Zip Coon Snippet from "Open Season": Section 4 of White Supremacy on Its Deathbed
Let's workshop a sequence from section 4 of White Supremacy on its Deathbed, a sequence that underscores the ostracism faced by blacks who challenge the "antiracist" narrative of black victimology
Zip Coon Snippet from “Open Season”: Section 4 of White Supremacy on Its Deathbed
[White supremacy on its deathbed] could just sit back and revel in our world where university students, mainly white ones full of teary outrage, chant the phrase “Nazi scum, Nazi Scum, Nazi Scum” to drown out the words of the invited speaker, a speaker described as just another “Huxtable sellout to the other side.”[i]
[T]he real issue is that there is a black-American ideology, cherished especially by journalists and academics and artists, where for black people—and black people alone—there’s always a certain shoe that hasn't dropped, there's a beef. It's fundamental to the [black] identity that there's a beef and while that beef is going on we can't be expected to be subjected to truly serious competition. And everything that we do has to be seen through a different lens than you would see it with pretty much anybody else. . . .
[This ideology] is fraying. And you know there's a canary in the coalmine. . . . [S]eams are really beginning to show in terms of the portrait of Blackness as this tragedy—you know: just to be this color means that you're laboring under this burden and if you don't understand it, it means that you’re too dumb [or bigoted] to see it. But then again, look at these people who are pretending to be black! If it were really as bad as everybody says, there would be no such thing as this Rachel Dolezal—you know, who is this white woman who walks around truly having fashioned her sense of identity; she really identifies as black, including creating oppression, creating episodes of racism so that she can walk around complaining about things that happened to her.
And then my favorite example . . . Jessica Krug. . . . She's a white Jewish girl who grew up in Kansas City, upper middle class to affluent (“Krug”), who decided after she graduated from college to fashion herself first at some vaguely African black person . . . and then she decides she's an Afro-Latina. And you know she's wearing big earrings and loud clothes and pretending that she grew up in the Bronx to a drug-addicted prostitute mother. . . . And this person was . . . a tenure professor, wrote serious award-winning books (one in particular). And finally some of her colleagues began to sense that she was not this Afro-Latina person because the whole story doesn't make any sense. She actually claimed that at immigration in some way they misinterpreted “Cruz” as “Krug” . . . as if it's 125 years ago and it's some tough Jewish name or something. And so . . . she actually walks around calling herself “Jessica Cruz”. . . . She had, you know, blog posts where she was discriminated against at conference hotels, where they thought she was the help etc. None of that happened.
There would not be people like her—there's a little list at this point of Rachel Dolezals and Jessica Krugs. There wouldn't be people like that 50 years ago because being black really was a problem. Nowadays things have changed so much that . . . you have these people who are pretending to be black for the fake oppression [and the great rewards one can get from all of that]. That shows that something is really changing. . . . Because if it were really such a pain to walk around as a black person, nobody would choose that. Those people are new and that’s only over about the past 10 years. Canaries is what I think of them. We'll see more. . . .
[And whereas white people who, in pursuit of opportunity, try to pass themselves off as black are considered some of the most abominable people, blacks can get away with that level of phoniness. Why? Well, because] it’s different with black people. Remember, it's different with us because our whole identity is based on being the losers, being the ones who are owed something. . . . [W]hen it comes to a black person pretending to have grown up poor [or to having been abused by cops or whatever], the idea is not ideal—a little phony—but at least black people get to hear about black poverty [and racist hardship] and at least you signal to your people that you sympathize with people who grew up poor [and suffering under the boot of the white man].
I mean there's that whole routine with a lot of rappers frankly, to bring up something antique—where there's this competition. You know, “How real are you? Did you grow up in the hood? Did you do any gang banging? Did you sell any drugs?” And yeah, there was a lot of phoniness about that. But the idea was that you know you're sacrificing truth for something larger about giving a message [of black oppression] to the world through your art.
And so yeah, we're not held to as high as standard. I don't like it. That's exactly what's wrong with this sort of thing. You couldn't imagine it with any other group of people, with any other demographic. But for black people it's always different. And you know, to live under that is to feel condescended to if you pull the camera back a little bit.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where, almost as if an orchestrated attempt to keep blacks cloven from one another, we swiftly brand as “self-deluded double-crosser” any black who buys into the “neoliberal-white-supremacist fantasy” of having a personal say in their destiny, who embraces practices to fortify their resilience to the injustices of the world (especially “white” practices like journaling, cultivating a growth mindset, prizing punctuality, embracing emotional intelligence, tackling addictions, combating negative attitudes towards education, developing financial savvy, setting clear interpersonal boundaries, resisting the peer pressure to lead with violence, entering prosocial circles, practicing mindfulness meditation)—yes, even if those injustices merely amount to seeing the word “nigger” while reading an American-History textbook for a college class they chose to be in, or hearing white people (and others contaminated with whiteness) speak on black topics.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where any black who fails to repeat and repeat the ghoulish gospel, the macabre mantra, as to how much blacks have been and continue to be victimized (and hence to how deserving blacks are of inferiority-ossifying sympathy perks, pity-driven privileges that excuse them from the responsibilities requisite for human flourishing) is to be excommunicated from blackness, ceremoniously stripped of the card so many are literally ready to lie and even slaughter to possess: the “Black Card.”
It could just sit back and revel in our world where any black who refuses to follow the cardinal shibboleth of the black community (namely, that victimhood remains forever the beating heart of black identity), and who strives to make the best of the cards they were dealt instead of pouring all their vigor into whining about cross-generational unfairness, earns the moniker “Uncle Tom” (or as it is now put, to refer to one of the great boot-strap paragons of black excellence renown for rebuking the victimology narrative tearing through his brothers and sisters since the early seventies, an “Uncle Clarence”).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where blacks are branded “deaf, dumb, and blind” for defying the temptation of the victimhood mentality—a temptation for all people given that it provides an aura of purpose and gravitas while also a golden ticket not only to sidestep hard work and accountability for past behavior and future fate-carving, but also to extort and abuse and manipulate one’s purported victimizers; a temptation especially for blacks given that it affords them Lord-of-the-Rings level grandeur as part of a longstanding communal struggle for justice against “the man,” an ancestral crusade for payback against the ever-shifting “powers that be.”
It could just sit back and revel in our world where any black is smeared as a “whitewashed jigaboo,” disparaged as an “off-brand switch-up,” mocked for “acting all brand new,” if he happens to point out too loudly the disturbing parallel between yesterday’s slave masters who said (often, yes, out of warm-fuzzy sympathy) that “Readin’ ain’t right for black kind” and today’s woke pedagogues who say (with equally-troubling certitude and feel-good righteousness) that “expecting black kids to become as literate as white children is an antiblack affront, intrusive to their native disposition.”
It could just sit back and revel in our world where any black is labeled a “step-n’-fetch-it-ass negro” should he remind fellow humans—if only for the wellbeing of his black children—that the story of black significance extends beyond the true tale of their historical subjugation and degradation by whites, and most definitely beyond the false tale too lucrative, too institutionally sacrosanct, too psychologically ingrained, too wise-and-moral sounding to resist reciting as catechism: namely, their skin-of-the-teeth survival in the face of ongoing white oppression.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where any black is tarred a “cracker lover” for pointing out that all the talk, talk as grim and self-defeatist as it is tired and self-righteous, about blacks being the most dominated and degraded and devastated people the world has ever seen (such that there remains “little reason to strive in this racist abyss”) is merely self-serving—but self-serving in the most antiblack sense since it allows them to wipe their hands of any complicity in their failures and instead fault the nebulous specter of “antiblackness,” which thereby promotes an agency-and-dignity-deprived circumstance that further fuels grievance about being so dominated and degraded and devastated by whites; self-serving in the most antiblack sense since all the subminimal expectations (not just in education, but in conduct even), all the kid-glove leniencies, such repeated talk aims to wrest from whites only spoils blacks into an infantilized state of arrested-development dependency on whites, which further fuels grievance about being so dominated and degraded and devastated by whites (a vicious feedback loop).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where any black is pilloried as a “rented negro in denial,” ridiculed as a “Carlton,” should he voice dismay over sending his child into a school system fixated on keeping black people locked in rumination about their subjugation at the hands of whites, a school system where they learn that any desire to see themselves through any lens that fails to center their being the descendants of slaves is just a tragic symptom of Stockholm Syndrome.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where any black is labeled a “bootlicking yessa-boss” who screams the following against the so-called “antiracist movement” and especially against the liberal white elites at the root of it and leading it (and monopolizing it just as they did the civil rights movement).
Please stop helping us: all your help—all your denial of the problems of education and violence plaguing the black community; all your police defunding predicated upon a nonexistent epidemic of police brutalizing blacks for being black (skinned); all your mockery of enlightenment ideals (like objectivity and hard work and future planning and self-reliance and personal responsibility) as hallmarks of whiteness (that contagious evil of all evils); all your defunding of math and classical music programs on grounds that they are inimical to black bodies; all your insistence that kindness and punctuality and excellence in “white areas” are neither aspirational nor achievable for us; all your patronizing; all your holding us to lower standards like we are children; all your placating of us in fear that we will throw a tantrum ruinous to your careers and reputations; all your big-bucks incentivizing of us to dwell on the horrors of our past and the overblown (and often made up) horrors of our present more so than on our achievements and on our role-models who shattered the narrative of black victimology (a narrative you profit from); all your hiring of diversity bureaucrats eager to purge any voice from workspaces, and even college classrooms, that might “unsettle” black people; all your university administrators who mandate watered-down curricula of “safe think” so that no black person feels offended and so that the university (reduced to a defunding-worried cheerleader of political fads) does not seem to be targeting blacks with bad grades (the way cops are said to with guns); all your “antiracist” propaganda endangering more and more Great Books courses; all your expecting our children not to be able to behave in class because “it’s in their nature to dance and clap and be a bit raucous”; all your agency-crippling and welfare-entitling slogans about how blacks have little chance in this white supremacist nation; all your lowering of standards and expectations; all your centering of black advocates of violence (Assata Shakur and Mumia Abu-Jamal and Bobby Seale and Angela Davis) over nonviolent role models (like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Congressman John Lewis and Frederick Douglass and Thurgood Marshall); all your centering of black thugs and black whores especially in music; all your race-baiting injustice towards the heavily-armed majority population on the basis of the obvious lie that whites have it so much better and are driven by their voracious whiteness to subjugate blacks—is literally ruining us.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where any self-loving black who champions individual agency and resilience, and who pushes fellow blacks to recognize that an addiction to bellyaching interferes with seizing upon the over-ample opportunities available, and who tries to wake his bothers and sisters up to the black-growth-impeding industrial complex of black victimology, and who thereby utters that riddle striking at the jugular of the whole belittling enterprise “the best evidence of white supremacy being alive and well is the lie that it is,” is smeared as a “self-loathing Kanye.”
It could just sit back and revel in our world where any black who refuses to recite the story of how terrible it is for blacks in this land, of how “impossible it is for blacks—too often enough literally—to breathe in this inferno,” is an “Aunt Jemima” (or as it is now put, to refer to one the most notable “bed wenches” of the bukkake-happy white man, a “Candace Owens”).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where any black who embraces the path of forgiveness (which leads to gratitude, and to focus on the parts of the garden we can tend to, and to regeneration, and to excellence, and ultimately to heaven on Earth) instead of down the path of bitterness (which leads to vengeance, and to harm to others, and to harm to self, and ultimately to hell on earth) is “a house nigger.”
It could just sit back and revel in our world where any black who expresses gratitude, that chief emotion for halting the human march toward oblivion from crumbling along the way into a bleak bazaar of bitterness and blaming, is a “backstabbing Stacey Dash”—for, on top of lying to herself (since again, as with Dostoyevsky’s devil, the victimized station of blacks could never warrant such a feeling of non-misery), she drains the reservoir of resentment aimed at “the whiteness behind all black setbacks” and thereby undercuts the vengeful drive to remind humanity how deserving of boosts and restitution blacks remain.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where any black bold enough to tweet the career-ruinous thought that the police shooting of the black man “might not have been an act of white supremacy (especially when we consider that he was flaunting a weapon and was living a thug’s life too often glorified in pop culture)” is a “handkerchief-headed negro” guilty of a black-on-black crime more poisonous—more poisonous because metaphysical—than any gang bangers in Little Rock could ever be.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where any black saintly enough to speak up against the repeated falsehood, the foundational untruth, upon which her inflated diversity bonuses rest—the lie of white supremacy having revved up to such redline rpm that, like blurred propellers, it is as shredding as it is invisible—is denounced as a “white man’s whore,” a “slave-quarter concubine.”
It could just sit back and revel in our world where any black who sins against the Holy Ghost (that is, who ever speaks “invalidating” words like “The push for us to identify as victims in the sanctimonious guise of ‘antiracism’ makes us hallucinate racism in every shadow and distracts us from black excellence”) is a “race traitor” more deserving of rebuke than even night-raiding Klansmen—more deserving of rebuke, yes, since he draws a different conclusion from apparently the same information base of experience and so (just as the apostate imperils faith more severely than could any infidel who never belonged) is someone who threatens the religion of antiracism more severely than any white ever could.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where even the sweetest blacks—yes, even those who shudder at the notion of ever dehumanizing another black person as the mere “brainwashed puppets of the white man”—are still likely to wonder in their hearts (which shows how deep the siren song of victimology penetrates the black soul) what, other than self-hatred and a Stockholm need for white validation, could motivate a black person “zip cooning around” with all these “white-supremacist statistics” about how things are not as bad as they seem for blacks—the irony being, of course, that those blacks “zip cooning around” in this way are spreading a higher black love, a more uplifting and positive vision for black empowerment.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where even the kindest blacks are still likely to wonder in their hearts what, other than self-hatred and a Stockholm need for white validation, could motivate a black person “zip cooning around” with all these “traumatizing arguments” suggesting that antiblack racism is not behind every black failing—the irony being, of course, that those blacks “zip cooing around” in this way are pushing a brave and wise love concerned with seeing the best for black folks (much like a mother who, loving not just in idea but in action, exposes her child to challenges of uplifting degrees instead of sheltering it from all challenge).
It could just sit back and revel in our world where the antisocial violence and criminality all-too-cliché among inner-city black enclaves marred by pitiable life expectancy and pitiable education are hastily chalked up to a thriving disdain—present both in individual hearts and the very fabric of which all our institutions are made—for blackness (as if black people would phoenix up from the blunt ashes of their predicament of high susceptibility to robbery and rape and murder and incarceration and disease and so on if only the suffocating shroud of white supremacy were suddenly lifted off their heads), when the reality-check truth is that—despite our egalitarian society at present having as much love for black people as it does for anyone else (if not more)—blacks find themselves in a situation of physical and mental and familial and cultural debilitation resulting not only from the ravages of intentional anti-black oppression (slavery followed by multifarious forms of discrimination), but also from the ravages of several efforts largely meant to help black people:
the welfare reform and the war on drugs and the counterculture movement of yesterday, which jointly encouraged today’s bloom of black single babies having babies more often to ain’t-workin’-for-the-man alleyway hooligans highly vulnerable to jail cells and early caskets by their black market occupation and rebellious attitude (an occupation and attitude lionized as aspirational and authentically black in the anthems of popular culture);
the handouts and the diluted standards of conduct and achievement that, however important as a transitional lifeline during emergency times, continue even now (in the ironic name of mercy and justice and racial equality), which—like opiates taken too heavily and for too long—has engendered dependency as well as feelings of black shame in the face of all the black underperformance and all the white (and Asian and African and Caribbean) condescension invited by such “helping practices”;
the condemning as “antiblack”—again, in the name of mercy and justice and racial equality—any educational benchmark unmet by blacks, which helps to hide what their getting lower math and reading scores really means (helps to hide, that is, the motivating truth that they are, at the time of the test, less capable than their peers) and thereby allowing blacks and society as a whole to circumvent the goliath task of addressing the developmental reasons for black deficits across class lines and so even when unafflicted by the housing and food and schooling traumas of poverty (addressing, that is, the ideals and attitudes and norms of black culture that present roadblocks in the face of which even affluence struggles);
the demonizing as “white man’s sambo,” as “foot-shuffling mammie,” any black who tries to lift blacks to higher ground by reminding them that to blame all their underachievement on past and present white supremacy would not only be false but self-defeatist (sabotaging the very drive toward self-improvement that has gotten so many other groups with a history of persecution out of the morass);
the vilifying as “race-traitor Oreo,” as “cooning Uncle Tom,” any black who calls upon fellow blacks to root their significance beyond just being descendants of slaves still doomed to remain lowest on the hierarchy of oppression (♫“Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen”♫), who calls upon fellow blacks to reject the agency-and-dignity maiming lie that their unfortunate behaviors in the present are the result of an omnipresent structure of antiblackness centuries old, who calls upon fellow blacks to stop waiting for some external messiah to deliver them from the quagmire, who calls upon fellow blacks to take responsibility for rectifying their debased situation (even if foisted upon them at birth, even if due to racial biases) instead of wallowing on past tragedies or buying into race-monger lies that divest them of any present-day fault or (God forbid) even glamorizing their debased situation as what makes them cool like their favorite rapper (Sexyy Red or Finesse2tymes), who calls upon fellow blacks to start looking more granularly at how their own issues hold them back (power-sapping issues, in some cases akin to teen-girl cutting, much less apparent even through the eras of slavery and reconstruction and Jim Crow)—their shattered family structures, their negative attitudes toward academic pursuits, their glorification of criminality and violence and promiscuity and drugs, their antisocial role models, their thuggish peer groups, their anti-curiosity and anti-reading norms of parenting, their laziness-propped fear to leave the ancestral nest of victimhood, their grape-drank dietary choices, their proud isolation from others who could uplift them just by osmosis.
[i] These are the words of John McWhorter. They were taken from a podcast he does with Glenn Loury.
