Soft White Supremacy

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Soft White Supremacy

By: James Taranto


As inevitably happens when the U.S. Supreme Court closes its term by deciding a case involving racial discrimination, white liberals are scorning Clarence Thomas for failing to conform to their expectations of how a black man should think. Among them is Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman, last seen trivializing the Holocaust in the name of global warmism:

A special shout-out to Clarence Thomas, who may embark on his annual road trip in his 40-foot motor home knowing that he's accomplished one life goal. The justice is now talked about even less in terms of race--less as the profligate successor to Thurgood Marshall than as a certified member of the court's right wing. Color him conservative. . . .

Thomas's psyche still intrigues those who search for the biography in his opinions. We know Thomas as a man who benefited from the affirmative action he scorns. He attended Holy Cross with a scholarship established for blacks after the death of Martin Luther King Jr. He was accepted to Yale Law School, where a program committed 10 percent of the seats to minorities. . . .

I have no doubt that Thomas sees himself as the victim of racism and the "racism lite" experienced by many black professionals tagged as "affirmative action babies." He's kept the pile of rejection letters received after graduating from law school. At his searing confirmation hearings, he froze the senators in their tracks by consciously describing himself as the victim of a "high-tech lynching." He also knows that many people questioned his credentials for the Supreme Court.

Let's focus on one of Goodman's tropes: "We know Thomas as a man who benefited from the affirmative action he scorns." Goodman implies, and others among his critics have stated directly, that because Thomas (purportedly) "benefited from affirmative action"--that is, from racial discrimination in favor of blacks--he is morally obliged to favor such discrimination, and to hold it constitutional.

Ellen Goodman is a person of pallor, and her bio tells us that she finished college in 1963, the year before the Civil Rights Act became law. Thus she is old enough (sorry, Ellen) to have benefited from discrimination because she is white. Would anyone suggest that therefore she is morally obliged to support discrimination in favor of whites? Of course not.

In the white liberal's worldview, if a white past beneficiary of discrimination favors racial equality or even discrimination against whites, that is an act of atonement or principle. But if a black past beneficiary of discrimination favors equality, white liberals view him as a traitor to his race. To put it another way, white liberals expect blacks to act out of self-interest based on race, while they expect whites to act altruistically. They attack blacks like Thomas who rise above racial self-interest--and they do so in explicitly racial terms--while faulting whites who fail to do so.

This may be the most invidious racial view to remain respectable in 21st century America. The idea that whites are on a higher moral plane than blacks is a form of white supremacy; and the attacks on Thomas and other blacks who embrace equality and reject racial self-interest are an attempt to keep black people in their place.

White liberals often claim that racism is everywhere, "just beneath the surface." Given the intensity with which they target blacks who reject liberal orthodoxy on race, one suspects they are telling the truth--about themselves.

 

Affirmative action should never ever have been adopted.

Racial discrimination can never be eliminated by creating more of it, as affirmative action did. Anyone should be able to recognize that simple fact.

 

Agreed, but here is one of the root problems:

"The fact is that, while they present themselves as the party that looks out for the interests of minorities and women, Democrats are only concerned about the plight of these constituencies if they are willing to toe the liberal line. Blacks and Hispanics and women who have ignored Democratic pleas to see themselves as victims and who have gone on to realize significant professional accomplishments and rise to positions of prominence through personal initiative are no longer representative of what the term "minority" has come to stand for in the Democrat lexicon."


Greg Lewis