less are exposed to more air pollution, and people who drive more are exposed to less air pollution, and this is all because of racism. Why? The real answer to that question is this: it’s racism because everything is racism these days. Air pollution is racist and there are alleged disparities in how much white people and racial minorities are exposed to it because there is an entire industry these days devoted to finding new sources of racism.
The L.A. Times published this article because finding new ways to attribute various inconveniences of life to racism fuels the race victimhood industry, exacerbates the divisions in American society that the Left wants to exploit to advance its agenda, and justifies all the blather about “systemic racism,” which means racism so subtle that no one ever actually noticed its existence until now.
Roth notes that the study that supposedly established all this “was published in the peer-reviewed journal Urban Studies.” This is supposed to establish its reliability, but in today’s Left-dominated academic environment, all manner of fool ideas get supported by supposedly reliable “studies” and are published in peer-reviewed journals. The academic establishment in America today is so far to the Left and so deeply corrupt that peer review is a guarantee only that fellow Leftists examined a given academic work and found it to be ideologically pure, not deviating from the establishment line.
And so the Whitey Drives Cars, Black Folk Hardest Hit study, Roth tells us, “largely comes down to the shameful history of Los Angeles County’s low-income communities of color being torn apart to make way for freeways.” This means “many residents of the county’s whiter, more affluent neighborhoods — who were often able to keep highways out of their own backyards — commute to work through lower-income Black and Latino neighborhoods bisected by the 10, 110, 105 freeways and more.” Of course! So every time you drive in the City of Angels, you’re choking a person of color. You might as well join the Klan, you racist.
The Los Angeles Times seems to assume that people who belong to racial minorities don’t drive in Los Angeles and that white people don’t breathe. A sane study might note that if you’re looking for polluted air, it’s far more concentrated on the highways themselves than anywhere else, and so if the highways are filled with the Bull Connors and George Wallaces of southern California, then it is the racists who are choking on the exhaust fumes, not the saintly people of color. But we’re not talking about sanity here; we’re talking about the L.A. Times.
Related: Now Disney Says Bluebirds and Sunshine Are Racist, Too
Sammy Roth uses this article as a kind of confessional, hoping to confess his racial sins and receive absolution: “As a white guy who’s lived on L.A.’s Westside for most of my life,” he tells us, “I’ve benefited from the region’s sordid history as well. Much as I try to do my part — taking the train a couple times a month, walking to local coffee shops and restaurants instead of driving across the city — there’s no question I contribute to the inequitable air pollution that Boeing’s study describes.” It’s no use, Sammy. You can’t expunge your whiteness. You could give up your car altogether (by making a gift of it to a person of color, of course) and rely on public transportation, but even then, you’d still be riding while white. You can’t escape your guilt.
What does the Los Angeles Times hope to accomplish by publishing this garbage? More societal division, more white guilt, and more socialist authoritarianism as the remedy to it all. In the workers’ paradise, you see, the L.A. skies will always be clear of exhaust fumes, as no one will be able to afford a car anyway.
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