Tag: Race

Dear ‘White Women’: You Are Racist

Mike Coté1 Comment

Once again, I read it so you don’t have to.

I read a racist book recently. It was one of the most virulently bigoted screeds I’ve ever read – and, for comparison’s sake, I’ve read a lot of Nazi propaganda. No, it wasn’t a dusty old tome from the 19th century; although I do love me some Victorian-era books. It wasn’t a tale of the Antebellum South, or the Jim Crow South, or South African apartheid, or Japanese internment, or the Holocaust. It wasn’t a novel or fictionalized memoir. In fact, it wasn’t even about the past at all. What it was about was WHITE WOMEN. Funnily enough, that was the title: White Women: Everything You Already Know About Your Own Racism and How to Do Better.

This 2022 work of staggering racial bias, stereotyping, and progressive nonsense crawled out of the primordial ooze after the 2020 Summer of George (Floyd). Its authors, race grifters Saira Rao – do me a favor and scroll her Twitter for a tad; you won’t be disappointed – and Regina Jackson, are the founders of the company Race2Dinner, in which they are paid thousands of dollars by woke white women to berate them for two hours for their invidious racism. (Oh, and they sell merch.) This sadomasochistic endeavor has gained the two ladies a great deal of fame on the political left, both from self-flagellating white progressives and the minorities – sorry, People of Color; sorry, BIPOC[1] – whom those whites apparently oppress. They have been treated to episodes of Dr. Phil, fawning profiles in mainstream media, and lucrative book contracts with major publishing houses. And boy, did they deliver on that book deal.

White Women: Everything You Already Know About Your Own Racism and How to Do Better (really rolls off the tongue, n’est-ce pas?) is a masterclass in absurdity, lack of self-awareness, and outright racism. It is a totally insane book that should be laughed at, not taken seriously. Honestly, it would be hard to make a better parody – it had me cackling aloud throughout. Unfortunately, the book is deadly serious. And many influential people and outlets, from comedian Chelsea Handler and actress Anna Paquin to the New York Times, have embraced it as such. So, as a reviewer, I’ll take it seriously too. (Well, at least for as long as I can stand it.)

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The Urge to Purge

Mike Coté1 Comment

The Revolution always eats its own.

Wokeness, identitarianism, anti-racism, progressivism – whatever label one chooses to affix – has become an integral aspect of modern politics and the academy. Universities, high schools, and extracurricular activities have been especially prone to infection by this novel crusading ideology. There has been a panoply of these stories over the course of the past few years, with professors being defenestrated for speaking Chinese, a brouhaha over whether the entire field of Classics is racist, administrators looking at banning ‘offensive’ words like “American,” and more. One such story, published last week by the online outlet Compact Magazine, has received a great deal of attention. (Disclaimer: I am not a fan of Compact nor its New Right ideology, but even a broken clock can be right occasionally.)

The piece, titled “A Black Professor Trapped in Anti-Racist Hell,” is written by Vincent Lloyd, a professor at Villanova University. He tells the story of his time as seminar leader for the prestigious Telluride Association summer program for high schoolers and how it descended into a dystopia of progressivism run amok, eventually turning its fire on the professor himself. The tale is not itself novel – there have been myriad such pieces across the media environment – but aspects of it are especially interesting given the professor’s own unabashed left-wing ideology.

The piece is worth reading in full, but there are some quotes that stand out, both in understanding the truly cult-like dynamics on display among the students and in the professor’s complicity in his own cancellation.

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