The Strange Pandemic of ‘White’ Disparagement

American Greatness ^ | 4 Jun, 2023 | Victor Davis Hanson

[MtnClimber]

All of a sudden, the obsession with whites as a Satanic collective has become a national fad.

One of the tenets of the early civil rights movement some 65 years ago was ending racial stereotyping.

When Martin Luther King, Jr. called for emphasizing the “content of our character” over “the color of our skin,” the subtext was “stop judging people as a faceless collective on the basis of their superficial appearance and instead look to them as individuals with unique characters.”

It is tragic that King’s plea for an integrated, assimilated society, in which race became incidental, not essential to our personas, has mostly been abandoned by the Left in favor of racial stereotyping, collective guilting, and scapegoating by race and gender.

Indeed, many of the old Confederate pathologies—fixation on racial essence, obsession with genealogy, nullification of federal laws, states’ rights, and segregated spaces and ceremonies—are now rehabilitated by woke activists.

In that larger landscape, the collective adjective and noun “white” now has also been redefined and mainstreamed as a pejorative to the point of banality.

“White” followed by a string of subsequent oppressive nouns—“rage,” “supremacy,” “privilege”—has become a twitch on campus. Diversity, equity, and inclusion deans and provosts cannot write a memo, issue a communique, or sign a directive without a reference to “white” something or other.

Like the mysterious omnipresence of transgenderism in popular culture, all of a sudden, the obsession with whites as a Satanic collective has become a national fad—a pet-rock or hula-hoop-like collective madness.

Yet such an addiction remains bizarre in a variety of ways. Millions in the present are now to be libeled as oppressors by the contemporary self-described oppressed—supposedly for what some whites who are mostly now dead once did to now mostly dead others.

Yet what does “white” really mean anymore?

[texas booster]

One of the facets of Dr. Hanson’s stye is is employment of the Socratic method to foster knowledge rather than just telling us how it is.

Agreed!

Helping us breakdown a complex subject to where we can repeat the knowledge learned is the goal.

Which Prof Hanson does extremely well.

[PapaBear3625]

The controversial City University of New York firebrand and graduation speaker Fatima Mousa Mohammed recently railed against capitalism, Zionism, Israel—and, of course, “white supremacy.” Yet she herself is whiter than white. She is now an elite with a law degree. Is she then a beneficiary of “white privilege”? Or do her radical politics trump skin color and earn her exemption?

She regards "white" as meaning "Christian of European descent". As a Middle Eastern Muslim, she regards herself as being one of the "marginalized people of color", regardless of her skin tone.

[4Liberty]

[rlmorel]

Absolutely. He has a talent for this...

[V_TWIN]

Yep.....da stoopid white boy....also, ever notice security company commercials always portray burglars as White?.....every time.

[GOPJ]

Indeed, some of the most severe critics of “white privilege” and “white rage” are themselves ensconced in white neighborhoods, such as the Duchess of Sussex or LeBron James. When Oprah Winfrey damns white supremacy in graduation speeches, is her subtext a snarl at her fellow billionaire neighbors in Montecito?

Everyone of Michael Moore's mansions are in white communities... even though he longs for the day when America is Majority minority ('of color'...)

Obama retires and with his millions owns all his mansion in White World - including one in Martha's Vineyard...

I heard there were two black athletic stars who still live in the black community - the rest have moved to 'white world'. I suspect these folks feel they're fooling all of us - without realizing the only people gullible enough to believe their crap are their fellow liberals and members of the liberal press. The rest of us can see.

[Nea Wood]

Or white men portrayed as dumb doofuses using the wrong product and being corrected by women or people of color.

[V_TWIN]

I suspect that’s what happened to the all White children’s choir with the White choir director.....a black female capitol cop couldn’t have that so she stopped it.

Not much worse than a black female with even a little authority over White people....saw it a few times during covid.

[eeriegeno]

We are wasting trillions of dollars in capital, labor, and time in tribal cannibalism as our friends abroad watch in horror, and our enemies savor our decline into collective suicide—while we sink into debt, our cities turn medieval, our border disappears, our criminal justice system collapses, and our military chases its tail.

I beg to differ from Mr Hansen with this passage. It is not 'we' who are causing all of this calamity, it is a small handful of elected and non-elected elites who are the cause. This group has effectively consumed our government, media, military, schools, and corporations to the point that little can be done to reverse the trend so that our freedoms might be saved.

All too often writers like Mr Hansen, whom I admire greatly, write articles about how bad things are but they offer little in their writing about what can be done to 'right the ship.'

The American people were at this abyss in the 1700's and a revolutionary war was necessary to secure their freedoms.

Is that what is coming?

[cymbeline]

“This post in memory of whites in commercials.”

Yes, there was a day when not merely whites, but non-stupid whites, were prominent in commercials.

The career path for a commercial writer now is to produce a more stupid, more non-white commercial than has been done before.

But in their defense I suspect they are effective selling tools.

[Moltke]

The dearth of actual racism also demands a new set of adjectives that serve as something like sophisticated detectors to discover otherwise invisible natural gas fumes. The adjective “systemic” means only the select can now spot racism. Like air, it is everywhere but invisible and thus requires battalions of diversity, equity, and inclusion inspectors to use their training to expose it in the common atmosphere.

Systemic racism - the 21st century Phlogiston.

[FreedomPoster]

>>Does reading this make me a racist.??

If you are white, of course! How could you think otherwise!?

< /s>

[Jamestown1630]

I have a friend who said shortly before Rush Limbaugh died, that Rush was keeping him sane in insane times.

VDH does that for me.

[rlmorel]

VDH is a smart, rational man. I trust his judgement after reading a huge amount of his output, articles, books, videos, interviews.

I’m good. If I am going to throw in with someone, it will be him.

[bert]

White in reference to people, American Citizens, means not Black.

Black is not now a color. Black is a sub culture that exists in America of not anti Americans but rather un Americans. Black is a political culture of citizens who can’t and won’t assimilate. They insist on whining about enforcing an equality that doesn’t and can’t exist.

The Black sub culture has segregated into the bowels of the City States from where like the man says it attempts to loudly complain about the white superiority it fails to change. At the same time, the Afro Heritage minority of this larger minority has become well adjusted and has in fact assimilated. This minority minority is castigated as being white.

What a dangerous joke these citizens have become.