Irina Zhezhko-Braun | Remaking the American elite Intellectual elite gone with the wind of protests
When did today’s revolution start?
The protests, which began in connection with the death in detention of black George Floyd, continue to this day in many major US cities. A number of analysts already call this situation a social revolution.
Analysts deduce the causes and triggers of modern protests in the United States either from a very long history (the history of black slavery, protestant ethics, and so on), or from the newest (Covid-19, quarantine, the murder of blacks, including Floyd, by the police). Meanwhile, the roots of today’s revolution lie in the “new” history, in particular, in the many years of preparation for the revolution in America, namely, training personnel and social technologies developed for it, creating financial, informational and organizational infrastructures, preaching the idea of revolution and protests in schools and colleges, and fostering tolerance in society to the idea of “justified” violence in the name of “social justice” and the social democratic future.
The death of Floyd while being detained by the police, however tragic it was, cannot fully explain the enormous scale of the protests. Modern protests, ignited by several sparks, turned into a fire of revolution due to the fact that “firewood” and arsonists were prepared for them in advance, namely, that these protests are based on the life support system of the revolution, which has been created in the United States for decades.
The revolution in the United States did not begin on the day of Floyd’s death and not with the massive demolition of historical monuments, renaming of streets, schools, universities and military bases; editing the famous movie Gone with the Wind; it has been cooking in the country for at least 70 years. It was not recognized not only in Russia, but also in the United States. Many authors mistake the current protests for revolution, but the opposite is true: protests are a direct consequence and one of the stages of a step-by-step (incremental) revolution, which is so slow that it is hardly noticed.
Professional cadres for this revolution – social organizers – have been trained in America since the middle of the twentieth century. And it is not I who call them revolutionaries, the founder of this movement, Saul Alinsky, called them that. His book, Reveille for Radicals (1946) [iii] was the first, but not the last, textbook for revolutionaries. It was originally named by the author Rules for Revolutionaries, but then this title was not palatable and was not accepted by the publishing house. Since then, hundreds of books have been published in America to develop Alinsky’s ideas and practices, numerous centers for the training of social organizers have been created, hundreds of protest movements of various sizes and molds have been organized and dozens of headquarters and front groups have been formed or, more precisely, professional protest organizations (PPO) with solid budgets, their own media and websites and staff on salaries.
You don’t have to look far for examples of such organizations: Black Lives Matter (BLM), founded in 2013, is just one of them, a centaur – an organization-movement. This organization has recently become a corporation and has about a $ 1.5 billion account. They did not earn a cent from this amount; these are all donations from the “woke” capitalists. If you look at Wikipedia, BLM has its own program, strategy and tactics, its own Internet presence and social media. They participated for the 2016 presidential elections and are going to do the same in 2020. They have their own staff that appears on television programs, and of course a decent budget for visual propaganda, maintaining websites and media, as well as for arranging political campaigns. Move.on and other on-line organizing centers are other examples of PPO. They all have their own agenda and their own army for protests. As indicated by several sources [iv, xviii], the huge masses, led to street protests in May-July 2020, are organized by PPOs using the technologies described in books about “color” revolutions [xxiv]. The list of these PPOs is quite long and among them black organizations make up only a small fraction. People outside the United States, especially in Russia, learned about protest technology much earlier than the general public. Handbooks on how to organize street protests written for overseas have now come in handy for the American PPOs [xxv].
Protestant elite died long ago
Arkady Nedel mentions “Protestant masochism” as the reason for white support of BLM [i, ii]. What religious Protestants in the 21st century is he talking about? We have lived in a completely different for quite a while. The Protestant elite (or its upper class), as described by I. Digby Balzel [v], Richard Hernstein and Charles Murray [vi], has long been replaced by the intellectual (cognitive) elite, or meritocracy, which is mostly non-religious and professes completely different values. Its origin and ethos are popularly described in the book “Bobo in Paradise” by David Brooks (first edition – 2000, Russian translation – 2013) [vii].
The end of the Protestant elite and the beginning (inception) of the American intellectual elite can be counted from the decision of the admissions committee of Harvard University to increase the admission scores in the tests of academic abilities (a precursor of SAT) [vii]. University President James Conant decided to end the admission of young people by hereditary characteristics (namely, WASP – mainly students of private schools and children of parents who graduated from Harvard or other Ivy League schools), and begin to accept according to their cognitive abilities (merits). Up to this point, the average passing score at Ivy League universities was around 500. By 1960, the Harvard passing score on the oral test had risen to 678 and on the math test to 695. The Protestant elite ruined themselves with the best of intentions. Universities and the education system as a whole have demonstrated that they can not only reproduce, but also remake elites. So in American society, an attempt was made to create a new class – meritocracy, which eventually ousted the Protestant (WASP) aristocracy from politics [xxvi].
The new elite, having risen to their feet and filled the corridors of power, universities and business, gave birth to a new social phenomenon, the so-called “woke capitalism”. This term was first introduced into the political lexicon by Ross Douthat [viii]. According to Wikipedia, it derives from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke”, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues. By woke capitalism, Douthat understands the growing wave of social activity of business companies and their owners (corporate activism), including social networks, many of which have their own socio-political philosophy and put it into practice. “Woke” corporate activist groups support leftist movements such as the BLM, #MeToo movement, intersectional feminism, LGBTQ and gun rights restrictions, etc. The “woke” elite adopted the doctrine of identity, namely that a person is completely determined by his skin color, gender and sexual preferences. Adherence to this doctrine has become the driving force behind protests not only in America, but in many countries of Western civilization.
The new elite not only left in action the affirmative action policies (AAP), originally designed to create a temporary social channel (bypass) for ethnic minorities, but also extended it to the female half of the population, which, strictly speaking, is not a minority, as well as to those social minorities, which share its agenda. AAP has also implicitly penetrated into the spheres of social and artistic life, where before the progress on the social ladder depended solely on personal merits, talents and performance, and not on skin color or gender. For example, in recent years, American Film Academy awards and pay-TV movie channel schedules include skin color and sex (gender) “quotas”.
The history of replacing the American elite unexpectedly repeated itself in the 21st century. Having embarked on the path of “woke capitalism,” the intellectual elite, like the Protestant one before, has undermined itself and is living out its last days. And just like the first time, it all started with tests in US educational institutions.
Changing of the Guard
In virtually all tests that demonstrate vocabulary, math, and other intellectual abilities, according to several academic studies, African-Americans, on average, are inferior to at least 200 points to immigrants from Europe and Asia [v, ix, x]. In order to provide easier access for African Americans and a number of other minorities who did not meet the required minimum to higher education institutions in accordance with the AAP, many of them decided not to consider test results as the main criterion for admission. In 1998-2001, at the same income level, blacks were 3.6 times more likely than whites, and Latin Americans were 1.8 times more likely to get into higher education schools [ix].
Not all professors were happy with this decision, as students with low test scores read with great difficulty and do not have the necessary skills to express their thoughts in writing. Even with additional training within universities, they, on average, coped poorly with the educational process and more often than others dropped from the university. To ensure that these students keep up with the learning process, lightweight versions of courses and specializations have been created. Thus, for example, a new specialty, Critical Research into Race Issues, was created in the Law Department at Berkeley University [ix].
These students were more likely to choose social science courses such as “feminist, or gender studies,” “African American studies”, and the like instead of science, mathematics, and economics. Michelle Obama graduated from Princeton University with two diplomas (major and minor), sociology and African American studies, writing on them one graduation work “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community”. In preparing students from among the beneficiaries of the AAP, the main focus is not on achieving academic success, but on developing leadership skills and abilities in the field of social organizing.
In 1996, the state of California voted to abolish AAP in the public university network and on hiring. State university administrations openly boycotted this decision as much as they could in their admissions practices. 24 years later, in June of this year, the State Senate and Legislature returned again to this issue and decided to bring the issue of returning the AAP to the next elections. The decision is the visible result of this summer’s protests, along with cuts in police budgets. This decision has more symbolic than practical meaning, since a month earlier, the president of the network of state universities, Janet Napolitano, proposed to completely exclude tests from the requirements for applicants. Although the decision does not say anything about the demography and ethnic structure of the applicants, it is mostly dictated by these two factors: for the first time in American history, whites have become an ethnic minority, although so far only among young people. It can be assumed that other states in which the Democrats are in power will follow California’s example. The circle is complete. In the 1960s, Harvard University, by its decision on tests, spawned a new, intellectual elite, in the 2010-2020s, the abolition of tests brought a new social group to power – the beneficiaries of the AAP.
Strictly speaking, the AAP elite began to grow much earlier, namely from the moment this policy was introduced, and at least three generations of its benefiaciaries have already joined the ruling class. However, there are still not enough of them to occupy all the leading posts in society. Now, with simplified admission to universities, the process of preparing the new elite will be put on assembly line. Among the first generation are Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who called herself the child of the PAP; the Obamas, whose school tests and university entrance documents are still classified; several Democratic congressmen and so on. Michelle Obama even published an article whose title speaks for itself: “Don’t let your test results define who you are.”An army of highly paid bureaucrats has been created in universities to enforce the AAP, to ensure the policy of “diversity and inclusion”, “equality and social justice”, sitting in the same-named divisions. For example, in 2012, the senior vice president at the University of San Diego responsible for “equality, diversity, and inclusion” received an annual salary of $250,000 [ix]. The number of these units and number of bureaucrats in universities is growing, their employees receive substantial salaries, and the number of tenured professors is declining every year. This is the process of imperceptible natural replacement. The future elite is replenished in the process of selecting applicants and prepared by the administrators of these divisions.
Boston University has just created a new center, the Center for Anti-Racism Research (another result of the protests). Thirty-seven-year-old Ibram X. Kendi became its head and at the same time a full professor. The fate of the professor can serve as a classic illustration for the portrait of the new elite [xi]. Upon graduation, his SAT slightly exceeded 1000 (like Michelle Obama’s) with a maximum of 1600, a passing score of 1200 for most universities, and 1400-1500 for Ivy League schools. This did not prevent Kendi from going to college. The very fact of its acceptance to the detriment of someone with higher rates does not bother him; he stated in his book that “intelligence is as subjective as beauty” and that test scores should not be taken into account at all in admission. He prepared a thesis (and later published books) on the racial reconstruction of higher education and racist ideas in America.
As mentioned above, the ideology of “diversity and social justice” has spread not only to the education system and government agencies, but also to business. Thus, the process of replacing the old intellectual elite with a new one, grown on the basis of AAP, is in full swing. Soon intellectuals will take the place they occupied before – serving the elite. They have already entered their service, creating false narratives of black protests.
How liberal old and new media created false narratives and new myths around Floyd’s death
There is an almost unanimous opinion in America that Floyd was killed. However, whether this was a manifestation of racism on the part of this police officer, this unit, and even more so, a manifestation of systematic racism in America, this still needs to be proved. However, the next day the journalists had simple and ready answers. The BBC published an article with the headline “George Floyd: ‘The Epidemic of Racism’ Leads to His Death”. The New York Times ran an article entitled “The Assassination of George Floyd and the Origins of American Racism”. One eloquent headline, in their opinion, was not enough, the article accuses the citizens of their own country not only of racism, but of an even more serious and more specific crime – bias against the black race (“anti-blackness”).
No sane person defends a murderer-policeman, but the myth of systematic, deliberate and unconscious police racism is refuted by a number of researchers [xii, xiii]. Of the four police officers who detained Floyd, only two were white. None of the other three other than the alleged killer – the investigation is still pending – have fought Floyd.
In numerous comments on the networks, most agree that there is no state racism in the United States. Moreover, at the level of interpersonal relations, racism is condemned and blocked. It is no coincidence that American actor Jesse Smollett had to hire foreigners, also black like him, to help him stage a scene of attack and violence against him by white people.
America collects detailed and fairly reliable statistics on the use of force by the police, and especially murders. An African-American professor at the University of Kentucky, which is important in this context, Wilfred Reilly cites figures from the database of the left-leaning newspaper The Washington Post: in 2019, police killed 229 blacks (of which only 15 were unarmed and did not attack the police). The total population of this ethnic group in the United States is 42 million. Any number of victims is still too many, but the number of those killed cannot be called genocide. In addition, the number of white policemen killed is higher than the number of blacks killed. It should also be taken into account that the number of crimes committed by blacks is 2.4 times more often than by whites [xiii], and that since 2013, when the BLM movement was created, which declared war on the police, the number of attacks on the latter increased. In 2019 alone, 48 police officers were killed, 44 of them with the use of weapons; in less than half of 2020, 25 police officers were killed from firearms, not counting those who died as a result of car accidents in the process of the pursuit of criminals [xv]. Everyone now knows Floyd’s name, but the names of the police officers killed in the line of duty are not of interest to the general public.
The American and British media have turned recent police victims into national heroes, although virtually every one of them, including Floyd, has a history of violations of the law, and some have served several times in jail. Big business, universities and even the leaders of the Democratic faction in Congress bowed their knees to a movement that was considered extremist not long time ago. The genuflection also consists of numerous refusals to prosecute those involved in robbing and killing police during the protests.Big business and media have fully subscribed to the BLM platform, a mixture of Marxist and anarchist slogans with outright blackmail and extortion. Remember, as Barack Obama said publicly about the election: “If they bring knives, we will come with a gun.”
Police-free zones have been created in several cities in America, the so-called “autonomous zones” (a term from the history of anarchism) [xiv]. If you look at their memes, lifestyle and their posters, they are one to one reminiscent of another anarchist movement – Occupy.
Lessons of Occupy
One of the rehearsals of the current protests was the Occupy movement, which emerged in 2011. The name of the Occupy movement (“Occupy Wall Street”) is understood in many countries without translation. It arose in one day with no apparent reason or trigger. Occupy is still one of the most mysterious modern political movements. It was started by anarchists, while the BLM movement in May 2020 by black protest groups. However, they have more in common than differences. Occupy was conceived not just as a protest, but as a revolutionary movement [xv].
Everyone remembered the meme of this movement: “I am 99%”. This slogan is an example of successful manipulation of public opinion. How did it not occur to their ideological opponents to come out with the poster “I am 50%”? The latter figure has a very specific meaning, in contrast to the mythical 99. In America today, only half of the population pays federal taxes, even less state taxes. It is their taxes that pay subsidized housing for the poor and the “free services” provided to the other half of America: food stamps, state college scholarships, medical services for those without insurance, and so on.
America has never had the experience of occupation, maybe that’s why the organizers chose such an inappropriate name for their movement. In many languages, the word “occupants” has an ominous flavor. One of the authors contrived to name his book Occupy the Nation [xvi] as if it were not his country. Or maybe they really want to be captured? This is not at all an absurd assumption, the organizers have long chosen for themselves a future new social system, something like Scandinavian socialism. The titles of publications dedicated to the Occupy movement are apocalyptic: “Occupy the nation!”, “It changes everything!”, “The fall of America begins!”.
The Occupy movement was initiated by professional organizers for whom protest activism is a lifelong commitment. Occupy was conceived “in a test tube” by the Canadian anarchist magazine Adbusters. Its initiators later described in detail the initial steps and technology for starting the movement. It all started with an email from Mika White, with the tag @OccupyWallStNYC. The message was titled “Dream of insurrection against corporate rule” [xv]. This text was sent to several public addresses, including the anarchist forum Reddit, and anonymous sites of political activists who hide in “dark” part of the Internet. The audience of the magazine they edit covers all major cities of the United States and the authors hoped that at least one in four on this list in the metropolis of New York will respond to their call. However, the reality exceeded their expectations.
Within a day, the movement was picked up by a large group of activists, which were dominated by anarchists. They began to get together and plan its development. The movement meme, symbolism and idea slipped out of the hands of its creators and began a life of their own. Although the two journalists at Adbusters who started this “political spectacle” continued to track and guide the movement in their publications to the best of their ability, it began to develop along its own trajectory.
Mika White became a social organizer at age of 13. He is not only a practitioner, but also a theoretician of the protest movement. Not a protest against a specific evil, but a protest as such, as a specific activity – activism. In this sense, he directly continues the traditions of leading radicals, including Saul Alinsky. His book The End of Protest, written after Occupy, is entirely devoted to the technology of protest [xiv].
One of the main goals of any protest movement is to impose a certain concern (topic, problem) on society, include it in an active public discourse, and make it a platform for election campaigns. [xvi]. In the Occupy movement, it was the topic of inequality, economic in the first place. Occupy began during the tenure of a black president, so the liberal elite quickly came to their senses and redirected the direction of popular anger in the other direction in time. Occupy, first raised on the shield by the democratic press, was soon consigned to oblivion in the name of “higher interests” with the tacit consent of President Obama. The movement happened at the “wrong” time, in the third year of Democrat Barack Obama; and the first two years, the Democrats had a majority in both chambers of Congress. The Occupy participants were the “wrong bees” and made the “wrong honey”.
The Occupy movement, which spread throughout the country, very quickly became an object of capture and manipulation by various social forces. Trade unions, PPOs, socialists and political activists of all stripes, funded by the Soros Foundation and other billionaires, saw him as a driving force for their agendas. The “occupation” zones with their free food and lodging began to attract the homeless and drug addicts. The movement was bloodlessly suppressed by city mayors, including New York Mayor Bloomberg.Occupy swung a lot to change the world paradigm among the citizens of many countries. Magazine “Yes!” briefly summarized the alleged changes in the mass picture of American society that the movement brought about: it named the source of the crisis; presented a picture of the world as the participants want to see it; set a new standard for public debate; proposed a new narrative; created a space for many different participants (big tent); enabled everyone to make change; combined the local and the global; proposed the ethics and practice of deep democracy and community; took power from the elite. Some of these changes did take place, while others turned out to be illusory. However, there is one change that the magazine did not name and which is the most important – Occupy has created a matrix (prototype) of the revolution, which is easy to reproduce at any suitable moment.
The BLM movement, together with its temporary allies, filled this matrix in 2020 with new people, slogans, memes and imposed new myths on society. This time, progressive elites are acting in concert and will hold out the movement until the end of the current presidential campaign
Black start the game, but will they win? Who “hijacked” their revolution?
The country of America is changing …
Blacks will soon come to power in it.
Statue of Liberty that stands by the shore
repainted under a black woman.
Vladimir Uflyand. 1958
Some experts believe that the counter-revolution of the pre-Trump elite is hiding behind the current confrontation between “blacks” and “whites” [i]. However, if it wins, it is not entirely clear which of the elites will take over power at the end of these protests. The fact is that a completely new political elite is gaining strength within the Democratic Party.
The driving forces of the current protest have not yet been studied in depth, but there is already some preliminary data on which expert opinions can be drawn. To begin with, a relatively small proportion of African Americans participate in protests, even much less support robbery and violence. Society now hears the voices of the most radical and “noisy” groups because they are amplified by the liberal press and TV.
Other protest organizations have joined BLM, most of which have been conducting offensive operations in society for a long time [iv, xiv]. The affiliated organizations actually “hijacked” this wave of protests. Among the hijackers, socialist-oriented organizations constitute a powerful wing. Bolshevism, including its most radical organizations, has existed in the United States under the guise of a socialist platform since the beginning of the 20th century. Already three candidates run in the presidential elections with a socialist agenda – Howard Dean and Barack Obama, without declaring it, and Bernie Sanders, openly promoting this agenda at rallies.
The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is the largest socialist organization in the United States. The DSA has brought together socialists of all stripes. It is rooted in the Socialist Party of America. DSA members remain the same socialists as before, but now they are allies of the Democratic Party, and therefore call themselves Democratic Socialists. The DSA’s ideology, according to their charter, is eco-socialism, socialist feminism, anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, anti-racism, and anti-fascism. Members of this organization seek power in order to actually fight the existing social order in the United States – capitalism, or, as President Barack Obama carefully formulated this goal in his second presidential campaign, to fundamentally transform America. Another force in the US protests is the anarchist movement. It is the socialists and anarchists who have seized the initiative in today’s movement.
The feeling of guilt, and even more so its public expression, is indeed a weakening of social immunity of the nation, a breakdown of resistance to obvious violence from the radical wing of the black population, a voluntary renunciation of leadership and privileges. However, who just now knelt? Only a certain part of society repents publicly, namely the old elite of the Democratic Party and its active supporters, thinking that this will save them. If we give the name of the current revolution, it will rather be a minority revolution under the socialist flag within the Democratic Party.
Most revealing in this sense was the arrival of former bartender Alexandria Ocasio Cortez in Congress in 2018. Her electoral success was all the more surprising since she defeated not just anyone, but the very famous politician Joe Crowley. who had previously been re-elected to Congress ten times, and who was expected to take the third post in the hierarchy in the next term after the Speaker – Majority Leader.
In the mass media, the congresswoman is called by her initials – AOC, thereby placing her in a row of famous politicians, such as JFK (John F. Kennedy) or FDR (Franklin Delano Roosevelt). Since then AOC had set the tone, if not in the entire lower house of Congress, then certainly among the candidates for the presidency from her party. (For more on her and the group of other minorities who have come to Congress in 2018, see [xviii]). At first she was a confidant of Bernie Sanders, now she writes programs for Joe Biden.
AOC did not win her election campaign on her own, other people won it for her, namely, social organizers, or rather their organizations (I apologize for the forced tautology). Since Obama’s first presidential campaign, they have been actively involved in the presidential elections. The network of social organizers and their front groups have chosen the path of being in / outside the Democratic Party, de-facto creating a virtually shadow party. This new “para-party”, a sparring partner of the Democratic Party, remains in the shadow of the latter all the time and is not constrained by the official rules of electoral campaigns, is organizing training and victory for socialist candidates from this party in many key regions.Some of these organizations are few in number, while others are very crowded. For example, Democracy for America, founded by former presidential candidate and also former Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean, has about a million members, according to their website. Organizations of radical organizers influencing congressional elections share a common goal of imposing a radical socialist agenda on the Democratic Party.
Justice Democrats, another PPO, made up of social organizers, provided an electoral fund for the AOC, then a zero-recognition candidate, and created a visual advertisement at the highest professional level. The election of the AOC is just one small step in the project of the takeover of the American Congress by representatives of radical minorities, which its authors called “Brand New Congress” (BNC). The idea behind the BNC project is to replace the establishment in Congress with a new generation of radical revolutionaries and bring about a peaceful socialist revolution. Working with the YouTube channel Young Turks, they made a documentary called Knock the House (a pun) [xxvii]. After electing AOC, they already had many small victories in elections to all levels of local and federal executive and legislative branches.
A new phase of confrontation between the establishment of the Democratic Party and the social organizers has happened in the last ten years. The new political forces dictate their conditions to the democratic elite and not only figuratively, but literally bringing them to their knees. It is these organizations that lead people to protests, including today’s ones. Who will win in this protracted conflict is not difficult to predict. The Democratic Party, which builds its policy on steroids – the methods and tactics of social organizers – hаs gradually radicalized under their pressure and turned into a socialist party of a radical kind. It is already doing everything it can to expand its social base at the expense of easily manipulated groups of population: recent immigrants, both legal and illegal; high school and college students; inmates in prisons, and, of course, people receiving benefits from the state.
Biden is viewed by many only as a transit candidate, a cardboard character, a kind of “moderate Democrat” against Trump. Fifty political organizations of all denominations, including Muslims, have already sent an ultimatum letter to Biden demanding that he support their suggestion to reduce police funding and redirect this money to organizations that their movements control [xix]. Under their pressure, the “moderate Democrat” Biden said in his Independence Day speech that he was coming to power to transform America.
Biden has pledged to select a vice president from among black women and chose senator Kamala Harris. She was trained and groomed by social organizers and, in particular, the organization Emily List, supported by the “woke” capitalists like Mike Bloomberg and others.
Those behind the BLM movement (who “hijacked their plane”) have a very definite goal – to continue the unrest until the November elections in order to demoralize Trump supporters and weaken their resistance to the ticket Biden-Harris.
White guilt, white racism, and white privilege
A discussion of the prehistory of today’s protests and unrest in the United States would be incomplete without discussing the concepts of “unconscious white racism”, “white privilege” and “white supremacy.” The ideologists of the black movement have long found a way out of how to justify the preferences and handicaps that need to be granted to minorities in all areas of public life. They are needed, in their opinion, in the name of social justice, that is, in order to align with whites but not the tests, as one might think, but the preferences and handicaps, which, as they claim, the white race has. They tried to convince everyone, especially white Americans, that they have all three of the above qualities -“unconscious white racism”, “white privilege” and “white supremacy “. To be able to win public opinion on this matter, ideologues needed to switch the public discourse direction from individual efforts, responsibility and results of each of us to the characteristics of group identity – race, sex /gender, sexual preferences.
One of such ideologues, Robin DiAngelo, chose the topic of her research not just the white population, but “whiteness” as a psychology and mode of behavior. “Denying the existence of racism in America today,” she argues in her book White Fragility, “is an important aspect of the political imagination of white Americans” [xxviii]. DiAngelo defines white fragility as a condition in which minimal racial stress becomes unbearable. She argues that whites have a special fragility, that is, that they always have a tendency to stand up to defend their advantage, given by their race. This book became not just a bestseller, but was included into the mandatory curriculum in colleges, as well as in training programs to overcome this very fragility, and in fact, to instill a sense of guilt in people of the white race. These training programs in some way remind Chinese “re-education” camps. Of course, trainers do not expect people to read all 168 pages of her book, so a whole package has already been prepared for studying the ideas of this author – theses (a digest), a workbook and a questionnaire for tests [xi, xxv].
In order for the reader to form his/her own opinion about the correctness of DiAngelo’s statement, I will cite one specific fact from the life of the famous sociologist and political scientist Charles Murray, whose work I referred to above. In March 2017, Professor Murray was invited to speak at Middlebury College by two students and a Republican student councilor from the Administration. The students gathered in the classroom insulted and physically injured the professor who was introducing the guest, resulting in a concussion. They further prevented Murray from speaking by stonewalling him, knocking on walls and floors, and triggering a campus fire alarm. Murray, seventy-three, narrowly escaped the same fate as the woman who represented him. After this story became widely known, 177 professors from all over the country, including people of different races, wrote an open letter, demanding that the students responsible for this story not be punished. The professors argued, I quote their letter, that the failed “Murray lecture posed a threat to the students”; that students were “marginalized”, “neglected”, “objectified”; that the protest was a fact of “active resistance against racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism (discrimination on physical grounds – I.Zh.), ethnocentrism, xenophobia and other forms of discrimination” [xx].
I will leave it to the reader to decide who, in this situation, defended themselves from embarrassing facts, who became aggressive from the slightest stress of discussing racial issues, and who carried fragility. I will add that cases of suppression of uncomfortable viewpoints like this case were repeated multiple times in different colleges during 2017-2020. Moreover, it is whites who try to enter into a dialogue with blacks and people of other races, each time with a risk to their health. Regarding DiAngelo’s assertion about whites’ willingness to stand up to defend their advantage given by their race, did not whites themselves adopt PPA and by that create a social advantage for the colored population? Didn’t whites create the phenomenon of “woke” capitalism preoccupied with social justice and diversity? Aren’t whites going to protest alongside blacks this summer?
The white fragility thesis is repeated in many works with slight variations that do not change its essence: it only seems to whites that they are not racist, in fact, they are racist on a subconscious level.
The invincibility of this argument is as follows:
- firstly, it cannot be refuted, since it will further prove that you are racist;
- secondly, it saves speakers from the need to prove the thesis that racism is indeed ubiquitous and inherent in all whites, and not only in those few who manifest it in practice;
- thirdly, the thesis about subconscious white racism is very convenient, since the subconscious mind cannot be verified;
- and in the latter, it allows the demand for moral retribution for the events of 250 years ago and material compensation for the damage caused by them, namely reparations in the amount of 17 trillion dollars, that is, approximately one million for every African American family [xxi].
To understand the scale of this figure, let me remind that in 2019, one of the best years of the American economy with almost 3 percent growth per year, the gross domestic product (GDP) of the United States amounted to $ 21.438 trillion, and the national debt in 2020 was about 25 trillion. It is clear that the US state has no money for a long time, and it is proposed to make reparations in debt, which the next generations will pay. Without waiting for Congress to decide on this, some states have already created their reparation funds during the pandemic, while many states and cities are not just short on money but in deep debt.
But wait, why did only blacks deserve reparations, regardless of when and from what continent and country they came to America, and whether they themselves were descendants of slaves, slave owners, or slave traders (and there were all three categories among blacks)? The $ 17 trillion reparations bargaining isn’t over yet. If you should pay African-Americans, then you have to pay the Indians. And that’s just an additional 35 trillion [xxii]! But even here it is impossible to put an end to it. Senator Elizabeth Warren has offered to pay reparations to homosexuals for what they might be entitled to a family tax cut pending legal recognition of their legal right to marriage and family. Other “victims of the regime” stand in line behind them. So the “dialogue” with Black is not only not blocked, but on the contrary is gaining momentum. The white racist thesis has not only social, but also practical implications for the entire country, namely, it will cause it to go bankrupt.
The conversation about race relations has been going on in the United States for many years. He became especially active after the election of Barack Obama as president. During his term, the rules for pardoning criminals from the colored population were greatly eased and thousands of people, mostly blacks, were released early from prison. President Trump’s decree in 2018, known as the First Step Ordinance, aimed at early release and facilitating post-release adaptation. However, all this was not enough for the ongoing black movement. In May-July 2020, the situation escalated again and black activists decided to bring their white fellow citizens to their knees, literally and figuratively, for the sins of one policeman. In many organizations, letters issued by the administrations from above are signed by employees about the collective guilt of whites and the recognition of the guilt of children for their forefathers.
In DiAngelo’s picture of white racism, all blacks feel and act in one, there is no place for black dissidents who, through their life experience, have proved that there is no systematic racism in the United States. Among them are journalists Candice Owens and David Webb, Senator Tim Scott, Professors Thomas Sowell and Reilly Wilfred, neurosurgeon Ben Carson and many others [xxii, xxii]. They all come from poor black families, have achieved success through their own efforts and have no intention of playing the racial identity card and receiving reparations handouts. Their presence violates the coherent picture of black suppression by white.
Black journalist Candice Owens was the first to point out that black radicals are working to lower standards for their ethnic group in every way: they diminish the credibility of those who have achieved success (Foreign Minister Condoleezza Rice, Chief Justice Clarence Thomas and many others); they raise people with a criminal past on the shield (put in a gilded coffin); refuse to compete on equal terms with whites and demand privileges. PPOs call successful blacks “Uncle Toms”, “home negroes”, “sold out”. The hidden reason for such a rejection of the true cultural heroes of their race is the fact that all the above-mentioned characters are conservatives, not liberals. At the same time, the leaders of the black movement are feeding the victim complex of ethnic minorities. The situation turned upside down: earlier the sign “For Blacks Only” meant the denying blacks of their rights, now it means their right to additional financial injections and other privileges.
The propaganda of the theses of “unconscious white racism”, “white privilege” and “white supremacy” aims to make immoral to resist to radical forms of the black movement. As I tried to show above, these protests can lead to power, not the old, but a completely new force, which is difficult even to call the elite. In the end, the Bolshevik Party and its successors in Russia claimed to be “the mind, honor and conscience of the era,” but did they deserve the title of the elite?
References
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