{"id":55696,"date":"2020-06-06T22:28:33","date_gmt":"2020-06-07T03:28:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=55696"},"modified":"2020-06-06T22:28:33","modified_gmt":"2020-06-07T03:28:33","slug":"55696","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=55696","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

I did not kill George Floyd.<\/a>
\nThe attempt to hold all whites responsible for the death of Floyd shows what a dead-end woke politics is.<\/em><\/p>\n

There\u2019s a new sin. Forget gluttony. Forget sloth. The great moral error today is whiteness. To be white is to be fallen. Whiteness has become a kind of original sin, an inherited moral defect one must atone for throughout one\u2019s life. In the wake of the brutal execution of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, this almost religious treatment of whiteness as an existential flaw has gone uber-mainstream.<\/p>\n

Listen to the Archbishop of Canterbury. Yesterday he called on \u2018white Christians\u2019 to \u2018repent of our own prejudices\u2019. Repent, ye sinners! Or if you prefer your leaders to be secular, how about the high priestess of middle-class decency, Nigella Lawson, who instructs her fellow white people to \u2018acknowledge [that] systematic racism exists\u2019 and that we are \u2018complicit in it\u2019. That brutal killing in Minneapolis \u2013 it\u2019s your doing, white people.<\/p>\n

Or read Time, the most mainstream magazine in existence. \u2018White people\u2019, says one of its contributors, \u2018have inherited this house of white supremacy, built by their forebears and willed to them\u2019. Inherited. The sins of the father shall be visited upon the son. The Time writer says white racism is a spectrum, stretching from those white people who tell a black woman \u2018how pretty our hair looks when we wear it straight\u2019 to \u2018the more extreme end of the spectrum\u2026 cops literally suffocating black people like George Floyd as they beg for their lives\u2019.<\/p>\n

To compare a compliment about a woman\u2019s hair to the merciless killing of Floyd is deeply disturbing. It sanitises the crime committed against Floyd and debases his suffering by putting it on a par with a mere uninvited compliment. It also confirms how thoroughly whiteness has been pathologised in mainstream ideology. What was once said about black men \u2013 that it is problematic when they compliment women of another race and that their racial make-up drives them towards murderous behaviour \u2013 is now said about white men. Perhaps someone can explain how replacing one form of racial fatalism with another is progressive.<\/p>\n

Whiteness-as-sin is everywhere. \u2018White America, if you want to know who\u2019s responsible for racism, look in the mirror\u2019, cries the Chicago Tribune. \u2018White people, you are the problem\u2019, it continues, in case you didn\u2019t get its message that this sinful race, these fallen people, are the scourge of our time.<\/p>\n

\u2018I\u2019m talking about white people\u2019, said\u00a0James Corden<\/a>\u00a0in his monologue on\u00a0The Late Late Show<\/em>\u00a0on Monday. \u2018This is our problem to solve\u2019, he said of the murder of Floyd and the problem of racism. White people, all of you, you did this. This is how mainstream the pathologisation of whiteness has become: it is now beamed into suburban living rooms across the US by famously inoffensive TV hosts. A white man telling white people about the sins of white complicity \u2013 this is, at the very least, an extremely odd state of affairs.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s be clear about what is happening here: this is an effort to establish racial collective guilt for the murderous suffocation of George Floyd. There are two problems with this approach. The first is that collective guilt on the basis of racial origin is always a wicked ideology to pursue. Whether it\u2019s Jews being held collectively guilty of the alleged excesses of \u2018rich Jews\u2019 or blacks being collectively punished for the offences of individual black people, such racial extrapolation always leads to prejudice and suffering. There is a twisted irony in the fact that so many commentators and activists who pose as anti-racist are promoting the ideology of collective racial guilt in response to the killing of George Floyd.<\/p>\n

The second problem with this sweeping anti-white reaction to Floyd\u2019s death, and with the pathologisation of whiteness more broadly, is that it acts as a distraction from the real problems facing the US and other societies. Collectivising the crime committed by four police officers in Minneapolis turns attention away from the specificity of police brutality and of structural disarray in modern America, in favour of pursuing a blanket suspicion of all whites. The problem is dissipated, then obscured. We are implicitly discouraged from seriously analysing specific residual political problems in the United States in favour of joining in the thrill-inducing project of bashing all whites.<\/p>\n

It is important to understand where this distracting moral project comes from. It is an outlook of the privileged elites, very often white elites. It comes from academia, from the media class, from the younger members of the political establishment. For years now, these privileged elites have promoted hostility to whiteness.<\/p>\n

They have projected the sins of the past on to whites living today, claiming that white people are the beneficiaries of slavery and colonialism. They have pushed the ideology of \u2018white complicity\u2019 (that is, all whites bear responsibility for racial crimes) and \u2018white fragility\u2019 (that is, any white who pushes back against this idea of collective racial guilt is showing his moral weakness). They have encouraged the checking of one\u2019s white privilege, which is really a modern form of penance.<\/p>\n

Anyone who thought the cranky woke idea of privilege-checking was confined to PC campuses will have had a rude awakening over the past few days. We\u2019ve had the Archbishop of Canterbury promoting a Christian version of white self-correction. And anyone who has seen the incredibly creepy videos showing groups of\u00a0white people begging black people for forgiveness<\/a>\u00a0for the historic crimes of racism or\u00a0chanting<\/a>\u00a0in a massive crowd about how they will do better in future will know that privilege-checking has become the new religion. Original sin, repentance, public self-flagellation \u2013 it has it all.<\/p>\n

Anti-whiteness comes from the top. It is most pronounced among privileged whites. It has nothing in common with the noble struggles for racial equality in the past. Rather, it expresses the nihilism and fatalism of the contemporary liberal elites and intellectual classes. It is self-loathing disguised as radicalism. It is not the friend, by any stretch of the imagination, of black people or white people. On the contrary, it condemns both to an interminable status quo in which the former must perform the role of perennial victim and the latter must engage in penitence, publicly and noisily, forever. Elite fatalism sees no way out of inequality or injustice, precisely because it has reimagined these things as \u2018traits\u2019, as the\u00a0Chicago Tribune<\/em>\u00a0puts it, of racial behaviour. All it can envisage is a technocratic system of racial management in which black victims are encouraged to speak and weep and whites are encouraged to listen and repent. Like a forever truth and reconciliation commission.<\/p>\n

It is striking that where past black campaigners for racial equality spoke in terms of visions, dreams, better futures in which things would be different, today\u2019s self-styled correctors of white privilege can only obsess over the past. History is their stomping ground. Slavery and colonialism are their obsessions. A writer for\u00a0Slate<\/em><\/a>\u00a0says these things are America\u2019s \u2018original sin\u2019 and George Floyd\u2019s murder shows that they infect us still. This sums up the fatalism of the new racial guardians. In describing racism as America\u2019s \u2018original sin\u2019, they utterly demean the agency of the black people, and white people, who fought for rights and equality over the centuries and who tangibly changed America for the better. Worse, they lock America into racial permanence, into round after round of racial accusation and racial repentance, into a never-ending self-whipping for the inherited sins of the past. It is an entirely dispiriting ideology that offers nothing whatsoever to blacks and whites fighting for freer, better futures.<\/p>\n

This is why corporate America and the new political elites have no problem at all with the woke ideology of pathologised whiteness. In fact they embrace it. In recent days some of the most powerful corporations in the\u00a0US<\/a>\u00a0have commented on the problem of \u2018white supremacy\u2019. Leaders and officials in Minneapolis and elsewhere initially refused to condemn rioting on the basis that, as white people, it wasn\u2019t their place to do so. The academia-born new racialism can be easily internalised by the capitalist and political elites because it poses no threat whatsoever to their influence over society. On the contrary, in dissipating the problems of racism and social inequality, in personalising these things and reducing them to \u2018traits\u2019 that exist across the whole of society, the woke ideology takes the heat off the powers-that-be and even creates a space for them to perform their penitence and advertise their awareness and in the process become part of the \u2018saved\u2019 people. It\u00a0empowers<\/em>\u00a0them.<\/p>\n

This is the great tragedy in the US right now. People are on the streets marching and arguing for some kind of change, but the dominant political ideology and language of our time utterly fails to meet their expectations or even to allow that meaningful change is possible. In accepting today\u2019s ruling-class ideology \u2013 the ideology of wokeness and of forever racialism \u2013 the leaders of these protests have defeated themselves already. They have embraced an ideology that makes solidarity virtually impossible, by constantly flagging the differential \u2018traits\u2019 between blacks and whites, and which elevates backward-looking historic repentance over moving towards a better, wealthier future.<\/p>\n

George Floyd\u2019s death has exposed how dominant, destructive and futile the woke worldview has become. Rejecting the new racialism, spurning the woke creed, turning one\u2019s back on elite fatalism that today comes in the garb of caring about black people \u2013 these are the preconditions for proper solidarity and real change.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I did not kill George Floyd. The attempt to hold all whites responsible for the death of Floyd shows what a dead-end woke politics is. There\u2019s a new sin. Forget gluttony. Forget sloth. The great moral error today is whiteness. To be white is to be fallen. Whiteness has become a kind of original sin, … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=55696"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55696\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55697,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55696\/revisions\/55697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}