A prescient article from 2018:
The High Price of Stale Grievances
"I was hired to play in Rihanna’s back-up band at the MTV Video Music Awards...
One of my friends had been fired and replaced. The reason? He was a white Hispanic, and Rihanna’s artistic team had decided to go for an all-black aesthetic—aside from Rihanna’s steady guitarist, there would be no non-blacks on stage...
If the races were reversed—if a black musician had been fired in order to achieve an all-white aesthetic—it would have made front page headlines. It would have been seen as an unambiguous moral infraction. The usual suspects would be outraged, calling for this event to be viewed in the context of the long history of slavery and Jim Crow in this country, and their reaction would widely be seen as justified. Public-shaming would be in order and heartfelt apologies would be made. MTV might even enact anti-bias trainings as a corrective.
Though the question seems naïve to some, it is in fact perfectly valid to ask why black people can get away with behavior that white people can’t. The progressive response to this question invariably contains some reference to history...
Yet there we were—young black men born decades after anything that could rightly be called ‘oppression’ had ended—benefitting from a social license bequeathed to us by a history that we have only experienced through textbooks and folklore. And my white Hispanic friend (who could have had a tougher life than all of us, for all I know) paid the price. The underlying logic of using the past to justify racial double-standards in the present is rarely interrogated. What do slavery and Jim Crow have to do with modern-day blacks, who experienced neither? Do all black people have P.T.S.D from racism, as the Grammy and Emmy award-winning artist Donald Glover recently claimed? Is ancestral suffering actually transmitted to descendants? If so, how? What exactly are historical ‘ties’ made of?...
Many black progressives use the myth of collective, intergenerational transfers of suffering to exempt themselves from the rules of civil discourse. Dyson, for instance, responded to Peterson’s criticism of the concept of ‘white privilege’ with the finger-wagging rebuke: “You’re a mean, mad white man!” Despite hurling this racialized insult, Dyson will likely face no consequences. The question naturally arises—what would have happened to Peterson if he had called Dyson a “mean, mad black man”? I think it’s fair to say that Peterson would have received something less pleasant than the round of applause with which Dyson was rewarded.
The celebrated journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates provides another example of the lower ethical standard to which black writers are held. In his #1 New York Times bestseller, Between the World and Me, Coates explained that the policemen and firemen who died on 9/11 “were not human to me,” but “menaces of nature.”... New York Times columnist Bari Weiss—a young Jewish woman—was recently raked over the coals for tweeting, “Immigrants: They get the job done,” in praise of the Olympic ice-skater Mirai Nagasu, a second-generation Japanese-American. Accused of ‘othering’ an American citizen, Weiss came under so much fire that The Atlantic ran two separate pieces defending her. That The Atlantic saw it necessary to vigorously defend Weiss, but hasn’t had to lift a finger to defend Coates, whom they employ, evidences the racial double-standard at play. From a white writer, an innocuous tweet provokes histrionic invective. From a black writer, repeated expressions of unapologetic contempt for public servants who died trying to save the lives of others on September 11 are met with fawning praise from leftwing periodicals, plus a National Book Award and a MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grant...
Modern-day blacks are permitted to employ language and behavior for which whites would be condemned...
A 2009 study by Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade found that Asians and whites had to score 450 and 310 SAT points higher than blacks, respectively, to have the same odds of being admitted into elite universities. Although it’s possible to justify this double-standard without referencing historical oppression—for instance, by arguing that the benefits of increased ethnic diversity on campuses outweigh the costs incurred by whites and Asians—in practice, most defenses of Affirmative Action use the history of white racism as a key link in their argumentative chain. Of course, those who appeal to historical racism for this purpose gingerly sidestep the fact that Chinese-Americans were also lynched in the 19th century, Japanese-Americans were legally barred from owning land in the early 20th, and over 100,000 Japanese-Americans were forcibly interned during World War II.
When called upon to justify the fact that we make Asians work harder than whites and blacks to get into college, progressives appeal to principles like diversity and inclusion—goals which may indeed be defensible in some form. But there are good reasons to believe that these lofty principles are in fact anchored to an unthinking, reflexive bias towards blacks. In one study, participants were asked to decide between two similarly qualified hypothetical college applicants—a black student with a higher GPA, and a white student with a tougher course load. Participants chose the black applicant, citing the importance of GPA. But when researchers switched the resumes so that the white student had the higher GPA and the black student had the tougher course load, participants still chose the black applicant, this time citing the importance of taking tougher classes. In both cases, participants denied that race had anything to do with their decision. [Ed: This is Mixed motives and racial bias: The impact of legitimate and illegitimate criteria on decision making.]
An even cleverer study asked participants whether they would sacrifice an innocent person’s life to save the lives of one hundred. The innocent victim was either named “Tyrone Payton” (a stereotypically black name) or “Chip Ellsworth III” (a stereotypically white name.) Right-wing participants were equally likely to kill the innocent victim regardless of their perceived race. Left-wing participants, however, preferred sacrificing Chip over Tyrone. What’s more, left-wing participants were completely unaware of their pro-black bias...
Blacks cease to be agents, instead becoming “puppets at the end of a string…dangling there…waiting to be made whole,” as Brown University economist Glenn Loury has put it...
The white criminal is no more deeply responsible for the mixture of causes that led him to offend than his black counterpart. Why is it, then, that historical forces are only ever invoked to explain the behavior of blacks?
Though we have not consistently lived up to the principle, liberal democracies decided long ago that the individual was to be the primary unit of moral concern and responsibility. What happened to your parents, grandparents, or fellow tribe members is supposed to be left at the door when it comes time to judge your actions. We do not give Jewish writers free rein to incite hatred against German people because the former’s grandparents were murdered by the latter’s. As tempting as such temporal displacements of justice might be, we’ve learned that indulging them creates an unending cycle of retributive violations.
But we make an exception for blacks. Indeed, what George Orwell wrote in 1945 seems more apt today: “Almost any English intellectual would be scandalised by the claim that the white races are superior to the coloured, whereas the opposite claim would seem to him unexceptionable even if he disagreed with it.” Only a black intellectual, for instance, could write an op-ed arguing that black children should not befriend white children because “[h]istory has provided little reason for people of color to trust white people,” and get it published in the New York Times in 2017. An identical piece with the races reversed would rightly be relegated to fringe white supremacist forums. In defense of such racist drivel, it won’t suffice to repeat the platitude that ‘black people can’t be racist,’ as if redefining a word changes the ethical status of the thing that the word signifies. Progressives ought not dodge the question: Why are blacks the only ethnic group routinely and openly encouraged to nurse stale grievances back to life?...
Can we speak honestly, for instance, about the fact that blacks make up 14 percent of the population but commit 52 percent of the homicides? Or to state the problem in reverse, can we speak honestly about the fact that the same percentage of America’s murder victims are black? Will purveyors of the idea that culture is irrelevant ever explain why blacks living in the same Los Angeles neighborhoods as Hispanics are nevertheless murdered at two to four times the rate? Do proponents of the idea that high-crime black neighborhoods are over-policed have a realistic solution to the epidemic of unsolved murders in such neighborhoods that does not involve more policing? And if they do have such a solution, will we ever be able to marshal the bipartisan coalition necessary to implement it when so many on the Left cannot even bring themselves to mention the statistics needed to describe the problem? Can we speak honestly about the social and psychological consequences of living in a community where known murderers roam free? Can we speak honestly about the economic externalities of high crime rates—the capital that is scared away; the higher prices businesses must charge to compensate for the increased risk of robbery? Or does the ever-present specter of white supremacy—and the attendant risk of trafficking in old stereotypes—really loom so large as to render frank discussion of these issues and their policy implications anathema?
At the turn of the 20th century, Italian-Americans committed crime at three times the rate of German-Americans. The issue was not danced around, to say the least. But the moment one makes this comparison, one runs into the brick wall of history. Italians, it will be argued, were not brutally enslaved and formally subjugated in America, nor were they trailing centuries of deadly stereotyping. Here again, I question not the truth, but the relevance of these appeals to history...
They are content that homicide is the leading cause of death for black men and boys age 15-34—a fact which cannot remotely be said of any other ethnicity/age group in the country. They act as if they are content with this grim status quo, so long as we keep the abstract threat of white supremacy at bay... one could mistakenly get the impression that the Left is content to sacrifice thousands of underprivileged black men and boys per year on the altar of progressive sensibilities...
Cracks in the reparations mindset are beginning to show themselves. Whites are noticing that black leaders still use historical grievances to justify special dispensations for blacks who were born decades after the end of Jim Crow—and many whites understandably resent this. Asian students are noticing that applying to elite colleges is an uphill battle for them, and are understandably fighting for basic fairness in admissions standards. The majority of blacks themselves are noticing that bias is not the main issue they face anymore, even as blacks who dare express this view are called race traitors.
As these cracks widen, the far-Left responds by doubling down on the radical strain of black identity politics that caused these problems to begin with, and the far-Right responds with its own toxic strain of white identity politics. Stale grievances are dredged up from history and used to justify double-standards that create fresh grievances in turn. And beneath all of this lies the tacit claim that blacks are uniquely constrained by history in a way that Jewish-Americans, East Asian-Americans, Indian-Americans, and countless other historically marginalized ethnic groups are not. In the midst of this breakdown in civil discourse, we must ask ourselves—academics, journalists, activists, politicians, and concerned citizens alike—if we are on a path towards a thriving multi-ethnic democracy or a balkanized hotbed of racial and political tribalism."
