Isn’t it weird how the loudest voices assuring America we’re all incurably racist tend to do so from very comfortable, financially secure perches?
That fact couldn’t have been illustrated more perfectly than in an article last week by Washington Post columnist Paul Butler, an oppressed minority who also happens to be a law professor at the prestigious Georgetown University and a well-paid legal analyst on national television for MSNBC.
The thrust of Butler’s column is that America remains a top-to-bottom racist country and that even when blacks achieve success in white-dominant fields and spaces, it sucks.
“[F]or now, I am okay with working at a university that in its early years was financed by the sale of enslaved people,” he wrote. “I love my students and respect my colleagues, and have been part of the community’s efforts, still incomplete, to make reparations for that travesty.”
He added that “helping majority-White spaces be less racist and more inclusive feels transformative,” but also that “other times, it feels like an intellectual version of my great-grandfather’s job; he cleaned outhouses — i.e., shoveling White people’s excrement.” Knowing what’s really on Butler’s mind must fill the heart’s of his colleagues with great affection and admiration for him. Who wouldn’t want to be around a person who associates you with feces?
But how is it that someone with so much opportunity and financial security at his fingertips — and at a level most white people couldn’t bother to dream of — can be so miserable? It’s almost always the case in our never-ending nightmarish discussion on race that those leading the insistence that America is hopelessly racist are curiously doing very well, even thriving, despite not being white.
Race hustler Benjamin Crump, an alleged attorney, is making a fortune by hyping up every single run-in between cops and blacks that he can spin into another example of the absolute myth that police everywhere are out to shoot them.
He said in a recent interview that his firm gets one-third of the settlement claims he negotiates with local governments that he shakes down through his wild media campaigns. That means the $12 million settlement in September for the death of Breonna Taylor earned Crump an almost $4 million cut. The $27 million settlement for the death of George Floyd just four months later got him double that.
Joy Reid moved swiftly from guest to contributor to weekend morning host to finally having her own primetime show at MSNBC. If that’s not the face of oppression, what is?
The New York Times’ Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Stacey Abrams of journalism, whined her way to a tenured job at the University of North Carolina, akthough she ultimately refused the offer after complaining that “the credentials, the awards, [and] the status that I have” weren’t properly appreciated. (Victimhood is now weighed in credentials, awards, and status.)
Her colleague Charles Blow, also at the Times, wrote last month in earnest that as a bisexual black man, he is so aggrieved that in one interview he had to remind the journalist “that I had written a best-selling book about my identity and that that book has been developed into an opera that will become the first opera by a Black composer to be staged at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in its history.”
Ibram Xolani Kendi, formerly known as the more easily pronounced Henry Rogers, holds lofty jobs with the prestigious Atlantic magazine and at Boston University, writing things like, “Whenever an American engages in a racist act and someone points it out, the inevitable response is the sound of … denial.” Kendi’s department at BU last year got a $10 million donation from Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. How do black people survive in this country?
Admittedly, it’s possible to point out problems without actually having personally experienced them, but that’s not what any of these people are doing. Each of them professes to have been marginalized and disadvantaged because that’s the black experience in this country. Yet there they sit with some of the most coveted jobs and status that America has to offer.
Are they special? Were they able to accomplish something in spite of being black that others in the same race cannot?
What’s their secret? Maybe black Americans would be in a better position if they shared it.
