‘People of Color’ are ‘Mascots’ for the Global Elites It’s all about class status and superiority. by Bruce Thornton
https://www.frontpagemag.com/people-of-color-are-mascots-for-the-global-elites/
During the World Economic Forum’s annual conclave of plutocrats last week, the attendees enjoyed an exotic display of indigenous culture and their own virtue signaling of their love for “diversity.” The Catholic News Agency reports, “as part of a plenary session on Wednesday titled ‘Climate and Nature: A Systemic Response Is Needed,’ Chieftess Putanny Yawanawá of the Amazonian Yawanawá tribe . . . performed a shamanic rite.” Resplendent in her tribal garb and face-paint, she stood close to each of the several panel members’ faces, coughed, then blew on their foreheads.
This show captured perfectly the condescending, patronizing attitude of the DEI mentality of the progressive left, who make the world’s real diversity into occasions for cultural slumming, and preening their superior cosmopolitan “tolerance,” at the expense of the POC’s full, complex humanity.
Such displays have for decades characterized the progressive left’s treatment of what they now call “people of color,” that superficial, vague category that simplifies, idealizes, homogenizes, and politicizes the world’s vast, intricate ethnic diversity by turning them into “mascots,” as Thomas Sowell put it in his 1995 book The Vision of the Anointed. These symbols of the cognitive elite’s lofty virtue and sensitivity are celebrated at the same time Western elites promote energy policies that make it harder for developing nations to improve their lives.
Idealizing the exotic “other,” particularly by peoples who are technologically and civilizationally more sophisticated and advanced, goes back to antiquity. The Greeks idealized the barbarian Scythians to their north, and the imperial Romans extolled the Germanic tribes east of the Rhine, usually in order to contrast Greek or Roman decadence and corruption, with the simple, hardy lives of formidable tribal warriors.
These are the roots of the “noble savage” trope, which in the Age of Discovery frequently typified the indigenes of the New World––“guiltless men, that danced away their time/Fresh as their groves, and happy as their climes,” as the 17th century British poet John Dryden, who invented the phrase, called them.
Then too, these noble savages were usually wielded as sticks for beating Western civilization’s crimes, corruption, and vices, especially its self-imposed exile from the natural world. French essayist Michel de Montaigne’s famous essay “Of Cannibals” (1580) argued that the indigenes’ wild savagery and barbarism reflected their close connection to nature: “it is those that we have changed artificially and led astray from the natural ‘wildness’ that we should rather call ‘wild.’” The Indians live in a “state of purity,” with a “naturalness so pure and simple,” free of all the alienating sins of European civilization such as private property, laws, trade, wealth, crime, war, corruption, and vice.
These cultural and literary ideals have had a powerful influence on the West. In the postwar world, they informed the decolonialization movement, which was directed by the Soviet Union to extend communism’s global influence. Europe’s working class may have failed to play its part in Marx’s “scientific history,” but fashionable Third-Worldism among Western leftists made Europe’s colonies the new sites of the Marxist revolution, “where the concentration of contradictions,” as Leszek Kolakowski wrote, “was greatest, i.e. on the fringe of the capitalist world, in backward, colonial, or semi-colonial countries.” As Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in the introduction to Franz Fanon’s influential The Wretched of the Earth, “Natives of all the underdeveloped countries unite!”
This rewriting of the Marxist script, moreover, exploited the earlier “noble savage” cultural tropes and idealizations of the dark-skinned “other,” who now became the vanguard of socialist history. It also fueled the cult of non-white “diversity,” influenced lax immigration policies, and stoked the West’s suicidal self-loathing obvious in the West’s foreign policy of permeable borders, retreat, and appeasement.
Moreover, such policies are predicated on the doctrine that “every Westerner,” as Pascal Bruckner writes in Tears of the White Man, “is presumed guilty until proven innocent,” for we Westerners “have been raised to detest ourselves, certain that, within our world, there is a certain essential evil that must relentlessly be atoned for”––imperialism and colonialism.
Finally, with the help of Cultural Marxism and propagandists like Howard Zinn, black Americans were now treated as an “internal colonized” people whose freedom and rights, like those of other colonials, would come not from Martin Luther King’s non-violent protest founded on Christian doctrine and the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, but from violent revolution and subversion.
Hence the budding black identity movement was hijacked by Marxism’s legitimizing of violence. And added to the sins of the “white man” was the “systemic racism” which, like colonialism, had vitiated the American Founding, and still today lurks within every white person––a textbook definition of real racism.
American blacks also became the “noble savages” of our times, as can be seen in Norman Mailer’s objectively racist 1957 essay “The White Negro.” For Mailer, the nobility of the “savage” comes from his instinctual passions and appetites, a notion that once underlay the vicious smears of actual racists. And the same disdain for civilization that Montaigne expressed also reappears: given America’s “bourgeoise conformity and depression,” only the black man or his white imitators can escape this capitalist prison and find an authentic and meaningful existence as a “rebel. . . a frontiersman in the Wild West of American nightlife.”
Moreover, because of inveterate violent racism, the black man “has stayed alive and begun to grow by following the needs of his body where he could . . . and could rarely afford the sophisticated inhibitions of civilization.” Thus he “lived in an enormous present” and “subsisted for his Saturday night kicks, relinquishing all the pleasures of the mind for the obligatory pleasures of the body.” I’m old enough to remember when racists called all those vicious stereotypes “jungle instincts,” one of the many racial slurs that justified Jim Crow segregation.
This pattern of building identity on historical grievances has come to define all self-styled liberationist identity politics, whether based on ethnicity, sex, or sexual practices. These are the politically favored identities that have been historically victimized by “white males,” the “cancer of history,” as Susan Sontag wrote. Even affluent, government sanctioned victims are allowed to leverage their historical grievances for greater privilege and power.
So we have an absurd spectacle like the disgraced president of Harvard, a consummate academic mediocrity from a wealthy Haitian family, who blames “racism” for her fall, while still drawing her nearly $1 million salary, and movie producers are offering her $15 million for the rights to tell her story.
Meanwhile, the black working-class struggles, while the underclass is trapped in a malign nexus of addiction, broken families, and gang violence, all serially ignored by our “woke” cognitive elites and the regime media.
No good has ever come from reducing human beings into “mascots” of one’s virtue or hatred. Stripping people of their agency and individualism, which is to say their human dignity and freedom, has always been the predicate for inhumanity, from the sex slavery and forced labor on our southern border, to the genocide and terror of the left’s “mascot” Hamas’ savage attack on Israel––all the while the global elites revel in their superior virtue as they stroke their “mascot” clients.
In the end, it’s all about class status and superiority. For as the African proverb has it, “The hand that gives is always above the hand that receives.”
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