My new pet theory is that the people who own newspapers don’t actually know or interact regularly with people of color.
It would certainly explain why our largest and most powerful newsrooms have gone hard into the paint promoting “anti-racism” philosophy. Foisting this “anti-racist” trash on the public is what a clueless, out-of-touch news mogul would do, thinking all the while he’s serving groups that he has little, if any, personal connection.
Never mind that people of color largely have no idea what the “anti-racist” frauds feted and promoted by the U.S. media are talking about.
This is what you people like, right? I’m helping!
The Washington Post seems determined to outdo the New York Times’s error-riddled, “anti-racist” historical fiction known as the “1619 Project.” As a result, the newspaper released a video instructing white viewers to think of their “whiteness” and the ways they’ve benefited from “white supremacy.”
The video is not just stupid, replete with eye-rolling platitudes and incomprehensible psychobabble. It’s also evil. It is evil to think and talk about human beings this way, lumping them together like lab specimens into neatly organized subgroups categorized by skin color.
“What is white racial identity, and why is it important?” asks the Washington Post-produced video.
“When George Floyd died,” it adds, “people across the United States started to look more critically at how white supremacy affects all of us. In this episode, we talk to mental health experts and scholars about why understanding your whiteness and the ways that white supremacy benefits you is an important part of becoming self-aware.”
The video — which features “anti-racist” quacks Resmaa Menakem, Rebecca Toporek, Ilyse Kennedy, Kelsey Arias, and Washington Post staffers Nicole Ellis and Lindsey Sitz — encourages white viewers to join “accountability” groups to help them think about the ways their “whiteness” contributes to systemic racism, adding that “white people need to start getting together, specifically about race.”
Kennedy, who is white, complains she has had to revisit everything she thought she learned in school because everything she was taught was “completely through a white lens.”
“There’s a period of deep shame for being white,” she adds, explaining her process of re-learning the world through a non-white lens, and “that’s a very legitimate piece of this work.”
“We can’t ask people of color to hold our hands through the shame piece,” Kennedy said. “That needs to happen with other white people.”
But be careful, said Toporek, who is also white. There are natural problems with asking white people to hold themselves accountable for racism.
You see, she says, “White people don’t really understand racism.”
“There’s a different cost for my friends of color to be in a relationship with me,” she added.
This absurd Washington Post struggle session literally asks white people to live in a perpetual state of shame. It also asks white viewers to consider drastically limiting interactions with people of color because to do otherwise could be a burden to those most directly affected by racism. (Yes, according to white “anti-racists,” segregation is good now.)
It is anybody’s guess how anyone can seriously believe that self-loathing, self-segregation, and determining human worth based on skin color are good, healthy, and productive steps toward addressing systemic racism.
More seriously, the obvious problem with the video is that it is all so damn self-indulgent.
The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf sums up the problem with the Washington Post’s do-nothing approach to racism, which says the best approach is to look inwards and form “accountability” groups.
He notes correctly the people arguing “racism is structural, not personal” are the same people who say, “The answer is for white people to go on an introspective journey toward a racially essentialized self-understanding.”
Good luck squaring that circle.
“Is the war on drugs ‘structurally’ or ‘systemically’ racist?” he asks. “I think so. If you agree, please join those of us who’ve spent our adult lives pushing to end it instead of joining a ‘white accountability group’ because you think ‘doing the work’ means racialized self-reflection.”
He adds, “Do you think drone strikes or exclusionary zoning are structurally racist? Work toward ending them by assembling a coalition of opponents from diverse perspectives instead of insisting that the first step is for everyone to adopt your racecraft nonsense.”
But that would involve doing actual work. It would involve approaching and cooperating with people from outside our own racial subgroup. It’d involve strategy, compromise, and coordination. Why do that when you can sit back and publish videos calling for “white” shame?
The latter approach, pushing academic nonsense about “whiteness” and “accountability,” allows the people who own these newspapers to feel as if they’re doing something noble without doing anything at all. It’s the path of least resistance. It’s also the path one would expect from a person with very few interactions with actual people of color.
