In our time, sexism and racism have become the province of the rich.
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.
One, the frequent charge of racism and sexism is predicated not so much on one’s gender and race as on one’s gender, race, and politics. Certainly, few on the left worried much about the slurs against Sarah Palin during and after her vice-presidential run. America’s overclass in the media and leftist politics constructed a sexist portrait of a clueless white-trash mom in Wasilla, Alaska, mindlessly having lots of kids after barely graduating from the University of Idaho. Even Bill Maher’s and David Letterman’s liberal armor would not have withstood leftist thrusts had, mutatis mutandis, the former called Hillary Clinton a c–t or the latter disparaged Ms. Clinton as “slutty flight attendant” and joked that, when a teen, Chelsea Clinton had had sexual relations with a Yankee baseball player in the dugout. Ironically it was the by-her-own-bootstraps lower-middle-class Palin who braved the frontier, no-prisoners, male world to become governor of Alaska; in real terms, she is the true feminist. In contrast, according to doctrinaire feminism, Hillary Clinton does not measure up. She has largely clung, in mousy fashion, to her two-timing husband, excused his serial and manipulative philandering with young women of less clout and power, traded on his political nomenclature, and piggy-backed on his career.
Leftism assumes that racist and sexist speech by liberals constitutes good people’s lapses of judgment and tact.
The Black Caucus rarely if ever comes to the defense of Justice Clarence Thomas when, periodically, liberal commentators suggest that he was and is unqualified, and is largely a token black conservative. No one suggests that the New York Times is on an anti-Latino crusade against Marco Rubio in trying to fashion a story of recklessness from the paltry evidence of his receiving one traffic ticket every four years. Had candidate Mitt Romney suggested, as did Senators Joe Biden and Harry Reid, that Senator Barack Obama was a “clean” and “light-skinned” black man without “a Negro dialect,” he would have been considered little more than a Clive Bundy buffoon and would have had to drop out of the Republican primary.
It appears that leftism assumes that racist and sexist speech by liberals constitutes good people’s lapses of judgment and tact — not, as in the case of conservatives, valuable windows into the dark hearts of bigots. In other words, the idea of sexism and racism is not absolute, but relative and mostly socially massaged and constructed by politics. Had President Bill Clinton declared during the O. J. trial that if he had had a second daughter she would have resembled Nicole Simpson, the media and popular culture would have excused such a sick Obamism as a quirky slip — in a way that it would not have if a Bob Dole had uttered the same banality and thereby supposedly revealed his poorly suppressed racist proclivities.
A second tenet of socially constructed racism and sexism is “white privilege,” which usually translates into “white male privilege,” given that women such as Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren are rarely accused of being multimillionaire white elite females who won a leg up by virtue of their skin color. But if whiteness ipso facto earns one advantages over the non-white, why in the world do some elite whites choose to reconstruct their identities as non-white? Would Elizabeth Warren really have become a Harvard law professor had she not, during her long years of academic ascent, identified herself (at least privately, on universities’ pedigree forms) as a Native American? Ward Churchill, with his beads and Indian get-up, won a university career that otherwise might have been scuttled by his mediocrity, his pathological untruths, and his aberrant behavior. Why would the current head of the NAACP in Spokane, Wash., a white middle-class woman named Rachel Dolezal, go to the trouble of faking a genealogy, using skin cosmetics and hair styling, and constructing false racist enemies to ensure that she was accepted as a victimized black woman?
Ms. Dolezal assumed that being a liberal black woman brought with it career opportunities in activist groups and academia otherwise beyond her reach.
The obvious inference is that Ms. Dolezal assumed that being a liberal black woman brought with it career opportunities in activist groups and academia otherwise beyond her reach as a middle-class white female of so-so talent. Critics will object that we are really arguing in class terms as well as racial terms: Privileged whites play on society’s innate prejudices against darker-skinned minorities by positioning themselves as light-skinned, elite people of color. That is a Pandora’s box that is better left unopened — given that Harry Reid and Joe Biden have already unknowingly pried open the lid on these matters in ways that would transcend Barack Obama and equally apply, for example, to Eric Holder or Valerie Jarrett.
Suffice it to say that in our increasingly intermarried, assimilated, and integrated culture, it is often hard to ascertain someone’s exact race or ethnicity. That confusion allows identity to be massaged and reinvented. That said, it is also generally felt among elites that feigning minority status earns career advantages that outweigh the downside of being identified as non-white in the popular culture. That was certainly my impression as a professor for over 20 years in the California State University system watching dozens of upper-class Latin Americans — largely white male Argentinians, Chileans, and Brazilians — and Spaniards flock to American academia, add accents to their names, trill their R’s, and feign ethnic solidarity with their students who were of Oaxacan and Native American backgrounds.
Poor George Zimmerman. His last name stereotyped him as some sort of Germanic gun nut. But had he just ethnicized his maternal half-Afro Peruvian identity and reemerged as Jorgé Mesa, Zimmerman would have largely escaped charges of racism. He should have taken a cue from Barack Obama, who sometime in his late teens at Occidental College discovered that the exotic nomenclature of Barack Obama radiated a minority edge, in a way that the name of his alter ego, Barry Soetoro, apparently never quite had. If, in America’s racist past, majority culture once jealously protected its white privilege by one-drop-of-blood racial distinctions, postmodern America has now come full circle and done the same in reverse — because the construction of minority identity, in all its varying degrees, is easily possible and, in ironic fashion, now brings with it particular elite career advantages.
Third, when we look at questions of class, we see again that racism and sexism are largely leftist constructs and not empirical terms describing millions of Americans who are supposedly denied opportunity by the white establishment because of their gender or race. The CEOs in the industries of sexism and classism are for the most part wealthy and privileged — and their targets are usually of the middle class. When Michelle Obama labors to remind her young African-American audiences of all the stares and second looks she imagines she still receives as First Lady, she is reconstructing a racial identity to balance the enormous privilege she enjoys as a jumbo-jet-setting grandee who junkets to the world’s toniest resorts with regularity. The 2016 version of Hillary Clinton is, at least for a few months, a feminist populist, and has become so merely by mouthing a few banal talking points. Apparently the downside for Hillary of being a woman is not trumped by the facts of being a multimillionaire insider and former secretary of state, wife to a multimillionaire ex-president, mother of a multimillionaire, and mother-in-law to a multimillionaire hedge-fund director. Hillary can become a perpetual constructed victim, denied the good life that is enjoyed by a white male bus driver in Bakersfield making $40,000 a year.
Given the construction of race and gender, the children of Eric Holder and Barack Obama will be eligible for affirmative-action consideration out of reach for an 18-year-old white male in Provo, Utah. As a general rule, when advising classics majors who wished to apply to Ph.D. programs, I assumed that a white male needed a near-perfect GRE score and GPAs, to avoid being rejected out of hand as a middle-class so-so white man from Fresno State. (I reminded them that the “system” assumed their white privilege had given them advantages from preschool onward that the Ivy League and the University of California system now had to adjust for.) For my minority classics students, on the other hand, admission was rarely a problem, despite the fact that many were of a higher social class than their mostly rejected white counterparts.
Fourth, sexism and racism are abstractions of the liberal elite that rarely translate into praxis. Barack Obama could have done symbolic wonders for the public schools by taking his kids out of Sidwell Friends and putting them into the D.C. school system. Elizabeth Warren could have cemented her feminist populist fides by vowing to stop flipping houses. Feminist Bill Clinton could have renounced all affairs with female subordinates. Eric Holder could have vowed never to use government jets to take his kids to horse races. In solidarity with co-eds struggling with student loans, Hillary Clinton could have promised to limit her university speaking fees to a thousand dollars per minute rather than the ten thousand dollars for each 60 seconds of chatting that she actually gets, and she might have prefaced her public attacks on hedge funds by dressing down her son-in-law. Surely the lords of Silicon Valley might have promised to keep their kids in the public schools, and funded scholarships to allow minorities to flood Sacred Heart and the Menlo School.
Charges of racism and sexism have little to do with demonstrable racial and sexual prejudice on the part of a white-male establishment. They are relative, not absolute, phenomena, and more often constructed by political beliefs and careerist concerns than observed independently. Such concepts are often entirely divorced from class reality, and often have more to do with illiberal privilege than with actual exclusion.
I’ve never seen white or black sportscasters contrasting the number of blacks and whites on any team in any sport, and then attempting to predict or excuse how the game will be or was played. That certainly speaks clearly that American sportsmen and women are not bigots. Thank you Dr. Hanson for once again bringing common sense to our cultural situation.
In a civil society a man is expected to greet a passerby, as in “Hello. Good morning to you!”
In a society where public funds paid for “Progressive-Retardnation Worldview” education, the responding woman’s duty is to say, nothing, but text her friend: “This man creeps me out! He spoke without permission! I will alert the civil authorities! When does the victimhood for us ever stop?”
Hence, we need a Constitutional amendment to defund “Progressive-Retardnation Worldview” education, and from this point on only fund the “Tragic-Liberty Worldview” education as existed from 1776-1900. Then the lady can respond, “Good morning to you, sir.” And the police and courts and people can be full of life, liberty and happiness… not the endless sorrow of Protgard Serfdom Zombieland.
The particulars are unimportant, any justification for the expansion of the power of the state will serve equally. When the state is empowered to their satisfaction, the leftists will proceed to enforce their version of utopia at the point of a gun.
I think Ms. Dozeal is not mentally sound,….multiple personality disorder. The whole country (well not all of us) seems to be slipping further and further into madness. As for the Clintons, they are evil people, but hey that’s the leftist way, turn moral values on their head…what’s right is wrong, and wrong is right. Are we witnessing Madness on an epic scale?
As usual, you’ve hit the nail directly on the head. A great read.
I wonder what credence you give to the notion that Critical Theory underlies many of these pathologies and directional moralities? Reality and facts as subordinate to ‘social justice’?
When John McCain announced Sarah Palin as his VP choice, I laughed out loud. The irony was that thick. Palin had a marvelously feminist story…Except she was hard-right in politics. I believe this is why Palin was singled out for so much vitriol. To the Liberal Meme, Palin should be one of them, *is* one of them…and isn’t. Palin is a heresy. She is an abomination. Same for Clarence Thomas.
So in classic conservative christian fashion, Paling and Thomas are cast out, “shunned”. Their claim on the Liberal Meme’s outrage at race or gender slurs is revoked as a warning to others. It’s open season.
Taking racist or sexist shots at Palin and Thomas aren’t tolerated as innocent lapses in judgement…they’re encouraged. A Progressive shows how tolerant and loving they are by using the most hateful and hurtful language possible when talking about race and gender traitors.
Humans construct all these ethnic classifications and divisions.
They’re nothing if not vague and in the end totally inaccurate.
Re Ms. Dolezal?…. I would say that she is indeed African American.
It’s been scientifically established that we’re all descended from one common ancestor that lived in Africa.
This is not some arbitrary category based on the amount of Melanin in one’s Epidermis.
This is factual scientific evidence based on DNA research.
DNA from humans who lived in Africa is in all of us and the American component is predicated on ones Zip Code.
Sarah Palin? African American. Hillary Clinton? Ditto. Rush Limbaugh? Likewise.
O.J.Simpson? James Brown? Michelle Obama? Also African Americans.
Angela Merkel? She’s an African GERMAN.
See how this goes? Human DNA? All from Africa whether residing in China, Mexico, Alaska or Timbuktu.
What race do you all belong too?
Easy peasy: The Human race.
(Except maybe Barrack Obama. The jury’s still out on that)
The birth of a Nation, its flowering and its decay. An ongoing mental war over the Left controlled airwaves. The elections of 2016– two possible outcomes. A Nation divided, at war within, or, the moral side wins. The axis powers of domination are ready to step into the void left by an Obama-Hillary type world. Yet, through all the slime and evil— there was Evolution. Al Sharpton evolved. From floundering in a strained track-suit on the Morton Downey Jr. show, to battling the teleprompter on MSNBC——- its called gumption.
From looking at the picture of the Obamas, I have to ask the question: why is Michelle always pissed off? I suppose that is a topic for another day.
My in-laws live on Mercer Island, which is a well to do community of varying degrees of affluence east of Seattle (it’s also the home of billionaire Paul Allen). My father in-law is an Ivy League educated lawyer, and he and his wife would probably fit the Left’s contemptuous description of “white and privileged” which feeds into its burning resentment towards anyone white and successful. Should they care about the Left’s kooky concepts of victimology? Maybe, if the status quo continues.
The idea of such a thing as “white privilege” would have seemed proposterous in 1970, but that was before massive demographic shifts started appearing. Today this vile concept has steadily metastisized from the cloistered environment of academia and into society at large. Where will this lead? One possible scenario comes from our dysfunctional immigration policy. Since the 1965 Immigration Act, and really since the 1990’s, America has been slowly transformed from a European based society into a Third World based society. This is not necessarily a bad thing if immigration were tightly controlled and only people with education, language skills and investment capital were admitted. But because poor and uneducated immigrants make better Democrat voters than those with educations and capital, our system is being deliberately overwhelmed by mostly poor Oaxacan Province Mexican nationals. The white majority population in this country that has existed since its founding is predicted to be gone by 2042. What then? Could we see massive transfers of wealth in the form of taxes as whites lose political power, and would there be legalized discrimination against successful whites (but not Asians) who tend for mostly cultural reasons to have higher rates of academic achievement, and lower rates of illegitamacy and incarceration than balck and hispanic minority groups? Could we have an entirely new Constitution written by permantly aggrieved minority groups? Will the new white minority still be the bogeyman of the Left and responsible for everything that ails some minority communities or will we all live in a Shangi-la of diversity and tolerance?
Maybe the reason Michelle is so angry is because the future just can’t arrive fast enough.
“” China completes island construction zero hedge””. The word, idea is ” Lebensraum”. The modern-day plague of Asia needs a new host, having laid waste to their own country AND the Western World. Apologies if this falls under the broken-record syndrome, but history teaches two priceless lessons—-The past repeats and Man everlastingly creates wars. Another concept soiled by our destructive leaders, military readiness. A unified strength with all our allies that invokes paralyzing fear on the other side. This is how the Western World solves its unemployment problem— The second coming of Reagan. What is at stake— “” You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: Victory. Victory at all costs— Victory in spite of all terror—Victory, however long and hard the road may be, for without victory there is no survival.
I think it is unfair to blame this “construct” solely on the left. You have made an excellent point, and I enjoy reading your writings. Racism, sexism, and the problems caused by them sell newspapers (or clicks). We glue ourselves to the TV when there are “race riots”, and we all know sex sells, whether it be sexist or scandalous. Is the media “right” or “left”, or is it just interested in gaining viewers and making money?
Racism and sexism are not “largely leftist concepts.” They are entirely and without remainder leftist “concepts.”
Racism has only one purpose: to destroy the status and power of the White race and replace its dominance with non-White peoples. Sexism has only one purpose: to destroy the status and power of males and replace them with females (and transgenders and LGBs).
Both these concepts function like HIV: infecting the mind and spirit of the targeted groups so that they destroy their capacity to defend themselves against hostile outside forces. Any White self-defense or self-assertion is immediately CrimeThink: racism! Any male self-defense or self-interest is likewise CrimeThink: sexism! And both Whites and men police one another savagely about this, infected all.
Any White or any male who gives them the slightest legitimacy, even by denying that they apply to him, only embeds them further. They need to be even more radically de-constructed than Dr Hanson does here. There are no racist or sexist ideas, attitudes or actions; there are only true or false, rational or irrational beliefs, attitude or actions. That is all.
They have no more legitimacy than but just as much power as the concept of “witchcraft” in pre-modern times.
We need to destroy them entirely or they will continue their triumphant progress in destroying us.
Sarah Palin is indeed the paragon of the feminist ideal. Not only did she build a commercial hub, attracting major business chains to Wasila, (after building the infrastructure, roads sewage etc.there) asa two term major, she did it all w/ babies at her hip.
She fought her own party, “the corrupt bastards club” in the smoke filled all-male backroom, & sent them to jail. She cut taxes & raised Alaska’s SP rating to AAA. She took on the oil companies & the tough old boys, forcing them to begin drilling for oil or they would lose their contract, she was the youngest & first female to break the chain of 30 male governors. Palin never plays the victim.
She is Obama’s antithesis as a walking American flag that is all about restoring & perserving the constitution, not fundementally transforming it.
Hillary is all about resume titles, lies, scandals & entitlement running on her husbands coat-tails. Sarah epitomizes that American can-do spirit, that says women are hurt more by the it-takes-a-village tyoe of welfare gov’t intervention the Dems love…Palin doesn’t wait for gov’t or media lapdogs to get the job done….she does it her self from hunting to sustain her family to standing up to the big boy oil companies, lamestreqm media & RINOs all w/ a smile onher face & an genuine love for America & and the military (she;s a proud mother of a combat vet, so truly invested in the game.)
The libs fear her honesty & fierce devotion to common sense conservative individual values & they will Alinsky-ize her, destroying her reputation, at all cost. Palin2016 resonates.
“Discrimination by sex and by race are ancient innate pathologies and transcend particular cultures.”
No, it’s actually an evolution survival strategy, a feature, not a bug or pathology.
I totally agree with you!
And then last Friday 19 June these comments by the President:
“Racism, we are not cured of it,” Obama said. “And it’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say nigger in public. That’s not the measure of whether racism still exists or not. It’s not just a matter of overt discrimination. Societies don’t, overnight, completely erase everything that happened 200 to 300 years prior.”
Sorry you cannot change human nature even if you are the president…what a progressive fool…not just “overt discrimination”…here come the thought police
Hmm, I think it’s time to buy some of Dr. Hanson’s books!
“Leftism assumes that racist and sexist speech by liberals constitutes good people’s lapses of judgment and tact.”
It’s always a mistake to take Progressive arguments on face value. They don’t argue from facts. They don’t believe in antiquated notions like “facts”. They argue from power.
Charging people with racism and sexism *works* to further their power, hence that is how they argue. If charging people with secretly being turnips *worked*, that’s what they’d do.
Any correspondence to reality in anything they say is pure happenstance. Correspondence to reality is simply *irrelevant* to them.
Tired of being managed by the politically correct, ever whining, excuse making, overly wealthy and wisdomless leaders who look and sound and act like the thugs who run banana republics, tribal regions, and despotic regimes the world over? Then, start voting for leaders who sound and act more like the Founding Fathers or the Greatest Generation. Even a pig who gets something for nothing has to go to market sooner or later while his owner just gets fatter.