“[W]hen everything becomes racist, then nothing in particular can be racist.”
—Revered conservative scholar and pundit Victor Davis Hanson in his column prompted by the absurd progressive calms that the beating death of young Tyre Nichols by five black police officers was caused by “white supremacy” and “systemic racism.”
Hanson’s piece “Race Everywhere” neatly supports my observation in the previous post that it is time to retire February ‘s designation as “Black History Month” (though “Hot Breakfast Month” can stay). His thesis:
In sum, class, not race, remains the best litmus test of being underprivileged in America. It is no longer synonymous with race. No wonder the identity politics industry now strains to attach prefixes such as “systemic” or “implicit” to “racism,” or “micro” to “aggression,” purportedly to ferret out bias that otherwise is not apparent. Pause to reflect that America is the only successful multiracial constitutional republic in history.To survive in an increasingly dysfunctional and hostile world abroad, the unique idea of the United States requires concord. But national cohesion is only possible through citizens subordinating their tribal interests to a common culture. Only then do they cease being automatons of warring tribes and collectives.
Hanson includes many examples of the fact-immune push to elevate the black race above all others in the U.S. while deliberately reversing our national and societal progress away from segregation and racial hostility, as well as why the movement is neither rational nor responsible. Three that I was aware of include,
- “Whites”—to the extent we can determine any race in an intermarried, multiracial society—do not fit the now ossified definition of an exploitive majority. They no longer even compose a majority in most major American cities and in some states. They rank well behind many nonwhite ethnic groups in terms of per capita income and millions of working-class Americans certainly don’t fit the tired stereotype of “privileged.”
-
“The city of San Francisco, along with the state of California, was exploring paying out huge cash reparations to its African-American residents for the ancestral sin of slavery. That evil institution was abolished some 158 years ago through a Civil War that killed some 700,000 Americans. Yet California was always a free state with no history of slavery. No resident of America in six generations has been either a slave or slave owner. Such multibillion-dollar payouts apparently are to be funded by a nearly bankrupt state facing a $25 billion budget shortfall. “
- “Race-based admissions have transmogrified from proportional representation—the entering class should reflect roughly the racial make-up of the nation—to reparatory or compensatory admittance…”
Some I had not picked up on previously are…
- “Stanford University’s incoming class of 2026 lists white students at 22 percent of the enrolled, roughly one-third of their percentage of the nation’s general population.” No discrimination there! (Hansen works at the Stanford-based Hoover Institute.)
- “A recent National Association of Scholars study found that of some 173 schools surveyed, 42 percent provided racially segregated residences. Some 46 percent offered racially segregated orientation programs. An overwhelming 72 percent hosted racially segregated graduation ceremonies.” (Yikes. No wonder the mainstream media is keeping mum about those revolting developments.)
- “[Whites] commit suicide at double their demographics—and more than twice as frequently as blacks and Latinos.”
- “In terms of hate-crime offenders, whites are demographically underrepresented. The most over-represented victims of hate crimes are whites of Jewish background. Whites commit violent crimes against those of different races at rates below their percentages in the general population.”
Hanson’s a fearless and relentless iconoclast whose punishment for such astute observations over his long career is to be virtually banned from commentary and contributing slots in the media, with the exception of conservative websites and Fox News. One has to wonder, however, how long the taunt of “Racist!” will keep the inevitable and necessary backlash against the toxic policies (and the false theories supporting them) he describes from occurring with full fury.
Ethics Alarms 
Jack
The charge of racism will continue until non-poc’s learn to use your favorite retort “Bite Me” when it is leveled at them.
I had just read the piece by Hanson about fifteen minutes before reading this post. He has been waving this warning flag for a while now, but I fear the people who most need to read it will never see it. VDH repeatedly points out the folly, lies and logical inconsistencies of the Left, and even though he occasionally misfires (I heard him say in an interview once that slavery was THE cause of the Civil War, and he sometimes fallaciously compares the Democrats and Republicans of the 1860s to today’s euphonic but vastly different parties) he is likely the best contemporary historian left standing, particularly when giving historical perspective on current events.
When American history is not taught, but rather distorted, uprooted and banned it is impossible to reach concord. With our institutions of higher learning bringing back segregation we’re not going to achieve cohesion.
Good luck getting Black History Month booted. MLK is now the only American acknowledged with his own individual holiday, and the congresscowards recently added a mostly obscure local celebration, “Juneteenth” to the federal list. According to advertising media, fully half (or more) of the country is black, and most families are interracial. Blacks are the only non-indigenous Americans to have their own Smithsonian museum.
Blacks typically vote 90%+ democrat. As long as that stat holds, so will the pandering.
(NB: Considering that voting percentage, and the fact that blacks, at about 13% of the population, commit over half the homicides in the US, one could rightly say that “Guns don’t kill people; democrats kill people.”)
It occured to me a while ago that by the time I was in Elementary school (89-94) “racism is evil” was the only moral judgement the school was allowed to teach. Everything else — religion, obviously, but also respect, honesty, integrity, work ethic, individuality, loyalty, etc. were never mentioned, and in as much as we were exposed to them (through books, for example,) could be good or bad depending on the circumstances. But racism, in particular, was Always Evil and in order to be a good person you had to not be racist, ever. Black History Month was the yearly reminder of this moral imperative.
Now, granted, this was before CRT, so “don’t be racist” just meant you couldn’t openly dislike people for being black. It wasn’t a high bar, so we all felt pretty safe that were were good people and not racist. But these days I kind of feel like they planted a trigger word in us, and 20 year later they started using it. I feel like my generation (older Millennials) have a really hard time breaking the conditioning, it was the only thing everyone — schools and parents together — taught us was sacred.
VDH should be a permanent ethics hero on EA. He’s incredibly erudite on classical history. He’s a California farmer witnessing what illegal immigration is doing to the California countryside. He’s on the Stanford campus and thus up on the state of the American academy. He’s just a five-tool public intellectual. His WAR has to be about forty-five.
That simply isn’t so. The French Third and Fifth Republics are counter-examples, defining success by longevity and by giving scope to people of mixed or largely black ancestry – provided they were acculturated like the 1940s governor of Chad* (many that weren’t, like Algerian muslims, ended up marginalised – but for that, not for race). And any special pleading to disqualify those also works to disqualify the U.S.A.
And, of course, there is a paucity of successful constitutional republics of any sort for comparison. On any truly long time scales, the only ones around now at all are the U.S.A. and Switzerland. (If we accept historical cases, the real Venice that inspired Shakespeare’s imagined Venice of Othello also had successful “blackamoors”.)
* Félix Éboué, a black from the West Indies who rose through the ranks of the public service and briefly became famous when he brought Chad over to the Free French.