David Marcus, at The Federalist, writes on how this election cycle has seen the end of the old rules about race and culture that have been in place for several generations; a racial détente that no longer holds due to the left’s inevitable tendency to overplay their hand and push the limits until they break.
These old rules, by which we used to play, have been overturned, not by conservatives or the election of Donald Trump, although he has perhaps been the most visible sign of the deterioration of the old rules. No, the rules were changed by the left in their never-ending search for more and greater victim status. The charge that every white person is automatically a racist due to “white privilege,” has caused many of those same white people to simply throw up their hands in frustration and say “to hell with you.”
Privilege theory and the concept of systemic racism dealt the death blow to the détente. In embracing these theories, minorities and progressives broke their essential rule, which was to not run around calling everyone a racist. As these theories took hold, every white person became a racist who must confess that racism and actively make amends. Yet if the white woman who teaches gender studies at Barnard with the Ben Shahn drawings in her office is a racist, what chance do the rest of have?
Within the past few years, as privilege theory took hold, many whites began to think that no matter what they did they would be called racist, because, in fact, that was happening. Previously there were rules. They shifted at times, but if adhered to they largely protected one from the charge of racism. It’s like the Morrissey lyric: “is evil just something you are, or something you do.” Under the détente, racism was something you did; under privilege theory it is something you are.
That shift, from carefully directed accusations of racism for direct actions to more general charges of unconscious racism, took away the carrot for whites. Worse, it led to a defensiveness and feeling of victimization that make today’s whites in many ways much more tribal than they were 30 years ago. White people are constantly told to examine their whiteness, not to think of themselves as racially neutral. That they did, but the result was not introspection that led to reconciliation, it was a decision that white people have just as much right to think of themselves as a special interest group as anyone else.
