The reason that our Democratic friends play the race card is because it works. There is nothing worse in educated society than being accused of being a racist. Therefore nice white people can be bullied into shutting up, because who can survive the stigma of being called a racist?
Personal note: I have been publicly accused of being a racist twice in my life, both times at dinner: once by the black son of a black university professor and once by a gay guy. Funnily enough, I have never been accused in private of being a racist. I wonder why?
So when House Republicans vote to kick Democrat Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) off the House Foreign Relations Committee, because payback, Good Little Girl AOC goes on the floor of the House to accuse the GOP of racism in an emotional, heart-rending speech. Bless her heart.
And when five black cops in Memphis, Tennessee, allegedly fatally injure a black guy in a traffic stop, then it’s white racism what done it. Only, it now appears on far right conspiracy websites that maybe there is a woman issue in the case. But Newsweek says there is no substantiation of the charge of an argument over wimmin.
Meanwhile we have Gov. DeSantis in Florida sending far-right activist Christopher Rufo onto the board of Florida’s lefty New College to stir things up; objecting to the racist College Board AP class in African-American Studies; schooling woke Disney.
The danger for our liberal friends is that if a politician like Ron DeSantis can push back successfully against the Dems’ systemic racism culture and live to tell the tale, then the whole racism grift is over.
Can it work? We don’t know. It probably depends on conservatives and commoners everywhere telling their liberal friends that they can take their systemic racism, their woke ideology, their race card, and put it where the sun don’t shine.
The other possibility is the Thermidor gambit, meaning that in any ideological movement — such as the French Revolution — the revolutionaries end up fighting with each other, and that the revolutionaries hate it, and decided to dial back the revolution. The current row between transgender activists and TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) is such an example. Transgenders and feminists are supposed to be on the same side. Until they aren’t.
My basic line is that the left’s narrative, that they are the Allies of the Oppressed Peoples against the Oppressors had some validity when the Oppressed Peoples were the working class — even though the industrial revolution lifted the working class out of rural idiocy and indigence. It had a point in the days of racial discrimination against blacks. It never had a point where women are concerned: feminism has always been an educated-class thing. It never had a point where gays are concerned: ordinary people don’t care about gays unless the gays are “doing it in the street and frightening the horses.”
And if there are Oppressors in the world today they are educated-class activists, politicians, professors, administrators, and Klausi Klones at the WEF.
So we middle-class commoners need to up our game. When some activist or DEI administrator warbles on about systemic racism and whiteness, you jerk right back and say that the only racist around here is you, cupcake.
And when they retort that they are “anti-racist” you tell ‘em that “that’s not what Hegel said.” (What Hegel said was that a thing is the same as its opposite, only opposite. Just like the north pole and south pole of a magnet. Therefore “racism” and “anti-racism are the same. Only opposite.)
Onwards and upwards.