Discrimination by sex and by race are ancient innate pathologies and transcend particular cultures. But the American idea of sexismand racism in the 21st century — unfailing, endemic, and institutional discrimination by a majority-white-male-privileged culture against both women and so-called non-white minorities — has largely become a leftist construct.
We can see how these two relativist -isms work in a variety of ways.
Barack Obama and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder at Holder’s portrait unveiling ceremony, Department of Justice, Washington DC—Feb. 27, 2015 (Rex Features via AP Images)
In our racialist society, race always trumps class. In that sense, we do live in a classless society — at least as far as racial matters are concerned.
Remember when Attorney General Eric Holder called Americans a “nation of cowards” who put “certain subjects . . . off limits”? Holder,
Claude McKay
of course, was referring to “subjects” that in fact we do nothing else but talk about non-stop – the refusal of whites to admit the persistence of white racism and its responsibility for all the ills afflicting the black underclass. To quote Paul Krugman for this received wisdom, “Race is the Rosetta Stone that makes sense of many otherwise incomprehensible aspects of U.S. politics.”
Yet Holder was unwittingly accurate, for there is a subject the mainstream culture and political discourse never touches: what Harlem Renaissance novelist Claude McKay called the “yellow complex.” This is the psychological condition of light-skinned blacks that was explored in novels of the 1920s like McKay’s Home to Harlem and Wallace Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry. Back then, the mulatto or light-complexioned black, especially the well educated, lived in a social and psychological limbo, excluded by racism from the white world, and forced by segregation to live among darker blacks whom they often despised and looked down on. Yet darker blacks themselves experienced conflicting emotions, at once attracted to and resentful of the light-skinned who scorned them.
Thurman’s Emma Lou is a sympathetic portrait of this complex from the perspective of a woman whose mother is a mulatto, but who inherited her father’s black skin: “Emma Lou had been born in a semi-white world, totally surrounded by an all-white one, and those few dark elements that had forced their way in had either been shooed away or else greeted with derisive laughter.” When she matriculates at an exclusive Negro college, she despises Hazel, another dark-skinned girl who attempts to befriend her, as “just a vulgar little n***** from down South.” Emma Lou “was determined to become associated only with those people who really mattered, northerners like herself or superior southerners, if there were any, who were different from whites only in so far as skin color was concerned.” What she discovers, however, is that most of the light-skinned students to whom she is attracted despise her as much as she despises Hazel.
A creation of racism and segregation, the psychology explored in this persistent theme of classic black literature was supposedly transcended by the “black is beautiful” movement of the 1960s. In black identity politics the poles of value were reversed: the snobbish mulattoes or blacks who lived by so-called “white” values were attacked for “acting white,” and authentic black identity comprised Read more →
Attorney General Eric Holder must be suffering from a sort of amnesia. He is upset at supposed divisiveness and rudeness directed at him when testifying before Congress, and suggests not too subtly that he and President Obama
Talk Radio News Service via Flickr
have been accorded inordinately harsh treatment (fill in the blanks why). Aside from the fact that he seemed to have relished the combat with Representative Gohmert in quite unprofessional tones (“you don’t want to go there, buddy, alright?”/ “good luck with your asparagus”), he seems to forget what former attorney general Alberto Gonzales once endured both in the liberal media and before Democrats in Congress, not to mention the films, comic routines, novels, and op-eds that focused on the idea of assassinating President George W. Bush, a shameful chapter in our history, which I think Eric Holder was largely mum about at the time.
But, more to the point, is this not the same Attorney General Holder who once called the nation collectively “cowards” and referred to African Americans as “my people” — not to mention a president who has called for some “to punish our enemies”? All that sounds pretty divisive and ugly. Read more →
Rasmussen reported last Friday that 52% of likely voters approve of Obama’s job performance. This number is both astonishing and depressing. The avalanche of Obama’s failures both domestic and foreign should have buried this presidency months ago. Yet despite the slow-motion implosion of Obamacare now catching the attention of even the court-journalists of the mainstream media, millions of American voters still think one of the worst presidents in modern history is doing a good job.
In any other administration, even without Obamacare, the litany of scandal and bungling would have politically crippled not just Obama but the Democrats as well. The murderous gunrunning of the Fast and Furious debacle, Attorney General Eric Holder turning the Justice Department into the Democrats’ Luca Brasi, the out-of-control EPA waging its economy-killing war on carbon, the National Labor Relations Board unleashed to browbeat business and revive a moribund labor movement, the SEC shaking down banks for billions, the IRS targeting political opponents, the trillion-dollar “stimulus” spent to achieve the worst economic recovery in history, the trillions more borrowed and created out of thin air to finance entitlement spending and payoffs to political cronies––and that’s just domestic policy.
Add the outrageous incompetence and indifference that got 4 Americans murdered in Benghazi, the subsequent lies and cover-up for political advantage, the waste of American money, toil, and blood in Iraq by the precipitate withdrawal of our forces, the likely reprise of that malfeasance in Afghanistan, the alienation of allies like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Israel, the cozying up to the genocidal Muslim Brotherhood, the appeasement of the equally genocidal mullahs in Iran, the groveling to a rampaging Russia, the whole Syria “red line” humiliation over chemical weapons––any one of these foreign and domestic fiascos would have inflicted serious political damage if we weren’t living in the alternative political universe in which we suddenly found ourselves on January 20, 2009. Read more →
Last week President Obama weighed in again on the Trayvon Martin episode. Sadly, most of what he said was wrong, both literally and ethically. Read more →
The attorney general of the United States lied recently to Congress[1]. He said he knew of no citizen’s communications that his department had monitored. Lie!
In fact, Holder knew[2] that his subordinates were targeting reporters. He also did not tell the truth about the New Black Panthers case[3]. He had sworn that there was no political decision to drop the case. Not true; the decision came from the top. He again lied about the time frame in which he first learned of the Fast and Furious case[4]. Read more →
In ancient Athens, popular courts of paid jurors helped institutionalize fairness. If a troublemaker like Socrates was thought to be a danger to the popular will, then he was put on trial for inane charges like “corrupting the youth” or “introducing new gods.” Read more →
Violating Americans’ privacy while failing to identify the terrorists among us.
by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online
All can agree that the Obama administration is mired in myriads of scandals, but as yet no one can quite figure out what they all mean and where they will lead. Read more →
Victor takes on Joe Biden, golden-goose-strangler; the radical new rules imposed on post-America; COVID realities in the face of expert lockdown-love; Delta, Major League Baseball, and other big business virtue-signalers accommodating the Woke Police (while deal-making with Red China’s oppressors); and Young Victor meets Martin Luther King in 1965. Today’s episode is sponsored by the Bradley Foundation’s “We the People” speaker series.
Victor takes on the latest Fauci winging-it, flip floppery, whether America is committing suicide, the trouble of our military’s progressive “recalibration,” the bizarre morality of anti-racism racism, and reflections on pal Conrad Black’s argument that the Trump-Hate coalition is crumbling. This episode is sponsored by a great friend of the Victor Davis Hanson Podcast, Shraga Kawior.
Victor discusses America’s new class warfare, the foreign-policy consequences of our Feeble POTUS, the Biden Administration’s getting out-manipulated by Red China and Russia, how the “party of science” loves superstition and prefers ideology, and a media starting to weakly admit that Scranton Joe owns the border crisis. Today’s episode is sponsored by the Bradley Foundation’s “We the People” video series.
New Episode of The Classicist: Failures at Home, Dangers Abroad
In a wide-ranging conversation that covers voting rights, COVID, Immigration, foreign policy, and debt, Victor Davis Hanson looks at the perilous consequences of the Biden Administration.
New Episode of The Classicist: Racism By Any Other Name
Victor Davis Hanson examines the dramatic change in elite racial attitudes in recent years and issues a stern warning: there’s never been a bigger threat to America’s ability to hold together as a successful multiethnic society.
New Episode of The Classicist: Collision Course with China?
In the wake of the Biden Administration’s diplomatic fiasco with Beijing, Victor Davis Hanson looks at the trajectory of Chinese ambitions, the elements necessary for America to face down the threat, and what the future may hold if the tensions boil over into conflict.
Area 45: Victor Davis Hanson: Holding The Trump Card
Iran’s next move, a Senate impeachment trial, and the beginning of the Democratic primaries. Despite January and February’s uncertainties, Victor Davis Hanson, the Hoover Institution’s Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow, believes in this certainty: President Trump is on a path to reelection this fall.
Victor Davis Hanson discusses the damaging disclosure about Obama keeping tabs on the FBI Hillary Clinton email investigation, State Department unmasking, why Hillary’s and Obama’s hubris may be their own downfall and how this can very well be a Watergate or Iran-Contra type scandal.
For Obama, Nothing Succeeds Like Failure
by Bruce S. Thornton // FrontPage Magazine
Rasmussen reported last Friday that 52% of likely voters approve of Obama’s job performance. This number is both astonishing and depressing. The avalanche of Obama’s failures both domestic and foreign should have buried this presidency months ago. Yet despite the slow-motion implosion of Obamacare now catching the attention of even the court-journalists of the mainstream media, millions of American voters still think one of the worst presidents in modern history is doing a good job.
In any other administration, even without Obamacare, the litany of scandal and bungling would have politically crippled not just Obama but the Democrats as well. The murderous gunrunning of the Fast and Furious debacle, Attorney General Eric Holder turning the Justice Department into the Democrats’ Luca Brasi, the out-of-control EPA waging its economy-killing war on carbon, the National Labor Relations Board unleashed to browbeat business and revive a moribund labor movement, the SEC shaking down banks for billions, the IRS targeting political opponents, the trillion-dollar “stimulus” spent to achieve the worst economic recovery in history, the trillions more borrowed and created out of thin air to finance entitlement spending and payoffs to political cronies––and that’s just domestic policy.
Add the outrageous incompetence and indifference that got 4 Americans murdered in Benghazi, the subsequent lies and cover-up for political advantage, the waste of American money, toil, and blood in Iraq by the precipitate withdrawal of our forces, the likely reprise of that malfeasance in Afghanistan, the alienation of allies like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Israel, the cozying up to the genocidal Muslim Brotherhood, the appeasement of the equally genocidal mullahs in Iran, the groveling to a rampaging Russia, the whole Syria “red line” humiliation over chemical weapons––any one of these foreign and domestic fiascos would have inflicted serious political damage if we weren’t living in the alternative political universe in which we suddenly found ourselves on January 20, 2009. Read more →
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