Section 9 of "White Supremacy on Its Deathbed"
Let us workshop this section (of a larger essay) that reflects on how the "antiracist" efforts of Wokestan SJWs stoke black-white racial tensions as much as, if not more than, Trumpestan Molochs
Section 9: Nazi Alert
Until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally abandoned, until the color of a man's skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes, the dream of lasting peace . . . will remain but a fleeting illusion.—Haile Selassie (1892-1975)
To exacerbate the already-suffocating extent to which inherited identities define us; to make race the overriding factor, overshadowing the multifaceted aspects that shape an individual's life, choices, and outcome; to incite a seething white backlash, which would “prove” (in ghoulish self-fulfilling prophecy) whites to be the racists they are declared to be by birth and thereby further entrench the deceptive narrative of continued black victimhood; to bait whites closer into a hot war and thereby appease both the Molochs of Trumpestan and the Molochs of Wokestan alike—what might white supremacy do from its deathbed?
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, according to mainstream “antiracism” (which shares with white supremacism an eagerness not only to block the free flow of knowledge and art and technology and ritual between cultures, but also to regard whiteness as somehow extraordinary and to reduce people to mere shades of skin), to be white is to be irredeemably evil—well technically, and taking a twisted cue from those antiblack racists of yesteryear who insisted that worthy of demonization was merely blackness (not individual black people themselves), it is simply the whiteness in white people that is the evil (not individual white people themselves).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, unraveling the hard-won progress that led to judging each person on a case-by-case basis (as opposed to reducing them to mere tokens of identity groups), racism—a constant, like slavery, throughout recorded human history and always threatening to mushroom into malignant proportions—crops up with renewed vigor (across the US and beyond) in the form of righteous-feeling but bitterness-fueled vilification of individual people and western superpowers alike for their whiteness: that modish scapegoat for all the world’s afflictions (and especially for black failings); that essential feature behind, for example, the atom bomb; that core characteristic explaining—like phlogiston does combustibility—why, for example, “the Native Americans would have been just fine had any other group aside from whites sailed to the New World.”
It could just sit back and revel in our world where any person (not just white people) can be afflicted by whiteness—a multiracial malady that manifests itself in manifold modes:
in black scholars (like Glenn Loury and John McWhorter and Shelby Steele) who deny that blacks continue to be held back by an omnipresent white supremacy;
or in black cops (like Tadarrius Bean and Demetrius Haley and Desmond Mills Jr.) who, even when they have the blackest names, brutalize black citizens;
or in the black-on-black slavery (like that perpetrated by the Ashanti and the Dahomey and the Nubians) before even physical contact with Europeans;
or even in Japanese racism against Chinese people.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where whiteness, along with the institutions and philosophies that keep it alive and promote its spread, stands as the chief indictable energy—a malevolence of such magnitude, in fact, that it is imperative, as a matter of (revenge disguised as) justice, for the academic discipline of history to constrain its focus to weaponized extremes:
condemning the various ruinous expressions of whiteness;
ridiculing any assertion suggesting that whiteness has been or could be nonruinous;
exalting every form of nonwhiteness, even if it means undoing progress;
refuting any claim as to the ruinous expressions of nonwhiteness (or, when that is not feasible, proving how such expression are, ultimately, expressions of whiteness).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, perpetuating a culture of division and resentment and atrophied agency, antiblack racism is to blame for anything negative that happens to blacks whereas—since whites, after all, have so much privilege—personal failing, barring cases of disease and coercion and the like, is to blame for anything negative that happens to whites.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, although it is encouraged as a form of mocking payback for blacks to call even senior citizens “white boy,” it is right up there with the hard-r n-word to call a black person “boy" (even in the lighthearted form of “Boy you crazy”) and doing so on social media will robotically prompt—even from celebrities, even if you are a nobody—the response of the phrase “Nazi Alert” followed by an arrow to your @-handle.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where—with the help of slave movies stoking rage against whites (even at the cost of promoting an inferiority complex among black children, but one that will then be exploited as evidence of white-supremacy’s reign); with the help of pathos-leaden videos to unveil (Buffalo-public-school-style) the widespread brutality against black children (Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Aiyana Stanley-Jones)—one of the most important lessons to drive into our grade-schoolers, so that whites learn early on that their rapacious-oppressive natures are so baked into them that they cannot help but unfairly push others down in some fashion and blacks learn early on that in their crippled state they are owed lifetimes of recompense and coddling by their cripplers (those to whom their enmity is always righteous), is that not only have blacks been and will continue to be discriminated against in a white supremacist country such as this (such that the only hope for keeping racism in check is to make antiracism too an indelible part of every institution), but—and here are the eye-for-an-eye mantras of vengeance perhaps children will learn to repeat as regularly as the Lord’s Prayer once was—“the only right answer to past discrimination is present discrimination” and “the only right answer to present discrimination is future discrimination.”
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, and keep in mind that discrimination is the only right answer to discrimination, the skin of white devils is as disgusting as black skin was once thought to be—indeed, where to be born white is to be born as wicked as blacks were once thought to be: inherently wicked, such that the best hope is to quarantine them off from opportunities to do damage and to undue their damage piece by piece (such as by replacing every “nigger” and “injun” in Huckleberry Finn with “slave” and “indigenous American” and, at least in those schools that have not gone so far as to “worry about the white supremacy intrinsic to math itself,” by replacing the dead-white-male-reminding name “Pythagorean Theorem” with the laborious safeternative “side-length relationship for right triangles).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where virtually no one, white or black, can name even five of the millions of whites who fought against white-supremacist ideology—not just John Brown (who slaughtered white people on his anti-slavery mission and was ultimately executed during his abolitionist rebellion), but the countless unsung heroes: the Quakers like Benjamin Lay (who penned polemics against slavery), or Sarah and Angelina Grimké (who ignited fires of abolitionism with their speeches), or William Lloyd Garrison (who founded an abolitionist newspaper) or Cassius Clay (who was a Yale abolitionist after whom Muhammad Ali’s father was named), or James Reeb and Viola Liuzzo (who were murdered by white supremacists while participating in anti-segregation marches), or Reverend Bruce Klunder (who was crushed to death after lying in front of a bulldozer to protest school segregation), or Anne Braden (who warred against redlining even to the extent of putting a house in her name for a black couple, which earned her the ignominy of being one of the most reviled people in the mid-twentieth century), or the countless others who (unlike the majority of others, black and white) had the courage to transcend the paralyzing inertia of their times and act on what they knew was right.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, in yet another day preparing them for “a menacing world of white supremacy,” middle-school children with their bowdlerized Twain in their backpacks are shown a news clip of various hipster-like black people answering the question “What if anything are white people superior at?” posed to them by the famous white newscaster in a “heartfelt sit down of racial reckoning”—answering (sometimes with laughs and sometimes with rage and sometimes with exasperation) in a rebarbative collage of normalized bigotry that one would be horrified to hear said of any other race:
“they’re real good at violence”;
“creating racism, of course”;
“stealing black pain, pain they created”;
Even in subtle ways, like making the smaller keys on a keyboard black, they strive to make blacks feel inferior." "Whites, particularly white men, are masters of school shootings and serial killings," a chilling remark follows. "Genocide," another voice intones. "
“doing the sneakiest things to make blacks feel inferior (I mean, why they have to make the small piano keys black?)”;
“whites, white men in particular, are superior at being school shooters and serial killers (tell me I’m lying)”;
“genocide”;
“stealing people’s lives just because they feel like it”;
“insecurity”;
chimes in a derisive voice, citing examples of denying racism as a uniquely white invention or attempting to convince black people to be grateful for their place in the United States. "They intellectualize oppression, downplaying its true nature," claims another. "
“whites are really good at blaming others and they seem to enjoy traumatizing black bodies”;
“they are superior at being dicks”;
“Ooh don’t get me start-ted: whitey real real good at gaslighting (like when he says that racism is not a white but a human invention or when he tries to tell black people there are things to be grateful for in the US of all places)”;
“intellectualizing oppression, making it seem like it’s not really the oppression it is”;
“taking what’s not theirs and will never be theirs”;
“whites are the best at cultural appropriation, stealing practices and styles born of black experiences they could never understand and then saying its just ‘appreciation’ even as they go and make money off of it like Elvis”;
“white folks are good at gentrification”;
“well, they definitely not good at cooking or staying in their lane, I can tell you that”;
“absorbing the cultural practices of those they torture and enslave, and then making everyone believe they invented those practices”;
“destruction of land and people”;
“wearing dreadlocks and then talking ’bout ‘Vikings’ (‘white boy, please!’)”;
“whites are manipulators, that’s what they are superior at”;
“white fragility: whites are very good at white fragility”;
“lying and withholding information”;
“controlling mother earth whether by building dams and big cities and lawns, or by turning melanated bodies into their slaves”;
“saying they discovered things already there (‘no Mr. White Man, indigenous peoples already done knew about that herb’)”;
“omg yes, white people be saying they made all these ‘discoveries’ (like the ‘New World’) and then they get all small-dick defensive about it when we call they asses out, talkin’ ’bout ‘Haven’t you ever said you discovered a new hiking trail?’ (‘no, hun, you ain’t never gonna find this ass hikin’ in no woods’)”;
“whites are the best at being murderers and rapists, and they continue to murder and rape black bodies just by failing to fess up to their demonic traits.”
It could just sit back and watch our work where, to drive-home the narrative of whites as perpetuators of systemic racism, the post-video assignment is for students to surveil their white friends and family—“Grab a notebook and observe just how true the insightful words in the video are,” with “extra credit for evidence of whites behaving in problematic ways not mentioned:
defensiveness when it comes to their privileged and terrorizing natures (one of the biggest signs of their white supremacy);
insensitivity to black styles of knowing;
invalidation of black lived experience;
talking over black folx;
using words that awaken black trauma;
judging black bodies as pretty or ugly or any other way that makes black folx feel like they are back on the auction block;
disagreeing with the recent removal of the triggering name George Washington from our school;
having upsetting banners (like Blue Lives Matter or Trump flags);
invalidating black existence (even in small ways like referring to the peach crayon as ‘flesh-toned’).”
It could just sit back and watch our work where, after a student asks the teacher what the person in the video meant by saying that white people are “gaslighters,” the teacher explains: “Gaslighting’s where you make someone doubt what they know to be true. White people like to make black people doubt many things, the main one being that this really is a white supremacist country. They like to dismiss instances of police officers killing black people as what they call ‘multifactorial,' meaning that the cause is complicated. In reality, the cause is simple: white supremacy. But they do not want to face it—no, not so much because it causes them shame, but simply because it is their way to terrorize black people with lies. Like a lion going after a gazelle, in many cases they cannot help it—although if you’ve ever been to a zoo, you know there’s hope for them to be tamed or at least prevented from acting upon their instincts.”
It could just sit back and watch our work where, after a student asks the teacher what the person in the video meant by saying that white people are “good at white fragility,” the teacher explains:
White fragility refers to the defensive reactions exhibited by white people when confronted with the truth about their oppressive nature. Just like a fragile glass shatters easily when dropped, whites often fall to pieces when a light is shown on their privilege or when black folx insist they restrict their privilege. I will give you a perfect example. Have you ever wondered why Mrs. Tarquinno no longer teaches here at Glenmoore? The simple answer is that she was asked to stop talking over black folx and yet she refused to apologize or take part in the necessary training to show she has the ability to participate in a diverse community of students and colleagues. She quit her job instead of budging. That is white fragility. When called out on her white privilege, she claimed that Glenmoore was a racially hostile workplace. She demanded—using white tears to get people to comfort her like she was some Scarlett O’hara—that we all, including black folx, stop reducing her to the ‘abstract color category of whiteness’ and stop insisting that her whiteness means she is an oppressor. That, my dear student, is white fragility. She just couldn’t take the truth. And it doesn’t stop there. Remember when we watched that video of a Karen calling the cops on a black man, weaponizing the law to her ends? Well, Mrs. Tarquinno did something just like that. She filed a lawsuit against Glenmoore. That is white fragility.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where the high school teacher gives the following response to a brave parent who wonders how, on the one hand, she can assign rap lyrics full of racism and sexism and ableism as reading material but, on the other hand, refuse to teach Shakespeare on grounds of it sowing seeds of bigotry in impressionable minds:
The rap lyrics I assign, yes, can be tough at times. They reflect deep pain that needs to be heard if we really are going to take our antiracist agenda seriously (instead of just going through the motions like so many other schools). Technically, black lyrics cannot be toxic in the ways you mentioned. The beautiful black men and women making that music are oppressed. Black folx, for that reason, lack the power to perpetuate racism (a white creation). On the other hand, the works of Shakespeare and Homer and the like, works with antiblack racism implicated in their creation, are classics of the white-supremacist culture that continues to this day to have the upper hand. Besides, there is already an undue elevation of these white authors to the exclusion of diverse voices. That reason alone justifies my pedagogical approach. It’s crucial to give diverse and inclusive voices a chance. How about this? How about we think of replacing Mark Twain and Harper Lee with Ibram X. Kendi and Ta-Nehisi Coates as no more wild than replacing our school statue of Jefferson with George Floyd? That was a noble move that pretty much all parents were on board with. It’s about representation, you see. It’s about dismantling white supremacy!
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, despite blacks becoming overrepresented in more and more sectors, countless job rejections start with the chilling refrain: “We are no longer pursuing your candidacy. It has come to our attention that you are nondiverse. We know this is not the news you wanted, but we take seriously the ethical imperative to redress past discrimination and to dampen the ever-growing trauma of discrimination against black people. You are perfect for this job. A person of your optics, in that case, should have no trouble at another company. Thank you for your time.”
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, in perfect alignment with the prevailing attitude of praising and blaming people for things beyond personal control, one of the most stinging insults is to have “small-dick energy”—a condition that, much like the closely-correlated condition of whiteness, transcends racial boundaries, but where everyone understands (if only just below the threshold of consciousness) is another way of saying nonblack-dick energy (which explains, of course, why in the porn world, filling more and more with taunts like “bet your girlfriend never moaned like this on your puny white dick,” a woman being “blacked” is a woman being dicked by a monster cock).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, while it is normalized and encouraged (playground-bully style) for everyone to poke fun at “whitey” even from a place of malice and to ethnic-cleansing degrees (while simultaneously venerating, of course, all the varieties of non-whitey), it is unacceptable—on pain of mob outcry resulting in doxing and unemployability—for whites (“land and people stealers”; “land and people rapists”) ever to poke fun at blacks even from a place of joking love: “Mahfuckah, you so black I bet you don’t even have a father figure!” or “Why can blacks be racist but not whites? Because racism is a violent crime and violent crimes are a black thing!”
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, instead of striving for a level playing field on which all individuals get judged by equal standards, the goal is eradication of all disparity—enforced equality of outcome—by means of putting down a thumb hard on the scale in favor of blacks during hiring and admission for various programs, which kills two birds with one stone: riling up racial ill feeling in whites (enough perhaps to bellow the embers of antiblack sentiment into a fire) and coddling blacks (enough perhaps to decimate their resilience and drive).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, against a constant bass-bumping backdrop of niggative lyrics (“Don't be speakin' on me if you owe a nigga / I'll catch him in traffic and ho the nigga”), whites—perhaps gaslit to think there is no such thing as the use-mention distinction altogether or at least that every case of mentioning is a case of using (indeed, lobbing)—are bullied away not only from using but from mentioning and even quoting the word “nigger,” are removed from jobs and colleges for singing along to rap lyrics or from quoting the raw words even of thoroughbred antiracists like Mark Twain and Ralph Ellison.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where reparations might even be given to black people directly (instead of to institutions with experts that know how best to cultivate black excellence), which would kills two birds with one stone: (1) blacks would likely remain trapped in the same mentality, would likely keep up the same attitudes and behaviors behind their overrepresentation in violent crime and underrepresentation in intellectual pursuits, such that in the future they can justifiably demand future reparations with as much urgency as before (no reparations ever being enough); (2) whites—especially those from the untouchable class, and especially especially those there as a result of a cancelation agenda in the name of antiracism—grow in resent (since those who merely resemble those who were mistreated in the distant past would be siphoning wealth, so at least it seems, from those who merely resemble those who mistreated people in the distant past).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, in all cases of one group performing better than another group in a certain area, it is an indictment of the injustice either of that area itself or of the better-performing group (especially if white)—the exception being, of course, those areas (like basketball and rap) where blacks perform better (since, after all, blacks are an exceptional case, having suffered centuries of the cruelest abuse at the hand of a horror the likes of which there can be no greater: antiblack racism).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where we read every interaction through the lens of blacks being dominated by whites, even innocuous interactions:
a white person interrupting a black person out of excitement;
a white person mispronouncing a black person’s name;
a white person complimenting a black person on their hairstyle;
a white person asking a black person for help with carrying an object;
a white person asking a black person if they need help carrying an object;
a white person catching a black boy after falling from the monkey bars.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where—heartened by media reminders of how much and how long their ancestors lived in fear (Hollywood depictions of Middle-Passage bodies sardined in suffocating cargo holds of piss-shit-vomit brine only to be anchored into the implosive depths of the Atlantic if a life of slavery is not in their cards, or of grainy black-and-white footage of white women dumping ketchup on their heads as they sit at segregated diner counters, or of cops hosing them away like roaches for the chase of German shepherds); heartened by constant doom-and-gloom news splices that drumbeat within us all an irresistible feeling that blacks live in more fear today than ever before—blacks can bask, in sleep-tight conscience, in the cheap feeling of power that results from seeing whitey afraid:
afraid to broach any “black topics,” lest they get (in the very least) a humiliating face spritz with the dog-training bottle for being “appropriators” or “gate-stormers”;
afraid to raise evidence against a black person’s opinions or “lived experience,” lest they be pilloried as “gaslighters trying to control the narrative” and for having a “slave-master complex” and a sense of “colonial entitlement” that perhaps “no sensitivity trainings could ever cure”;
afraid to set an agenda at the beginning of a Zoom meeting, lest they be charged with “white-speak” and—were they to make the reckless move of defending the importance of setting an agenda—with “whitesplaining.”
It could just sit back and revel in our world where whites are afraid even to condemn acts of black barbarity, lest they “tell on themselves” for being bigots in ally clothing, where whites are afraid even to hold up three fingers at backyard barbecues so that their wives (worse if black wives) bring out three more beers, lest any guest—God-forbid one filming—take this as the universal symbol of white power still appearing in business logos as American as apple pie: WWE, Walmart, Werner freight trucks, and—accompanied by the telling image of our globe covered in white paint (and later in red paint, perhaps indicative of white blood purity if not of black genocide)—Sherwin-Williams, of course.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where—although it comes at the expense of cruelty to whites (any yet we should perhaps remember what slave masters know all-too-well: cruelty itself debases and deranges the cruel)—all the major bookstores are crammed with guides on how whites, if they will not simply do what is best and “exit themselves,” at least might retrain themselves on how to lessen the negative effects of their inherent toxicity.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where blacks—distracted from ennobling pursuits—are hooked to their screens, unable to stop scrolling through the popcorn hilarity of whites teary in guilt and on hypervigilant tiptoe (as jumpy as Bigger Thomas), adding caveat after face-reddening caveat (each caveat oozing, louder and louder, the pathetic subtext “Please don’t hate me, report me, irradicate me”).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where blacks, and in a sense all of us really (especially members of the Chinese Communist Party), cannot get enough
of the white public intellectual, with his “Undoing Racism Begins With Me” button, who—face contorting and voice trembling with revulsion—cries out in the podcast discussion “Quite frankly I’m ashamed to have this puke body: there is no end in sight for the atonement whites have to make”;
or of the white celebrity on TikTok who—face teary to the point of Blair-Witch boogers—announces (in her “I support black victims” shirt) the “good news” that “the recent census has shown the number of whites to have gone down”;
or of the white music teacher who, despite having a classroom full of African art and always wearing her rainbow-colored "Ally" pin, steps down from her twenty-five-year position in foggy-spectacle shame for having shown her freshmen class a documentary that included vintage footage of a white man describing the singing behind him as what everyone called such singing at the time (“a negro spiritual”);
or of the white employee whose whistleblowing on a fellow developer for having retweeted something “the black community could regard as problematic” immediately resulted not only in the firing of that developer, but also in the name-change of a central character in the world’s most popular first-person shooter game (a change from Mark to Malik) since that character was named after the problematic developer in question;
or of the white HR-rep who, after taking the time to give a meaningful stare at each black person in the room, commences the meeting on the importance of diversity quotas by “seeking forgiveness for any neurological trauma” her “whiteness might have caused in the past or”—her voice extra soothing to project empathy—“might be causing in the present and even might cause in the future”;
or of the white car salesman who, wearing the yellow wristband of BLM, refuses to push luxury vehicles onto black customers (in hopes “never to participate in the exploitation of the financially vulnerable”) and whose business card states under his name “White, privileged, and sorry (but desperate to learn)”;
or of the white politician on the debate stage denouncing her own whiteness as “a disease in need of eradication,” while her black opponent stands beside her in discomfort clear behind a stoic facade;
or of the white butcher who, still in his bloody apron, goes off on a TikTok rant about how exhausted he is dealing with “the constant flood of ignorant whites” who continue to ask “‘What meats are native to the area?’, a problematic question since it involves racist decisions of who does and who does not belong”;
or of the white news correspondent who, on grounds that “it has only been two days since the mother of three was last seen,” mocks—as a case of “missing white woman hysteria”—the volunteer fire department’s decision to participate in the search effort (instead of staying another day at the BLM protest);
or of the white museum curator who, “in light of the BLM protests around the world,” feels “compelled to denounce” the once-revered painting, which depicts a Kalenjin marriage ceremony, as “the worrisome and illegitimate acquisition of a white gaze,” claiming the artist’s own diary entry about the painting (“a deep tribute to the beautiful people of an East African community”) was “at best, cope for having engaged in poaching and, at worst, a willful lie”;
or of the white mother (known in the community for spearheading the program “Reparations by Gift Card”) who at a PTA meeting takes a stand in her “Decolonize Museums” t-shirt and—after announcing her pronouns, and that she is “a white millennial transmasculine femme survivor of acute and complex trauma who happens to be nonbinary, mostly able-bodied, neurodivergent, obsessive compulsive, chronically ill, culturally Jewish, unitarian universalist, nonmonogamous, demiromantic, and above all archenemy of white supremacy”—encourages fellow whites to return “immediately” any gifts received by black people “given the likelihood that our colonial spirit, even if only working subconsciously, manipulated those gifts out of them”;
or of the white “antiracist conductor” who—smelling of expensive diffuser oils and eager to “sacrifice as many chairs as possible for the greater good"—insists (from beneath a George-Floyd scarf that could double as a blanket) that, “aside from scrapping blind auditions altogether, there is no way to rectify the imbalance, the legacy of white hegemony, that has orchestras looking so pasty”;
or of the white greenskeeper who—if only as a “symbolic gesture against the white supremacist impetus to suppress (chop down and even poison) black bodies in its goal for monocrop homogeneity”—vows, in his “Journalism is Activism” t-shirt, to let the weeds (beautiful, strong, natural, diverse) grow on the campus lawns;
or of the white US Representative who, although admitting that one part of her would have liked to have seen the NFL replace “the National Anthem (representing racism)” with “the Black National Anthem (representing antiracism),” finds it best “all things considered” for the National Anthem to remain included since “otherwise we run the risk of forgetting, football being the quintessential American game, (1) that America can never not be white supremacist as long as it is America and (2) which racial group has the least institutional power (and thereby deserves to run things)”;
or of the white “abolitionist judge” who comments “white people are guilty until proven innocent" in response to his own tweet that “‘blind justice’ and ‘equality under the law’ are white-power notions that interfere with the equity goals of an antiracist (and so reparation-based) system of law,” one demanding “emergency measures (such as a moratorium on the 14th Amendment, and other guarantees of equal protection) so that we can reduce the number of black incarceration”;
or of the white bishop who—after reminding parishioners to “say something if you witness any violation of our safe space (since, after all, praying white supremacists are nevertheless white supremacists)”—vows, banging the church podium with his fist, to switch to black depictions of Christ (describing the move as “one small thing to help decolonize white normativity in the church, which is just so G-damn white!”);
or of the white ethicist who—infamous for pushing her so-called “Hippocratic Oath for White People (first, do no harm to black bodies)—writes, in a major philosophy journal, “moral equals ought to be treated equally, but white citizens (as complicit beneficiaries of systemic racism at least tacit perpetrators of the white-world’s total war on black bodies) are not morally equal to black citizens, who deserve a freer pass under the law to do whatever it takes to push back the white supremacy that unfortunately can never go into remission while America remains America”;
or of the white celebrities (the majority wearing baggy beanies) who, in a by-no-means-cringey PSA about “the malignancy of white supremacy,” swear back to back in a viral collage “never to bring more white babies, more wicked heirs of ill-gotten privileges, into the world”;
or of the white university president sending out an email reminding students as well as staff and faculty that, especially since “unacknowledged antiblack assumptions infect every US institution and every white heart,” it is crucial “never to question or debate the lived experiences of black peers and colleagues”;
or of the white pediatrician who, “especially given the centuries of medical exploitation and experimentation on black bodies,” writes an open letter declaring that, as her “small contribution to curbing the spread of the unfortunately undefeatable cancer of systemic racism,” she will give preferential treatment to nonwhite (especially black) babies (“and not merely when it comes to vaccination scheduling”);
or of the white professor of American literature who, as a condition of continued employment after having said in class that she admired Twain (an author implicated in the sin of slavery merely by having characters that use the word “nigger”), is according to the university’s Committee for Equity “hereby barred
(1) from wearing the color red (garments, makeup, and so forth) since students report feeling unsafe seeing it set against the pasty pallor of oppression;
(2) from making any comments that could be construed as related to black culture;
(3) from assigning any white author too unseparated from colonialism and slavery, whether by having benefited from such horrors, or having bad actor ancestors or descendants, or having stories set in Western locations without due focus on how those locations are problematic, or so on (consult the British Library’s antiracist blacklist for starters).”
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, after a professor simply asked that we show some leniency and forgiveness when video appeared of his colleague twenty years earlier imitating Tupac during a stand-up-comedy routine at a local open-mic event, his entire department, even faculty from various other departments (especially Fat Studies and Communications), sign a petition demanding the termination of both professors since “Those who sympathize with racists are racists, and no racist will find safe harbor at an anticolonial institution that purports to be inclusive like BYCC.”
It could just sit back and revel in our world where blacks, all of us really, just eat up the alluring sensationalism of white employees, lest even the most excellent of whom be fired, having to renew their pledge each year to be “effective allies” by “checking their privilege” and their “implicit biases” and, in particular, by not voicing any opinions or stating any research findings or making any connections (even outside the workplace) that “blacks, or any vulnerable population for that matter, might potentially find offensive”; or even of psychologists who say that the growing urge among blacks to shoot white people and even stomp white-infant “skulls into liverwurst pulp” are completely warranted, “no more indicative of a problem with blacks in our time, whatever pathologizing label whites put on it (‘insane,’ ‘psychopathic’), than was the urge to runaway from captivity—an urge whites pathologized with the label ‘drapetomania’—a problem with blacks in the time of slavery.”
It could just sit back and revel in our world where—turning down the niggative lyrics for a second (“Put a mask on quick then take your shit/ Know these dirty lil niggas don't play that shit / ten out of ten got a tool on 'em / Tryna catch a sucker slipping with them jewels on 'em / Wolves foaming at the mouth, got drool on 'em / Young nigga with a bunch of tattoos on 'em / Got a Mossberg, Metro Boom on 'em”)—blacks wonder, as communicated through wide-eye glances of silence at one another beyond the ken of the white gaze, how long this pathetic groveling of whites will go on and if it has gone too far (and yet, in that lower-lip bite of chimpish eroticism known well by soldiers raping villagers in a war whose righteousness they doubt deep down, how much further it can be pushed):
whites afraid of career suicide and social banishment and divorce for saying anything that could be construed as “hurtful” by “black Americans and other vulnerable populations” (especially anything that could be construed as suggesting that the western world is not ruled by an intractable white supremacy);
whites afraid of being called the r-word on Twitter simply for being accused of having overheard something potentially “hurtful”;
whites afraid even of denying that the r-word applies to them (since denial is a sign of being an r-word of the most virulent sort).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where blacks, carrying out an intoxicating punking-program of sadism (emboldened no longer just by peers in middle-school cafeterias but by society at large), become hooked on seeing how much whitey will take, on seeing how high crackers will jump (after they hear that insidiously innocuous order, “Do better!”, so commonly used against them today), on seeing whitey shook—like parents of out-of-control terrors—enough to cave to the quirkiest demands:
that whites not come to see the black-power Disney film on opening weekend (on grounds that “black people want to feel safe” and that “black people deserve a chance to experience their own cultural artifacts first for once”);
or that the university enforce no-whites-on-campus days (on grounds that “whiteness gentrifies and suffocates, white eyes and ears and voices infesting every space”;
or that whites, whatever rheumatoid stiffness they might have or however cold it might be, not rub their hands in public or at least apologize if caught doing so (since that gesture, being close to a known white-supremacist gesture and coming from people with their optics, “undermines the ability of black bodies to heal” and “fosters a toxic atmosphere of domination and oppression”);
or that white employees, plucked from their cubicles at random, be asked—for the sake of “making nonwhite employees feel more at home here at Wrest Corp” and for “seeing which whites show signs of resistance to the request (and so signs of being unqualified in today’s workplace”—to swear off (live, to the rest of the room) all allegiance to white supremacy and to pledge both to undergo antiracist training and to leverage their privilege to bring about a more equitable future.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where it might soon be common—first among those elementary school teachers with “Abolish Whiteness” on their hand-print doors and then among those political candidates in districts where race-baiting will get them votes—to do an anti-whiteness salute (involving, of course, hip gyrations that make whites look idiotic and thereby make blacks laugh).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where—to the opiating amusement of priggish black bullies and their anxious-looking worried-laughing side-glancing slouchy-beanie “allies” (who might just be, in truth, worm tongues egging them on)—whites are constantly placed in unfair (if not downright cruel) doublebinds, or at least near doublebinds, meant to showcase how they—try as they might—can never not be racist.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, for example, not only is it racist when the white actor’s scream at the black actress is sufficient for the scene (since it makes the black actress feel “unsafe” and brings out “a lot of intergenerational trauma, particularly feelings of black-body rape”), but it is also racist when the white actor’s scream is too weak (since it makes the black actress’s subsequent reaction seem “overblown (like I’m just another overreacting black woman)!”
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, for example, not only is it racist when blacks are held to the same achievements standards as all other neurotypical humans (since it fails to acknowledge how set back blacks have been), but it is also racist—enough to get you escorted off a plane after a midflight rerouting—to mention the statistics concerning blacks not meeting achievement standards (since that suggests the white supremacist idea that blacks are inferior).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, for example, not only is it racist when whites look outward like Bruce Lee to appreciate and learn from and imitate other cultures (since that amounts, of course, to the whiteness sin of cultural appropriation), but it is also racist when whites adopt the more insular stance of limiting themselves to “their own culture” (since that suggests that whites think, as if stricken by a superiority complex, other cultures having nothing worthwhile on offer).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, for example, not only is it racist to expect blacks not to be civilized (since that evokes images of African cannibals with bones through their septa), but it is racist to expect them to be civilized (since that involves expecting them to give up their native culture and assimilate whiteness).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, for example, not only is it racist for whites not to ask to be forgiven by the black person who claims they insulted her (since that amounts to “invalidation of the truth of someone who is and will always be the victim”), but it is also racist for them to ask (since doing so discounts how dire the black experience remains due to terrors perpetrated by whites).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, for example, not only is it racist for whites not to ask a black person how she is (since that reflects insensitivity to the fact that white supremacy, displayed in much more subtle ways than simply officers openly killing black people with no repercussions or Klan members burning crosses on lawns, has metastasized now into cure-evading depths beyond what was even imaginable in lynching times), but it is also racist for them to ask (since doing so can never not reek of the shame they have for black mistreatment and of their trying to assuage their white guilt, which has the oxygen-depleting effect of making the question really about them as opposed to about the oppressed person in front of them).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, for example, not only is it racist for a white person to fail to use his platform of unsurpassable privilege to speak against racism, but it is also racist for a white person to do so (since he thereby acts as if he has some right to speak for blacks or at least to speak on oppression he can never know anything about, especially when it comes to the “lived experience” of it).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, for example, not only is “it racist to fail to be—and so not just appreciate—hip hop” (since, more than just music that best speaks for the urgency of the antiracist ethos that all true antiracists must speak, hip hop is the anti-white-supremacy stance of antiracism itself and, of course, anyone who fails to be antiracist is racist), but it is also racist—perhaps with truly rare exception—for a white person to try to be hip hop (since to try to do that is “culture-vulture activity” that “black folx find, like a white person wearing a Native American headdress or a Mexican serape, traumatizing at worst and laughably cringey at best”).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, for example, not only is it racist for a white person to have pride in their white identity (since white identity is innately racist), it is also racist for a white person to disavow their white identity (since that would be tantamount to denying their true nature)—thus leaving whites at best with the narrow range of options (aside from following the black order to “kill yo’self”): either diluting one’s whiteness (that is, diluting the power of one’s antiblack oppressiveness) through trainings and spreading the protective benefits of white privilege to black people and so on, or else—and perhaps for the best given that “whiteness is highly contagious”—finding ways to quarantine oneself off, as in those scary movies when the father demands that his family keep him tied up until the full moon passes (so as to thwart any opportunity for one’s antiblack oppressiveness to have real-world effects).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where restaurant customers, black and white too, refuse to tip white waiters on ground that they already had more than enough of a tip in benefiting from the centuries of slavery.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, as if there really were hordes of Nazis ever lurking (or, perhaps more accurately, to bullifacture such hordes into existence), businesses have to fly “Abolish Whiteness” banners expressing how angry they are at antiblack racism and how they will forcibly remove any racist from their premises (“We reserve the right to fuck up any Nazi in our SAFE SPACE!”)—gestures meant to keep them on the good side of Fuck-White-Supremacy marches (led in the beginning mainly by rich-white college protesters drumming offbeat on bongos and djembes):
marches to raise awareness for the plight of black people by smashing Nazi windows, and setting fires to those “homes stolen by Nazis” in areas once predominantly black, and knocking grocery bags out of the arms of Nazis, and blocking Nazis from crossing the street (even, well especially, if those Nazis are undercover as walkered grandmas), and punching Nazis to the rhythms of their chants (“Nazi scum / off our streets”), and dragging Nazis from their car windows, and spray painting Nazi statues with the word “Nazi” over the name “Jefferson” or “Washington” or “Hamilton,” and tearing Nazi statues down with impunity (since police commissioners and mayors and so forth do not want to appear even more like Nazis than they have already been deemed to be);
marches whose chaos and destruction is understandable, of course, given the globally-contagious media attention it brings to “the dire cause of protecting black bodies” (although news reports will typically describe the fiery live footage behind them as “largely peaceful,” and will definitely not draw attention to the many police-officer injuries, so as to disinvite the career-ruining charge of being Nazis themselves).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where businesses that want to stay in business have to fly antiracist colors, safe-space colors, and other flags proving they are victims (trans black gay obese disabled) or allies of victims and also proving they are not someone with hope in or love for a system hopelessly racist (as might be indicated not only by lack of banners, but definitely by bad banners: pro-Trump, pro-troop, pro-police, pro-free-speech).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where blacks and their allies, while in the streets raising awareness of (or is it manufacturing belief in?) “the unfathomable plight of black people,” smash and loot and burn businesses (white and, drunk by their power, black too)—businesses that fail at least to make the compulsory declarations against black brutality on banners or their boarded up windows:
“Whole Foods stands against the continued mistreatment of black people”;
“CVS believes in the right of black people to leave their homes without fear”;
“No white supremacist is allowed in Lowes”;
“Dollar Tree is a SAFE SPACE for African Americans”;
“Delete Uber if you won’t fight antiblack racism.”
It could just sit back and revel in our world where the American Medical Association—committed to “leveling the playing field a bit at least when it comes to healthcare,” and to “dismantling the structural racism that poses a daily threat to the health of black Americans,” and to “weakening white supremacy’s grip over the literal bodies of black citizens”—endorses a “reparation-based model of medicine” as opposed to the “antiquated colorblind model: an equality model of healthcare that, in failing to achieve racial equity, only serves to keep blacks in their debilitated position.”
It could just sit back and revel in our world where various hospitals and medical boards and national health agencies, influenced primarily by university activism’s call to treat blacks as the children on the sinking Titanic and whites as the male adults (ones, in fact, with a contagious illness of oppression), argue that since this country is structured to promote white health and lifespan above all, and since whites pose an “existential threat” to black lives anyway, “it violates the dictates of equity-oriented healthcare” to allow whites to get vaccines before blacks or to allow greater numbers of whites in cardiology units and cancer wards or to allow whites to be treated before nonwhites (or even be treated at all) in situations where there are too many nonwhite patients for medical facilities to handle.
It might just sit back and watch our world where—as a measure “to reduce the high number of incarcerations of black Americans” (without, of course, addressing the root causes), a measure that at the same time “gives whites a small but humbling taste of the police fear that grips black Americans”—it might soon become a hate crime to call 911 on any black person “without a preponderance of evidence that the black person in question really is guilty of a crime or really poses a danger,” starting perhaps first in San Francisco, a city that has already proposed the CAREN Act (which stands for “Caution Against Racially Exploitative Non-Emergencies” and is named, of course, after the widespread term “Karen,” an antiracist (and so acceptable) racist slur that refers to a white woman, often with an inverted bob, who is quick “to weaponize their white privilege especially by calling the cops on black bodies).
It might just sit back and watch our world where—to ensure that “black voices get their chance to be overrepresented in the research world—more scientific journals might start promising to take “giant steps toward enforcing equity-based publication measures” so that “it is not simply the best and the most intriguing work that gets in (as if we were not dealing with an international crisis of white supremacy), but also a good portion of work by black scientists.”
It could just sit back and revel in our world where—similar to how unescapable labels like “beast” once tormented blacks enough that some in turn lashed out, in effect, with “Wanna see beast, bitch?” (even if it meant raping white girls they were said to crave more than watermelon)—unescapable labels like “racist” will torment whites enough that some will lash out, in effect, with “Wanna see racist, bitch?” (even if it means raping black girls like the sex chattel they are said never to stop looking at them as): “See, caint never trust ’em!”—yesterday’s Klansman and today’s “progressive” bully blending into one voice.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, as part of a tried-and-true strategy to “heighten the contradictions” between black and white (resulting in prison-style polarization), every individual black failing or immorality is placed on the back of “whitey”—yes, even to the extreme of saying that, by some magic (perhaps the magic of having been infected with the same “internalized whiteness” that has black cops brutalize black civilians or that had African Americans legally owning slaves), no blame is to fall on those “man-stealing” Africans who sold Africans (not just enemies, but neighbors and family members even) to Europeans as well as to Arabs (whose craving for free labor was not strong enough, as is clear by their castration practices, to risk their population being tainted by slave procreation).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where whites are gaslit daily, starting from elementary school, into believing that “white society” has nothing good about it—tarnished as it is with unforgivable evils (yes, even though (1) those are largely the same evils in which all major societies have committed or at least would commit in similar circumstances and (2) “white society” has given gifts in technology and understanding, beauty and morality, the likes of which the world has never seen.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where equity (equality of outcome) is considered holy enough that various institutions (from universities and intelligence agencies and law firms to orchestras and museums and news agencies) go out of their way to see that black people are represented (if not overrepresented as redress to past oppression), where all sectors of life—not just the understandable sectors of law enforcement and hospitality, but even fire departments and physics programs and architecture firms—face a moral need to have enough blacks to represent their actual percentage in the population (if not way more as compensation for past injuries by the white world)—yes, even at risk of hurting those sectors, or at least not improving them (in the same way that having the white population be accurately represented in the NBA would hurt the NBA); even at risk of turning down or removing more qualified white musicians and engineers (as China keeps growing without such self-imposed restraints); even at risk of keeping cloaked the root causes of black underperformance as whites become resentful.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where the phenomenon of “white unsafeness,” which can be felt even in (fake) blacks, is then mocked as a just another move of white supremacy to leverage biopower over black bodies, mainly to justify calling the cops on them—disrupting flights and classes and concerts—or using deadly force against them whenever just one white feels unsafe.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where blacks are groomed to feel that white babies—locked into their oppressor roles as indelible racists, so “university studies” suggest, by about three months—will grow up to be not simply the wicked heirs of ill-gotten wealth with an voracious hankering to participate in various forms of black-body domination, but “soldiers in the new total war against blacks” (in which case there might be moral grounds for everything from sterilizing whites to crushing infant skulls under blacks combat boots so as “to knock the colonial entitlement right out of them” and be able to say to brains on the roadside “How does your all privilege, all your math knowledge, look now!”).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where white children internalize such dehumanizing sentiments as to their inherent wickedness, which together with their fear of blacks—a fear bred in them given their disproportionate displays and celebrations of violence coupled with a long history of stereotypes as to their animalism coupled with steady background of ruthless lyrics targeting “White boys” coupled with their fathers’ palms getting sweaty around them and so on—will further fuel the rift of radical polarization.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, flouting the notion that the riches of knowledge and culture are there for all humans across all categories and borders (there to be admired, imitated, learned from, remixed, improved upon), whites are censored, silenced, shamed, and threatened for doing “black people things” in what is a petulant program of cultural gatekeeping supposedly justified by lobbing the term “appropriation” (as if the mere label were an argument, and as if blocking the transfer of knowledge and technology and art were not one of the sickest things implicated in the sickest movements of history, and most importantly as if every invention were not but the unfolding of what came before anyway)—yes, censored, silenced, shamed, and threatened even though whites themselves do not cry “theft” in the face of Nat Clifton or Earl Lloyd playing the game of basketball or in the face of Chou Wen-Chung and Toru Takemitsu composing in the vein of classical European music.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where whites are bullied so much that, especially in light of the statistics about black violence and representations of such violence in hip hop, old slave-trade stereotypes of black supernatural strength and animality resurge along with a sentiment of feeling unsafe around blacks—this helping to ensure, of course, that we never get to a post-racial society where the difference between brown and pale skin matters about as much as the difference between having dark-brown or light-brown eyes.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where “white culture” is besmirched so widely, as being the source of all the ills against blacks and the world at large, that whites feel more and more a need to start harping on the statistics about black violence and black lower IQ and lack of high art and inventions and entrepreneurship and breakthroughs and how much more black thugs attack white people than vice versa (even including white cops).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where “white ancestors”—even white heroes from Plato to Churchill—are besmirched so widely, as being the source of all the ills against blacks and the world at large, that whites feel more and more a need to start harping on the plagiarism and adultery (almost fifty different women) of MLK while going down the list to highlight the human-all-too-human dirt on various black icon.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where white history is besmirched so widely that it is hard to see bitterness not growing among whites (especially when, just as slaves who ran away were described as afflicted with drapetomania, whites are hit by the sadists themselves with a pathologizing term to describe such bitterness: “white fragility,” “white rage,” “white tears,” and so on)—yes, a bitterness that might even blow its top, the bullied eventually having enough: “Why should I respect your history when you treat mine like shit?”; “Why should I even allow you access to any of the gifts (the rights, the programs, the society, the cities) produced by my history?”
It could just sit back and revel in our world where—instead of fighting the divisive idea that some things are allowed to be appreciated only by certain groups, that mean-spirited idea that cultures have borders in which no immigrant is allowed to pass—whites will perhaps soon enough stop saying either (1) “there is no whiteness culture by and for whites (only universal human culture)” or (2) “if one insists there is a whiteness culture, then let it be considered the culture that is by and for everyone”—whites will perhaps soon enough stop saying these things and, instead, help ossify the direction blacks were already going in (the “Build the Wall” direction that has led to the worst atrocities in the past) by cordoning off arguably the best (philosophy and art and technology and beauty) from black people, by demanding that no black be allowed to do any “white people things” or participate in any of the anti-repressive and heterodoxy-allowing “white culture” that produced Goethe and Spinoza and Plato and Kant or reap the rewards of “white achievement”:
no basketball;
no metropolitan hubs;
no composing of classical music;
no cosmopolitanism;
no eagerness to expand beyond one’s own traditions;
no analyzing Joyce's Ulysses;
no rocket building;
no getting to enjoy vaccines and antibiotics and transplants and chemotherapy (and any of the other awesome medical advancements gifted to the world);
no getting to benefit from the spread of the written word and of universities;
no free-market capitalism (that brought so many out of extreme poverty);
no Marxism;
no receptivity to foreign cultures and ways of being to learn from and build upon;
no writing white characters in stories;
no ultimate frisbee;
no equal treatment under the law;
no separation of church and state;
no getting to appreciate learning about dead civilizations (their customs and languages) uncovered and preserved by “white culture’s” curiosity about the foreign;
no representative government;
no thinking there are objective truths;
no government change without standard risk of bloodshed;
no philosophically-principled celebration of tolerance (backed up, in fact, by encouraging criticism as a way for “white culture” to get better);
no religious and artistic and political freedom;
no civil rights;
no skyscraper constructing;
no use of the scientific method;
no enjoyment of freedom of expression;
no reaping the benefits of internal combustion engines;
no computer programing;
no school shooting;
no aiming for perfection;
no Bach;
no yoga;
no dipping carrots in hummus;
no segway riding;
no brother-sister romance;
no constructing of mathematical proofs;
no serial killing;
no Nascar;
no ironic tattoos;
no recycling;
no supermarket sushi;
no wine-tasting events;
no fashionable use of Himalayan salt (and definitely no Himalayan-salt lamps);
no reiki;
no getting to be lifted by Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo;
no western philosophy and art that has awed all cultures around the world;
no white society that (unlike with African and Middle Eastern and Asian and South American societies or various indigenous societies) people across the world en masse struggle to be a part of for good reason (sometimes even risking their own lives to do so).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where the punking of whites becomes so stifling, so intrusive (affecting them in their own homes: every channel, even conversation) as to provoke a backlash against all blacks—not just the gurus riding the big-bucks gravy train on speaking circuits as the racial-injustice-peddling tools of a Palpatine cheating death through the use of the dark side of the force (and a little help from China), but even those “Uncle Toms” who recognized the widespread claims of oppression were exaggerated and harmful to black people, who recognized that with white supremacy on its deathbed it was time for blacks to embrace the burden of carving their own fates, who recognized the great deal to be grateful for having been born in the West at this time with such a fruitful inheritance of opportunities and cultural treasures (the works of Shakespeare and Mozart to name but a few) guiding one in how to make the best of these opportunities (grateful, yes, whatever the US media likes to show and the US people like to say perhaps out of boredom or to feel hip or to self-sabotage or to carry out the equivalent of whatever a depressed teen does in cutting her arms or an immune system does when sheltered so long that it has nothing to attack but itself).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, with the rise in cyber bubbles in which you get only news and data and friends that corroborate what you already think or where you want your thought to go, many more websites catering to and breeding racist extremism will be available for whites who feel suffocated by the punking—stoking, in effect, a potential Armageddon of backlash.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where at least some whites, having tolerated so much blame for so long for what they always knew was an overblown narrative of thugs trying to smash and grab cheap power (as one might TVs in a riot), seem on the verge of saying enough is enough to all the taunting vileness done in the name of “dismantling [a nonexistent] white supremacy”—striking back, no, not merely by taking down the anti-white-supremacy signs they hoped would protect their storefronts from smashing arson, and not merely by taking their great figures and achievements out of the antiracist trash bin, and not merely by asking devastating questions (“Which of your artists compares to Shakespeare and Goethe and Mozart and Bach and so on?” or “Which of your philosophers compares to Plato and Aristotle and Leibniz and Kant and so on?” or “Which of your medical advancements compares to gene-editing and organ-printing and antibiotics and stem-cell therapy and anesthesia?” or “Which of your cities compares to New York and London and Paris?”), and not merely by ridiculing the comparatively lame innovations of a people with the lowest IQ and the highest tendency to violence among humankind, and not merely by pushing hard (regardless of their free-speech commitments) the anti-art agenda of allowing lyrics to be used against rappers in a court of law; striking back, in addition, by opening themselves up to what will give these largely-college-based thugs the satisfaction of seemingly having been proven right: namely, to the Palpatine “Do It” of lynch-friendly violence.
This piece is unpublished