White Innocence at the cost of Black Progress
“I saw that my friends were starting to treat me as an enlightened figure, like a Messiah, there to teach them of their sins and offer repentance. We were no longer equals, I was their saviour, they were my apostles. Yesterday, we had played basketball as pals. Today, I was cast into the role of their spiritual liberator, offering salvation from their sins. My wisdom did not arrive from merit - it was solely the colour of my skin which had suddenly elevated me to these unwanted heights.”
The thoughts above were emailed to me by a former student last summer, bemoaning his sudden ascendence to spiritual sage, merely because he was the only black person in his circle of friends. I’ve now heard many people of colour, including the great Coleman Hughes, indicating the exact same sentiments. And only a few days ago, the unwatchable Chris Hayes from MSNBC, tweeted the following:
What is going on?
Although any talk of “tipping points” are far too simplistic, there certainly has been a major and sudden shift in the collective minds of white people recently, mostly (but not exclusively) in the Anglosphere. This new dogma teaches that, merely by the colour of our skin, people of colour are somehow morally and spiritually superior to our white neighbours. We are, as Hayes clearly spells out, a “master race”.
How did we come to earn this semi-deistic stature?
The generation who took to the streets to protest the Vietnam War, American interventionism and Watergate have grown up and embarked on careers within academia, and with them, their anti-Western ideologies are now rooted in the halls of learning and higher education. For these people, the specific cause was never the critical factor - they found a moral identity in opposition to authority. The given authority was not relevant, as long as they portrayed themselves as the insurgence, “fighting the power”.
Today, they have created a conveyor belt of students infested with anti-Western, anti-Capitalist convictions and a deification of victimhood.
For them, history is not the story of freedom realising itself, but an immutable battle between oppressors and the oppressed. In this hierarchy, white, straight male occupy the apex of the pyramid of evil and every person of colour occupy a strata in the victimhood column.
This secular religion is based on a single, fundamental lie: Race matters.
Fact of the matter is that, although perhaps not expressly racist, the movement is inherently race-ist.
It posits that the world is made up of sinners (whites) and saints (non-whites). The saints are incapable of any wrongdoing, and the sinners are forever guilty, but can be granted redemption by
Acknowledging their inherent, irredeemable racism
Unquestionably acquiesce to every dot and tittle laid out by the self-proclaimed saviours
Constantly and tirelessly tout their commitment to anti-racism, by actively looking for any- and everyone not signing on to the creed, and endlessly shame them, in as public fashion as possible
A movement by white people for white innocence, at the cost of black progress
But one does not need to be a sleuth to see what’s actually underlying this entire movement, nor does one have to have prophetic powers to understand where this will lead society.
For whites, as the great Shelby Steele has argued for more than 30 years, this is nothing but a crusade to achieve innocence. When “your people” have historically been responsible for the systematic oppression of another population, you may be under the false conviction that their sins are hereditary and the only way to achieve absolution - innocence - is by actively distancing yourself from the ideas and practices of your forefathers.
People such as Robin diAngelo, Ibram X. Kendi, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ava DuVernay, Nikole Hannah Jones, Michael Eric Dyson, Kehinde Andrews, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson have all taken the opportunity to create a cottage industry out of this cultural guilt, and amassed tremendous wealth from their flocks of sheep, desperate to rid themselves of a guilt they never should have had to begin with.
And as this doctrine, with its prophets, priests, sinners and saints, gains speed, one particular population suffers the most; Blacks.
For what are the core tenants of this new religion? What does it actually boil down to? Again, it’d be foolish of me not to plagiarise the words of the great Shelby Steele, from a recent podcast with Megyn Kelly, where he was joined by his son Eli to discuss their brilliant new documentary “What Killed Michael Brown?”
“When a country confesses to having oppressed a people for four centuries, in the most brutal instance of oppression in all of history, and then finally in 1964 you pass a Civil Rights bill [and] you say ‘Oh, we were wrong, we’re sorry’ - that confession - and this is what I call ‘The Great Confession’ - put White America in a position [where] after you’ve confessed a sin, you have to then redeem yourself from that sin, and so White America was put in a position, where race was concerned, where it had to redeem itself.
And we have been in that redemptive phase of race relations since the mid-60’s… we say ‘we want to save the lives of all these black people’, but we don’t really look at them, we don’t really see them as human beings, we just gonna save their lives, because we want to be able to say ‘We are redeemed of our collusion with racism’.
It redeems White America, it redeems the legitimacy of the democracy, of our government, to then begin to give things to blacks - all sort of programs; The Great Society, War on Poverty, Affirmative Action, Public Housing, School Bussing, Advance Welfare Payment, so forth and so on. Just give, give, give - not because we want to help black people, but because we want to redeem white people!
And so, all of these policies then, in effect, exploited black people all over again! Now we’re using black people as evidence of white innocence of racism!”
In other words, none - not a single one - of the policies, demands, schemes, approaches or strategies proposed by this movement is designed to actually help black people, but to redeem white people and profit from white guilt.
This movement is inherently white supremacist, as it assigns agency only to whites, and denies it of blacks and other people of colour. In fact, even the suggestion that black people of 2020 may have some responsibility in their current state, is considered a racist claim. For example, if you were to say that black children in America grow up in households where more than 70% of fathers are missing, and this may explain parts of why this demographic lag behind others in wealth creation, you are deemed a racist by The Washington Post.
This despite the Patron Saint of this movement, Barack Obama, preaching the following:
“...if we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that what too many fathers also are is MISSING – missing from too many lives and too many homes.
You and I know how true this is in the African American community. We know that more than half of all black children live in single parent households. (*It’s actually almost 70%*)
We know the statistics: That children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime, nine times more likely to drop out of school, and twenty times more likely to end up in prison. They are more likely to have behavioural problems, or run away from home or become teenage parents.”
Yet, any white person making the exact same claim will be accused of peddling “racist tropes”. Because every ill, every pain and every tragedy experienced by blacks is, according to this creed, the fault of whites.
And the only remedy is to submit, to give, to repent - more governmental programs, more charities, more alms. Blacks, according to this race-ist movement, are a handicapped people, and only by the submissive hand-holding of whites will they ever be able to walk upright.
Point to the areas where blacks have succeeded the most - sports and entertainment - and how this has been precisely because they were offered no preferential treatment, and had to make it on their own merits, leading to their flourishing - and you’re accused of belittling black achievements to trivialities.
But the most blatant example of this unwillingness to actually help blacks comes from the studies in Charter Schools versus Public Schools.
In his 2011 book “Class Warfare: Inside the fight to fix America’s schools”, journalist and lawyer Steven Brill gives the example of Eva Moskowitz, a former New York City councilwoman, who now runs the Success Academy Charter Schools:
Success Academy Harlem I, which selects students by lottery, shares a building with PS149, one of the city’s better traditional public schools. Both schools serve kids from the same racial and economic background in classes that have approximately the same number of students (the charter school’s class sizes are slightly larger).
But the similarities end there. In 2009, 29 percent of students at PS 149 were performing at grade level in reading and 34 percent were at grade level in math. At Harlem 1—literally across the hall—the corresponding figures were 86 percent and 94 percent. Ninety-seven percent of Harlem I’s students passed the state exam that year, ranking it in the top one percent of all New York state public schools.
Is it therefore much of a surprise that some surveys show up to 78% of Black Americans support school choice for their children? And that the likelihood is higher if the person answering the survey is from a low-income household?
Yet, charter schools are directly opposed by Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Barack Obama (even though he sent his own daughters to private schools), The NAACP, The Democrat Party and almost all Left leaning institutions. Why?
If the empirical data demonstrates clearly that the black population would benefit enormously from school choice and charter schools, then why are all these self-proclaimed “anti-racists” so against it?
Could it be because their agenda is not black empowerment, but white innocence? And by not being the direct benefactors of education, they lose the possibility of claiming to bequeath education to blacks - a significant blow to their quest of achieving innocence?
Another illustration of this self-serving dogmatism comes from how one views Affirmative Action.
The most empirical example of the benefits blacks would enjoy from the abandonment of Affirmative Action comes from State of California. In 1996, California passed Prop 209, which gutted Affirmative Action overnight.
As always, there were doomsayers who predicted that this would set blacks and minorities back several decades, that this would lead to larger divisions between whites and blacks, that this would cause a new wave of segregation and so forth. In reality, the exact opposite happened.
From Stuart Taylor and Richard Sander’s book “Mismatch”:
· The number of blacks entering UC as freshmen in 2000 through 2003 is, on average, only 2 percent below pre-209 levels, and black enrolment jumps when we take into account transfers and lower attrition.
· The number of Hispanic freshmen is up by 22 percent over the same period, and again more when we include transfers.
· The number of blacks receiving bachelor degrees from UC schools rose from an average of 812 in 1998–2001 (the final cohorts entirely comprised of pre-209 entrants) to an average of 904 in 2004–2007 (the first cohorts entirely comprised of post-209 entrants). For UC Hispanics, the numbers rose from 3,317 to 4,428.
· The number of UC black and Hispanic freshmen who went on to graduate in four years rose 55 percent from 1995–1997 to 2001–2003.
· The number of UC black and Hispanic freshmen who went on to graduate in four years with STEM [science, technology, engineering, and math] degrees rose 51 percent from 1995–1997 to 2001–2003.
· The number of UC black and Hispanic freshmen who went on to graduate in four years with GPAs of 3.5 or higher rose by 63 percent from 1995–1997 to 2001–2003.
It did therefore not surprise many when, in the 2020 election, the citizens of California overwhelmingly voted against Proposition 16, which was set to repeal Prop 209.
Yet, even suggesting that one has questions about Affirmative Action results in being assigned labels of racism. Not because Affirmative Action helps blacks - it clearly doesn’t - but because it threatens a key instrument with which whites can attain innocence.
Black tragedies and white indifference
In 2014, when Michael Brown was lawfully and justly shot by officer Darren Wilson, over 3, 000 black kids were shot in Chicago - 700 of them fatally.
The lie which gave rise to BlackLivesMatter - that Brown had his hands up and pleaded Officer Wilson not to shoot - was swiftly debunked by none other than black Attorney General Eric Holden. Every witness to the event corroborated Officer Wilson’s testimony of the events; Brown charged after him and had tried to snatch his service weapon. Even Ta- Nehisi Coates has acknowledged this.
Yet, across the Western World people joined in marches and riots to express solidarity with this movement. News media have discovered a seemingly bottomless pit of attention generating well, and every instance of a white person having any form of confrontation with a black person is immediately deemed to be motivated by racism, highlighted with the most powerful spotlight and magnified to the extremes.
This despite almost every known case being revealed as not having been motivated by race, and most of the famous instances having been completely misconstrued - such as the death of George Floyd (see here).
The greatest tragedy here is that, while all focus is on a manufactured, mostly non-existent “racism”, innocent black youth are killed by the thousands every year without ever garnering a mention on either mainstream nor social media.
These are just four children whose names were never even mentioned to later be forgotten, because the killers weren’t white and there was no credit to be gained by condemning their murders by the so called anti-racists, mainstream or social media activists.
They had no black squares dedicated to them on Instagram by virtue-signalling, innocence seeking whites. Jack Dorsey of Twitter did not donate 10 million USDs to a cause dedicated to preventing such atrocities, as he did with Ibram X. Kendi’s completely fraudulent, ineffective and vestigial “Center [sic] for Antiracist research”.
There were no marches from BLM, no hashtags, no demands for policy change, no petitions. The silence has been deafening, as with all the other thousands of black victims, killed by black assailants.
There are no pay offs by highlighting the greatest cause of death for black men aged 1-14, 15-24, 25-34 and 35-44.
The reward comes only from scouring society for any and every element which can be construed as “racist” - even the most absurd examples, such as ice cream, golf, chess and band-aids - rather than focusing on areas which would require actual time and resources to combat. There are no costs to this behaviour, no actual sacrifices needed. It’s the past-time of a spoiled, lazy and uneducated population, looking for a cause to assign their names to, without having to do any actual work.
It’s easy.
And the greatest victims of this movement are blacks.
Where focus should be on penalising the abandonment of children, teaching students to read and write, reducing school drop-out rates, abolishing the idea of “acting white” (accusation thrown at black students performing in academic settings), ending black on black violence, inspiring entrepreneurialism and ending The War on Drugs, these keyboard warriors are too busy taking down breakfast rice and cereal boxes:
How would this help blacks reduce the academic gap? How would this curtail the homicide rate among black men? How would this lead to black men taking parental responsibilities and not abandoning pregnant girls, to the extent where more than 70% of children grow up in single parent households?
It won’t. But of course, it’s not supposed to. These ideas are not designed to help blacks at all - they are only there to capitalise on white guilt and make the white accusers feel as if they’ve gained innocence, while black proponents are amassing power and wealth.
It’s the most narcissistic, self-centred and privileged exercise. It’s an endeavour conceived only for self-glorification and aggrandisement, camouflaged as a social justice movement. It’s solipsistic.
Do not participate in it.