The woke obsession with whites as a Satanic collective has become a national fad. By Victor Davis Hanson.
When Martin Luther King, Jr. called for emphasizing the “content of our character” over “the color of our skin,” the subtext was “stop judging people as a faceless collective on the basis of their superficial appearance and instead look to them as individuals with unique characters.”
It is tragic that King’s plea for an integrated, assimilated society, in which race became incidental, not essential to our personas, has mostly been abandoned by the Left in favor of racial stereotyping, collective guilting, and scapegoating by race and gender. …
Woke — the religion of the mediocre demanding equal outcomes — hates talent and western civ, so it attacks “whiteness”:
The collective adjective and noun “white” now has also been redefined and mainstreamed as a pejorative to the point of banality.
“White” followed by a string of subsequent oppressive nouns — “rage,” “supremacy,” “privilege” — has become a twitch on campus. Diversity, equity, and inclusion deans and provosts cannot write a memo, issue a communique, or sign a directive without a reference to “white” something or other.
Like the mysterious omnipresence of transgenderism in popular culture, all of a sudden, the obsession with whites as a Satanic collective has become a national fad — a pet-rock or hula-hoop-like collective madness.
Don’t mention class, but instead tell lies about whites:
Class apparently now means nothing. Does the white mechanic in Provo supposedly think like the Pelosi family — as a fellow “white” person?
Are Barack Obama’s “clingers,” Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” and “irredeemables,” and Joe Biden’s “semi-fascists,” “Ultra-MAGAs,” “dregs,” and “chumps” all of the same mentality? Do they share the same values as those embraced by Hunter Biden, Jane Fonda, and Adam Schiff, by virtue of some mystical bonds of whiteness?
Where are the data to support the charge of imperious whiteness? Do so-called raging whites commit hate crimes in numbers greater than their demographics?
In fact, they are underrepresented.
Do purported whites hunt down people of color as if we are all living in 1920s rural Mississippi?
In fact, in relatively rare interracial violent crime, whites are up to 10 times more likely to be victims of black- or Hispanic-perpetrated violence than agents themselves of interracial assault.
Do white supremacists send poor people of color abroad, as often argued, to die in rich white men’s wars?
In fact, white males died in Iraq and Afghanistan at twice their numbers in the general population. Is that asymmetry proof of what Mark Milley and Lloyd Austin pontificated about in fixating on white privilege?
How do we adjudicate or define “proportionate representation”? What is disproportionate?
Would it be the more than 70 percent of African Americans in many professional sports at six times their percentages of the population? Or perhaps the current admission statistics of the incoming class at Stanford University, where the university boasts that just 22 percent of its 2026 class is so-called white?
Is it white privilege, rage, or supremacy that explains why seven of the current 25 cabinet and cabinet-level secretaries of the U.S. government are heterosexual white males? Does white privilege reveal why Asian Americans, on average, enjoy an annual median household income some $25,000 higher than their white counterparts?
Are whites, by virtue of their supposed privileged caste, immune from suicide? In fact, the so-called white suicide rate is more than double the rate of blacks and Hispanics.
Do supremacy and privilege explain why two-thirds of the annual opioid overdose deaths are among whites? …
Are privileged whites insisting on white-only college graduations? Perhaps they are demanding set-aside spaces on campuses, where they feel “safer” and can enjoy racial affinities and solidarity by excluding others? In fact, there are racially segregated spaces on campuses, but they tend to exclude whites. …
We are told that it is not safe for the diverse to be around white people, given their supposed violent proclivities. But that certainly seems not to be the case for our elites. The Obamas often lecture the country on housing discrimination and the historic efforts of whites to self-congregate and exclude. But the ex-president owns four expensive homes, in Kalorama D.C., Martha’s Vineyard, Hawaii, and Chicago. Yet he is least likely to reside in his richly diverse Chicago neighborhood and apparently feels more at home with the mostly white neighbors of his other three estates.
Indeed, some of the most severe critics of “white privilege” and “white rage” are themselves ensconced in white neighborhoods, such as the Duchess of Sussex or LeBron James. When Oprah Winfrey damns white supremacy in graduation speeches, is her subtext a snarl at her fellow billionaire neighbors in Montecito? …
What racism?
The dearth of actual racism also demands a new set of adjectives that serve as something like sophisticated detectors to discover otherwise invisible natural gas fumes. The adjective “systemic” means only the select can now spot racism. Like air, it is everywhere but invisible and thus requires battalions of diversity, equity, and inclusion inspectors to use their training to expose it in the common atmosphere.
“Microaggressions” exist as a tacit admission there are no aggressions as we commonly define them. …
The new Yugoslavia:
We are wasting trillions of dollars in capital, labor, and time in tribal cannibalism as our friends abroad watch in horror, and our enemies savor our decline into collective suicide — while we sink into debt, our cities turn medieval, our border disappears, our criminal justice system collapses, and our military chases its tail.
We know from history the ultimate destination of tribal chauvinism, and it is not pretty. Once a society retribalizes, it descends into a Hobbesian war of all against all. Everyone eventually seeks out or manufactures a tribal identity for self-protection. Tribalism operates on the principles of proliferation: if a neighboring nation goes nuclear, then everyone in the neighborhood must too.
Unless some passengers on our runaway train force our engineers to hit the brakes, we are headed over the cliff into Yugoslavia.
Starting in the US, and spreading across the world.
Offered a color blind society where individuals were free to compete on a roughly level playing field, some rejected it because they realized they preferred equality of outcome.
