By Heather Mac Donald | Wall Street Journal
He
hardly mentions it, while his adversaries are obsessed with ‘whiteness’ and
‘white privilege.’
Long before the El Paso massacre, President Trump’s
political opponents accused him of sowing “division” with his “racist
language.” Mr. Trump “exploits race,” “uses race for his gain,” is engaged in a
“racially divisive reprise” of his 2016 campaign, stokes “racial resentments,”
and puts “race at the fore,” the New York Times has reported over the past
several months.
Yet Mr. Trump rarely uses racial categories in his speech
or his tweets. It is the media and Democratic leaders who routinely
characterize individuals and groups by race and issue race-based denunciations
of large parts of the American polity.
Some examples:
“As race dominates the political
conversation, 10 white Democratic candidates will take the stage” (the
Washington Post);
Mr. Trump’s rally audiences are “overwhelmingly white”
(multiple sources);
Your son’s “whiteness is what protects him from not [sic]
being shot” by the police ( Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand );
White candidates need to
be conscious of “white privilege” (South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg );
“White supremacy manifests itself” in the criminal-justice, immigration and
health-care systems ( Sen. Cory Booker );
“ Michael Brown was murdered by a
white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri” ( Sen. Elizabeth Warren );
Whiteness is “the very core” of Mr. Trump’s power, whereas his “predecessors
made their way to high office through the passive power of whiteness”
(Ta-Nehisi Coates in the Atlantic).
Liberal opinion deems such rhetoric fair comment, even
obvious truth, not “racially divisive.” America’s universities deserve credit
for this double standard.
Identity politics dominate higher education:
Administrators, students and faculty obsessively categorize themselves and each
other by race. “White privilege,” often coupled with “toxic masculinity,” is
the focus of freshmen orientations and an ever-growing array of courses.
Any
institutional action that affects a “person of color” is “about race.” If a
black professor doesn’t get tenure, he’s a victim of discrimination; a white
professor is presumed to be unqualified.
That interpretive framework explains asymmetries in how
the political and media elites analyze the Trump phenomenon.
Susan Rice,
President Obama’s national security adviser, recently denounced Mr. Trump’s
“almost daily attacks on black and brown people.”
But “almost” and “black and
brown” are superfluous.
Mr. Trump’s attacks on his fellow 2016 candidates—and
on more-recent adversaries as homogeneous as Robert Mueller, Rep. Adam Schiff,
Joe Biden and Ms. Warren—were as nasty as anything he’s directed at Rep. Elijah
Cummings or Rep. Ilhan Omar.
But according to the academic template, to criticize a
“person of color” is inevitably “about race.”
Mr. Buttigieg ran afoul of this
rule after firing South Bend’s black police chief for secretly taping officers’
phone calls. The idea that the mayor fired the chief because he was black is
absurd, yet Mr. Buttigieg inevitably faced charges of racial insensitivity.
Likewise, advocates and the media deemed Mr. Trump’s nonracial denunciation of
Baltimore’s leadership racist. Never mind that the victims of the city’s almost
daily drive-by shootings are black. Race shields minority politicians from
criticism.
Ms. Warren recently provided an unwitting summary of
academic identity politics.
Mr. Trump’s “central message” to the American
people, she declared, is: “If there’s anything wrong in your life, blame
them—and ‘them’ means people who aren’t the same color as you.”
She has in mind
a white “you,” but change the race and you encapsulate the reigning assumption
on college campuses—that white people are the source of nonwhite people’s
problems, and any behavioral or cultural explanations for economic disparities
are taboo.
The academy’s reflexive labeling of nonconforming views as
“hate speech” has also infiltrated popular rhetoric against Mr. Trump.
The
president’s views on border control and national sovereignty are at odds with
the apparent belief among Democratic elites that people living outside the
country are entitled to enter at will and without consequences for illegal
entry.
To the academic and democratic left, however, a commitment to border
enforcement can only arise from “hate.” Such a pre-emptive interpretation is a
means of foreclosing debate and stigmatizing dissent from liberal orthodoxy.
Identity politics, now a driving force in the Democratic
Party, celebrates the racial and ethnic identities of designated victim groups
while consigning whites—especially heterosexual white men—to scapegoat status.
But its advocates should be careful what they wish for. If “whiteness” is a
legitimate topic of academic and political discourse, some individuals are
going to embrace “white identity” proudly.
To note the inevitability of white identity politics in
no way condones the grotesque violence of men like the El Paso killer. But the
dominant culture is creating a group of social pariahs, a very small percentage
of whom—already unmoored from traditional sources of meaning and stability,
such as family—are taking their revenge through stomach-churning mayhem.
Overcoming racial divisiveness will be difficult. But the primary
responsibility rests with its main propagators: the academic left and its
imitators in politics and mass media.
Ms. Mac Donald is a fellow at the Manhattan
Institute and author of “The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering
Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture.”
