By: Jonah Goldberg – nationalreview.com – August 3, 2018

When I was a youngish teenager, I went to the bank one day. (This was pre-ATM machines, kids.) I stood in line behind a very old, very properly dressed white lady, complete with the sort of fancy hat that I still don’t know the proper name for. When she got to the teller, I didn’t pay attention at first but, very quickly, my ears perked up.

She earned my attention because this prim old woman was passionately raining racial epithets at the bank teller, who was an Asian-American woman. I have no idea what the bank teller’s specific ethnicity was. But the old lady seemed to roam the waterfront between “nips,” “gooks,” “slants,” etc.

“You damn gooks killed my husband and my son!” I distinctly remember her saying. The whole thing was shocking to me, and to everyone else at the bank. The teller handled it very well, as did the manager who ushered the obviously distraught woman out of the bank as quickly as possible.

What’s the point of this story?

The old lady was wrong to do what she did. She may have had plenty of rationalizations and explanations for why she tormented that young woman — but none of them added up to an excuse.

It’s Okay When We Do It

I haven’t thought of that incident in years, but it came back to me when I read this defense of Sarah Jeong in the Washington Post on Friday morning:

“Part of the reason it was so easy for the outrage to be manufactured in the first place was it was completely decontextualized and ahistorified,” said Nolan L. Cabrera, an associate professor at the University of Arizona who will publish a book in the fall about racial attitudes held by white college students. “Then it was easy to drum up anger and say it looks like she hates white people. That only makes sense if you are willfully ignorant of 400 to 500 years’ history and contemporary social context and also the context from which the tweets were sent.”

It seems to me that the old lady at the bank had more “reason” to hate Asians than Jeong has to hate white people. But the simple fact remains that the individual American of Asian descent that the old lady at the bank attacked didn’t do anything wrong.

Bigotry for Thee, Justice for Me

Sometimes I am well and truly baffled about why this sort of thing is so complicated. I mean, it’s not that the Left doesn’t understand my point.

For instance, when an Islamic terrorist murders people, there’s an instant rush to fret over and condemn any sort of “anti-Muslim backlash.” Never mind that such backlashes have been vastly rarer than we’re usually told, the principle is correct: It is wrong to blame innocent Muslims for the things other Muslims did.

Or just think about how much ink has been spilled arguing that it is unfair and unjust to assume that one black youth is a criminal or a threat just because he resembles in some way a negative stereotype. I’m not mocking this argument; I am agreeing with it.

As I’ve been saying until I’m blue in the face on my book tour, one of the greatest things about this country is the ideal — always in tension with the lesser devils of our natures — that says we should take people as we find them. My objection to identity politics is that it reduces millions of people to a single attribute or grievance. It assumes that, simply by accident of birth, some people are more noble or more evil than others.

If you think that all you need to know about an African-American person to size up his character or humanity is his skin color, then you’re a racist. Imagine some guy named Joe emerges from a block of ice and is trying to catch up on the news by talking to the first person he meets, David.

Joe: “Who is Barack Obama?”

David: “Oh, he’s a black guy.”

Joe: “Who’s Thomas Sowell?”

David: “Another black guy.”

Joe: “Who’s O. J. Simpson?”

David: “Black guy.”

Joe: “And this Willie Horton fella?”

David: “Typical black guy.”

It shouldn’t take a genius to see that David’s a pretty hardcore racist.

You can run similar thought experiments about virtually any group. If all you need to know about Oscar Wilde is that he was a gay dude, just like Richard Simmons or Milo what’s-his-name, you’re a bigot. If Meyer Lansky and Albert Einstein are merely two Jews to you, you’re an anti-Semite. If Margaret Thatcher, Joan of Arc, and Lizzie Borden are just three chicks, you’re a sexist.

And again, historically, this is mostly a left-wing or liberal (both in the classical and modern senses of the word) insight. But for some bizarre reason, for many people, this idea evaporates like water off a hot skillet when you replace any of these categories with “white” or, very often, “male.”

Suddenly fancy words and phrases fly like sawdust from a wood chipper: “structures of oppression!” “decontextualized!” “ahistoricized!” etc. It’s all so clever and complicated. The same people who take to the streets at the slightest suggestion that Muslims can be judged by the evil deeds of other Muslims will lecture and harangue you for hours, mob you on Twitter, or condescendingly dismiss you for not understanding that all white people have it coming.

I am not denying the history of white racism in America. I’m more than eager to acknowledge it. But what these people are basically saying is that you can say bigoted things about all white people based on things other white people have done. And spare me the argument that some 70-hour-a-week truck driver in Appalachia has it coming because he’s a grand beneficiary of white supremacy.

Again, the old lady at the bank had a historically grounded reason to be bigoted against people of Asian descent. If we take the gobbledygook about “personal truth” even remotely seriously — and I’m not saying we should — she has a better set of grievances against Asians than Sarah Jeong has against whites, including against the bigots who trolled her, or, for that matter, than Ta-Nehisi Coates has against whites. (Coates’s one example of personal grievance in his book boils down to a white woman being rude to his son in an elevator.)

The upshot of almost all the defenses of anti-white rhetoric boil down to an argument about power.

To see the remainder of this article, tweets and responses, click read more.

Source: Sarah Jeong & Racism: Anti-White Racism Is Still Bad