https://www.city-journal.org/bigots-within-antiracist-ranks
Most Americans agree that racism in any form is abhorrent. But in recent weeks, far too many who call themselves “antiracists” have inflamed racial tensions with antiwhite bigotry that’s every bit as disgusting as what they claim to oppose. When will the antiracists start rooting out the bigots in their own ranks?
When Robert Long, a 21-year-old Georgia man, killed eight people, six of them Asian, at three spas on March 16, prominent figures on the left reflexively branded it an anti-Asian hate crime. In a piece for The Root titled, “Whiteness is a Pandemic,” Damon Young wrote after the Georgia killings, “Whiteness is a public health crisis. . . . It shortens life expectancies, it pollutes air . . . it devastates forests, it melts ice caps, it sparks (and funds) wars . . . and it kills people.”
There was a palpable sense of disappointment in the media when Georgia police threw cold water on the theory that Long was motivated by animus toward Asians. Many on the left stuck to this story against all evidence, pretending that statements by police and others who knew Long well must have been wrong. Days later, when early news leaked out of Boulder, Colorado that ten people were killed in a mass shooting, a CNN anchor rushed to assert that “another white male” appeared to be responsible. Meena Harris, a prominent lawyer and Vice President Kamala Harris’s niece, wrote in a now-deleted tweet, “Violent white men are the greatest terrorist threat to our country.”
The Nation published a piece by a woman who wrote, “One of the principal benefits of the pandemic is how I’ve been able to exclude racism and whiteness generally from my day-to-day life.” And how about the bizarre poem penned by the (Democratic) mayor of Charlottesville, Virginia, who lambasted her city as a place “anchored in white supremacy” that “rapes you” and “suffocates your hopes and dreams.”
When the Boulder assailant turned out to be a Syrian immigrant, progressives pivoted to their second favorite obsession after race: gun control, because every tragedy must be exploited to advance preferred narratives. Police shootings aren’t noteworthy unless the cop is white and the victim is black. The Oregonian all but acknowledged this recently after Portland police killed a white man, tweeting that it was identifying his race “in light of social unrest prompted by police shootings of Black people.”