by Heather Mac Donald
It’s an odd way to seek national unity: call a significant portion of the American public white supremacists, racists, and nativists. Welcome to the Biden presidency.
Joe Biden’s inaugural speech as 46th president is predictably being hailed for its “unifying” message. And just as predictably, his invocations of the divisive bromides of the identitarian Left are being swept under the rug.
According to Biden, we are a “great nation” and a “good people.” But we also oppress minorities with an ever-rising fervor. “Growing inequity” is among the greatest challenges facing the country, according to Biden, along with the “sting of systemic racism” and encroaching “white supremacy.” Only now are we confronting “a cry for racial justice, some four hundred years in the making.”
One might have thought that more than 50 years of civil rights legislation; the banishing of Jim Crow segregation; the ubiquity of racial preferences throughout corporate America, higher education, and government; trillions of dollars of tax dollars attempting to close the academic achievement gap; and the election of black politicians by white voting districts would have reduced inequity, not increased it. But to Biden’s speechwriters, steeped in academic victimology, racial inequity is always with us, requiring constant remediation from government.
Biden rattled off a litany of white America’s sins: the “harsh, ugly reality” of “racism, nativism, fear, [and] demonization”; “anger, resentment, hatred, [and] extremism.” He did not name white Americans as such, but he did not need to. That qualifier is inherent in the language he chose to adopt.
This characterization of America’s worsening racism is not just factually ungrounded, it is also a tasteless rhetorical move in an inaugural address. Reflexive invocations of “systemic racism” and “white supremacy” have become the Tourette’s Syndrome of left-wing professors and activists. They are au courant, shallow terms of the moment, lacking depth or weight.
In fact, such terms are so overused today that it is easy to tune them out. But that would be a mistake. The “systemic racism” conceit means that every American institution is illegitimate and needs to be reconstructed. Biden’s cabinet nominees, whether in health, finance, environmental policy, or education, have declared that eradicating systemic racism is their top priority. How this agenda will play out has already been adumbrated in the CDC’s initial priority list for Covid vaccinations: hold off on vaccinating the elderly, despite their higher risk levels, because the elderly are disproportionately white.
And the media covers for him.
The other day I recorded “The Prodigal Son,” because somebody nearby told me it was a great murder mystery series.
Too PC for my blood.
Never again.
The mom of the profiler and wife of the mass murderer was breaking up with the detective who broke her husband’s case.
She actually said, “That’s what WASPs do.” referring to the fact that the soon-to-be ex was a POC, namely Lou Diamond Philips.
Later, same episode, that detective’s team needed back up so his black underling called in the request only to be chided, “This channel is for official police communications only,” and no back up was sent by the white police at the station.
Yikes.
So, not just news media, it is all of a type and a really bad, insidious type.
I’ve been watching old, really old movies/series from before PC even started.
Its the only protection from these brain washers.
Though white supremacists, though despicable, are not a significant source of violence today, judging by who is committing most or all of the violence, there indeed was a time when they were. Back at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, the Ku Klux Klan was very powerful and very active. They operated with virtual impunity, intimidating, harassing and murdering blacks at will. Of course, this was widespread in the South and Democrats controlled the politics there. So, what did Democrats do to address the problem? Hell, they JOINED them!! The Klan and the Democrats were intertwined and inseparable. Even as the federal government began wiping the Klan out, institutionalized racism survived strongly in the South until Democrats began getting defeated by Republicans.
The ground zero of “systemic racism” was Minneapolis, Minnesota where poor George Floyd was murdered, as he died of a fentanyl overdose, by a “racist” cop. Yet, there they have a Democrat police chief (well… had), Democrat mayor, Democrat city council, Democrat Governor, Democrat state legislature, Democrat Attorney General, two Democrat Senators and 5 of 8 Democrat Representatives. That pretty much totally encompasses the “system”. So, who is supplying the racism?
So, why would anyone expect Democrats to identify what the problem is and correcting it? Does it not serve their purposes (using violent left wing extremists to carry out political terrorism to suppress conservative support) to ignore the leftist element and pretend the “white supremacists” were the villains?
How about “black supremacy” where black people refuse to acknowledge any life but a black life matters, attacks anyone that thinks otherwise, condemns people based solely on the color of their skin and tries to instill a sense of guilt and self-hate strictly due to the color of the skin they were born with.
Funny, no one but Democrats utilize all those as political weapons. However, I don’t get the feeling Biden and the Democrats are planning a reassessment of their own character.
Bingo. There’s your agenda.
I learned all I need to know about “racism” from an 8th grader. I taught in a D C Public School. Black administration, black school board, black city council. After lunch an 8th grader would bring a soda into the classroom. This was prohibited, because of bugs and because the soda machine was for faculty use only. I challenged the young man. He told me that the restriction was “racist”.
So “racist” means I want to do something and you won’t let me.
Very simple.