Are you now, or have you ever been, a white person? I ask this not out of personal curiosity but for the betterment of American society. Everyone with a sense of justice knows that the greatest threat our country faces comes from its own white population.
This message now saturates our culture. We hear it from the president’s bully pulpit. It is everywhere in the media and it is an increasingly inescapable feature of school and workplace life.
Coca-Cola gave a useful and concise formulation to this plague in their now required “sensitivity” training for employees. The snappy message: “try to be less white.”
Now, what is a white person supposed to do with this information? How can one be other than what one is? Coca-Cola suggests being “less oppressive,” “less arrogant,” “less certain,” “less ignorant.” Whites should, instead, “listen” and “believe.” But this does little to clarify the situation. Listen to what? Believe what? Arrogant how? Oppressive how? “Be less certain” of what?
A normal person, somebody untutored in the sophisticated absurdity of our “elites,” readily recognizes that this is a message of hate, pure and simple. The plain meaning is obvious: there is something wrong with being white, whites are a class enemy, they are bad people.
The actual words in the expression “try to be less white” are not important. It is reducible to a simple command to obey. One could just as well say “stop being white” or “whites are not human” or “do what you are told, whitey.”
To say the truth aloud, however, is to give away the game. The critical pervasive myth of our time is that the Left desires equality. If this notion were seriously challenged, if enough people stopped believing it, their rule would become intolerable overnight, and their entire system of social control would start to collapse.
The Big Lie
We find ourselves in a curious situation. The most public, brazen racial hatred is put out into the world every single day by the Left, but it is never acknowledged. It must never be acknowledged for what it is.
Hatred must be disguised and repackaged as something else, something benign. The target is conscripted against his will in a movement for “justice” in which he is the enemy. That he himself is the enemy of justice is never far from the center of this new consciousness, in fact it is the entire reason he must be reeducated in the first place. But he is denied the right to protest his classification as enemy. His “programming” is for his own good.
He is, in this way, forced to pretend that he is not being attacked and becomes a participant in his own abasement. This strips him of all dignity and renders him totally defenseless. Defensiveness is considered a count against him, a sign of his “fragility.” If he is denied the right to acknowledge attacks on his honor, though, it can only be because he has been, in some way, reduced to something less than human.
Confronted with the most unmistakable hostility, it is his job to “listen” and “understand.” Sympathy for the tormentors is part of the torture.
The hatred directed his way is mystified and couched in a pretentious, fashionable language—a maze of nonsensical concepts with no fixed meaning, but which form their own dialect—a lingo that he must adopt to prove that he is human, in “good standing” with his rulers.
In this way, he is “enlightened” to understand the “proper” meaning of words and forced to participate in a lie.
While they may appear to use “white” as a slur, he is made to understand that this refers not to him personally, nor to any race, but rather to an abstraction: a social conspiracy of “whiteness” which must be “dismantled,” but which can never be precisely defined or identified.
Neither should he go asking for an explanation. He is not granted this privilege. His ignorance, rather, is another count against him. It shows that he is insensitive, that he has not been schooled properly, that he is not a true ally. Apropos of evidence, he is supposed to know what is meant by such nebulous terms as “white supremacy” and “systemic racism,” to acknowledge that they are real and encoded in the most mundane social interactions.
The problem is always conveniently a target that moves whenever they need it to. The case is different when their mood changes and the “construct” talk gives way to ethnic schadenfreude.
So, in a circular fashion, the indoctrination justifies itself. Critical race theory is remarkably impervious to criticism: failure to understand its propaganda as intended by the messenger, that is, as a benign call to make the world a better place, is considered a form of insolence or stupidity, to be rectified by training. You mean you don’t understand that racism against whites is impossible?
Defensiveness is likewise more evidence of the necessity of training. Suppose we changed “try to be less white” to the more candid, and honest expression, “whites are not human.” Rather than disown this, they would mock anyone who complained as displaying “white fragility” and deal with them accordingly.
The Enemy Within
This propaganda is now so pervasive, that any frustration with the obstinacy or ignorance of any holdouts is, one must admit, perfectly understandable.
The Left has cast such a pall of fear and lies over our culture that many Americans live in darkness as to its true intentions, and those who do not are too cowed by racial extortionists to speak the truth.
Others have fully adopted this assigned status of class enemy out of self-hatred and a perverse pride; they are puffed up with moral vanity and a desire to feel superior to their white (and non-white) neighbors. Especially if they are upper class, they wish to distinguish themselves from their working-class white counterparts. Fear of being “found out” as “racist” cannot be discounted here.
But there are a great many well-meaning whites who fail to grasp that there is no place for them in the future that the Left is building, i.e, that they are a class enemy, and that their good intentions mean nothing to those who see them as such. They imagine that a magnanimous liberalism is still out there, which prizes equality, tolerance, and the dignity of all. This is no longer the case, if it ever was. “Racism” is no longer something that can be rectified with enough goodwill and effort, because it is not about what you think and do, but who you are. If you are born a certain way, you carry a presumption of guilt with you that can never be erased.
The Left’s useful idiots—I am thinking chiefly of suburban, older whites who grew up in the pre-woke era and probably voted for Joe Biden—have not yet caught on to this, and they have not reckoned with the requisite price they must pay for their “whiteness.” It seems they have not considered the limitless rage that comes from seeing a certain race as having lived on the backs of the rest of the world for centuries. They are not simply expected to remain “aware” of their “unconscious bias” and “privilege,” as many seem to think. There will be a higher toll to pay.
How many Democratic Party voters understand the meaning of Biden’s watchword, “equity”—a term which by its novelty, signifies it has nothing to do with equality? Have they considered that they might have to sacrifice their own children’s educations in the name of this “equity?” That’s happening in Boston, where a program for gifted kids was canceled for being too white. In New York, parents of public school kids have been told to become “white traitors,” and betray their supposed white compatriots by actively dismantling “whiteness.”
“Equity” is not about equality, but just the opposite: hierarchy. In the new system, whites can be blamed for a seemingly infinite variety of crimes and evils, real and imagined. They are the reason for everything wrong in the world: not just familiar grievances about “colonialism” from centuries past, but even violent crimes happening today. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and leftist activists agree: the real culprits in a recent spate of vicious assaults and murders of elderly Asian Americans are not those individuals (mostly black men) responsible, but, you guessed it, white people.
The central teaching of critical race theory is totally alien to the equality of opportunity America is supposed to be about. Instead, a single race of people—whites—are a class enemy, a pathogen, who should feel ashamed for existing, and indeed must be erased for the good of society.
It’s a lie: all of it. But it will not simply disappear on its own, particularly not if Americans don’t muster the courage to call out the lies for what they are. Republican leaders, especially, have a moral obligation to respond to these calumnies and affirm the dignity of all Americans. Their failure to do so is an indictment of their leadership.