It’s hard being a pundit these days. Not only does steadily advancing groupthink and fear of cancellation increasingly force you to copy the same takes as everybody else, but frequently those views are very dumb.
Take the riot at the Capitol. Some minatory cabal of Twitter, Facebook, Google, the Bilderberg Group, FEMA and the Jesuits has issued its secret decree to all news outlets: the rampage through the halls of Congress was the work of dastardly white supremacists! And the outlets oblige.
AP: ‘Years of white supremacy threats culminated in Capitol riots.’
Vox: ‘The Capitol riot is a reminder of the links between police and white supremacy’
New York Times: ‘America in 2021: Racial Progress in the South, a White Mob in the Capitol’
CNN: ‘The Capitol insurrection could be a bigger racial reckoning than the George Floyd protests’
New Yorker: ‘The Bitter Fruits of Trump’s White-Power Presidency’
OK, OK, we get the point.
But there’s a small problem. Somehow, on their way to launching a neo-fascist takeover of the United States, the white supremacists ran out of whites. Simply looking at video of the Capitol riot, or looking at the FBI’s wanted images afterwards, makes it obvious that the mob of Trump die-hards were multiracial. The two most famous members of the Proud Boys, America’s premier ‘white nationalist’ group, are an Afro-Cuban and a Samoan. ‘Stop the Steal’ organizer Ali Alexander identifies as black and Arab. And of course, there are November’s famous exit polls, which showed that Joe Biden was carried to the White House by improving on Hillary Clinton’s support with white voters, while faltering with Hispanics and blacks.
Yikes! When you read those facts a few too many times, you start to wonder: what if the white supremacists aren’t white supremacists? What if they’re just a sundry array of people with different political beliefs and a tragic, delusional belief in Donald Trump?
Uh oh. That won’t do. Too much of that and you’re at risk of having an unapproved thought. Too many of those and Amazon shuts off your website.
Fear not, though! The Washington Post is here to explain all the bad think away. Over the weekend, the paper ran a piece by NYU history professor Cristina Beltrán: ‘To understand Trump’s support, we must think in terms of multiracial Whiteness.’
Multiracial…whiteness? Aren’t those antonyms? Not at all, you fool. Beltrán explains: ‘Rooted in America’s ugly history of white supremacy, indigenous dispossession and anti-blackness, multiracial whiteness is an ideology invested in the unequal distribution of land, wealth, power and privilege — a form of hierarchy in which the standing of one section of the population is premised on the debasement of others. Multiracial whiteness reflects an understanding of whiteness as a political color and not simply a racial identity — a discriminatory worldview in which feelings of freedom and belonging are produced through the persecution and dehumanization of others.’
See? Sloppy reporting has left everyone tragically confused. When the Post calls Trump supporters white, it’s not talking about their actual skin color. It’s just calling them evil. But the path of unrighteousness is open to all. Beltrán warns that those born brown may fall to whiteness by embracing the evil path of…’colorblind individualism’.
But what of those born white? Beltrán offers them only one way to be free of the original sin on their souls: ‘America’s racial divide is not simply between Whites and non-Whites. Thinking in terms of multiracial whiteness helps us recognize that much of today’s political rift is a division between those who are drawn to and remain invested in a politics of whiteness and those who seek something better. We witnessed this very divide in Georgia, when a significant segment of White voters broke with Georgia’s White majority, joining a multiracial coalition that sent Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff to the US Senate, following the leadership of Black women whose organizing made that electoral victory possible.’
So that’s how you save your soul in 2021: vote for a Democrat, and cleanse yourself of whiteness. Good to know.
