https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/race-america-still-incoherent-bruce-thornton/
We recently witnessed yet more examples of how incoherently the “woke” establishment talks about “race.” This confusion and duplicity can be explained by the Left’s commitment to “any means necessary” as their most important tactic for increasing their power. But it also reflects the strange persistence of the old racialist categories that flourished during the age of Jim Crow and “scientific racism.”
First came the murder of eight people, six of them ethnic Asians, by a clearly insane, guilt-obsessed sex-addict. Despite confessing his motives and their corroboration by friends and family, the “woke” commissars instantly began blaming white “racism” against Asians fomented by Donald Trump and his “white supremacist” minions. This attack, the narrative continues, explains the “outbreak” of anti-Asian “hate crimes” first stirred up by Trump when he insisted on calling the current pandemic “Chinese.”
Of course, this is all blatantly preposterous. Identifying diseases by geographical origin goes back half a millennium to syphilis being called the “Italian disease.” In 1957-58 we had the “Asian Flu,” and in 1968 the “Hong Kong” pandemic. No record of a “breakout” of anti-Asian pogroms back then. As for “white supremacists,” a plurality of “hate crimes” against Asians are committed by blacks. Meanwhile, blatant institutional discrimination against Asian applicants to our most prestigious universities––a lawsuit was making its way to the Supreme Court until Biden’s DOJ tossed the case–– continues to punish Asians for being hard-working and disciplined.
Then quickly followed another mass shooting that killed ten. Once more the itchy twitter-fingers of the “woke” decried psychopathic “white males” as a dire threat to our health and safety. Turned out the perpetrator is from Syria, most likely Arabic. While critics of the hasty “woke” gloated over the blunder, most people seemingly didn’t notice that Arabs are Semites, and Semites are Caucasians just like Swedes. Or at least they used to be: identity politics has turned “Caucasian” into a synonym for people of European descent. As Muslims, alleged victims of “white” Western imperialism, Arabs are now “people of color.”
This is where the incoherence becomes obvious. Those old racial categories were always useless other than for legitimizing the reduction of people to vast, simplistic categories based on physical traits like the color of skin, the texture of hair, and the shape of the nose or eyes. In other words, they are truly racist concepts that in their heyday invidiously defined the world’s peoples and put them into hierarchical ranks.
