Whiteness

Since the 1980s, conservatives have warned about the academic left’s “deconstruction” of Western culture. The fetishization of race and sex was shrinking our inheritance to a cartoonish morality play, they alleged. Academic identity politics would not stay put; its foundational conceits would migrate into the world at large. Such warnings had no effect. Corporations, law firms, banks, tech companies, publishers, museums, orchestras and theater troupes now routinely denounce the alleged racial oppression that is said to be endemic to the United States in particular, and to the West more broadly. Conservatives have responded in generalized terms: “The left is dividing us! It is betraying the ideal of judging people by the content of their character!

An op-ed in the Washington Post about the Canadian truckers’ protest tells us that the idea of freedom is “White” with a capital W and that the truckers’ belief in freedom is “a key component of White supremacy.” This is about as sensible as saying that the idea of gravity is “English” or that the Post reports the news. True, Newton’s apple fell in England and the Post looks like a newspaper, but gravity is universal. The same goes for stupidity, though that takes many forms, and for the impulse to be free, though that too takes many forms, some of them stupid. Taylor Dysart, the author of this insult to reason, is a white PhD student at private Ivy League university. Color me shocked.

As of Wednesday morning, Joe Biden seems to have the easiest path to victory in the presidential election. He currently holds leads in Arizona, Nevada, Michigan and Wisconsin with most of the remaining votes being mail-ins that should break in his favor. If Biden does pull it off, he may owe a big thank you to white men. Democrats claimed in 2016 that Trump’s shock victory was the result of white grievance politics. The President’s base, they said, was made up of white working-class voters railing against changing demographics in their country and getting payback for the country electing its first black president. Van Jones famously called it a ‘whitelash’.