Victor Davis Hanson // Private Papers
Part One
Here are the first three of five observations about our current woke racial mania.
1. Are the non-white elite in government, universities, entertainment, and the corporate world who rail about “whiteness,” “systemic racism,” and pathological “whites” in general mostly referring to their own elite white colleagues? Are not they doppelgangers of the same class without knowing much about so-called white, working-class America outside their own enclaves?
The social media crowd of Silicon Valley, the university administrative cadre, the corporate boardroom grandees, and the thousands of neurotic Hollywood elites are not exactly fond of the two-thirds of white America precisely because they feel their money, privilege, and zip codes exempt them from the consequences of their loud nihilist advocacies they are so eager to impose on others. In other words, is not most of the current racial war the infighting of those of the same class who agree in theory they are on the same side, but in the concrete don’t like each other much, as both claw for similar spoils?
Does not a Don Lemon or LeBron James privately believe that many so-called “whites” are similar to the CNN crowd they hang with, or the basketball corporate apparat? Do the elite non-white who fuel the war against “whiteness” mostly dislike, envy, fear, or compete with their own white mirror-images? I think a Van Jones has far more in common with Brian Selter than does half the white people in the country. In terms of class, do middle-class blacks especially identify with the multi-homed BLM head Patrisse Marie Khan-Cullors Brignac or 1619 promulgator Hannah Nikole-Jones? Do working class whites seek solidarity with Bill Gates, Dr. Fauci, or Steven Colbert?
2. We still have not received any systematic exegesis why the non-white are pouring into a country whose racism, they are warned by our current cultural and political elites, defines America. Why would the Squad or the Biden clique want two-million foreign citizens in the current twelve-month period to cross the border and thus suffer the terrible wages of racism?
Either one of three things surely must be true: 1) either the Left doesn’t really believe the country is racist, and so assumes illegal aliens don’t either; 2) or if they do believe it, and if illegal aliens believe it, then they feel legions of angry new recruits are being prepped for the holistic cultural, race, ethnic, and gender take-over to come; 3) or the more they claim America is racist, the more their opponents will compromise and let in more illegal immigrants to prove they are not racist.
3. Since the writs against “whiteness” are detailed and nearly endless, and since the prosecutorial case is conducted in starkly racial terms, will there be a defense in kind? I mean if a sometimes New York Times contributor Mr. Damon Young lists all the reasons whites have destroyed life on this planet (and thus deserve what exactly?) or a Dr. Aruna Khilanani damns all white people as sick and pathological liars and fantasizes of shooting them (as opposed to the Bernard professor who dreams of gassing them), will the people they despise and wish eliminated offer a defense in similar stereotypical and generalized terms? That is, would America unwind in the manner common throughout history, when tribes go full tribal? Would the white counter-defense appear something like calibrating the white percentage of the population and then scanning data tables to see whether such a mythical group is under- or over-represented in various good and bad categories: combat deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq? Violent crimes? Homicides? Victims or victimizers in interracial crimes? Nobel Prize winners? DUIs? Do we really wish to go down this road, where each tribe tries its case before other tribes?
One can see where this racism is going, for if there is such a thing as whiteness that characterizes all 230 million Americans, as seems to have been alleged nonstop since June of last year, then there is a commensurate “brownness” or “blackness” that is to be on similar grounds defined by the sum total of its purported demerits? Is that the logic of tribalism on the horizon?
In sum, why do nonwhite racists think they are not racists, 60 years after the Civil Rights movement? Why do they think it is in their interest to establish the principle that it is perfectly fine to categorize, systematize, stereotype, and generalize about tens of millions on the basis of their skin color, and why do they think that in a multiracial democracy their own protocols and tropes won’t boomerang on them?
Incorrect number: “all 230,000 million Americans,” should be “all 230 million Americans,”
Thanks. We got it.
Professor:
You’ve given Patrisse and Hannah their 15 minutes of fame. They are today’s Tom Hayden and Patricia Hearst, who’ll remember? (…much less care…)
rjb
At least for the worst of them, your option #2: they do believe it, and they hope that illegal aliens believe it, so that legions of angry new recruits can be prepped for the holistic cultural, race, ethnic, and gender take-over to come, is closet to the truth. But even as bile-filled as they are, they are not, mostly stupid (the two at the top of the heap excepted). They must know — they MUST — that what they are launching will bring not any utopia, but a violent, impoverished, dystopian nightmare that will cost hundreds of thousands or millions of lives and make the rest miserable. Try as I might, I cannot conjure any rational basis for their actions. This is a tragedy almost beyond description.
Brilliant, thanks for sharing. May i share this to the public group?
“Four legs good, two legs better”
They seem to see themselves as victims and/or saviors. Repeated patterns their brains have hard wired, so to speak. It would take a conscious effort to think outside the images and roles they see themselves, and that probably makes them feel too uncomfortable. To do so, they would have to take a look deep inside, something I’m not sure many of them are capable of doing. So they will stay in their comfort zones where they don’t believe anyone has a ‘right’ to go against them. They believe they are the stronger, but they are not. They don’t require of themselves what us ‘others’ (anyone that doesn’t believe as them of any color, but saying white helps to camouflage the true meaning), have been doing for decades and passing down to our children, to see people as people, not as groups to be controlled, feared or hated. But as individuals, each with their own personalities, each with their own flaws, but understanding we have ours as well. That is their true hate of us, we have actually passed them on the road to enlightenment of seeing a person as they are, and it seems this has just been too much for them to bare, seeing that they are the ‘true’ victims and saviors. I just wonder when they are going to start trying to put their behavior into a more succinct context of ‘religion’ that can save us all. They can’t round us all up, their control is not holding, and they will eventually wane on having to keep using ‘force’(just because their lifestyles would be hampered), so what exactly do they have in store for us ‘others’, the more enlightened than they.
Another excellent piece, Mr. Hanson. Thank you!
Wokeism is idiotic and a direct result of low IQ and ignorance (redundant). Facts: 1. White Americans, British, and Europeans discovered and developed 99.9% of all the science and medicine that we enjoy and prosper from today. 2. Millions (hundreds of millions of) of people are alive today (especially People of Color) because of the discoveries of White people. 3. People of Color (an idiotic phrase) (Aboriginals from Africa, Mexico, Central and South America) have never won a Noble prize in the sciences; they never discovered and developed sciences and medicines as did White people. 4. People of Color never developed highly prosperous societies as have White people. 5. Negroes in America commit 80% of the crime in America, while being only 13.5% of the population; White society is not violent as Negro Society.
Do we really want to turn our great American society to Black society?!
Considering that the vast majority of foreigners entering our country since the early 70s right on through today are poor/uneducated/unskilled people who know nothing but the corrupt, elite controlled third world nations they lived in, just exactly as their ancestors did, I believe the group behind all of the issues destroying America are looking toward the day when America and Americans have been defeated and the new we, the people, can be easily controlled because that type people is what they have replaced independent, determined, cantankerous Americans with. We see these tens of millions of foreigners, all categories, that have been taking over our country for decades, watch how they act, what they do here, and see the obvious, that they care nothing about America, but care only about material wealth and getting all they can no matter the costs to Americans or the future of the USA. We see all this in their attitudes, their feeling of entitlement to everything we have here, not because they deserve it or have earned it in any way, but purely because they are HERE and they want it. They care little about USA citizenship, readily recognizing that they reap greater benefits being non-citizens. And even those who do trod the citizenship path do so because it is required for the plans they have for power/fame/fortune such as government positions, which we have seen clearly in the congress’s squad members. Even the ones here criminally because of their illegal status loudly scream about their rights here, in a country they have absolutely no legal or moral right to be in. And because of all the other evil issues in our country and the very able and public assistance of half our nation including most all the most powerful people, these people are winning, know it and are gleeful about it. And they are helping in the planned and on-going destruction and conquering of America gladly and gleefully, in their knowledge that they never intended any change, any allegiance to America or Americans. As the Mexican American (I assume citizenship here) columnist quoted his wife as saying, “I am not, and never will be, American. I am, and will always be, Mexican.” This from a foreigner that has raised a family here, grabbed every opportunity for advantages such as free education, free medical care, career/job opportunities, etc, but holds no, none, gratitude toward the USA, only an attitude of entitlement. No doubt, she is one of the many working and looking toward the day (near future) when “her people” are the majority in our country and can begin to put us in our proper place and return, at least, our western coastal states to Mexico. Maybe I am wrong, but events and projections based on facts and those events point to a very dire and dismal future for our American descendants.
Can these cultural Marxists be saved? I am often dismayed that apparently the country is evenly split (though I don’t really believe that) between conservative leaning folks who hold to the goodness of America’s traditional values and those who find fault with every aspect of it. Can the leftist, progressive, statists be converted? seems like a spiritual battle and from that aspect their religion holds so little hope.
“Do we really wish to go down this road, where each tribe tries its case before other tribes?”
As in the case of every military defeat, the answer to your question, Professor Hanson, is “Too late.”
You should have asked your question — and answered it negatively from the unanimous historical evidence — before going along with the experiment in demographics that is massive, continuous and unending legal immigration into America from the Third World.
But you thought “We can do this” didn’t you? You thought “We’re America — Si, se puede!” didn’t you?
Despite all the changes to American culture brought on by the Ellis Island wave, changes that forced the US to end immigration in 1924 and which only the mass mobilization of a two-front war somewhat smoothed out, you still implicitly derided Enoch Powell’s advice in 1969 and approved of the legal flood of colored immigrants from the far sides of the globe.
The rivers of blood will be charged against those who did not prevent foreseeable evils, especially the historically literate.