ESPN host Molly Qerim was concerned that President Trump evinced racism by serving burgers and pizza to Clemson’s national-championship-winning football team. “When I saw him giving the football players—it’s a predominantly black sport—fast food my thought went a very different place. I mean, come on.” Clay Travis of Outkick the Coverage tweeted, “ESPN host argues Donald Trump giving fast food to Clemson players was racist because the team is majority black. Really. Fast food is racist, y’all.”39 Does it ever occur to these race cops that their characterization of fast food as particularly associated with blacks might itself be racist?
We reap what we sow. A group of more than a dozen Asian Americans sued Harvard for unconstitutionally discriminating against them by penalizing their high achievement as a group while giving preferences to other racial and ethnic minorities. They claim Harvard’s admission process is an illegal quota system. In 2016 the Supreme Court held that a university may constitutionally use race as one of many factors in admission decisions, though that case involved a white applicant suing the University of Texas at Austin.40
On David Webb’s SiriusXM radio show, CNN legal analyst Areva Martin, an African American, lectured Webb on his white privilege. “Well, David, that’s a whole ’nother long conversation about white privilege, the things that you have the privilege of doing that people of color don’t have the privilege of,” said Martin. An incredulous Webb asked her exactly how he benefits, and Martin responded, “by virtue of being a white male.” Webb responded, “Areva, I hate to break it to you, but you should’ve been better prepped. I’m black.”41 Ouch!
The left’s habitual demonization of whites for their alleged “privilege” gives license to subject whites to racist ridicule with impunity. In BuzzFeed, multicultural beauty writer Patrice Peck identified “37 Things White People Need to Stop Ruining In 2018.” Included in the list were the United States of America, the National Anthem, the Oscars, and the Grammy Awards. Peck mocked the “plague” of “white people” populating the planet. One reader commented, “Another racist article. Live, let live, stop blaming everyone else for your issues, and shut the hell up. In a nation where people of color have sat in the highest office on the planet, are some of the biggest names in entertainment, are world-renowned neurosurgeons, business owners, highest paid athletes, etc., the only thing keeping you from success is your own racist and ‘woe-is-me’ attitudes.”42 Consider the ensuing scandal if a white person had penned this article about a minority group.
Ravelry, one of the world’s biggest knitting websites with some eight million members, banned its users from expressing support for President Trump, likening it to “white supremacy.” “We cannot provide a space that is inclusive of all and also allow support for open white supremacy. Support of the Trump administration is undeniably support for white supremacy,” the company’s administrators said in a post. Setting aside their hysterically absurd claim that supporting Trump constitutes white supremacy, consider the logic in their position: “We must be exclusive to prove we are inclusive.”
In an op-ed in the New York Times, Ekow N. Yankah questioned whether her children could even be friends with white people in light of the election of Donald Trump. “For people of color, the stakes are different. Imagining we can now be friends across this political line is asking us to ignore our safety and that of our children, to abandon personal regard and self-worth.… [Trump’s] election and the year that has followed have fixed the awful thought in my mind too familiar to black Americans: ‘You can’t trust these people.’ ” It is not Trump who has done this, said Yankah, but “the ranks of Mr. Trump’s many allies and apologists” who “are practiced at purposeful blindness.… I do not write this with liberal condescension or glee. My heart is unbearably heavy when I assure you we cannot be friends.… Don’t misunderstand: White Trump supporters and people of color can like one another. But real friendship?… For African-Americans, race has become a proxy not just for politics but also for decency. White faces are swept together, ominous anxiety behind every chance encounter at the airport or smiling white cashier. If they are not clearly allies, they will seem unsafe to me.… We can still all pretend we are friends. If meaningful civic friendship is impossible, we can make do with mere civility—sharing drinks and watching the game.… In coming years, when my boys ask again their questions about who can be their best friend, I pray for a more hopeful answer.”43
Considering their divisive racial politics, it’s remarkable that Democratic politicians believe they have standing to complain about President Trump’s alleged racism and divisiveness. Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, having taken some heat for not infusing his socialist rhetoric with privilege ideology, sought to make amends with his base. “Today we say to Donald Trump—We are not going back to more bigotry, discrimination and division,” Sanders told an audience in South Carolina. “Instead of bringing us together as Americans, he has purposely and aggressively attempted to divide us up by the color of our skin, by our gender, by our nationality, by our religion and by our sexual orientation.”44 The irony of Sanders creating the very divisiveness he decries is completely lost on him.
Sanders is just one of many Democrat leaders pretending to fight divisiveness with their own despicable divisiveness. “We have a hater in the White House,” said Rep. Hakeem Jeffries. “The birther in chief. The grand wizard of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.… While Jim Crow may be dead, he’s still got some nieces and nephews that are alive and well.” “Our government is shut down for one reason,” declared Senator Elizabeth Warren. “So the president of the United States can fund a monument to hate and division along our southern border.” Senator Kirsten Gillibrand said that President Trump has “inspired a hate and a darkness in this country that I have never experienced myself.”45
In a CNN op-ed about the incident between the Covington kids and Nathan Phillips, Issac Bailey announced he wasn’t interested in who started the confrontation or who the real victims were. For Bailey, the central issue was not that Black Hebrew Israelite demonstrators harassed the Covington students, or that Phillips accosted them and lied about it, or that the kids were subject to endless vituperation based on false media reports. No, for him, the real wrongdoing was that the teenagers wore MAGA hats, thus endorsing Trump’s alleged racism. Wearing those hats sends a signal, you see, that they want to return to the days of American greatness when “it was worse for people of color,” whether during slavery, the days of Jim Crow, the height of lynching, or others.46 To the contrary, Trump supporters flatly reject that Trump is a racist and understand he is trying—successfully—to improve conditions in America for everyone regardless of race, creed, color, or gender. “Wearing MAGA hats, of course, does not automatically make someone evil, yet almost half of the country’s population…are considered such,” writes Sumantra Maitra. “[The hat] is simply a choice of apparel that denotes someone’s political preference, and he or she should be allowed to, because that is the sign of a healthy democracy.”47
Adam Serwer, in The Atlantic, critiqued the Rocky movie series in light of the latest installment, Creed II, which he argued redeems the series from its racist themes. Prior to the two Creed movies, the Rocky series “sees a black boxer humbled by a white challenger in every single movie.” They gave “a resentful white audience the catharsis of seeing a white boxer humble [Muhammad] Ali.… The Rocky films are a product of a sense of white pride and humiliation, and the desire to overcome it by restoring the proper order of things.”48 Serwer grudgingly gives Sylvester Stallone credit for Creed II because he allowed “his career-defining character, an avatar of white masculinity, to be transformed into a vehicle of redemption for Creed’s black protagonist—a role traditionally played by black actors.… Stallone’s decision to accede to fundamentally altering the most important fictional creation of his career, to elevate Apollo above Rocky as a fighter, and to make his journey subordinate to that of the young black man on the screen, is worthy of recognition.”
I’ve watched every Rocky movie, and race never entered my mind. Like most people, I rooted for Rocky because he was an underdog, not because of some racist antipathy for Muhammad Ali. In fact, like many whites, I was a fan of Muhammad Ali and rooted for him in every fight regardless of his opponent’s race. I doubt, too, that Sylvester Stallone, in the original Rocky series, had the motive Serwer imputes to him.
In anticipation of Republican senator Cindy Hyde-Smith winning the Mississippi runoff election, there was discussion about Democratic senator Kamala Harris being removed from the Senate Judiciary Committee because Republicans would be entitled to another committee seat. Although this would have been purely a matter of seniority and in accordance with past practice, Democrats turned it into a race issue. “Not only would it be unconscionable to remove the only African American woman from the committee, but Senator Harris also is the most skilled questioner on the entire panel,” said Brian Fallon, former press secretary for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.49 Reportedly, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer later negotiated a deal to give Republicans an extra seat on the committee in exchange for not kicking off any Democrats.50
In Dickinson College’s student newspaper The Dickinsonian, a black female student wrote that American society tells men, especially white men, that their opinions have merit and their voice is valuable, “but after four years of listening to white boys in college, I am not so convinced.… The list of what white boys think they are qualified to talk about is endless.… I am so g****mned tired of listening to white boys. I cannot describe to you how frustrating it is to be forced to listen to a white boy explain his take on the Black experience in the Obama-era. Hey Brian.… [y]ou do not speak alone, you speak with the weight of every other white man who has ever spoken over a woman, erased the contributions of queer people from history, or denigrated ‘broken English’ as unintelligent.… So, should white boys still be allowed to share their ‘opinions’? Should we be forced to listen? In honor of Black History Month, I’m gonna go with a hell no. Go find someone whose perspective has been buried or ignored and listen to them, raise up their voice.”51 It seems that some leftists will not be satisfied until, as the writer suggested here, white men are censored and silenced.
Wake Forest University hosted a series of “listening sessions” for minority faculty and staff to promote campus inclusiveness. The College Fix notes the irony in “no-whites-allowed” faculty and listening sessions—to promote inclusivity.52
Jennifer Lopez was savaged on social media for performing a tribute to Motown at the Grammy Awards because she is Puerto Rican, not black. Critics said any number of black performers could have done the tribute and “[n]o doubt Latinos would be upset if they had a black soul singer doing a tribute to Latin music.” Lopez responded without apology, and her answer could serve as a template response to criticisms of so-called cultural appropriation. “Any type of music can inspire any type of artist,” she said. “You can’t tell people what to love. You can’t tell people what they can and can’t do—what they should sing or not sing.” What kind of joyless ideology renders that a controversial statement? Motown legend Smokey Robinson defended Lopez. “I don’t think anyone who is intelligent is upset,” said Robinson. “I think anyone who is upset is stupid. Motown was music for everybody. Everybody. Who’s stupid enough to protest Jennifer Lopez for doing anything for Motown?”53 What a refreshingly defiant rejoinder to race-obsessed virtue signalers.
In an op-ed in the Yale Daily News, a female student, apparently upset by Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, implied that students should start collecting opposition research on future Kavanaugh types. Calling out classmates is not enough because it wasn’t enough to stop Kavanaugh’s confirmation. “But I can’t do that anymore—I can’t let things slip by,” the student wrote. “I’m watching you, white boy. And this time, I’m taking the screenshot.”54
CNN’s Don Lemon, one of the most racially obsessed media figures, is quite open about his rejection of color blindness. Lemon was appalled by Howard Schultz’s comment at a CNN-hosted town hall that “I didn’t see color as a young boy, and I honestly don’t see color now.” “Is Howard Schultz completely out of touch,” asked Lemon in teasing the segment. “What is this so-called color-blind ideology? What does it tell us about Howard Schultz and his views on race?” Lemon said that it is not okay to say “I don’t see color” in 2019, and that a better answer would have been, “Color has never been a defining characteristic for me, either qualifying or non-qualifying in this culture or in society.” CNN’s Bakari Sellers, who is black, complained that not seeing his color erases his blackness. It’s ignorant not to see black people’s color, he said, because you must see “the benefit of the diversity we bring to the table.”55
University of Washington “white studies” professor Robin DiAngelo said that a white American who sees people as individuals rather than defining them by skin color is a “dangerous white person.”56
Democratic presidential candidates Senators Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren both publicly support paying reparations for blacks, a proposal that until recently was found almost exclusively among obscure, radical academics. Previous Democratic presidential candidates have never taken that position, according to the New York Times—which shows how far left the party has moved and how immersed it is in racial politics. In light of her fraudulent claim of American Indian ancestry, some wondered whether Warren would support a similar measure for Native Americans.57
Kamala Harris insists that America hasn’t yet had an honest conversation about race. National Review’s Jim Geraghty soundly refuted Harris in a post chronicling the “perpetual and ubiquitous” conversations we’ve had, including after Charlottesville, Ferguson, Baltimore’s riots, Ralph Northam, Jussie Smollett, Roseanne Barr, Kanye West’s rants, and a dozen others. Moreover, we never stopped talking about race during the entire Obama presidency.58 The problem isn’t that we haven’t had honest discussions about race but that the left isn’t satisfied unless everyone agrees with its analysis and proposed solutions. Until the entire nation embraces the leftists’ worldview on race they will always warn of a crisis-level race problem in America. For them, there is only one legitimate opinion. All others are not just wrong but immoral.
One discouraging aspect of identity politics is that the left shows they don’t really want these problems solved. They will never acknowledge progress in civil rights, women’s rights, or overall interracial tolerance. It is not in their political interests to do so because their political power, which they crave above all else, depends on the existence of perpetual classes of victims. Their lust for social justice (read: revenge) is insatiable.
In sharp contrast to the left’s racial McCarthyism, John McWhorter, an African-American linguistics professor at Columbia University, sees substantial progress in our culture on race. He discusses the case of Jussie Smollett, the African-American gay male initially charged with fabricating a story about being attacked by MAGA–hat wearing homophobes. McWhorter doesn’t deny that racism exists but notes that “one might argue… that there is a degree of exaggeration in how Americans today discuss and process race.” Victimhood chic, says McWhorter, has taken hold so deeply that Smollett might have assumed he didn’t have to be that careful in choreographing his scam. McWhorter was particularly incredulous that Smollett didn’t remove the rope from around his neck by the time the police arrived. He notes that if Smollett was playacting, it might be that for him, “being a successful actor and singer” wasn’t “quite as exciting as being a poster child for racist abuse in Trump’s America.”
Smollett, McWhorter continues, would have realized that “very important people would find him more interesting for having been hurt on the basis of his identity than for his fine performance on an interesting hit television show. He would have known this so well that it didn’t even occur to him that his story would have to be more credible than the dopey one he threw together about bein
g jumped in near-Arctic temperatures by the only two white bullies in America with a mysterious fondness for a black soap hip-hopera.” McWhorter argues that this incident demonstrates that in America, “matters of race are not as utterly irredeemable as we are often” led to believe. “That anyone could feel this way and act on it in the public sphere is, in a twisted way, a kind of privilege, and a sign that we have come further on race than we are often comfortable admitting.”59
We must pray that Professor McWhorter’s optimism is warranted. But it’s sobering to recognize that race is far from the only sensitive issue the left exploits in their divide-and-rule strategy of pitting Americans against one another. In the next two chapters we’ll examine the left’s destructive ideas and initiatives on gender.
CHAPTER FIVE Gender Madness
In the past several decades we have witnessed a sexual revolution. Whereas the sexual revolt of the sixties was characterized by sexual liberation and licentiousness, this new revolution attacks the idea that there are two distinct sexes. The assault has come in distinct but overlapping stages: the feminist movement, the homosexual movement, and the transgender movement. “The third wave of this assault on the sexes [the transgender movement] has been an attack on a basic reality—that all people have a biological sex, identifiable at birth and immutable through life, which makes them either male or female,” write Dale O’Leary and Peter Sprigg.1
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