In the age of social media and progressive censorship, forums like X have become one of a few places in American life where people can still experience something like unadulterated freedom of expression. In these spaces, political feelings that are normally repressed find a voice, as anonymity allows one to avoid the consequences of failing to observe the often-hypocritical rules of polite liberal society.
This is one of the lessons from the online furor over Minnesota mother Shiloh Hendricks and the inchoate ethnic solidarity that her actions brought to the surface. Hendricks became the subject of international news after she was filmed by a stranger using the uniquely unmentionable racial slur, not once, but repeatedly, while having some sort of altercation at a playground. The viral video starts in media res, but the viewer knows what is about to happen: a naughty white person is about to be exposed as a racist.
Instead of being quickly canceled, as one would expect, Hendricks received an outpouring of sympathy and money from anonymous internet contributors. The reaction scandalized the left, which saw the incident as vindication of their incessant wailing about so-called white supremacy. Not a few conservative commentators and influencers who, we must note, make a living by monetizing outrage, also joined in to voice their disapproval. According to them, whites who sympathize with Hendricks are no better than blacks who rushed to lend support and money to Karmelo Anthony, the black teen who last month in Texas stabbed to death a white teen, Austin Metcalf.
Both of those interpretations are off. For one, there is no moral comparison to be made between a ghetto culture that makes martyrs out of its cold-blooded murderers, and an online movement that revels in using naughty words. But more to the point, whites are unique among racial groups in that they are not dominated by a majority who think and act tribally, nor are they permitted in our culture to do so. That’s in stark contrast to the “black community”—as the black interest lobby is often called—which will defend any action by any black person, even cold-blooded murder, against any other race. In the case of blacks and many other nonwhite groups, racial solidarity trumps any other standard, such as justice or fairness.
But some conservative influencers still insist that with enough goodwill from whites, Americans of all races will join hands and walk together into that land promised by Martin Luther King Jr., “where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Those who hold to this facile vision should consult the latest election results, which—despite the significant gains among minority voters that helped Trump win the election—looked much like the outcomes of every other election since the Civil Rights Act became law. Every demographic group other than whites voted overwhelmingly for the Democratic candidate, Kamala Harris. She won black voters by margins otherwise only seen in North Korea, as the Democratic candidate always does. To the extent Trump won over minority voters, he did so by ignoring those weak sisters on the right who bow to the demands of the race hustlers.
Certainly, it would be both wrong and counterproductive if whites adopted the victimhood tactics of the black grievance lobby. But that that is not likely to happen, anyway. Too many whites are caught up in the game of trying to win approval from the race hustlers who are paid to hate them. The hand-wringing response to Shiloh Hendricks from the professional conservative commentariat is a case in point: no other racial group except whites would expect members of their race to behave perfectly when they are provoked as Hendricks was.
Notably, many rich and well-off whites who readily criticize a low-status white person like Hendricks for uttering a racist remark, for her tattoos, and for her “white trash” behavior, are the same people who live like actual white supremacists. They wall themselves off from the dubious “blessings” of the forced diversity that they insist is necessary for their less-fortunate counterparts, who do not have the same privilege to opt out of living in America’s experimental melting pots. This absurd terror about being seen as racist under which whites in America live helps explain the dramatic overreaction to the Hendricks incident, which a more robust society would have dismissed as an unfortunate private matter and forgotten quickly.
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