Tim Wise is a white “antiracist” and crusader for “social justice.”
Recently, in an interview that he gave to Salon, Wise brought his “expertise” on race to bear upon the Trump phenomenon.
Donald Trump, he claims, exploited the “market for white resentment [.]”
Trump’s supporters, Wise assures us, are “crazy, bigoted, misogynistic” and “racist.” Moreover, they suffer from a “fragile masculinity” that’s threatened by the prospect of “pluralism,” of having to “share space” with those who aren’t white, Christian, heterosexual men.
To these folks, Wise bluntly states, “there’s a part of me that wants to say, ‘Fuck you.’” He admits to wanting to tell them: “I want your America to die, and I want you to be sad tomorrow, and I want you to deal with the fact painfully that your country is gone. And I don’t care because your country, as you conceived it, deserved to die.”
First of all, the only arguments that Wise makes here are the argument ad hominem and begging the question, arguments that are as psychologically, emotionally, and politically satisfying as they are logically fallacious. Wise blasts Trump’s white male supporters with the most radioactive of insults—“racist,” “bigoted,” etc.—while assuming that the resentment, the “white resentment,” that he attributes to them is unjustified. Yet this is exactly what needs to be shown.
Second, words like “racist,” “misogynistic,” are associative and affective, not logical or rational. Take “racism.” For something that functions as the political-moral equivalent of a nuclear bomb, the deadliest of all weapons of mass destruction, “racism” is used in wildly disparate contexts. It has been used to describe both Hitler’s policy of mass extermination of Jews and, most recently, Ellen DeGeneres’ posting of a Usain Bolt meme. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Simon Legree and Paula Deen, the Ku Klux Klan and “capitalism,” are all “racist.”
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Precisely because murder is universally recognized as the egregious offense that it is, very specific criteria must be met before a person can be found guilty of it. Moreover, it is the accuser upon whom the burden of proof rests. If “murder” was employed as variously as is “racism,” we would all be murderers. But if “murder” could mean all things to all people, it ultimately would wind up meaning nothing.
This, though, is the fate that “antiracists” like Wise have visited upon their bread and butter, the word “racism.” All that people know is that to be accused of “racism” is to be accused of something awful. As to what, exactly, this thing is, no one knows.
Third, if, as Wise contends,there really are millions of resentful whites, it remains an open question as to whether their resentment is justified. When we are not engaging in politics, everyone understands that resentment is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, upon hearing that a person has resentment toward, say, her husband or her parents, the average person, far from dismissing it or writing it off as a function of wickedness on the part of the resentful individual, will suppose that there is probably some warrant for the resentment.
Yet when it comes to talking about the resentment, or anger, of white men, the kind of sensible thinking that pervades non-political, everyday life yields to the hyper-emotionality—and bad faith—reflected in Wise’s remarks.
Fourth, if whites generally, and white men in particular, are resentful, could it be that they are resentful toward people like Tim Wise? Perhaps white men resent the campaign of demonization that the merchants of the Racism-Industrial-Complex (RIC) have been waging against them for decades? Maybe, just maybe, they’re resentful toward those who would reduce their concerns for the well-being of their families, their concerns over crime, dangerous schools, terrorism, and illegal immigration to expressions of raw hatred? Maybe they’re resentful over the fact that the agents of Big Racism, ideologues like Wise, tirelessly objectify them as non-persons by meeting their objections to “affirmative action” and other racial double-standards with, not just insults, but aspersions—like “racist”—that have the potential to spell the professional and social ruination for those at whom they’re aimed?
Fifth, his self-description notwithstanding, Wise and his ilk are not “antiracists.” They are anti-white. More specifically, they are anti-white male. If Wise and company truly were “antiracists,” then they would speak out against the phenomenon of black racial animus, for blacks are exponentially more likely than are those of any other racial group to engage in interracial violence.
In 2013, 85% of the 660,000 instances of interracial violence between blacks and whites involved black perpetrators and white victims.
While it’s standard operating procedure for “antiracists” like Wise to dismiss this inconvenient fact by noting that blacks, who comprise a significantly smaller percentage of the population than whites, are much more likely to have “chance” encounters with whites than vice versa, this line falls flat once it is realized that blacks attack Hispanics only slightly less often than they attack whites: Of the 256,074 acts of interracial violence between these two groups, blacks were the perpetrators 82.5% of the time.
From Wise, however, we hear not a peep.
Finally, more evidence—proof, really—that Wise is more anti-white than anything else is that he admits to indulging in genocidal fantasies regarding “white America” (or what, until recently, was known simply as “America”). For some of us, this confirms what we’ve long suspected, that invocations of “Equality” and “pluralism” and the like—moral notions that originated in Western (white) civilization—constitute a smokescreen behind which “antiracists” and others seek to wage a kind of cold war against whites and white men. It’s not that Wise (I have to believe) wishes to see anyone literally killed. This war, rather, is a war to dismantle a culture, to demoralize, to shame. Politics is war by other means, and this is the war that “antiracists” and “social justice” crusaders have been in the process of waging for at least a half-of-a-century.
Ultimately, Wise’s remarks regarding supporters of Donald Trump have nothing to do with either Trump or his supporters. They are revealing for his views on straight white Christian men, for these are the views that Wise has been pedaling well before Trump entered the political arena.
Make no mistakes, leftists like Wise oppose Trump not primarily because of his policy prescriptions, and not even because of the callousness with which Trump has spoken. Wise and his fellow travelers don’t even necessarily oppose Trump as a person or candidate.
Rather, they oppose what they think Trump symbolizes: The America that Tim Wise believes has long “deserved to die.”
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