Ed Brodow: White is a Color Too!

By Ed Brodow:

America has come a long way from my childhood on the issue of race. I remember visiting Florida as a boy and discovering separate drinking fountains at Woolworth’s: “white” and “colored.” That would be unthinkable today. In 1963, Dr. King suggested that people should be judged not by their skin color but by their character. The idea made sense and it became a part of the public consciousness. By 2008, it actually looked as though we had transcended America’s obsession with skin color.

Instead of signifying that we had arrived at the other end of the race issue, the election of a black president in 2008 set the country back 50 years. Obama’s actions in a series of controversial cases stoked the fires of racial discord. Race, says Rep. Mo Brooks, is the new campaign strategy of the Democratic Party—“divide Americans based on skin pigmentation and try to collect the votes of everybody who is a non-white on the basis that whites are discriminatory and the reason you are where you are in the economic ladder is because of racism.”

When the Left advocates diversity and social justice, they want people to be judged by the color of their skin. Under the aegis of identity politics, character becomes irrelevant. Instead of making everyone feel they are part of a unified American social structure, diversity plays into the leftist strategy of “divide and conquer.” The Left is achieving the “balkanization” of society, says Mark Levin in Ameritopia, “thereby stampeding them in one direction or another as necessary to collapse the existing society or rule over the new one.”

Diversity pretends to be inclusive. In reality, it is exclusionary. Diversity implies intolerance of Caucasians and males as it divides Americans between oppressors—heterosexual, white, Christian males—and victimized groups of women and minorities. “It is the old Marxist wine in new bottles,” says David Horowitz in Big Agenda, “and the results are bound to be similar.”

As explained by Colin Flaherty in Don’t Make the Black Kids Angry, racism is the current excuse being offered by the Democrats for the problems afflicting black America. “The ultimate excuse: White racism is everywhere. White racism is permanent. White racism explains everything.” The Left, says author Ben Shapiro, wants to portray America as “an incurable mass of bigoted whites.” The politically correct definition of racism is any criticism of protected classes of people. Evidence in support of the criticism doesn’t make it acceptable. According to the PC definition, I am a racist because I have the effrontery to criticize the behavior of minorities.

President Trump is not exempt. “Every tweet, policy decision, executive order and detail regarding the President, minute or otherwise, has been viewed in the context of race since he announced he was running for the nation's highest office in June of 2015,” Julio Rivera writes in Reactionary Times. “This unhealthy obsession with the race issue is and has always been a mechanism used by the left to win illogical arguments that have no basis in fact.”

The latest arrow in the race quiver is the designation, “people of color,” which is applied to everyone who is not white. Progressives, says David Horowitz, are using this politically correct term to “further isolate the white European American majority as an oppressor of everyone else.” If you are a person of color, you are exempt from accepted standards of behavior. Symone Sanders, a “woman of color” and advisor to both Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, has claimed that "we don't need white people leading the Democratic party right now." She is not accused of racism because the Left believes that only minorities can be the object of racism.

New York Times editorial board member Sarah Jeong, another “woman of color,” got away with tweeting “cancel white people,” “white men are bullshit,” and “dumbass f---ing white people.” Political commentator Bill O’Reilly said that Jeong’s tweets are consistent with the Times’ editorial philosophy that “white men have destroyed the country.” It comes as no surprise to anyone who has been watching current social trends.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib has attempted to use her status as a “woman of color” to excuse a series of anti-American and anti-Semitic statements. Tlaib criticized House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for “singling out women of color”—Tlaib and Reps. Omar, Ocasio-Cortez, and Pressley. Tlaib demands that Pelosi “acknowledge the fact that we are women of color, so when you do single us out, be aware of that and what you’re doing…because some of us are being singled out in many ways because of our backgrounds…” In other words, you can’t criticize people of color, period.

Fortunately, the R word no longer holds the kind of opprobrium that it did in the 1960s. The accusation of racism has been tossed around so carelessly that it no longer packs a punch. “Yesterday’s race-baiters were brutal white bullies,” says author Ben Shapiro. “Today’s are left-wingers invoking fictional white racism to achieve their goals.” The idea that white people are an inherently flawed group of oppressors is absurd on its face. The notion that blacks are victims of a racist society may have been true prior to the 1960s, but this is a half-century after the Civil Rights Movement. “White institutional racism has disappeared from our society,” explains Scott Greer in No Campus for White Men. “The oppression of black Americans is over with,” agreed African-American author Shelby Steele.

White America has been mostly passive about the blitz of anti-white rhetoric—perhaps because of white guilt, perhaps because of fear of violent reprisals, perhaps because so many people are uninformed. At the same time, “More whites have begun talking about themselves as a racially oppressed majority,” reports CNN. “In a widely publicized 2011 survey, white Americans said they suffer from racial discrimination more than blacks.” It is time to declare that white people are victimized by racism and ought to be designated as a special class. As a white person, I am appalled that white is not considered a color. Someone should explain to “people of color” that white is a color too.