An Orgy of Hate

On May 25, 2020, white police officer Derek Chauvin was video-recorded while arresting African American man George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Mahmod Abumayaleh, owner of the Cup Foods delicatessen, reported that Floyd had paid his delicatessen bill with a counterfeit twenty. "It was an obvious fake. The ink was still running," reported one observer.

In a video, Floyd is handcuffed and face down on the road. Chauvin kneels on Floyd's neck for several minutes, including almost three minutes after Floyd apparently lost consciousness. The three other arresting officers were Thomas K. Lane, Tou Thao, and J. Alexander Kueng. Kueng held Floyd's back. Lane held his legs. Thao looked on. Kueng and Thao appear to be Asian-American. The police summoned an ambulance, and an unresponsive Floyd was taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

The four officers were fired the next day. Chauvin was charged with third degree manslaughter and murder on May 29. The other officers will probably be charged as well. Once protests broke out, police officers in many locations participated in protests against excessive use of force by police.

American call-in shows, comment sites, and politicians' comments, on the left and the right, rang with condemnation. David Donovan's Facebook page was typical. Donovan, and many of his Facebook friends, are former Marines and law enforcement officers. He posted, "As a United States Marine and former sheriff's deputy, it has given me great hope to see so many of my friends from both the military and LEO communities stand firm in their condemnation of the murder of George Floyd. Our job is to protect folks. Once a suspect is in custody, his safety and well-being become our job. We have voiced rapid, unanimous condemnation of this terrible act."

Many conservatives, including Senator Ted Cruz, Jeanine Pirro, and Rush Limbaugh condemned Chauvin's actions. Mark Levin, a Reagan-administration veteran, bestselling author and talk show host, called the killing "murder." On May 28, 2020, notoriously tough-on-crime former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik condemned Chauvin's actions on WABC, a right-wing radio talk station, one of the nation's oldest and largest.

That Americans across the board condemned Chauvin, wanted to see him tried, and called for change meant nothing to thousands of agitators. Floyd's death was followed by days of violent, deadly rioting and looting, in the US and abroad.

Folks who rarely take to Facebook stampeded to keyboards, stood tiptoe on virtual boxes, pounded their chests, and typed in all caps. Many rich, white, liberal posters on social media joined, in a virtual sense, in the rioting and looting. By the "rich" in "rich, white liberal" I don't mean Jeff-Bezos-level money. I mean people who choose to live in mostly-white, bourgeois enclaves, people who have never lived in a majority-minority inner city, who have never been left exposed and vulnerable by an absent or hamstrung local police force, who have never had to take public transportation ten miles from their home to buy groceries, because, after the riots of the 1960s, all the local grocery stores packed up and left, whose school-age children can get summer jobs, because there are still local businesses, people who don't have to pay extortionate rates for car and homeowner insurance. These are comfortable people who own, inherit, and bequeath property, and want to retain the rights they exercise under a capitalist system protected by the police and the military. A quote often attributed to George Orwell: "People sleep peaceably in their beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." Rich, white liberals are rich because they can sleep peaceably in their beds at night. They are insulated from the consequences of their own, pro-violence, anti-white, anti-Western Civilization rhetoric.

By "white" I mean majority, but not exclusively, white. As mentioned below, Cornel West, given his biography, qualifies as a rich, white liberal. Unlike my rich, white liberal Facebook friends, I know black people in real life, and those black people hold diverse views. I know black people who condemn rioting. These black people are willing openly to state difficult, critical truths that defy rich, white liberal nostrums. Rich, white liberals don't state difficult truths; they are too intoxicated by their Messiah complex, a leftist white man's burden, that real black people rarely fall prey to. And real black people, as opposed to those inhabiting RWL fantasies, are quite capable of criticizing rich, white liberals, as an unnamed but powerful young black woman is able to do in a video. She screams at white rioters for spray-painting local businesses and setting fire to garbage cans on her street. "You are here profiting off of our pain," she screams at white rioters, who can only stand and film her, too intimidated to answer back. Real black people include Walter E. Williams, who is quite capable of skewering and deflating RWL's savior complex, as in his "Proclamation of Amnesty and Pardon Granted to All Persons of European Descent."

In using the word "liberal," I am not referring to leftists. I'm not referring to people who read Marx, or even have a clear idea of who Marx is. I'm not referring to people who wear Che t-shirts or talk of revolution. I'm referring to Facebook users who are content to vote Democratic, and not for Bernie Sanders, whom they regard as too extreme. They're often suburbanites who might not consider themselves particularly political. These nice, conventional, law-abiding, sometimes church-going people, unthinkingly parrot a thorough hatred of Western Civilization, a conviction that there is some vague something else out there that is better than Western Civilization, a something else they are content to access through visits to New Age bookstores, referring to God as "she," experiments in exotic cuisines, or by saying "Namaste" and "karma."

These nice people were cheering on the riots, even as small businesses were looted and ruined, even as CVS closed pharmacies in twenty states, pharmacies that no doubt many black people rely on for prescriptions, even as a Rochester, New York, woman, attempting to stop looters, was beaten with punches to the face and boards over the head, even as a Dallas man was beaten and stoned in the street, his attackers believing that they had killed him, even as three Bronx rioters beat a downed officer with a garbage can, even as the Kentucky National Guard was fired upon, returned fire, and killed a man, even as America, already laid low by a pandemic, was fraying at the edges.

The anti-civilizational aspect of the riots is evident from its targets. The Lincoln Memorial, The World War II Memorial, and Saint Patrick's Cathedral were all vandalized. Synagogues on the east and west coast were attacked. In a Kristallnacht touch, rioters threw a rock through a synagogue window. Rioters spray-painted a pig and obscenities on a monument to Tadeusz Kosciuszko. Kosciuszko was born in a colonized nation, Poland, he fought to liberate. He also designed West Point, fought for America's freedom, and he tried to convince Jefferson that slavery was a bad idea. He emancipated his own peasants, held under the slavery-like yoke of serfdom, and left money in his will to liberate American slaves.

Even after the blood-letting began, my RWL Facebook friends were insisting that the riots were not just justified, but cleansing, sanctified, and necessary for the creation of a brave, new world, for the transition to that vague something better out there, that something so much better than terminally tainted, distastefully white, hideously Western, America. Their rhetoric mirrored rhetoric I was seeing in the New York Times and hearing on National Public Radio. The main points of this rhetoric are summarized, below.

The proper response is not to attribute Floyd's death to the officers, two of whom were Asian-American, who arrested Floyd and pinned him down. Derek Chauvin is, at best, incidental to RWL narrative. His arrest should placate no one; that arrest is no more than a footnote. Derek Chauvin isn't responsible; America, and, by extension, all white people, are guilty of George Floyd's murder, and every white American must be punished. Every white American has blood on his or her hands. George Floyd's death proves that America is a white supremacist wasteland, where all whites are all-powerful, violent racists and all blacks are helpless victims with no power to resist, other than rioting and looting. "A riot is the language of the unheard," RWLs insisted.

I asked how African Americans could be unheard, in a country where African Americans are, and have been for decades, represented at every level of power, from the presidency to the cabinet to the judiciary to the legislature to the media, where African Americans occupy outsize positions in culture, from Oprah Winfrey to Beyoncé to Nobel-Prize-winner Toni Morrison, from the Tuskegee Airmen to Harriet Tubman to LeBron James to Langston Hughes to Aretha Franklin to Maya Angelou to Neil deGrasse Tyson to … too many other luminaries to mention, where museums, like the National Museum of African American History and Culture, receive millions of taxpayer dollars to research and recount the history of African Americans, where required curricula at every level of public and private education focus on African Americans, where the entire music industry, and elements of the broader culture, shut down in protest of George Floyd's death. We are all taught to focus on black victims of hate crimes, but we are not taught to remember victims who are not black. I know few who recognize the names Leo Frank, Sherry Michelle Ansley, or Yankel Rosenbaum, or have heard anything about the Lattimer or the Ludlow Massacres. I received no reply to my question about how black people are "unheard." I am still wondering what reply might be offered.

I was told that looting and rioting are not just justified, they are sanctified; they are holy rituals of purgation. One Facebook poster, Susan Carroll, a pretty white redhead, whose Facebook cover image is a red, black and green "Black Lives Matter" flag, analogized Americans whose property was destroyed during riots to Nazis. Americans = Nazis; rioting and looting Americans = American GIs storming Normandy Beach. That's a rhetorical mobius strip.

Blonde, smiling, Facebook poster Brittany Spinks describes herself as an "entrepreneur, dog mom, and awesome wife." Spinks lives in 84% white Galesburg, Illinois. She is one of many Facebook users who justified her support for riots with a frequently-shared meme that distorted facts to depict whites universally as killers and blacks, again, without exception, as powerless victims. She wrote, "These riots will soon end and those business owners will collect insurance and rebuild. The white people get to go back to their normal lives."

Spinks is mistaken. Studies consistently show that cities devasted by riots do not get back to normal. "In the 1960s many American cities experienced violent, race-related civil disturbances. This article examines census data from 1950 to 1980 to measure the riots' impact on the value of central-city residential property, and especially on black-owned property … Estimates indicate that the riots depressed the median value of black-owned property between 1960 and 1970, with little or no rebound." So wrote scholar William J. Collins, in just one of many studies investigating the long-term effects of riots on community prosperity.

Echoes of this rhetoric appeared across all media. White women are "instruments of terror" who "knowingly" conspire to lynch black men, wrote Charles M. Blow in the New York Times. The Times also published an op-ed arguing that the riots were justified because "the state is failing black people."

On NPR's All Things Considered, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, assistant professor of African-American Studies at Princeton University, justified the riots. "I think that riots, rebellions, uprisings are visceral expressions of rage and frustration. And what we have to do is understand why it's happening and do something about the conditions that led to its eruption … People are on the streets, and they're angry, and they have a right to be angry … What are we going to do about the conditions that create this level of rage? We're not all just going to lay down and die and accept this kind of meager existence that is being hoisted (sic) upon us."

WNYC's "On the Media" broadcast Apryl Williams, a communications and media professor at the University of Michigan and a research fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, who insisted that white women are racists who habitually file false reports on black men and thereby destroy their lives. Every black man is Emmet Till, a 14-year-old boy lynched in 1955 Mississippi . Every white woman is Carolyn Bryant, the store clerk who alleged that Emmet Till got fresh with her. Every day in America is the Jim Crow era. Every place is cotton-belt Mississippi. There was never any Underground Railroad, any Ben Franklin, who founded the Pennsylvania Abolition Society before there was a United States, or John Adams, who damaged himself economically by refusing to own slaves and who wrote anti-slavery language into the Massachusetts Constitution; there was never any Harriet Beecher Stowe or John Brown. The sentence "All men are created equal," and the ideas behind it, though written by a slave-holder, a sentence that would go on to inspire the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement, was never written. Whites who gave their lives for black liberation, like Viola Liuzzo, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and the soldiers who fought to end slavery, never lived, risked, fought, sacrificed, and died for others' freedom.

In the L.A. Times, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, an idolized sports legend, film star, recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, with an estimated personal net worth of twenty million dollars, insisted that rioters burning buildings were justified by America's pervasive racism. "African Americans have been living in a burning building for many years, choking on the smoke as the flames burn closer and closer. Racism in America is like dust in the air. It seems invisible — even if you're choking on it — until you let the sun in. Then you see it's everywhere. As long as we keep shining that light, we have a chance of cleaning it wherever it lands. But we have to stay vigilant, because it's always still in the air."

Lady Gaga, a college drop-out pop star whose Malibu house is worth twenty-two million dollars, said on Instagram that rioters' anger was justified by "systemic racism and corrupt systems" and the "silencing" of "black voices" who are shown "no compassion." "Everyday people in America are racist, that's a fact."

Billie Eilish reached to the depths of her accumulated 18-year-old pop singer wisdom and posted a lengthy, all-caps, obscenity-laced, anti-white rant. Whites are as stupid as "children," whites are "motherf---ers." Whites "are not in need. Are not in danger." Rather, "Black people are killed just for being black." "Why are white people given opportunities that people of other races aren't? Society clearly thinks black lives don't f---ing matter! And they f---ing do!" White people should just "SHUT THE F–K UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUP." Eilish appears not to realize that she and her 64 million followers, are, indeed, "society" to whom black lives "f---ing do" matter.

George Clooney, no doubt, has devoted as much time to plumbing the depths of race relations as is required of a man who has been a member of a show business dynasty all his life and has been cashing in on his good looks as a professional actor since he was 17. Clooney announced that "The anger and the frustration we see playing out once again in our streets is just a reminder of how little we've grown as a country from our original sin of slavery. The fact that we aren't actually buying and selling other human beings anymore is not a badge of honor." White supremacy "infects all of us, and in 400 years we've yet to find a vaccine."

Though black, Cornel West might be culturally classified as a rich, white liberal. He has lived his entire life held aloft on the power of supremely potent American institutions, like the Defense Department, insulated from the petty, daily agonies, humiliations, frustrations and deferred dreams of the poor, black and white. West has nothing in common with my mother, an immigrant cleaning woman forced by her father's coal-mine induced emphysema to quit school and clean houses to support her entire family, or my father, a child coal miner, and adult manual laborer and golf caddy. West used the privilege America bestowed upon him, a privilege no one in my family has ever known, to erect an edifice that insists that my mother, my father, and I all enjoy "white privilege," even as we clean our betters' homes, and carry their bags.

West's mother was a school principal; the Irene B. West Elementary School, in Elk Grove, California, is named for her. His father was a contractor with the defense department. West graduated from Harvard and Princeton and has taught at Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. He is one of the most richly paid professors in America. His mother described his childhood city. "The kids and parents were just wonderful. I never encountered any racial prejudice."

West has made a very comfortable career delivering statements like, "America is really a chamber of horrors." During the rioting and looting, West was sure to announce that the America that had been so good to him deserved every lick of every flame, every shard of broken glass. America is a "predatory capitalist civilization obsessed with money, money, money … There is a connection between the seeds that you sow of violence externally and internally."

That America is a hellhole that can do nothing but harm innocent blacks has percolated down from privileged elites like West to the man on the street. The Daily News quoted a young black man looting a Manhattan skateboard shop. After refusing to give his name, he "rushed out of the store with his arms full of hoodies, designer sportswear and skateboards. 'They've been beating my ass for four hundred years. Now I'm going to buy my own chains. They call me black. Black America.'"

The meme that Brittany Spinks and thousands of others shared made clear: every time a black person dies, whiteness is responsible. Trayvon Martin, who was killed in a fight with George Zimmerman, a man whose very features announce African and Peruvian Native American ancestry, was a victim of whiteness. Though three black officers were charged in the death of Freddie Grey, Grey was a victim of whiteness. Officer Peter Liang accidentally shot Akai Gurley. Liang was born in Hong Kong and is Chinese-American. Whiteness is to blame here, too. Sergeant Kizzy Adonis supervised the arrest of Eric Garner, who died in custody. This African American woman is not to be blamed; whiteness is to blame for Garner's death. Corey Jones was shot by Nouman Raja, a Muslim of Pakistani ancestry – but whiteness really pulled the trigger. Philando Castile was shot by Jeronimo Yanez, whose name and appearance suggest mestizo ancestry; nevertheless, as one website would have it, Officer Yanez "proves white privilege exists and protects white cops."

The Facebook meme listing a series of names doesn't just insist that black people who are killed are always killed because of whiteness, regardless of the identity of their killer. It also insists that all black people who are killed are engaging in obviously non-threatening behavior at the time of their deaths. The meme begins, "I have privilege as a white person because I can do all these things without thinking twice." One of the things white people can do without being shot to death: "I can play cops and robbers." The black person shot to death for "playing cops and robbers," the meme informs, is Tamir Rice. As video shows, Tamir Rice stood on the street in his mostly black neighborhood and pointed a gun at people. Pointing a gun at passersby is not "playing cops and robbers." No one wanted Tamir Rice to die that day, and no one celebrates his killing, but to insist that pointing a gun at strangers is a neutral behavior is beyond absurd and exemplifies the desperate hate-mongering of those who want to blame whiteness for every bad thing that happens in the world.

Another feature of the social media discussion of Floyd's death was its religious fervor. The attitude was not, "Let's present our set of facts and discuss till we reach a consensus." Rather, anti-white rhetoric was laid down with the emotions and fanatical intransigence of religious dogma that must be upheld at any cost. Any discussion was dismissed, not as uninformed or unsupported, but rather as leprous – both disgusting and evil – and worthy only of communal stoning. The RWLs gesticulating histrionically in this fashion were, as I knew in some cases, atheists who had abjured all religion, and indeed mocked religion. They were also people who often mocked expertise, authority, obedience, and conformity. Suddenly they were all popes, laying down dogma, demanding and exhibiting rigid conformity and announcing themselves as absolute authorities. Clearly, being a RWL was their religion, and any lack of deference to that religion was heresy, and set the heretic up not to be politely debated, but to be anathematized, bound and burned at the stake – or at the riot.

The terms "white privilege," "white fragility" and "white supremacy" served as a shorthand to encapsulate the unique, inherent evil of whiteness. Anyone who rejected being told he or she had "white privilege" and was a subconscious "white supremacist" was objecting because he or she suffered from "white fragility." To be white is to be tainted. The very word "white" was used to insult, denigrate, and self-flagellate. As it happens, the term "white privilege" was invented by a very wealthy white woman, a classic rich, white liberal, who has slim to no history of doing anything for black people or for black-white relations.

One poster, who lives in an 86% white city with a 1% African American population, justified the riots with reference to conversations she reported having with black friends. "I just had a discussion about this on my page. I think I can now understand the logic that says outrage is the proper response to the injustice. And the best way to express outrage is through physical acts like riots and fires and looting," she wrote. "There have been more than 4000 arrests made of protestors for allegedly looting, vandalism, arson etc. … Should these arrests have been made? Should these actions be called something less negative like removing merchandise or building-rearrangement to reflect that they were actions that stemmed from righteous anger and not the desire to be destructive? … In talking with those who know better than I, I have been informed that these actions and protests around the nation are logical and needed and perhaps even moral because peaceful protests have not worked. Like those who rose up violently in 1776, these actions are needed to get the attention of those in power. They are actions rooted in free speech and as such are not criminal but a cry of pain. Police or legal action against the protestors is fundamentally wrong. You don't punish someone for acting out of pain and anger … I have called out so many times by blacks for my white privilege, I had to conclude that for some segments of our society, violent protests are both inevitable and righteous. Since I cannot even claim to understand I just have to accept that my thoughts were in error." She asked a black friend how many lootings of whites should be allowed before enough had occurred to right wrongs. "One thing I don't yet understand is how long this kind of action should be accepted. And is it only within the context of a mass movement? What if six months from now an individual breaks into a store, robs it and sets it on fire and says he is doing it in protest of systemic racism, what leeway should be given him?"

I attempted to address some of the above points in Facebook posts. No, I said, it is simply not true that only blacks are ever killed, and that only whites do the killing, or that rioting is inevitable after disturbing video is released, or that rioting is inevitable because of "systemic" abuse. Statistics suggest that in the US, a white person is more likely to be a victim of a violent crime committed by a black person than vice versa. Also, there is much study devoted to, and much debate about, whether white cops are, in fact, committing a disproportionate amount of killings of black, as opposed to white, suspects. See the work of Heather MacDonald, Roland G. Fryer, and David J. Johnson. Again, every decent person condemns the killing of George Floyd. The question is not, Was this killing justified? but rather, Does whiteness-as-demon really offer the best explanatory power? Should we not be talking about what a difficult job policing is, and what pushes any officer, black or white, over the edge?

Not just cold, dry, inaccessible statistics, but immediate, heart-rending YouTube videos, throw a monkey wrench into the "whiteness as demon" explanation. There are highly disturbing videos of white police officers ending the lives of white people. See, for example, the 2016 death of Daniel Shaver, a white man killed by a white police officer. Warning: this video is highly disturbing. No one rioted over Shaver's death.

See, also, the highly disturbing video of white Tony Timpa's death at the hands of white and black Dallas police officers in 2016. No one rioted over Tony Timpa's death.

See the disturbing video of the aftermath of Somali-American Officer Mohamed Noor's shooting of Justine Ruszczyk. Noor shot Ruszczyk to death for no discernable reason in 2017. A white police officer attempts to protect Noor from implicating himself. No one rioted over the Ruszczyk shooting.

That blacks as well as whites can go over the edge was exemplified during the riots. In Atlanta, two black police officers were fired for using excessive force. As I write this, the most popular comments under the above-linked article at Yahoo are supportive of the black police officers. Commenters don't care that the officers are black. They care that the officers were trying to uphold the law during a riot, and had an interaction with suspects who, as video shows, were fleeing from police. One top post says,

"These two officers need to sue the city of Atlanta. The mayor sends them into a riot and expects them not to use force? Officers all over the country are having anything and everything thrown at them and they are to do what exactly? These two officers did their job and got fired. Blue flu for a couple days is what the Atlanta police need. Let the mayor and her pc staff deal with rioters and see how that works. The streets are very different from a boardroom."

If America were indeed the white supremacist hellhole that wealth-and-celebrity-cocooned Clooney, Eilish, Gaga, West, and Abdul-Jabbar want it to be, hundreds of Yahoo readers would not be upvoting support for two black cops who used force in an attempt to quell a riot.

On December 28, 2019, a black man stabbed Jews at a Hanukah party in Monsey, New York. That man will not go to trial. On December 10, 2019, a black couple carried out a terrorist attack on a Jewish grocer in Jersey City, New Jersey. The couple had bombs "with a range of up to five football fields" and had planned a larger attack. These attacks occurred against the background of many violent attacks on Jews by blacks, many of them filmed. YouTube videos show African Americans kicking Jewish women with strollers, defacing synagogues, and chasing and punching Jewish men without any provocation at all. No Jews rioted or looted in response to these deadly attacks.

On Facebook, I posted the photos of Tessa Majors, an 18-year-old college student who was stabbed to death by black 13-and-14-year-old boys in Morningside Park in 2019; Mindy Ferencz, a 31-year-old grocer killed by black, antisemitic terrorists in December, 2019; Samantha Josephson, a 21-year-old college student who was trapped in a car she entered accidentally, and murdered, with sharp blows to the head, by the car's black driver; and Justine Ruszczyk, shot to death, with no provocation, by a black police officer in July, 2017. No one rioted over any of these agonizing killings. They did not appear in my RWL Facebook friends' feeds at all. It was as if they had never happened.

It's not just that nobody rioted. Another difference is more important. In response to disturbing YouTube videos of blacks randomly attacking Jews, in response to black killings of Jews, in response to the shocking killings of the above-listed four women, no responsible person insisted that blackness was responsible for evil. No one said that black culture needed to be overturned. In contrast, of course, RWLs and their allies demonize whiteness, and attribute killing to white identity. This difference is profound. Conflating an identity with atrocity cultivates hatred and provides justification for hate-based abuse, as we are witnessing in riots and looting.

There's another problem with conflating white identity with "white privilege" and criminality, as did Charles M. Blow and Apryl Williams. In response to Blow's piece, I submitted this comment to the New York Times. "Four of my white acquaintances, that I know of, have been raped by black men. One was young, naive, an Ivy League grad, and thin as a rail. She was teaching, as part of a volunteer program, in a bad neighborhood. The rapist broke in at night. The administrators of the program for which she volunteered were not supportive. One was, again, young, naive, and in love with African diaspora culture. She was raped by her mentor on campus. One was a child. Her wealthy parents were activists who supported the Black Panthers. The rape happened in her childhood home. Her parents were not supportive. One was a survivor of previous sexual assault. She became morbidly obese, and was trying to get her life back together by becoming physically fit. She was raped on a jogging track early in the morning. The police never found the rapist. I knew these women over the course of decades, in different towns and cities. One thing they all had in common – they discussed their rapes rarely, briefly, and in whispers, and they expected no sympathy. They knew the stereotypes of white women as Southern Belles who make false accusations that result in a lynching. This was not they, though. None were from the South. None were belles. They were victims of racist, misogynist, violent crimes."

The New York Times declined to publish my comment. Empowered voices like Charles M. Blow and Apryl Williams silence real suffering, and distort national conversations. Influencer Billie Eilish who has, no doubt, struggled through famines and holocausts in her 18 years, insists to her influencees that whites have not suffered and that therefore whites must be silenced. She contributes to the silent shame felt by my friends who have survived politically incorrect rapes.

Everyone hates someone else in America right now. Why, with so many potential targets, am I raging at RWLs who have done nothing but speak?

I rage at RWLs because, as much as I may love them as individuals, I believe that their Facebook posturing is utterly phony. It is Darwinian. They have created an atmosphere where they gain social status by declaring that whiteness is evil. But they themselves are white. They distance themselves from the evil they identify with whiteness by emphatically distancing themselves from the whiteness they have stigmatized. Billie Eilish is no humanitarian and no outlaw. She is as crafty a practitioner of tooth-and-claw survival-of-the-fittest as any viceroy butterfly pretending to be a monarch. "Yeah, whiteness is bad, but it's the other whiteys you want, not me."

Inevitably, rich white liberals implicate poor whites. Poor whites are less comfortable accepting that they are recipients of white privilege, so poor whites will always be the scapegoat of RWL kabuki productions.

The Billie Eilishes and George Clooneys and my rich, white liberals Facebook friends are not acting out of love of black people. They're acting out of hate for their own whiteness. Blacks are surrogates. They urge blacks do act out in ways that RWLs dream of doing, but wouldn't dare to do. RWLs want their black surrogates to be gangstas. When I was in grad school, I had a shy, gentle black girlfriend. She told me that white men dated her because they wanted to have a fling with Sheena, queen of the jungle, but that's just not who she was. RWLs may dream of rioting against the restraints in their own lives, but lack the courage to throw that Molotov cocktail. They deputize blacks to do it for them, but then walk away from the scene of carnage.

Scholar Orlando Patterson has written of this. The gangsta pose "brought [black youths] a great deal of respect from white youths … young black men and women tend to have the highest levels of self-esteem of all ethnic groups, and their self-image is independent of how badly they do in school. I call this the Dionysian trap for young black men. The subculture that ensnares them … has powerful support from some of America's largest corporations. Hip-hop, professional basketball and homeboy fashions are as American as cherry pie. Young white Americans are very much into these things, but selectively; they know when it is time to turn off Fifty Cent and get out the SAT prep book." Young white Americans drop their gangsta surrogates when it is time to "act white." Whites applauding blacks for the gangsta act "is a major factor in [black youths'] disconnection from the socioeconomic mainstream."

If RWLs loved black people, they would not be cheering riots on from afar. They would be tutoring, mentoring, sweeping up broken glass. They would be reading Shelby Steele, Jason Riley, Walter E. Williams, Thomas Sowell, Orlando Patterson, and other black conservative authors they've never heard of. They would speak difficult truths about race relations, and that is the acid test. No one unwilling publicly to speak difficult truths has any authority on this topic.

RWLs are not just, at their core, indifferent to the welfare of blacks, and they are not just exploitative of black people's suffering, as the above-linked black woman haranguing white rioters makes clear.

RWLs hurt black people. All those "nice," liberal bourgeois Americans who see themselves as exemplars of compassionate post-Christian Madonnas, bleeding healing love from their sacred hearts, have killed more black people than Derek Chauvin.

America wants to give African Americans so much. There are millions of dollars earmarked for African Americans. Not for Native Americans, or poor whites, or the blind, or cancer survivors. Yes, those groups get money, too, but I'm talking about money specifically earmarked for African Americans exclusively. There are scholarships, jobs, programs, waiting for someone to walk in the door, or fill out a form, or pass a class.

RWLs insist that African Americans must go through their lives with their eyes on the ground and their arms over their heads, awaiting some evil white man's fatal blow. RWLs insist that they, and only they, and their anti-American, anti-white ideology of pity and white rescue can help African Americans. Constantly attributing any misfortune, from cloudy weather to a facial pimple to white supremacy. RWLs thus hobble young black lives.

Black conservative authors like Shelby Steele offer a different route to success in America for African Americans. I can't even discuss Steele with RWLs because they have never heard of him and see no reason to read him. They are the saviors, and black people must suffer in silence till they reach every last one. How? By bashing whiteness on Facebook.

This weird mess of RWL feelings for black people is summed up in a photo from the recent riots. A white woman gives the finger to a police officer, who happens to be black. No doubt she thinks he is an Uncle Tom. No doubt he thinks, with reason, that she is simply nuts.

Danusha Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery