In 2020, a Black Lives Matter organizer characterized looting as “reparations” and claimed that labeling someone a criminal was “based on racism.” Now a writer has echoed this, insisting in a recent piece that the only solution to “white supremacism” is to “take things from white people.” Worse still, Yahoo! News decided to republish the article, thus giving it vast exposure.
The piece, bluntly titled “Take things from white people,” was authored by an angry man named Michael Harriot and originally published at the grio. It’s essentially a very long rant that opens with the question, “What is the opposite of backlash?” The author then complains about the Supreme Court’s recent affirmative action decision and writes (reality checks inserted in square brackets):
Over the last five years, the long game of white supremacy has stymied police reform [read: handcuffing cops], thwarted student debt relief [read: having blue-collar people pay off white-collar people’s debt], criminalized Black history [read: protected kids from racist Critical Race Theory], ousted Black educators attempting to equalize education [read: shielded students from indoctrination] and made it harder for Black people to cast ballots [read: combated vote fraud].
…Most white Americans (57%) disapprove of selective colleges considering race and ethnicity in affirmative action. Eighty percent of whites do not support reparations for the descendants of enslaved people, compared to 77% of Black Americans — most of whom descended from enslaved people — who approve. The vast majority of Black, Hispanic and Asian Americans feel more needs to be done to ensure equal rights for all; only 42% of whites agree. In fact, most whites (62%) think our country has done enough or too much to give Black people equal rights. Perhaps it is a “frontlash.” Maybe “prelash” is a better word. “Forwardlash” sounds too benevolent. In any case, these pro-white victories are simply byproducts of the constant, unchanging stream anti-Black sentiment that periodically pierces the wall of Black defenses. And while Black America is furiously defending itself, the white reaction is always the same:
White people come to take things.
Now, Harriot does what’s common among racial agitators: He cherry-picks data and presents a simple black/white dichotomy. The reality is more complex, however. Consider that it isn’t just 57 percent of whites who oppose race-based affirmative action; Asians also do 52-37, while Hispanics are evenly split, according to the poll Harriot cites.
As for reparations, 65 percent of Asians and 58 percent of Hispanics join the whites in opposing it. In fact, every single demographic apart from blacks — whether defined by race/ethnicity, income, age, or educational level — opposes reparations. Why, even a plurality of Democrat/Democrat leaners do.
So while Harriot tries to make whites appear the outliers here, it is blacks who oppose the rest of America on reparations.
Harriot also relates the claim that a “poor white child has as much economic opportunity as a Black child raised by wealthy parents.” Yet the link he provides, from The New York Times no less, says nothing of the kind. Rather, the paper states that black “boys raised in America … still earn less in adulthood than white boys with similar backgrounds.” I wrote to Harriot about this, do note. He didn’t respond.
There isn’t time or space to evaluate Harriot’s entire litany of grievances. But his solution to these gripes, real or (perhaps in most cases) imagined, is this:
“We should take things from white people,” he writes.
“We should [also] remove their slaveholding heroes from social studies lessons that make Black children feel uncomfortable,” Harriot later adds. “We should eliminate job recommendations, unpaid internships and other policies that promote anti-diversity, inequities and exclusion. We should ban white Santas and Christmas songs and pro-police rallies and violent national anthems and cisgender bathrooms and books about heterosexual relationships.”
To reiterate, Harriot’s rant wouldn’t even warrant mention were it confined to the Hades of the Internet, whence it was spawned. But Yahoo, and the establishment generally, are helping mainstream such crazy ideas. Don’t believe the motivation is just presenting “alternative points of view,” either. Big Tech never, ever, to the best of my knowledge, posts a New American article. The un-woke need not apply.
The good news is that most Yahoo commenters were aghast at Harriot’s piece. Nonetheless, it does encourage thinking such as the below.
Reflected above is a certain consequence of pushing the victim card: Not realizing that most woes they lament are common to man, many blacks will start behaving as if the problems are unique to them and attribute them to oppression.
As to the tweeter’s lament, poet Henry David Thoreau wrote, “Most men live lives of silent desperation” precisely because it’s not uncommon to go through life unfulfilled; very few people “live their dream.” That’s not called being black.
It’s called being human.
The solution is not structural change in everyone around you, either, but change within you. Improve yourself, become more marketable via educational and skill attainment, and greater success can be had.
Even more important, however, is spiritual improvement: growing closer to God. If we inordinately value the things of this world — money, “success,” fame, adulation, power — we’ll generally be left unsatisfied. As Matthew 6:33 states, “seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.”
Unfortunately, far from righteous, grievance politics destroys. For the best way to keep a people down is to make them believe there’s no way they can help themselves up.
