The Internalized Racism of White Leftists By Daniel Greenfield
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/dgreenfield/the-internalized-racism-of-white-leftists/print/
After Rachel Dolezal graduated from Howard University, a historically black college that is 95% black [2] making it one of the least diverse schools in the country, she sued for racial discrimination alleging that she had been denied a teaching assistant position and financial aid because of her race.
She told her black adopted brother that the college had assumed she was black when she had applied.
According to her brother, “She used to tell us that teachers treated her differently than other people and a lot of them acted like they didn’t want her there.”
That experience might have made someone else racist, but Rachel Dolezal internalized the racism she experienced at Howard. And her brother states [3] that it was what led her to become “self-hating”.
After that, she started being “hateful to white people.”
The road from being hated to self-hatred and then to joining the hater group is the dynamic of racism.
The racism that Rachel Dolezal experienced at Howard created a conflict between her self-image and her political ideology. By trying to ‘become’ black, Rachel tried to destroy her image. She accepted the left’s idea that whiteness was evil and reconciled her sense of self with her politics by changing her race.
Her solution is implicit in the idea of white privilege. Like so many black women in another era, Rachel internalized the idea that there was something wrong with her race. It’s easy to poke fun at her absurd masquerade, but underneath the tanning lotion and wig is a more disturbing breakdown, not just in one woman’s mental state, but in the way that the left hijacked the civil rights movement to spread hate.
At the intersection of black racism and leftist politics is the dehumanization of white people.
To understand the process that could produce someone as screwed up as Rachel Dolezal, we need to look back at Jane Elliot; the wicked stepmother of diversity training. Elliot’s technique was to emotionally abuse students [4] in ways reminiscent of fringe cults and Soviet self-criticism sessions which break down an individual’s sense of identity by publicly attacking her sense of self.
Elliot’s infamous “Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes” technique involved separating people with blue eyes and emotionally abusing them to “cure” them of their racism. What “Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes” lacked in effectiveness, it more than made up for in malice. Jane Elliot’s racist child abuse was embraced by leftists and eventually became the keystone of diversity training.
In session after session, diversity trainers following [5] in Elliot’s violently hateful footsteps singled out blond and blue-eyed women for abuse in public. There’s no way to know if Rachel Dolezal ever attended one of those sessions. The incredibly non-diverse Howard University, bookended on the least diverse college rankings by two other black schools, would probably not have attracted Elliot or her pupils.
But Dolezal had almost certainly watched movies of Elliot’s racist antics and accepted her message.
And by then it didn’t matter. The idea that white people were the problem and that abusing them was justified in the service of tolerance and progress had become the essence of social justice.
Or as Jane Elliot put it, “white people invented racism.” Destroy white people and you destroy racism.
The “Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes” exercise is no longer just a way for a twisted woman to abuse others, but permeates every area of leftist politics and culture. Its underlying idea, that racial progress requires abusing white people informs everything from “white people” memes to White House policy.
The left gave moral sanction to black racism and then its own radical activists joined in the frenzy.
The insane place that Dolezal comes from is the same one in which progressive hipsters strive to outdo each other with “white people” memes that would be denounced as racist if targeted at any other group. It’s the one in which the only group it’s truly safe to make racist jokes about is white people. Much as black colorism targeted blackness, the white colorism of leftists makes whiteness into its target.
White people are encouraged to view “whiteness” with contempt and to leave it behind for “diversity.” In culture, the two are considered opposite poles with “white” being bad and “diverse” being good. Anything from the plays of Shakespeare [6] to a television show can be dismissed as bad for being “white.”
So far black people have yet to be cured of internalized racism (the doll test still tends to produce the same results) but some white people have internalized racism. Black children still choose the white doll, but adult products of the social justice system like Rachel Dolezal neurotically reject the white doll and then smash it into pieces on the floor while trying to smear bronzer on their faces.
And society is not any better off because there are now two races suffering from internalized racism.
The racism that Rachel Dolezal experienced did not lead to more tolerance because racism never cures racism; it only creates more racism. There have been white people like bandleader Johnny Otis who identified as black out of a love for black culture. But Otis’ enthusiastic “black by persuasion” had little in common with Dolezal’s twisted art filled with the racial fetishization of suffering black men and her own transformation into a caricature of a black woman while policing the racial identities of her students.
Rachel Dolezal’s blackness inhabited the left’s claustrophobic racial space in which white people are evil oppressors and black people are oppressed victims. Like Jane Elliot, Rachel Dolezal discovered that rejecting whiteness allowed her to do anything she liked in the name of social justice. Her newly acquired black skin privilege allowed her to endorse violence and fake hate crimes.
If good and evil were bound by color, then nothing she did as a white woman could be good and nothing that she did as a black woman could be bad. By switching race, she had transcended good and evil.
Her exposure only proved it.
As a black woman, Rachel Dolezal got away with faking hate crimes. It was only when she was exposed as a white woman that she got into trouble. It wasn’t the lying that was the problem. It was her race.
Rachel Dolezal’s attempt to physically pass for a black woman took internalized racism to an extreme, but the activist ranks of the left are filled with white men and women who talk much like her, delivering the same hateful rants about “white privilege” and justifying the #BlackLivesMatter race riots.
Internalized racism has become the engine of white leftism. Rachel Dolezal is diversity’s greatest triumph; a member of the “non-diverse” group who internalized racism so thoroughly that she tried to become black. Racism has gotten so bad that there are now white people passing as black people.
We can’t make progress by fighting racism with racism. Racial divisiveness isn’t civil rights. Under Obama, not only are race relations worse, but so is the economic status of black people. Abusing white people does not lift up black people. At best it creates freaks like Rachel Dolezal who hate white people so much that they begin wearing blackface while ranting about black power and white privilege.
Rachel Dolezal made many left-wingers uncomfortable because she embodied the absurdity of political correctness and the dark side of diversity. Her insane behavior is the outcome of an insane ideology. The social justice warriors rushing out their hot takes about her white privilege miss the central tragic point that her bizarre behavior was the logical outcome of their ideology taken to its inevitable extreme.
If the end result was insanity, that was because their racial ideology was insane.
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