After video
emerged
of five black police officers senselessly beating unarmed black man Tyre Nichols to death, many on the Left were quick to blame racism and white supremacy. It was a tragedy but not a hate crime.
Despite exactly zero white people being involved in the beating, CNN’s Van Jones
proposed
that Nichols’s death may “still have been driven by racism,” while the Atlantic’s Jamele Hill took it a step further,
claiming
that “the entire system of policing is based on white supremacist violence.”
Democratic politicians further advanced this narrative, with Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-FL)
adding
in a now-deleted tweet that it “doesn’t matter what color those police officers are … the murder of Tyre Nichols is anti-Black and the result of white supremacy.”
While the idea that white supremacy may have led to Nichols’s death is confounding, it’s not surprising to see prominent leftists take this position and insert race into a case where it does not belong, as scholars have been fanning the flames of racial division for years. Having covered leftist bias in academia for Campus Reform, I have documented numerous examples of professors paving the way for this notion to hit the mainstream, even working with the media to
influence
coverage of racial issues.
For instance, a Rutgers University professor
claimed
that George Floyd’s death was “an expected outcome of a world that thrives on and is organized around the transparency, privilege, and forgetfulness of whiteness.” Additionally, after a Jewish synagogue in Texas was held hostage by a Pakistani Muslim, one University of Pittsburgh law professor
described
the assailant as engaging in “white supremacy.”
The emerging idea that people of any race committing acts of injustice can be described as participating in white supremacy comes straight from critical whiteness studies, a subset of critical race theory that ascribes a litany of negative characteristics to “whiteness.”
The Washington Examiner previously
reported
on a viral Coca-Cola diversity training that encouraged employees to be “less white.” Ostensibly
inspired
by Robin DeAngelo’s “Be Less White” LinkedIn course, the lecture listed a number of ways employees could do just that: “Be less oppressive, be less arrogant, be less certain, be less defensive, be less ignorant, be more humble, listen, believe, break with apathy, break with white solidarity.”
With this idea of whiteness in mind, universities are able to get away with blatant racism under the guise of social justice. Here are just a few examples.
“Whiteness is based on delusion, produces suffering, and must be relinquished” was
declared
at an event held in partnership with many of the most prestigious universities in the world.
A University of California, Berkeley professor
went viral
after his comments from various lectures on whiteness surfaced on the internet, including that “to abolish whiteness is to abolish white people” and that “white people are born human,” but they are “abused” into becoming white.
Cornell University even
devoted
its annual Krieger Lecture in American Political Culture to the idea that America is “dying of whiteness” and that white people vote against their own interests out of sheer resentment toward minorities.
If whiteness is synonymous with all things evil, as the Left has proposed, then the police officers who brutalized Tyre Nichols were acting as white as it gets. But there’s nothing good or evil about whiteness, and blaming white supremacy for the actions of five individual black officers is abjectly absurd.
To say a person is acting “black” for engaging in some malign activity is rightfully deemed racist, and the Left would agree. In the same way, characterizing various unjust behaviors as “white” and claiming that a person is acting “white” when behaving that way is equally racist. Ascribing moral value to the color of one’s skin is antithetical to Martin Luther King Jr.’s plea to judge others not by “the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”
The ideas that start on campus spread to the “real world.” The ideology that inspired
black-only graduations
and
black-only dormitories
has resulted in
black-only theater performances
, lectures on how to be less white, and prominent figures blaming white supremacy for atrocities committed by nonwhite people.
Does that sound like MLK’s vision to you?
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Peter Cordi (
@PeterCordi
) is a contributor for the Washington Examiner.
