Should I Give Up on [Black] People?
The increasingly anti-white racist New York Times strikes again
by Alexander Zubatov
Here’s the latest bit of anti-white racist clickbait, courtesy of your frenemies at The New York Times:
It is written by someone who is billed as a “philosophy” professor at Emory University and who talks in his piece about teaching his students “to internalize something of what it means to practice philosophy, to love wisdom,” but this is disingenuous: even the most casual look at his faculty page reveals that, other than being listed within the “philosophy” department in his university, this guy isn’t out there teaching students anything as high-minded and respectable as Kantian transcendental idealism or the Hegelian dialectic or even anything that might be fairly characterized as “wisdom.” In fact, Prof. Yancy isn’t a philosopher at all, at least not in any conventional sense; rather, he’s a typical anti-white, cultural Marxist race hustler:
Here are his education and his research interests:
And here are his “Selected Publications,” virtually all of which are clearly and transparently about race issues:
Prof. Yancy’s area of interest, in other words, seems to be not philosophy itself, but rather, the (allegedly) racist practice of philosophy, the (allegedly) racist nature of America and the (allegedly) horrible nature of “whiteness” (whatever “whiteness” is). All of this might fit perfectly well in an African American Studies department or, at best, in a contemporary politicized university sociology department, but it really has not got much of anything to do with traditional philosophy, which he seems primarily interested in attacking.
The tall tale this “philosophy” professor tells readers in his new article is one in which he had previously published in The New York Times (on Christmas Eve, December 24, 2015) what he characterizes as a “letter of love,” entitled “Dear White America.” But his love, he tells us, went sadly unrequited by his letter’s mean white readers. To his shock, what he “had offered as a letter of love had unleashed the very opposite — a wave of white hatred and dehumanization.” He then describes some of the crests of that wave, ones in which some readers questioned his credentials as a “philosopher” (a perfectly legitimate line of inquiry, given what I’ve described above), and then pelleted him with racial slurs, taunts and threats. The rest of the article describes his emotional and intellectual reaction to these responses, leading him to his present “dilemma”: “ Do I give up on white people, on white America, or do I continue to fight for a better white America, despite the fact that my efforts continue to lead to forms of unspeakable white racist backlash?”
After plunging back down into more tales of “white racist hatred,” of which “America never seems to have short supply,” and telling us he is “convinced that America suffers from a pervasively malignant and malicious systemic illness — white racism,” Prof. Yancy then ends on a more hopeful note, presenting to us other responses he received from white masochists, those white readers who responded to him by regaling him in welcome spasms of self-flagellation: “I am a white liberal/ardent backer of civil rights, but as you say, also a racist. Godspeed, and thank you for helping to keep me honest”; “I have been living this past year with the growing understanding that my white privilege is toxic”; “I would like to offer you a gift in return: A commitment to fully accept the racism (and sexism) that is embedded in me, acknowledge the privilege that comes with having been born a white American, try my best to be educated about the suffering my racism and privilege causes others.”
All of this reeks of disingenuousness and hypocrisy. First, of course, Prof. Yancy’s earlier “letter of love” to white America was nothing of the sort … or, rather, it’s a letter of love in the same way and precisely to the same extent as an ex’s Dear-Ungrateful-Bastard-I-loved-you-and-you-ruined-it-all-so-f-ck-you! note might be characterized as “a love letter.” The letter to “white America,” available here, is an exercise in some very tough love, a point Prof. Yancy makes quite explicitly: “This letter is a gift for you. Bear in mind, though, that some gifts can be heavy to bear.” And, frankly, when he wrote it, he knew perfectly well he was going to get pummeled in response: “I give [my gift] freely, believing that many of you will throw the gift back in my face, saying that I wrongly accuse you, that I am too sensitive, that I’m a race hustler, and that I blame white people (you) for everything.” Yes, indeed. Having laid the groundwork, what he then gives us as his “gift” is what’s by now become a standard-issue litany of myopic racial essentialism and hateful anti-white shibboleths (trigger warning: the quotes from his “love letter” that follow are all extremely predictable, superficial, racist and stupid):
- “If you are white, and you are reading this letter, I ask that you don’t run to seek shelter from your own racism.”
- “Being neither a ‘good’ white person nor a liberal white person will get you off the proverbial hook.”
- “After all, it is painful to let go of your ‘white innocence,’ to use this letter as a mirror, one that refuses to show you what you want to see, one that demands that you look at the lies that you tell yourself so that you don’t feel the weight of responsibility for those who live under the yoke of whiteness, your whiteness.”
- “I’m asking for you to tarry, to linger, with the ways in which you perpetuate a racist society, the ways in which you are racist.”
- “I’m asking that you open yourself up; to speak to, to admit to, the racist poison that is inside of you.”
- “You may have never used the N-word in your life, you may hate the K.K.K., but that does not mean that you don’t harbor racism and benefit from racism. After all, you are part of a system that allows you to walk into stores where you are not followed, where you get to go for a bank loan and your skin does not count against you, where you don’t need to engage in ‘the talk’ that black people and people of color must tell their children when they are confronted by white police officers.”
- “As you reap comfort from being white, we suffer for being black and people of color. But your comfort is linked to our pain and suffering.”
- “White America, are you prepared to be at war with yourself, your white identity, your white power, your white privilege?”
After inundating us in this adolescent onslaught of animosity, Prof. Yancy then musters the temerity to tell us, “I’m asking for love in return for [this] gift.” Um … yeah.
Naturally, no one — and especially not someone with Prof. Yancy’s expertise and years of experience in stirring up racial animus — could genuinely be this tone-deaf, oblivious or flat-out silly. The “love letter” was plainly meant as a provocation, a finger poke in the eye deliberately calculated to shake the few genuine white racists that are out there out of the woodwork and to get them to come at Prof. Yancy with all the insults, slurs, taunts and threats they can muster. This would, then, provide a great opportunity for an even more angry and inflammatory “I told you so” article on Prof. Yancy’s part. I would venture to guess, in fact, that the follow-up article that is the occasion for his feigned surprise, grief and righteous indignation at the blowback he received was already planned out with malice aforethought from the beginning. This kind of stuff has been the anti-white race-baiter’s M.O. for awhile now. Here’s the step-by-step protocol from the official race-baiter’s handbook:
Step 1: Make a bunch of completely inflammatory and crazy racist generalizations about all white people that, ironically, accuse them of racism, while making the barest show of covering yourself by packaging your bigoted bitterness as some sort of feigned gesture of outreach.
Step 2: Sit back and wait for the blowback from some of the people you’ve tarred and pilloried.
Step 3: Dredge up the worst responses you can find, and say, see, that’s what I’m talking about, you white devils!
Step 4: Wait for an additional round of reactions.
Step 5: Repeat Steps 3 and 4 until you squeeze all the clicks and controversy you can out of it.
This kind of approach is a win-win for all involved. For a portfolio-building academic like George Yancy, it amasses exposure, prestige and credibility to his intended audience. For a once-successful, now-struggling publication like The New York Times, desperate to compete in a crowded and cutthroat media landscape with a shrinking profit margin, it stirs up controversy, collects clicks and ad revenue and builds cultural caché through virtue signalling to a certain subset of black racists, white masochists and others on the regressive identitarian rearguard. For white supremacists, they get to come in from the fringes of society, as their extremist views gain converts and their ranks swell due to once-non-racist white people, angered by the racist attack upon them, being sent hurtling into the open arms of the if-it’s-white-it’s-right whackos.
The one VERY BIG problem with this wonderful win-win-for-all is that, in the process, the self-fulfilling prophecy it instantiates makes our racial divide worse and worse. As I’ve demonstrated (and backed up with relevant numbers), this species of stirred-up racial animus is the kind of stuff that swings elections:
Eventually, it’ll lead us right into a (second) race war, if we’re not careful. But, heck, who can think long-term when we’re all having this much fun in the process, right?
And that, folks, is the story of how you get The New York Times compromising whatever small shreds of integrity it may have left and running awful clickbait pieces entitled, “Should I Give Up On White People?”
As for my own question, “Should I Give Up on Black People?”, my answer is no…because I refuse to play the game of intentionally judging people based on their race, but if self-promoting black racist trolls like “philosopher” George Yancy and profiteering white media corporations like The New York Times keep this up, eventually their credibility will bottom out, and then, they’re really going to have no choice but to give up on ever reaching any of us again.
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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, Times Higher Education, The Imaginative Conservative, Chronicles, The Independent Journal Review, Acculturated, PopMatters, The Hedgehog Review, Mercatornet, The Montreal Review, Republic Standard, The Fortnightly Review, New English Review, Culture Wars and nthposition.
He makes occasional, unscheduled appearances on Twitter (https://twitter.com/Zoobahtov).
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Originally published at republicstandard.com on April 20, 2018.
