Make Your Voice Heard: Tell the Elites You’ve Had Enough of Their Race-Baiting
Including My Draft Letter for You to Use to Tell Those Individuals, Institutions, Associations and Organizations to Stop Lecturing You and Keep Their Race-Baiting to Themselves
by Alexander Zubatov
If you have an e-mail address, in the past few weeks, you have likely been bombarded by e-mails from universities, schools, preschools, other organizations and corporations large and small telling you how concerned they are about “systemic racism,” how they stand with #BlackLivesMatter and how proactive they have been in taking action against the epidemics of “whiteness,” “white supremacy” and “white privilege” said to be plaguing the land. Each time I receive such an e-mail, if I have the time, I send off a quick rebuke to give the sender a piece of my mind. The essence of my message is that this is a complex, contentious and controversial political issue, as to which opinions diverge significantly, so that some technocrat buffoon working in the back office of We Make Woke Shoes, Inc. has no business sending out e-mails offering me his or her two cents … at least not if keeping the patronage of a massive proportion of the country that doesn’t agree with them is a priority. I’m going to suggest that you do the same, and below, I even have a draft for you to use if you don’t have the time to come up with one yourself.
Here, for example, is a message that I received today from the Yale alumni organization:
Now, granted that Yale is a pretty liberal place. While back when I graduated from there in 1997, it still could claim to have conferred some semblance of an education on students, today, under the cowardly leadership of its president, “Spineless” Peter Salovey, it is known primarily for creating an environment that enabled the infamous Yale shrieker, for being one of the first prominent institutions to capitulate to fragile students by erasing its own history and for capitulating again by dis-assembling its once-nation-leading English literature curriculum to cater to the slower students (likely admitted either as legacies, through affirmative action or via more or less legal variations on the “Varsity Blues” bribery scheme) who felt oppressed because dead white males like Chaucer, Spenser and Milton were a lot more complicated than the I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings-type middlebrow diversity lit they’d been schooled on. So, yeah, granted Yale is no longer a top-flight university and is now coasting on its reputation, but still, when you send out e-mails to alumni, you really ought to understand that there a lot of people on the receiving end of those e-mails who graduated from the place back when a Yale degree meant something and when the ability to engage in critical thinking (since replaced by ego stroking) was actually part of the package you got upon graduation. To say this another way, when you send out e-mails making outlandish claims about systemic racism, there are going to be Yale alumni who’ve looked into the issue with an open mind, applied those critical thinking skills they might still retain and learned that systemic racism is an overstated, politicized charade, largely a phenomenon that appears when every disproportionate outcome in society is reflexively mis-attributed to racism without too much thinking about what else there might that could’ve caused that issue to come about.
For example, here is an article I wrote some time ago to show with hard data — rather than anecdotal just-so-stories adorned by spurts of name-calling in a general penumbra of fuzzy thinking — that the entire narrative that cops are out there killing unarmed blacks is a big, fat lie:
Lest you think I am some sort of far-right-wing crank (I don’t even consider myself conservative, by the way, and have a broad spectrum of views that are all over the political map), here is a recent Wall Street Journal article from Manhattan Institute fellow Heather Mac Donald making some of the same points:
There are many more data-driven discussions of these issues where these came from, and you do not have to go seek out White Supremacy Daily to go find them. The long and short of it is that nearly every one of the individual phenomena that get called “systemic racism” have been either entirely empirically debunked or else shown to be a tiny, tiny part of the picture that’s manifesting as black people at the bottom of the socioeconomic totem pole in America. Go seek out the work of the prominent black Stanford economist Thomas Sowell for a good place to start in debunking the myths and lies that have been foisted upon you.
My goal here is not to convince you that I am right that systemic racism doesn’t exist (or hardly exists). If you really care about these issues, you should care enough to do the research to figure that out for yourself. What I do want to convince you of, however, is that these are controversial, complex issues that these various businesses, educational institutions, alumni associations, athletes and celebrities have no business opining on.
A recent survey found that, even with all the hoopla and political hysterics currently surrounding the #BlackLivesMatter movement, only 52% of Americans support the movement. That means 48% are of a different view. Among Republicans, 61% are opposed. I would wager any amount of money that even these numbers grossly overstate the actual support for #BlackLivesMatter. When businesses feel obliged to post #BlackLivesMatter signs in their windows just to avoid getting looted and vandalized while ordinary folks are getting fired from work for some Halloween costume they wore to a private party two years ago, it’s not hard to understand why individuals might be loath to tell pollsters how they really feel. This is the same issue that led to the massive screw-up by 2016 pollsters in underestimating support for Donald Trump and which, I am convinced, is leading to an even bigger distortion of presidential polling this time around.
But even if you believe that the polls on support for #BLM are exactly right, what it goes to show is that there’s a lot of disagreement in the country about this stuff right now. There’s a reason Tucker Carlson, the leading popular voice against #BlackLivesMatter at the moment, is the current prime-time ratings champion and winning the battle for hearts and minds concerning the campaign of organized terror that #BlackLivesMatter is waging against America:
If, by the way, you are curious about my own thoughts on the protests, they are here:
So given that the issue is a controversial one, why exactly is it that these organizations feel so at liberty to let us know how they feel? Clearly, the sentiment is being driven by a mis-perception that there is greater agreement than actually exists, but it also being driven by a deathly fear that if they do not speak out very strongly in favor of #BLM, the bullies will come after them next. As the race-baiting laughingstock weaklings at the Modern Poetry Foundation discovered, for instance, even if you endorse #BlackLivesMatter but don’t do so with sufficient enthusiasm, those big playground bullies might come after you and force you to try again, whereupon you still have to step down from your position:
So here’s the thing: we — the silent majority — need to speak up. Every time you get another one of those silly e-mails voicing support for #BLM or trying to lecture you about systemic racism, don’t sit there seething. RESPOND! Tell them how you feel. Tell them this is none of their business.
Politics ought to be left to politicians, whereas if you’re an uneducated jock who didn’t even go to college (LeBron James), an uneducated me-first, party-pooping jock known principally for using the platform his employer gave him to make incoherent political statements during working hours (Colin Kaepernick) or a self-promoting celebrity (fill in any one of hundreds of celebrity names here) who, frustrated by the lockdown keeping them from shopping splurges on Rodeo Drive, spends the time railing against the white privilege enjoyed by painkiller-addicted, pickup-truck driving coal miners in West Virginia, you really ought to keep your mouth shut. This is also the case if you’re a company whose primary mission in its life is to sell stuff or an educational institution or other organization that has a mission that has or should have nothing to do with race or racism.
The more of us who give voice to their thoughts, the more these types of elite louts will realize that they’d better think twice next time before they put their foot in it. For that reason, it’s critical that you not stay silent. So write them an e-mail to let them know how you feel. But if you’re feeling too lazy to compose it yourself, I’ll even save you the trouble. Here you go:
Dear [Fill in Cowardly, Ignorant Race-Baiter’s Name Here]:
Please note that your sentiments about what [we/you] believe or where [we/you] stand on the subject of contentious and controversial political issues that are currently roiling the nation are grossly inappropriate and do not express the views of many of your [customers/students/members, etc.].
The notion of “systemic racism” that serves as the premise for #BlackLivesMatter is one we hear about frequently nowadays, but it is one that is also the subject of a significant amount of empirically driven push-back from many sources, including by prominent figures like the African-American economist Thomas Sowell at Stanford University, the African-American economist Glenn Loury at Brown University or the Manhattan Institute fellow Heather Mac Donald, among many others.
While I would strongly advise you to educate yourself fully on these issues before sending out mass e-mails concerning them, at the very least, I would ask you to realize that these issues are very controversial. Even in the current political climate (in which many Americans are undoubtedly too intimidated to say what they actually think), a recent survey reveals that only 52% of Americans support #BlackLivesMatter, and 61% of Republicans are opposed to it. It is not your role to wade into such political controversies. Please stick to your primary mission, and do not send out communications that are certain to alienate many of your [customers, students, members, etc.]. Please think about these remarks, and next time, be a bit more circumspect in voicing your political views to a diverse political community.
Best regards.
[Fill in Your Name Here … or, at least, send from an anonymous e-mail account.]
There you go. I claim no copyright ownership over that letter, so go use it. Use it liberally. Make your voice heard. Don’t let the bullies win.
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Alexander Zubatov is a practicing attorney specializing in general commercial litigation. He is also a practicing writer specializing in general non-commercial poetry, fiction, drama, essays and polemics. In the words of one of his intellectual heroes, José Ortega y Gasset, biography is “a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.”
Some of his articles have appeared in The Federalist, Quillette, mises.org, Tablet, Times Higher Education, Areo Magazine, Public Discourse, The Imaginative Conservative, Chronicles, Front Porch Republic, The Independent Journal Review, Acculturated, PopMatters, The Hedgehog Review, Mercatornet, The Montreal Review, The Fortnightly Review, New English Review, Culture Wars and nthposition.
He makes occasional, unscheduled appearances on Twitter (https://twitter.com/Zoobahtov).
