Progressives Punish ‘Honorary Whites’ but Aren’t Helping Blacks
Holman W. Jenkins, Wall Street Journal, July 16, 2021
Like biting into a madeleine was reading a federal court injunction against the Biden administration’s pandemic bailout program for restaurants, which favored some ethnicities over others. Memories came flooding back of South Africa’s apartheid in its waning days, with its absurd designation of certain Asians as “honorary whites.”
Slight difference: Under the Biden plan some became honorary whites for the purpose of being disadvantaged, i.e., sent to the end of the line for government aid. According to no rhyme or reason, said the court, spared the prejudicial status were “Pakistanis but not Afghans; Japanese but not Iraqis; Hispanics but not Middle Easterners.”
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Meanwhile, still intact is the administration’s larger agenda of extending more entitlements to the middle class, inevitably making the entitled population whiter (and more Asian). Indeed, the more Joe Biden mouths the words Jim Crow, the more it seems he’s trying to satiate a part of his base (mostly consisting of white progressive racial extremists) with rhetoric alone. Perhaps you believe today’s “voting rights” kabuki is so Democrats can do even more to help blacks. Political realism suggests otherwise.
One premise of critical race theory is certainly correct: Today is built on a foundation of yesterdays. On the foundation of slavery, Jim Crow and housing segregation nowadays is built the exploitation of black communities by multicultural elites playing their “defund the police” games at the expense of blacks who suffer the lion’s share of violent crime.
On the foundation of past discrimination and marginalization of the black community is built the union power that advantages itself at the expense of inflicting inferior educations on black children.
In response to centuries of antiblack discrimination has risen an “antiracist” alliance of university activists who work to cheapen the educational attainments of blacks by relaxing the standards that apply to them.
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And talk about the “great replacement.” Far more mainstream than any white reactionary are those progressive theorists now fretting about Hispanics and Asians, with their disconcerting habit of giving some of their votes to Republicans, displacing black influence in the Democratic Party. Yet seldom do the theorists bother to ask how often that influence really has paid off for blacks.
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{snip} If critical race theory were critical in any meaningful sense (a more descriptive name might be self-satisfied race theory), it would critically explain why those politicians most answerable to black voters seem to do so little to improve their lot.
