The ugliest comments about white people in America come from those in the most comfortable positions in society today. “Inflammatory rhetoric” exited the stage some time ago. Credentialed inhabitants of the progressive cultural hierarchy are now openly dehumanizing a group of people in ways that surpass even the most elastic standards of basic decency.
Morgan J. Freeman is a B-list Hollywood and TV producer and director, not to be confused with the famous actor from The Shawshank Redemption and other hits. This Morgan Freeman caused a stir May 16 when he posted a scurrilous message on Twitter. “Being ‘anti-racist’ starts by admitting ‘whiteness’ is a disease,” Freeman wrote.
After being hit with a severe backlash, Freeman doubled down on his slur in the way woke progressives often do by turning to what he believes is an authoritative source that shares his outrageous views.
Institutional Backing
Freeman quoted extensively from The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History & Culture’s “Whiteness” page in its “Talking About Race” section on the institution’s official website. Fun fact: The Smithsonian is supported by US taxpayer dollars. Here is how your hard-earned money is being put to use. From the “Whiteness” page:
“Since white people in America hold most of the political, institutional, and economic power, they receive advantages that nonwhite groups do not. These benefits and advantages, of varying degrees, are known as white privilege. For many white people, this can be hard to hear, understand, or accept – but it is true. If you are white in America, you have benefited from the color of your skin.”
Being white is indeed seen as the “disease” Freeman labeled it as in the eyes of The Smithsonian:
“If you identify as white, acknowledging your white racial identity and its privileges is a crucial step to help end racism. Facing your whiteness is hard and can result in feelings of guilt, sadness, confusion, defensiveness, or fear….
“The feelings associated with white fragility often derail conversations about race and serve to support white supremacy. While these feelings are natural human reactions, staying stuck in any of them hurts the process of creating a more equitable society. The defensiveness, guilt, or denial gets in the way of addressing the racism experienced by people of color.”
Treating “whiteness” as a clinical pathology is also wholly accepted within the ranks of another cultural touchstone of the progressive left: academia.
White ‘Pathogen’ Passed on to Offspring
The University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Development runs a “Whiteness Pandemic” project that focuses on the ways Caucasian parents spread their racial characteristics to their offspring like a toxin.
UM’s website’s primer on the project heavily quotes Dr. Gail Ferguson, an associate professor who spearheads the effort. On April 11, Ferguson wrote a shocking essay for The Society for Personality and Social Psychology, in which she unflinchingly asserted:
“The central pathogens of the Whiteness Pandemic are color-evasiveness (avoidance or denial of race) and power-evasiveness (denial of racial oppression), which are passed on intergenerationally, especially in White families….
“The intergenerational transmission of the Whiteness Pandemic in families helps to explain why U.S. racism is so intractable. Color-evasiveness and power-evasiveness are especially common in the racial socialization approach of White U.S. parents….”
(Photo by Emily Molli/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Imagine the repercussions that would come with describing any other racial or ethnic group in this nation today as a pathogen threatening the body of the community at large.
It’s par for the course on the cultural left today.
George Yancy is a professor of philosophy at Emory University and a “fellow” at Dartmouth. Yancy has long surfed the wave of racial discord. He apparently keeps up with the times. His latest offering finds him embracing the disease narrative.
“‘Innocent” White People Are Also Complicit in the Anti-Black Murders in Buffalo,” screams the headline of his May 17 op-ed at Truthout, a popular leftist website.
Yancy writes:
“I’m not only concerned about the ‘radicalization’ of white people that occurs within xenophobic social media echo chambers. I’m also concerned about much more quotidian and ubiquitous white racist echo chambers — the ones that exist within white homes, white places of worship, predominantly white dorms, predominantly white schools, and within the context of white family dinner conversations. The toxicity of whiteness is bred within those everyday contexts where white life happens, where white people love each other, where they discuss the events of the day.”
(Photo by Jonathan Wiggs/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
A sitting university professor decries the pestilence that is the ordinary white person’s every day. Who knew that playing Wordle and eating yogurt were fundamental breeding grounds for reviving the Ku Klux Klan?
From entertainment to museums to academia, psychology and beyond, it is now fully acceptable in the hallowed halls of the cultural left to categorize whites as less than human. One has to wonder why all this seething hatred of alleged unfair privilege emanates from some of the most entitled spaces within the progressive ruling establishment nest.
Portraying whiteness as a disease provides a double win for this comfortable class. First, in dividing Americans along harshly delineated racial lines, any genuine systemic change that might threaten their lofty positions is thwarted. Secondly, in blaming an entire race for every evil under the sun, the true beneficiaries of the New Privileges being doled out in the Brave Woke World never have to apologize for their own embarrassments of riches as the wealth disparity gap they love to ramble on about continues to grow.
