by Robby Soave
But Ciccariello-Maher was hardly the only one to blame mass shootings on whiteness; writers for the Huffington Post, ThinkProgress, and Newsweek and the actor Cole Sprouse (formerly of Disney’s The Suite Life of Zack and Cody) all suggested that mass shooters are disproportionately white, and thus whiteness itself has something to do with extreme violence.36 Slate’s Daniel Engber and New York Magazine’s Jesse Singal have carefully eviscerated this notion: according to the data, white people do not commit disproportionately more mass murders than other groups—and even if they did, it would be no more valid to blame this on whiteness as it would be to blame blackness itself for violence within the black community.
Mount Allison University professors David Thomas and Zoe Luba penned an article in the Canadian Journal of Development Studies arguing that white students should address their own white fragility before enrolling in any study-abroad programs.37
A professor at Grinnell College teaches a sociology course titled American Whiteness that aims to attack racism by “making whiteness visible.” The syllabus quotes David Roediger, a professor of American studies at the University of Kansas and author of The Wages of Whiteness, as saying, “White identity has its roots both in domination and in a desire to avoid confronting one’s own miseries. Whiteness is, among much else, a bad idea.… [I]t is quite possible to avoid hating white people as individuals but to criticize forcefully the ‘idea of white people in general.’”38
An assistant professor at the University of Iowa claimed that her goal as an instructor was to “dismantle whiteness.”39
And on and on it goes. Many of the people involved in the above examples suffered consequences when the public became aware of their activities—and some of those consequences were quite ghastly. DeHart, the Michigan State student, initially agreed to be interviewed for this book, but backed out after receiving a series of threats from people who didn’t like her letter. Social media is a toxic place, and left-leaning activists are often pilloried on Facebook, Twitter, and other mediums. Sometimes their safety is threatened by alt-right trolls.
Most activists and academics who rail against whiteness don’t actually hate white people, of course. That would be ridiculous, since many are white themselves. Anti-whiteness is a performance—a social signaling device. That’s because “white people” cannot be subjected to racism, according to the dictates of intersectional progressivism. In intersectional parlance, “racism” does not mean what it means to most people: it is not defined as “prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one’s own race is superior,” as it is in the dictionary. For modern leftism, racism requires discrimination and systemic oppression. Since white people as an identity group have never been systemically oppressed, there is no such thing as anti-white racism. Individual white people can endure marginalization if they are gay, or trans, or disabled, and so on—but not because of their race. One of the simplest ways to signal wokeness, then, is to make anti-white statements. It’s like a flashing a badge that reads “I am an intersectional progressive.”
The mainstream media was treated to an unusually straightforward example of this in August 2018, when the New York Times announced that it had hired Sarah Jeong, a tech policy journalist, to join its editorial board. It was quickly revealed that years before, Jeong had penned dozens of mean-spirited denunciations of white people on Twitter. (Jeong was born in South Korea.) She claimed that these tweets were satirical; at the time she wrote them, she had been the victim of a vicious harassment campaign, and the tweets were intended to mimic the language of her attackers. But I read through the tweets fairly closely, and it seems dubious to me that she was always, in every case, merely trolling a harasser. I think it’s more likely she was doing as the intersectional progressives do: signaling her fidelity to the cause by bashing white people, an identity group whose historically privileged status means they are permanent outsiders from the standpoint of intersectionality.
It’s true that white people have generally benefitted from their ethnicity and are often privileged by virtue of not being black, or brown, or Hispanic, or Native American. The history of the United States is the story of white people enslaving, murdering, and otherwise mistreating people of color. I don’t mean to suggest that white people are typically victims—they’re not.
But attacks on whiteness itself play into a certain victimhood narrative that’s become extremely popular on the right. Two-thirds of millennial Trump voters, for instance, believe anti-white racism is more pervasive than anti-black racism.40 That’s obviously ludicrous, but it’s no doubt fed by people like Sarah Jeong, who found employment at the New York Times despite making statements that would render her unemployable if they were about any other racial group.
DeHart, the Michigan State student, wrote in her letter, “The problem with racism in the modern U.S. is that it doesn’t look like a sign posted over a water fountain indicating which one is acceptable to use.… It looks like people like Richard Spencer claiming that white culture is under attack.” Perhaps one reason Spencer has been able to successfully convince people that white culture is under attack is that the mere statement “It’s okay to be white” generates apoplectic denunciation.
A Culture, Not a Costume
There’s one more major category of race-related controversy among the young woke set: cultural appropriation.
Melia Bernal, a Native Hawaiian by birth, is an attractive young woman who did her undergraduate studies at Yale University. During her time on campus, she founded a dance group, Shaka at Yale, which performed authentic Polynesian dance routines—including, of course, the hula. Bernal takes dance very seriously: she was a member of a traveling hula and Tahitian dance team. The purpose of Shaka was “to create an inclusive group in which native and non-native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander peoples could learn, be exposed to, and share aspects of Hawaiian and Pacific Islander cultures,” she told the Yale Daily News.41
You might have expected that the Association of Native Americans at Yale (ANAAY)—a campus group that promotes Native American culture—would share this goal and express enthusiasm for Bernal’s cause. You would be wrong.
“ANAAY condemns Shaka,” student leaders of the association wrote in a statement. “There is no room for compromise on this matter.”
From the activists’ perspective, Shaka had committed a mortal sin, one of the most serious crimes known to campus activism: cultural appropriation. Though Bernal herself was Hawaiian, she had done the unthinkable: she knowingly allowed non-Hawaiian people—some of the other dancers, as well as the audience—to participate in, enjoy, and learn about Hawaiian culture.
ANAAY demanded that Shaka disband at once and apologize to Native American students for subjecting them to the “emotional labor” of having their culture appropriated. Shaka had also committed “erasure,” which is the act of behaving as if a certain group of marginalized people does not exist. This is quite the paradox, of course: by educating people at Yale about Hawaiian culture—through an authentic dance led by a woman who was indeed Hawaiian—Shaka had somehow delegitimized the Hawaiian experience. The group had all but erased Hawaii from the map, according to the activists.
“ANAAY calls for Shaka’s abolishment and formal apologies to indigenous students and the greater Polynesian community for sexualizing and homogenizing Native peoples, misrepresenting and erasing histories and political realities, and attempting to depoliticize inherently political cultures and communities and communities under subjugation,” read the statement. “Once again, ANAAY must make the clarification that our humanity is not up for debate, and that our cultures are not costumes.”42
Suffice it to say that no one in Shaka, and presumably no one else at Yale University, suggested that indigenous people were anything less than human. But in daring to practice hula—even in a learned, authentic way—for a mass audience, the dancers had essentially engaged in violence against Hawaiian cultur
e.
If that sounds insane to you, consider this: cultural appropriation is one of the most common charges leveled by campus race activists. “A culture, not a costume” is the refrain of black, Asian, Latino/Latina (often supplanted by the activist-invented gender-neutral “Latinx”), Two Spirit (a variant third gender recognized in many Native American cultures), and countless other activist groups on every campus in the country. Few campus issues provoke as much consternation from race-based identity groups—and confusion from everyone else—as cultural appropriation.
What is cultural appropriation? Simply put, it’s the idea that customs, traditions, clothing, songs, and food belong to the descendants of the race that invented them, and that other groups should essentially stay in their own lane when it comes to these traditions. When white people enjoy aspects of black, Latinx, Asian, or Native American culture, they are appropriating—stealing—something that doesn’t belong to them.
The term was invented in sociology departments in the 1970s and 1980s as part of the critiques of colonialism and imperialism. White people didn’t just conquer and destroy minority societies—they conquered and destroyed their cultures as well. Today, many activists think of modern cultural appropriation as the latest incarnation of the kinds of atrocities white societies have perpetrated against minority societies throughout history. It’s twenty-first-century subjugation.
“Cultural appropriation’s been going on for thousands of years with colonialism,” Andres, a student at the University of Chicago, told me. Andres was entering his second year at Chicago when I spoke with him. He is the leader of a “Chicanx” group for Mexican American students. “It’s just the idea of eradicating or undermining entire populations, either economically or politically or both, while, in my opinion, sort of stealing their objects, stealing their culture, while trying to also undermine the population where that culture actually comes from. It really echoes imperialism once again when you have this sort of cultural appropriation where you take what you like from the culture but what you don’t like are the people that are of that culture you’re undermining. [It] just seems unfair and unjust. It repeats a history, a narrative of imperialism within this country and within the world itself.”
Critics of the concept of cultural appropriation—and there are many—dispute that borrowing a cultural tradition is necessarily wrong or diminishes the minority group. Cultural appropriation can even promote empathy for other peoples, enhance cross-cultural understanding, and lead to new, blended cultural touchstones. As the libertarian writer Cathy Young wrote, “Peoples have borrowed, adopted, taken, infiltrated and reinvented from time immemorial. The medieval Japanese absorbed major elements of Chinese and Korean civilizations, while the cultural practices of modern-day Japan include such Western borrowings as a secularized and reinvented Christmas. Russian culture with its Slavic roots is also the product of Greek, Nordic, Tatar and Mongol influences—and the rapid Westernization of the elites in the 18th century. America is the ultimate blended culture.”43
But the issue is hardly up for debate among young leftists, and any display of cross-cultural pollination—even a harmless or obviously desirable one—could be subject to scorn.
One of the most infamous of these battles took place at Oberlin College in December 2015, when the liberal arts college’s exceedingly privileged students accused the cafeteria workers of serving culturally inauthentic Asian cuisine. “When you’re cooking a country’s dish for other people, including ones who have never tried the original dish before, you’re also representing the meaning of the dish as well as its culture,” student Tomoyo Joshi complained to the Oberlin Review. “So if people not from that heritage take food, modify it and serve it as ‘authentic,’ it is appropriative.”44
The students’ lack of self-awareness was jarring. Freddie deBoer, a left-leaning writer and academic who often criticizes the misplaced priorities of fellow activists, said on Twitter, “When you’re defending the cultural authenticity of GENERAL TSO’S CHICKEN, you’re a living Portlandia sketch,” referring to Portlandia, a show that often makes fun of Zillennial leftism.
I wrote about the Oberlin cafeteria cultural appropriation controversy for the Daily Beast; the widely read article was picked up by dozens of major media outlets—including the New York Times—most of which heaped much-deserved criticism on the students. But this did not deter activists from continuing to fixate on cultural appropriation. At Pitzer College in 2016, a residential adviser sent a campus-wide email forbidding white female students from wearing hoop earrings because they “belong to the black and brown folks who created the culture. The culture actually comes from a historical background of oppression and exclusion.… Why should white girls be able to take part in this culture (wearing hoop earrings just being one case of it) and be seen as cute/aesthetic/ethnic?”45 A student, Jaqueline Aguilera, took credit for spray-painting “White girl, take off your hoops!!!” on a campus wall. She later clarified that only intersectional feminists deserved to don those specific earrings.
College kids said some stupid things. Who cares? you might be thinking. But cultural appropriation has even been ground for violent reprisal. At San Francisco State University, a black female student named Bonita Tindle accosted and attacked a white male student named Cory Goldstein. Why? Goldstein was a white dude with dreadlocks, and dreadlocks, according to Tindle, don’t belong to white people. Goldstein responded that he was going for an “Egyptian” look, at which point Tindle demanded to know whether he was Egyptian.
“You’re saying I can’t have a hairstyle because of your culture?” asked Goldstein. “Why?”
“Because it’s my culture,” Tindle replied. When Goldstein attempted to break off the conversation, Tindle grabbed him and began pushing him around.
Portland-area activists have targeted white-owned restaurants for serving ethnic food. Two white women, Kali Wilgus and Liz Connelly, shuttered their burrito business after a local alt-weekly newspaper, the Portland Mercury, accused them of appropriating Mexican culture—even though the pair had previously traveled to Mexico to learn the art of the burrito.
A student even targeted a yoga class for disabled people at the University of Ottawa. Yoga comes from India and should not be practiced by Western colonizers, this student argued. The instructor cleverly changed the name of the class from “yoga” to “mindful stretching,” but to no avail: administrators still suspended the problematic course.
The surest way to get in trouble is to wear a culturally appropriative Halloween costume: cowboys and Indians, ninjas and samurai, et cetera. That may seem easy enough until you consider that so many beloved costume-friendly characters come from other cultures: Pocahontas, Aladdin, Zorro, and so on. Would lefty culture warriors really tell a little girl she can’t dress up as Moana, the eponymous protagonist of Disney’s wildly popular 2016 film?
In fact, they would. Both Redbook and Cosmopolitan published a column by “race conscious” mom blogger Sachi Feris, who hoped to dissuade her daughter from dressing up as the Polynesian Disney princess Moana for Halloween.46
Rarely addressed is the fact that Halloween itself was appropriated from Irish culture. Dressing up at all is in some sense an act of cultural appropriation of the Gaelic holiday.
By Any Means Necessary
“Given the historic abuses African Americans have suffered at the hands of police and the disproportionate ways they are affected even today by racist or inept police officers, many find the racial framing of Black Lives Matter is essential,” wrote the Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf. “Unfortunately, its explicitly racial focus has been alienating to others, including those who don’t believe that racism is a significant factor in police killings; those who put fighting racism low on their priority list; and anti-black racists.”
Friedersdorf makes note of a horrific case of police brutality: a cop killing a defenseless hotel guest, Daniel Shaver, in Mesa, Arizona, for absolutely no reason.47 The incident, described in Fr
iedersdorf’s article “A Police Killing Without a Hint of Racism,” generated little public attention, in part because both the victim and the officer were white. For Friedersdorf, cases like this are evidence that all people, white Americans included, ought to be more concerned about the abuses of law enforcement, and I agree with him. But by making the cause of criminal justice system solely about race—by blaming whiteness itself for the subjugation of all black bodies—Black Lives Matter may have turned what should be a broadly popular agenda into a fringe crusade. No wonder it’s floundering in the era of white identitarian backlash.
I do not mean to suggest that BLM is uniquely radical or pernicious, or to paint an overly rosy portrait of the civil rights movement by comparison. It’s easy to romanticize its best elements, like the inspirational message of Martin Luther King, while forgetting about groups like the Black Panthers, a black nationalist fringe group that advocated—and practiced—violence against the police and others. Eldridge Cleaver, a leader of the Black Panther Party, wrote in his memoir Soul on Ice that he was guilty of serially raping white women as “revenge.” Black Panther founder Huey P. Newton was accused of numerous crimes, including murder, assault, and embezzlement. And their group was much more obviously radical in that the Panthers had an explicitly socialist ideology. In his essay “On the Ideology of the Black Panther Party,” Cleaver wrote that Marxism-Leninism was their guiding ideology, and black people who didn’t grasp that were “like crabs that must be left to boil a little longer in the pot of oppression before they will be ready and willing to relate.”48
At its best, BLM is calling attention to the fact that certain injustices—police abuse, poverty, discrimination—are more likely to be visited upon people of color. If your neighbor’s house is on fire, you shouldn’t throw up your hands in frustration and declare that actually, all houses matter—you should try to help your neighbor. The statement “Black lives matter” is not an assertion that only black lives matter, or that black lives matter more than other lives. It’s just a recognition of an unfortunate reality: historically, black lives have not mattered as much as they ought to.
