Leftists often accuse conservatives of wanting to return to the past — but leftists don’t have to.
They’re already there.
In a sort of racial version of Groundhog Day, to them it’s ever and always 1963, with Bull Connor siccing dogs on civil-rights protesters and Governor George Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door. Thus are they shocked — shocked, I tell you — that some Americans actually live in 2023.
The latest example is the mainstream media’s outrage that Trump voters and self-identified Republicans say that anti-white racism is a bigger problem in today’s America than is the anti-black variety. What’s more, Yahoo News complains that this belief is “one major roadblock” standing in the way of reparations.
The opinions were discovered via a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll, about which Yahoo writes:
The survey of 1,638 U.S. adults, which was conducted from July 13-17, shows that among 2020 Trump voters, 62% say that racism against Black Americans is a problem today — while 73% say that racism against white Americans is a problem.
Asked how much of a problem racism currently is, just 19% of Trump voters describe racism against Black Americans as a “big problem.” Twice as many (37%) say racism against white Americans is a big problem.
Trump voters and self-identified Republicans — overlapping but not identical cohorts — are the only demographic groups identified by Yahoo News and YouGov who are more likely to say racism against white Americans is a problem than to say the same about racism against Black Americans. A majority (51%) of white Americans, for instance, think racism against people who look like them is a problem — but overall, far more white Americans (72%) say racism against Black Americans is a problem.
Some may be troubled that 72 percent of even white Americans fancy anti-black prejudice the bigger problem, saying that this bespeaks of delusion. Yet do consider that this poll, like so many today, may reflect left-wing bias. But what is the truth about America’s contemporary racial reality, anyway?
There’s a very obscure, but rather well done, 1960 film called I Passed for White. The title bluntly reflects its theme, and, art imitating life, there were blacks many decades ago who’d “pass.” One example was a distant cousin of Stanford historian Allyson Hobbs.
Now, anyone asking why these people would thus masquerade might be met with eye-rolling. Obviously, you embrace another racial identity when doing so offers advantages, such as freedom from unjust discrimination. This raises a relevant question, however:
When was the last time you saw a black person passing as white?
On the contrary, people today with even minimal black ancestry will boldly and proudly claim black identity. Examples are this HuffPo writer — who self-describes as a “fair-skinned Black woman with green eyes and light brown hair” — and the residents of this unusual Ohio town. So blacks “passing” is now an anachronism. Yet there’s another phenomenon apparent, one we now see regularly:
Whites passing as non-white.
Oh, it’s not just Rachel Dolezal, the infamous white woman who parlayed her masquerade into an NAACP chapter headship. There’s also Muslim activist Raquel Saraswati, who, her mother says, is actually white and of European descent. There are the “Pretendians,” such as Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and disgraced ex-professor Ward Churchill. Then there are other black-by-popular-demand types, such as “racial justice activist” Satchuel Cole, University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate student CV Vitolo-Haddad, and George Washington University history professor Jessica Krug.
Have all these people embraced non-white identity because they’re masochists? If so, masochism is all the rage: More than a third of “white students who applied to colleges falsely claimed they were a racial minority on their application,” reported The Hill in 2021.
Asking why this is happening should also be met with eye-rolling. For, again, obviously, “you embrace another racial identity when doing so offers advantages, such as freedom from unjust discrimination.” Non-white status today is a serious resume enhancer.
In reality, anti-white racism is now intense and everywhere. In 2015, prominent website Salon published a piece titled, “White men must be stopped: The very future of mankind depends on it.”
“For 500 years, they’ve exploited their fellow man and plundered the planet,” read the subhead. “It’s time they rein themselves in.”
In 2018, The New York Times’ then-new editorial board hire Sarah Jeong was found to have sent numerous vile racist tweets such as, “Dumba** f*****g white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs p*****g on a fire hydrant.” The paper’s response?
It stood by her.
Contrast this with the treatment of white singer Jason Aldean, who’s being canceled for imaginary racism relating to his latest music video.
These are just a few of a multitude of such examples, too.
So for “anyone who may be skeptical that anti-white racism is now worse than anti-black racism, consider this: Overt acts of anti-black discrimination today are socially, politically, and professionally unimaginable,” wrote RealClear Politics’ Lynn Uzzell in 2021, explaining the obvious. “Anti-white discrimination, on the other hand, has become almost an institutional requirement.”
Thus do we have a third of white students lying to institutions about their race. This is also why we have college “safe spaces”; segregated dorms, graduation ceremonies, and events excluding whites; quota-dictated anti-white discrimination; talk of “white privilege” and “white supremacy”; and, should whites dare complain about any of this, accusations of “white fragility.”
Yet by leftists’ light, “racism” against whites is always non-existent because they’ve changed the term’s definition: Only whites can be racist — and only non-whites can be victims of racism.
Moreover, since under this definition, “racism” is “no longer committed by word, thought, or deed — but is based instead on an inescapable ‘socially constructed racial hierarchy’ that always ‘privileges white people,’” Uzzell notes — “it means that white people are engaging in racism simply by being white.”
In other words, it’s not really so much that leftists live in the past, but in an alternate reality. And since it isn’t reality at all — but, as with Hell, a place where there is no reason — we allow it to be perpetuated at our nation’s peril.
