Eeyore’s Cabinet: The Paradoxes of Woke Racism

Victor Davis Hanson // Private Papers

Part One

Here are the first three of five observations about our current woke racial mania.

1. Are the non-white elite in government, universities, entertainment, and the corporate world who rail about “whiteness,” “systemic racism,” and pathological “whites” in general mostly referring to their own elite white colleagues? Are not they doppelgangers of the same class without knowing much about so-called white, working-class America outside their own enclaves?
   
   The social media crowd of Silicon Valley, the university administrative cadre, the corporate boardroom grandees, and the thousands of neurotic Hollywood elites are not exactly fond of the two-thirds of white America precisely because they feel their money, privilege, and zip codes exempt them from the consequences of their loud nihilist advocacies they are so eager to impose on others. In other words, is not most of the current racial war the infighting of those of the same class who agree in theory they are on the same side, but in the concrete don’t like each other much, as both claw for similar spoils?
   
   Does not a Don Lemon or LeBron James privately believe that many so-called “whites” are similar to the CNN crowd they hang with, or the basketball corporate apparat? Do the elite non-white who fuel the war against “whiteness” mostly dislike, envy, fear, or compete with their own white mirror-images? I think a Van Jones has far more in common with Brian Selter than does half the white people in the country. In terms of class, do middle-class blacks especially identify with the multi-homed BLM head Patrisse Marie Khan-Cullors Brignac or 1619 promulgator Hannah Nikole-Jones? Do working class whites seek solidarity with Bill Gates, Dr. Fauci, or Steven Colbert?
   
   
2. We still have not received any systematic exegesis why the non-white are pouring into a country whose racism, they are warned by our current cultural and political elites, defines America. Why would the Squad or the Biden clique want two-million foreign citizens in the current twelve-month period to cross the border and thus suffer the terrible wages of racism? 
   
   Either one of three things surely must be true: 1) either the Left doesn’t really believe the country is racist, and so assumes illegal aliens don’t either; 2) or if they do believe it, and if illegal aliens believe it, then they feel legions of angry new recruits are being prepped for the holistic cultural, race, ethnic, and gender take-over to come; 3) or the more they claim America is racist, the more their opponents will compromise and let in more illegal immigrants to prove they are not racist. 
   
   
3. Since the writs against “whiteness” are detailed and nearly endless, and since the prosecutorial case is conducted in starkly racial terms, will there be a defense in kind? I mean if a sometimes New York Times contributor Mr. Damon Young lists all the reasons whites have destroyed life on this planet (and thus deserve what exactly?) or a Dr. Aruna Khilanani damns all white people as sick and pathological liars and fantasizes of shooting them (as opposed to the Bernard professor who dreams of gassing them), will the people they despise and wish eliminated offer a defense in similar stereotypical and generalized terms? That is, would America unwind in the manner common throughout history, when tribes go full tribal? Would the white counter-defense appear something like calibrating the white percentage of the population and then scanning data tables to see whether such a mythical group is under- or over-represented in various good and bad categories: combat deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq? Violent crimes? Homicides? Victims or victimizers in interracial crimes? Nobel Prize winners? DUIs? Do we really wish to go down this road, where each tribe tries its case before other tribes? 
   
   One can see where this racism is going, for if there is such a thing as whiteness that characterizes all 230 million Americans, as seems to have been alleged nonstop since June of last year, then there is a commensurate “brownness” or “blackness” that is to be on similar grounds defined by the sum total of its purported demerits? Is that the logic of tribalism on the horizon?
   
   In sum, why do nonwhite racists think they are not racists, 60 years after the Civil Rights movement? Why do they think it is in their interest to establish the principle that it is perfectly fine to categorize, systematize, stereotype, and generalize about tens of millions on the basis of their skin color, and why do they think that in a multiracial democracy their own protocols and tropes won’t boomerang on them?