Anthropology Film Politics Television

Obviously, Inevitably, The White Devil Did It

March 29, 2022 by David 177 Comments

So, anyway, as you may have heard, at a recent awards ceremony, a black millionaire celebrity slapped another black millionaire celebrity. The root cause, however, has only now been discovered:

This is about a much larger systemic issue rooted in white supremacist culture designed to police the behaviour of Blacks amongst the who’s who in Hollywood and beyond.

It says so here:

Respectability politics suggest that equity and fair treatment require that Black people — both inside and outside of Hollywood — conduct ourselves in a manner deemed acceptable to whites. Furthermore, expressing any emotion other than complacence, apathy, or agreeance directly violates those norms, disqualifying Black people from receiving the same equitable treatment that whites enjoy as a birthright. And sadly, there is a large group of Blacks who have internalised this toxic messaging.

You see, when Mr Will Smith, a black millionaire celebrity, publicly assaults Mr Chris Rock, another black millionaire celebrity, on live television, and is promptly given a prestigious award, for which he is applauded, and is then seen celebrating triumphantly at the award after-party, this is somehow proof of victimhood, of being racially “policed” by “respectability politics” and other works of the White Devil. Mr Smith, we’re told, is “not receiving the same equitable treatment that Whites enjoy as a birthright.”

Readers will note the implication that any black viewers who regard Mr Smith’s behaviour as not entirely optimal are merely parroting views “deemed acceptable to whites,” having somehow “internalised” the “toxic messaging” of “white supremacist culture.” For what it’s worth, I don’t have strong feelings on the incident one way or the other – it all seemed rather farcical – but I doubt my first impulse would be to suggest that black people who disapproved, however much or little, are merely aping whitey and don’t know their own minds. But such is wokeness.

The author of the piece, published in Forbes, is Maia Niguel Hoskin, a “writer, activist, and college professor,” whose areas of supposed expertise include “oppression, difference and mental health,” including “racial battle fatigue,” and who claims, modestly, to “facilitate cultural consciousness.” As a self-styled “speaker of truth,” she is, of course, schooled in “critical race theory.”

And so, Ms Hoskin tells us that she does not condone violence, while insisting that responsibility for violence must be shifted from those who indulge in it, provided they are black, and attributed instead to the insidious, all-pervasive, yet oddly nebulous, power of pallor. The “racist system that was designed to incubate his and so many others’ frustrations.” And which, in ways never quite specified, compels very rich comedians to tell bad jokes, and makes very rich actors slap the people who tell them. This, we’re assured, is “white supremacist culture.”

And the way to be scrupulously “anti-racist” is to erase any agency or expectation of self-possession from people with brown skin.

[ Expanded via the comments. ] 




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