Everything is White Supremacy Now

And apparently it's only endemic in America.

People march on the day of the release of a video showing the Memphis police beating of Tyre Nichols, at a protest in New York City, January 27, 2023. (Andrew Kelly | Reuters)

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Never let the facts get in the way of the narrative. That is the chief operating principle of the mainstream media. When the facts don’t fit the narrative, they figure out a way to fit the narrative to the facts.

Nowhere is this more obvious than the MSM’s treatment of race and the obsession with attributing all of society’s ills and shortcomings to white supremacy, a phrase that’s become so infinitely elastic that it’s been divested of real meaning.

Consider the most recent attacks on Ron DeSantis, who, in the words of Jen Rubin, has gone “full-blown white supremacist” after Florida rejected the College Board’s pilot Advanced Placement African American Studies course because it was tainted by critical race theory, which teaches that racial conflict is unending and irresolvable and reduces people to the color of their skin.

DeSantis was fully right to ask the College Board to make revisions. One of the proposed courses, for example, was “Black Queer Studies.”¹ The curriculum explains that this topic “explores the concept of queer color critique, grounded in Black feminism and intersectionality, as a Black studies lens that shifts sexuality studies towards racial analysis.” Forgive me, but why on earth should high school students be taught anything even remotely related to this esoteric woke BS?

It would be fine if students were exposed to critical race theory the way they might be exposed to Marxist philosophy or some other ideology. That’s not what’s happening though. Instead of a subject to be examined, critical race theory is being treated as a lens through which to do the examining.

The final framework for Florida’s AP African American Studies excised the ideology-laden units and replaced them with actual fact-based, apolitical history. But now that the College Board has pivoted back to common sense, far-left critics have dropped their masks. The Human Rights Campaign complained about the exclusion of the “names of major black writers and scholars associated with critical race theory.” The National Black Justice Coalition lamented that the College Board had “removed topics of critical race theory, Black Lives Matter, Black Feminism, and the Black LGBTQ+/Same Gender Loving (LGBTQ+/SGL) experience.”

Amazing. I’d say this qualifies as an example of the Law of Salutatory Contradiction: “That’s not happening and it’s good that it is.” The Left went from “they’re not teaching critical race theory!” to “how dare they not teach critical race theory!”

Mythinformed MKE @MythinformedMKE

Here is Critical Race Theory advocate Kimberlé Crenshaw admitting that the goal of Woke activists is to add “Intersectionality, Queer Theory and Black Lives Matter” to school curriculums.

What makes the braying about DeSantis being a white supremacist for “bullying” the College Board into making “anti-black” revisions all the more ridiculous is that his dissatisfaction with the ideology-infused history wasn’t even the reason for the changes. Straight from the New York Times:

David Coleman, the head of the College Board, said in an interview that the changes were all made for pedagogical reasons, not to bow to political pressure. “At the College Board, we can’t look to statements of political leaders,” he said. The changes, he said, came from “the input of professors” and “longstanding A.P. principles.”

Over and over again we see the MSM’s fetishistic relationship with “white supremacy” result in the shoehorning of complex events into crude narratives based on rigid racial hierarchies. When unable to do so, they simply move along to the next story.

Consider the two recent mass shootings that occurred in California. Both incidents involved an Asian American shooter killing other Asian Americans. After some initial excitement, the MSM quickly lost interest when it became clear that a white man couldn’t be blamed.² But that didn’t stop some ambitious woke journalists from trying to fit the narrative to the facts. An Asian-American “Wellness” reporter for USA Today wrote, “So yes, this time, the tragic shootings might not have been out of racism. But that doesn’t negate the constant harassment, violence and hatred we battle on a daily basis.”³ Michael Luo of the New Yorker immediately saw the “spectre of anti-Asian violence.”

I’ve been reliably informed that only white people can be racist,⁴ so the implication here is obviously that, though the shooters might have been Asian Americans, anti-Asian whiteness is to blame. Indeed, according to the Washington Post, when a non-white person does something terrible, it’s called “multiracial whiteness.”

Then we have the recent killing of Tyre Nichols. The five officers who attacked Nichols, who was black, were black themselves. They served in a department that is majority black, which is a result of a concerted and successful effort to recruit officers who look like Memphis’s majority black population. Even the police chief is black.⁵ But according to the Left, this tragedy is still an example of internalized white supremacy.

Representative Maxwell Alejandro Frost (D., Fla.) tweeted (and then deleted) this:

“If you think the Memphis police officers had to be white in order to exhibit anti-Blackness, you need to take that AP African American Studies course Ron DeSantis just banned,” former congressman Mondaire Jones explained. The Los Angeles Times ran an op-ed under the headline “What finally sunk me on the Memphis videos? Five Black officers’ embrace of racist depravity.” The Milwaukee Independent offered a blunt analysis of “How the Culture of White Supremacy Killed Tyre Nichols.”

For The Atlantic’s Jemele Hill, a race grifter whose stupidity has no precedence in the annals of planet Earth, the murderous cops were non-white people “carrying water” for whiteness:

I need so many people to understand this regarding Tyre Nichols. Several of the police officers who murdered Freddie Gray were Black. The entire system of policing is based on white supremacist violence. We see people under the boot of oppression carry its water all the time.⁶

The term “white supremacy” became woke jabberwocky long ago, a tool of political and social intimidation and manipulation, but if there were any doubts about this then surely they’ve been put to rest after these imbeciles rushed to blame the death of Tyre Nichols at the hands of five black cops on “white supremacy.”

Many arbiters of the national discourse continue to argue this theory despite it being bereft of any evidence at all.⁷ As they tell it, it’s because these five black cops received the same “training as white cops” and entered into a profession “born of anti-blackness,”⁸ which resulted in their minds being captured by white supremacy, as if this racial construct is capable of infesting one’s mind and soul.

It’s a neat little premise, the result of using a grossly oversimplified lens through which to understand police abuse and misconduct. It leaves no room for complexity or nuance. Not only that, but it is itself racist because it robs the five black cops in question — and, a priori, black people in general — of agency. Rather than individuals with unique histories and elaborate pathologies, the activist class uses a vaguely Marxian theoretical framework to reduce these men to passive hostages of forces beyond their control.

It simply isn’t very satisfying or consequential to say that a majority black police force with a black police chief had five black cops who were out of control and abusing their power,⁹ at least not compared with claiming, with all the righteous self-certainty of a religious zealot, that America was founded on racism and white supremacy, and that our nation’s rotted foundation must be rebuilt from the ground up on equity and “anti-racist” principles. And therein lies the reason the Left elevates race above all the other factors that might play into a police encounter gone wrong. The racial interpretation allows the Left to make a broader critique of American society and force wide-ranging political and social changes.

It should make you mad that they insist on flattening all the complexities and overlapping factors that might contribute to police misconduct so as to claim it wouldn’t happen if only more people would embrace faddish unfalsifiable postmodern claptrap such as critical race theory in our schools and institutions. You are being sold a bill of goods.

It’s one thing to remain cognizant of racism’s enduring effects in society. It’s another thing entirely to insist that people see the world through a neo-Marxist lens in which race is an inescapable social construct pivoting groups against one another in a state of permanent, zero-sum warfare. That is the very definition of toxic. A society that, if not colorblind, can at least see past color is being jeopardized by progressives who apparently can see only color. The promise of America lies in escaping the narrow prisms of race and identity, not being permanently trapped by them.

1. Another: “Intersectionality and Activism.” A leaked copy of the syllabus shows that the course clearly proselytizes for a “socialist transformation.”

2. Contrast this with the Atlanta spa shooting a couple of years ago. The shooter, a white male, explicitly stated that he was motivated by a combination of religious beliefs and a sex addiction, yet over and over and over again the mainstream media claimed it was an anti-Asian hate crime. And the media frenzy lasted weeks.

3. “…might not have been…”

4. This is a key WoQaeda belief.

5. The Washington Post says this dichotomy has inspired “complex grappling” among activists who are often quick to cite racial disparities to explain episodes of police violence. I believe that’s called cognitive dissonance.

6. Andrew Sullivan points out that this is strongly reminiscent of the moment author Ta-Nehisi Coates saw “the true depths of white evil, when a black cop killed a black friend.” Coates explained the real culprit: “The Dream of acting white, of talking white, of being white, murdered Prince Jones as sure as it murders black people in Chicago with frightening regularity.”

7. Three of the officers involved are part of the pro-black African-American men’s fraternity Omega Psi Phi—the “Que Dogs.” Not very white supremacist-like.

8. A defamation predicated on the dubious claim that American police forces were created to enforce chattel slavery. Worth pointing out that the first American police departments were in fact all located in the North, and many of these first northern policemen targeted Irishmen more than members of any other group. Hence “paddy wagons.”

9. A “rumor” substantiated enough to be presented as an actual article in Newsweek indicates that the vicious nature of Nichols’s beating may have resulted from a personal conflict. The Memphis Police Department has launched a formal inquest into claims that Nichols may have been involved in a romantic relationship with the ex-wife or ex-girlfriend of one of the officers. In other words, some of these cops may have had “beef” with him.