Brett Kavanaugh’s real crime? He’s a white man

If you are obsessing over someone’s skin colour, you are probably a little bit racist

brett kavanaugh's real crime whiteness
Brett Kavanaugh speaks at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to be an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, USA, 27 September 2018. US President Donald J. Trump’s nominee to be a US Supreme Court associate justice Brett Kavanaugh is in a tumultuous confirmation process as multiple women have accused Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct.
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No one knows for sure if Brett Kavanaugh is guilty of assaulting Christine Blasey Ford 36 years ago. But there is one thing he is definitely guilty of: being white. It’s written all over his face. All over his Caucasian face. He has committed what social-justice warriors and race-obsessed liberals consider to be the great crime of our era: he was born white. And male too! He’s the bearer of two original sins — whiteness and maleness — and his haters will never stop reminding him, and us, of this fact.

The extent to which commentators…

No one knows for sure if Brett Kavanaugh is guilty of assaulting Christine Blasey Ford 36 years ago. But there is one thing he is definitely guilty of: being white. It’s written all over his face. All over his Caucasian face. He has committed what social-justice warriors and race-obsessed liberals consider to be the great crime of our era: he was born white. And male too! He’s the bearer of two original sins — whiteness and maleness — and his haters will never stop reminding him, and us, of this fact.

The extent to which commentators have focused on Kavanaugh’s skin colour has been extraordinary. He is representative of ‘white male anger’, said the New York Times. Kavanaugh’s angry responses to his grillers at the Judiciary Committee, who were deciding whether he should rise to the Supreme Court, was the ‘sound of privileged white male entitlement’, said a columnist for the New York Daily News. It was a ‘wretched display of white entitlement’ said a writer for the Washington Post. ‘No humility. No contrition. No humanity beyond his narrow interests’… this is how the ‘white man’ behaves under pressure, the WashPost writer says.

Kavanaugh had an ‘angry white man tantrum’, said actress America Ferrara, much to the delight of CNN. We are witnessing the ‘unleashing of a white male backlash’, said Vox. This elitist media handwringing over the psychologically disturbed white male and his inhuman selfishness echoes the fury that followed the election of Donald Trump. That vote was a ‘whitelash’, said one American commentator. Like Brexit, Trump’s victory was an act of ‘white supremacism’, said Polly Toynbee.

The attacks on Kavanaugh on the basis of his skin colour, a natural characteristic over which he has no control, confirms that whiteness has been well and truly pathologised. To be white today is to be suspect. It is to be privileged and entitled and, as a consequence, uncaring and possibly even hateful. The word ‘white’ is now entirely derogatory. If someone calls you a ‘white man’, make no mistake: they are saying you are a bad person. They are saying you are infected — infected with the disease of whiteness and all the personality disorders that entails.

Everything bad — or supposedly bad — is blamed on white men. Political life is being screwed up by the march of ‘angry white men’, says Bonnie Greer. We are heading towards ‘the white male version of the zombie apocalypse’, she claims.

The casualness with which an entire group of people is written off as angry and sociopathic and on occasion wretched is remarkable. It is testament to the rehabilitation of racial thinking in this era of identity politics. For all the ‘anti-racist’ posturing of many of today’s movers and shakers in the world of politics and opinion, in truth these people do not challenge the old, foul view of human beings as racial creatures — they reinforce it. They see everything in racial terms. To them, we are not complex individuals but racially determined beings, always acting out the backward tendencies bestowed upon us by our skin colour or gender.

Imagine if the things being said about white men in the era of Trump and Brexit were said about black men. Political life is being screwed over by ‘angry black men’. We all suffer as a consequence of ‘black male anger’. The election of black politicians is a ‘black-lash’. Society is sick of these ‘angry black man tantrums’. That would be awful, right? Well, saying these things about white men is no different. This, too, is riddled with racial thinking, with an ugly instinct to write off ethnic groups on the basis of the behaviour — or alleged behaviour — of a small minority.

Some will say: that’s how black men were spoken about for a long time. This is true. And that was terrible. But that idea that it is a victory for progress that these things are now said about white men rather than black men is bizarre — a sign of how the identitarian era doesn’t seek to overcome the nastiness of the old racist era but rather just to change the targets of our racist ire.

This is the bottom line: to attribute guilt to Kavanaugh on the basis that he is a white man is as wicked as it would be to see a black man on trial and say: ‘He’s definitely guilty. Look at him. He’s black.’ If you are obsessing over Kavanaugh’s skin colour, you are probably a little bit racist.