So I started reading this column by Paul Craig Roberts explaining why “white privilege and white racism are hoaxes” and I began to feel a little woozy. Roberts’ leaps of logic were so strange and vertiginous I began to halfway wonder if someone had put something in my drink. Or in his.
More likely in his. The other inhabitants of my apartment don’t have opposable thumbs (they’re cats), so I don’t think they slipped me a mickey. No, the discombobulation I’m feeling right now must be coming from Robert’s article.
Let’s just go through it line by line and see if it affects you in the same way it affected me. Like so many far-right figures before him, he begins with a reference to The Matrix:
As part of the false reality that The Matrix has created for us, white people are privileged because of their skin. Allegedly, this privilege creates in white people the impression that they are superior to all others, and this makes them racists.
Not so much “allegedly”; that’s how it actually happens.
This dogma has become immune to all evidence. For example, when Americans elected Obama, who regards himself as black, President of the United States and then re-elected him, it passed unnoticed that these events disproved that the white majority is racist.
How does Obama’s election prove whites aren’t racist? Most white voters voted against Obama. And more than a few spread the rumor that he wasn’t even born in the US. Then there was the Tea Party and well, I think you’ve probably got the idea.
And what’s that bit about Obama “regarding” himself as black?
I have often wondered why Obama, who is half white and half black, chose to be regarded as a black person. This decision cost him “white privilege.”
What “decision?” What “choice?” The way race has historically worked in the US is that mixed black and white people are considered black. This isn’t something that Obama could have just overturned by declaring himself white. Had he done so, people wouldn’t have started recognizing him as white; they’d have dismissed him as a crank.
Obviously, Obama, a politician accustomed to considering what most improved his chances, decided that the advantage was in being black, not in being white.
Gosh, I guess it was lucky for him that he was black, according to America’s unwritten laws of race.
Now do you see why Roberts’ argument made me feel like I was taking crazy pills?
Obama is not the only mixed race person of note who decided being black was advantageous to being white. Lewis Hamilton is also half white, half black, and he also has chosen to be black rather than white.
Lewis Hamilton — in case, like me, you never heard of him before — is a Formula One racecar driver. This is what he looks like:
In our racial regime, people who look like this are considered black; they do not have the choice to identify as white.
Roberts points out that the black Hamilton makes more money from racing than his white team partner does. Of course, that might just be because, as Roberts acknowledges, he’s the better driver of the two. Then Roberts hedges this a little bit by noting that he’s also got the best car.
Why does Hamilton, who is 50% white and 50% black, identify as a black if there is white privilege?
If white people were racists, why do the white British Formula One fans cheer Hamilton so sincerely and delight in his wins?
Maybe because the racists in Formula One fandom are a little shy about being overtly racist in real life and would prefer to send Hamilton racist messages anonymsously online?
In other words, all this white racism stuff is poppycock. Go watch a deep South football or basketball game. 85-90% of the players are black, and the white fans cheer them wildly. How does this reconcile with white racism?
I don’t know, dude, how do you reconcile your argument with what happened to Colin Kaepernick after he took a knee during the national anthem?
Dear readers, if you’re already feeling a bit seasick because of Roberts’ weird lurches from topic to topic, brace yourselves because he’s about to make a big swerve.
You are not allowed to say so, but the same holds for National Socialist Germany according to documented facts presented in his histories by David Irving. The national socialists went through extensive debates as to how much of a Jew one had to be to be a Jew. Whatever the decision, Irving reports that there were 150,000 half or quarter Jews serving as officers in the Wehrmacht.
How do we reconcile this fact with the holocaust? We can’t, because no one is allowed to investigate or offer an opinion. The holocaust is unchallengeable. Europeans and Canadians who challenge it go to prison.
First off, David Irving is a holocaust denier who’s been found in court to have lied about history (in a libel case he brought against a critic and lost). Nothing he writes can be assumed to be true.
Second off, fuck you.
But it doesn’t really matter because Roberts quickly moves on to what he sees as the upcoming END OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION.
The situation in which the Western world lives is one in which reality is based on suppositions and ideological assertions, not on facts.
I’m not sure it’s your ideological opponents who are the ones light on facts.
Facts have become irrelevant in the Western world. Having rejected facts, Western civilization, which is based on facts, has repudiated itself.
It is this self-repudiation that signals the dissolution of Western civilization.
Well, it was fun while it lasted, huh?
Having already suggested that the Holocaust was a myth, Roberts might as well finish off his article with a reference to one of the top five most racist books of the 20th century. So he does.
As Jean Raspail made clear in 1973 in The Camp of the Saints, European Civilization only exists in its monuments.
What on earth does this even mean? What does it have to do with anything else you’ve been writing about? Are you really and literally high?
In the United States, allegedly a Christian country, no Christian symbols are permitted on public display at Easter and Christmas.
What are you talking about? You can publicly display all the Christmas or Easter crap you want to, just not on government property (and even there you can get away with it lot of the time.)
Also, the US is not “allegedly a Christian country.” It’s allegedly a country with separation between church amd state. Have you ever looked at the Constitution?
There is no such thing as a living civilization whose roots are dug up and cast away.
Whatever the fuck that means.
This was truly the worst LSD trip I’ve ever been on, minus the LSD.
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I read the Roberts article and had the same reaction: Does he really think people like Obama and Hamilton could choose to be white?
But I’m also concerned about the “un-human” screed posted by IQ84. Categorizing your opponents as sub- or non-humans is never acceptable. It has historically been used against BIPOC, immigrants, Jews, Muslims, gender non-conforming…really anyone who can be “othered.”
When one plants a garden full of healthy & beneficial plants, you also get destructive weeds that grow & kill them off. Every wise gardener knows the best way keep your garden healthy, is to dig those weeds out BY THE ROOTS & CAST THEM AWAY. (Don’t even put them on your compost pile – they may take root & continue to grow!)
Racism is the most poisonous & destructive weed in the garden of human society. It was planted in the soil of American democracy by the decision to treat an entire race of humans as slaves based solely on race, and to enable the economic prosperity of the wealthier classes of people. In order to justify treating a race of people as farm animals, the “Great Lie of the Inferiority of the Negro Race” had to be created. Laws may have made slavery illegal, but the “Great Lie” has lived on in too many hearts for the last 175 years.
How can white people be racist if they cheer for black sports stars and entertainers? JFHC.
I mean, this guy is writing at a middle-school level and using obviously debunked nonsense because he’s writing to the lowest-common-denominator; abject racists.
@Ten Bears: Might also be cocaine*, but I bow to your expertise. I don’t even like the way caffeine makes me feel, so I’ve never done uppers. I guess “his people” are more likely to do meth.**
But yeah. Not LSD, definitely stimulants.
*Powder, not crack, because he’s a Nazi, duh.
**Nazis were big on amphetamines.
I’m really not comfortable with language that dehumanizes these people and reduces them to sub-humans.
They’re NOT sub-human. They ARE us. I was like that once! My dad is a lifelong Republican, a MAGAhead, a pro-Jan-6er (nonattending), a dyed-in-the-wool Dittohead and his dad hosted an early chapter of the John Birch Society in his own home for meetings. Rumor has it one of my uncles was in the KKK. Mom is a perfectly submissive Christian woman. I was horrified to learn that about 6 generations ago, the family owned at least one household slave, who was a lady that did for the family what most “middle class” non-plantation folks liked having slaves for… cooking, raising the family kids, and household chores – as per the “Mammie” stereotype. I have no idea what her name was or whether I have any Black relatives, and no idea how to find out. EVERYTHING in my family makeup was in perfect place to raise me as yet another one of Those People in That Tradition, and I WAS…. but I got some perspective and I’ve been agnostic and slid leftward gradually since about 2004, landing on “hard left” (by American standards, so more like center-leftish) about 8 years ago. (Which is why I’m not very comfortable in my parents’ home, naturally.)
It’s critical to remember these people are human for proper perspective, and, importantly, HUMILITY. We have the same weak spots in our own psyche, and it’d be foolhardy to think we’re somehow superior and can’t be brainwashed or persuaded as easily as they can. If you’re white, and somehow not one of these people, the difference between you and them is some mixture of upbringing and life experience that amounts to chance, basically. There, but for the grace of whatever power I might hold dear, or even sheer dumb luck, go I.
I’m not saying they’re not lying intentionally – people can justify to themselves all kinds of horrible things… racism, greed beyond measure, corruption, mass murder, terrorism, insurrection… especially the ones that have a higher power they can conveniently credit with the same desires, preferences, likes and dislikes they have – but they are, most certainly, human… albeit paranoid and preoccupied with their own self-centered and myopic worldview.
I realize absolutely none of his arguments are in good faith, but it seems he believes unless every white person is a neo-nazi or a Klan member racism doesn’t exist. He has no room for implicit or systemic racism. Unless we fight to tear racism out by the root it will never be any better than it is today.
No one goes to jail in Canada for Holocaust denial. Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel was detained on a security certificate in 2003 for being a foreign national considered dangerous to national security. The validity of such security certificates is an obvious question, but Zundel wasn’t actually convicted of a crime. He was detained because he never obtained Canadian citizenship, and at the time of his detention had been gone from Canada long enough for his landed immigrant status to expire. The risk to national security assessment was made based on his connections to groups like the Aryan Nations and Neonazis like Christian Worch. Zundel was eventually deported to Germany.
Apparently Roberts has never heard of the concept of passing, where a person looks sufficiently white that their mixed heritage isn’t obvious. They are assumed to be white by those who encounter them, and hence avoid racism directed at those who aren’t white.
Kupo – That nym doesn’t ring any bells, unfortunately. I used to go by Twincats then (I think I did here for a while, too.) I spent most of my online time over at Shapely Prose. If you were there too, you know it was a huge commentariat, at least as large as Pharyngula was back then, with comment threads in the thousands not terribly uncommon.
Well, that was an exercise in incoherence. Basically, Roberts started by affirming several false premises, then got further away from reality the longer he continued writing. As for his point about Lewis Hamilton: many white racists have no problem enjoying the work of black athletes or entertainers — until they express opinions that racists don’t like.
Who needs a ‘mickey’ when you can spread toxoplasmosis?
Yes, (idiomatically only), fuck him.
Beside all your excellent points about racing and football fandom, consider that Romans cheered for gladiators. More generally, most racism has not been as eliminationist as the Nazis, who spoke among themselves at the highest level of how unfortunate it was that the Mischlings had too many Aryan relatives who might raise a stink, so that they would have to put-off murdering them (or, in an earlier draught, sending them to Madagascar) until after the war were won.
In any event, most racists have been just fine with members of inferior races’ existing strictly within their places. Some even will go so far as to insist that such may in fact be superior at inferior pursuits….
I came 2 this… i don’t know what to call it. It’s not commentary, analysis, opinion. It’s certainly not intelligent in any way. Let’s call it a piece of writing. I’ll start again.
I came 2 this piece of writing via a friend’s suggestion and it was clearly for a laugh. Who in their right mind spends time and money having a blog to clip parts of someone else’s work and swear every so often?
Bubby, mensa material you ain’t, more like a dog howling at the moon. Don’t quit ur day job.