I Am As Black As You Are (Because I Say So)
Examining black privilege, DEI absurdity, and the illogic of transracialism
I am as Black as you are!
Why? Because I say I am.
That’s all you need to know as a Good Progressive. Good Progressives are good people. They accept others for what they claim to be, not what they actually are. Reality doesn’t matter to Good Progressives; reality is racist, imperialist, colonialist, supremacist, cabalist, hedonist, herbalist, fetishist, thaumaturgist, horticulturalist and sacerdotalist.
You don’t want to be any of those things! Then you’d be a right-winger!
Some Black people have told me I can’t be Black because I’m White. I told them they were racist bigots and that identity is the most important thing ever. That my brother is a Chinese Mithraist transwoman and has been since last week when we got drunk over a pitcher of martinis while watching Pose. I told these internalized racist bitches off! That if it was okay to declare one’s self a woman or a man or a non-binary meta-ethnic pantodemisexual stegosaurus, that it was okay to be Black if one wanted. They said that’s not how it works and I said you’re oppressing me, and that we must decenter normative racial positionality through intersectional praxis of racial accountability.*
And they said, "To unpack this assumptive racist boundary construct you’ve pulled out of your ass, one must interrogate the discursive mechanics of your underlying oppressive race fascism, you culturally appropriating blackface Karen cracker!”
Which was totally unfair because I do NOT wear blackface. I tan my skin and rat my hair like my sistah, Rachel Dolezal.
And man, they couldn’t tolerate me putting them in their place like I did, so it ended after the paramedics scraped me off the sidewalk and shoved me in the ambulance.
The transracial double standard
I kid about ‘going black’, but the progressive fight against ‘transracialism’ exemplifies one of the last great woke hypocrisy holdouts.
Why is self-identity the unquestionable ruler for how you should treat others, but transracialists are somehow crossing some intersectional Rubicon?
Critics can’t argue that white people mustn’t ever appropriate the color line because they’re oppressors. They’ve already accepted transgenderism. Men are still unquestionably more powerful than women, but all a man has to do is declare his womanhood, and the social justice set falls into line like good little second-graders.
Therefore, it’s hypocritical for critics to argue that white people can’t be black but men can be women and vice versa.
Black privilege is unearned special rights granted to one by virtue of one’s birth, developed primarily by progressive ideologues to provide cultural immunity. Sixty to seventy years ago, no one except white men needed to apply for better-paying jobs. Beginning around fifty years ago, white women began making more headway in the boardroom. It wasn’t fair to those not granted their skin privilege, which is why we’ve tried to rectify that in more recent decades.
White privilege is with us still, but, like its brother ‘oppressor’ Da Patriarchy, it’s ceded much power since the dawn of the 21st century. Liberal politics brought white awareness to the ‘black experience’ and the acknowledgement of systemic racism and racial harassment. A sense of privilege arose among black activists who argued they could never be racist because they’d suffered oppression, or at least their ancestors had, ergo they were above reproach. But the grievances have began to wear thin, especially viral racial incidents later revealed as false. Political scientist and academic Wilfred Reilly wrote a whole book about fraudulent racial attacks: Hate Crime Hoax: How The Left Is Selling A Fake Race War.
The height of black privilege may have reached its peak with Ibram X. Kendi’s expression that nothing will fix the history of black oppression except 400 years of white oppression, a position he has since backed off on.
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From Equal Opportunity to Institutional Engineering
Affirmative action intended to give women and racial minorities a better chance at being hired on the basis of their qualifications beginning with the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964. Modern DEI evolved around the 2010s to address alleged systemic inequalities and replace affirmative action programs and policies.
With the rise of woke ideology around the same time, black activists were still complaining that ‘almost nothing has changed,’ while by 2012, the black vote had achieved a historic high in U.S. elections, 83.2% of blacks were attaining a high school diploma or more, black test scores had continued rising, poverty rates had fallen to 27.2%, and the average black annual household median income was at $33,321, as compared to 1968’s $5,400 in unadjusted dollars according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
What got me thinking about it is the Journal of Free Black Thought’s Substack piece, There’s Little Or No Anti-Black Discrimination Today by social psychologist Lee Jussim, a white man. Jussim has written other articles challenging the narrative of racial discrimination and implicit bias. “This is not 1954,” he notes, and I am reminded once again of Barack Obama’s last speech as President.
After my election, there was talk of a post-racial America. And such a vision, however well-intended, was never realistic. Race remains a potent and often divisive force in our society. Now, I've lived long enough to know that race relations are better than they were 10, or 20, or 30 years ago, no matter what some folks say.
Jussim executes a nerdly dive into the heart of past studies and finds that in the past ten years, ‘the most relevant social science’ “does not show any clear pattern of racial discrimination”.
Not that it’s non-existent, but when we’re talking about who gets hired, or doesn’t (applicant outcome disparity), according to Jussim, hiring discrimination or bias in the last decade occurs around 3.6% of the time. Which means there’s no evidence of bias 96.4% of the time.
He has his critics, as comments below the article show. His findings have been challenged by academics at the National Institute of Health, at Rutgers University, and of course, those esteemed pundits at Reddit.
The Bigotry of Low Expectations
Some research, he notes, shows some bias in favor of black people. His evidence for pro-black bias includes the 2023 Students for Fair Admissions U.S. Supreme Court case which found significant pro-black admission bias at two universities, Harvard and the University of North Carolina. Black applicants at Harvard, data showed, scored over 60 points lower than Asian applicants and 40 points lower than white ones. It brings up a highly uncomfortable question: Were these DEI admissions the best of the black applicants to Harvard?
Research has shown a combination of factors responsible for test score disparities. Differences in student studying time, for example, show lower rates in black families, even when compared with similar parental education and the same level of family income as whites and Asians. Here, the black study gap grows wider.
Black kids in higher social classes have the same opportunities as others, including expensive tutors and coaches, yet still punch in less study time.
It’s also been noted that first- and second-generation immigrant families tend to value education. A National Institute of Health study found that black students from immigrant families, including African and West Indian, were ‘twice as likely’ as third-plus generation African-Americans to attend highly-elite institutions. And they outperformed African-American students with significantly better grades and higher persistence.
This contradicts what DEI hiring subtly suggests: That black people can’t compete on merit. Or African Americans, anyway.
‘Blatantly discriminatory’ is the only way to describe the DEI framework in many institutions that explicitly state which identity boxes receive special priority for the job, which has sometimes led even to black people being discriminated against because the hiring process wanted an Indigenous or trans person, or perhaps a different human recipe for cross-woke-AF-ness.
Cambridge University’s DEI accepted Jason Arday, who claimed autism (unproven), certain alleged unsupported racist attacks, and is accused of fictionalizing some of his history to get the professorship. It suggests he already understood on some level that being black wasn’t enough of a qualification anymore. There was too much competition.
It’s gotten better—for some
It’s much more difficult for a white man to get a job today than a black man, and harder for a black man than a black woman, thanks to arbitrary post-modern illogical discourses hierarchizing ‘marginalization’ (a human construct). One must wonder if some white men are ‘going trans’ because it’s easier to get hired. I’m serious.
The world will never be free of human tribalistic impulses, but it’s a lot less imperfect than the one I was born into, ninety-eight years after the Civil War ended.
I’ve packed over sixty years of living with eyes wide open and attention paid. Blacks and many others are earning more, accomplishing more, and getting elected more, which research and observation bear out. But the DEI anti-meritocracy has been leaning into the bigotry of low expectations set by decades of liberal activism and kowtowing to one specific domination history, while domination is The Story of Humanity Everywhere.
It makes it doubly difficult for women, Indigenous, blacks, and others, who truly are superlatively qualified for their jobs, to be taken seriously.
Leveling the identity field
What social justice activists never want to admit, strangely, is victory.
Outraged activists rail against the pale-faced babadook which dares to step outside its assigned role and challenge the rise of black privilege. Or worse, appropriate the mantle of victimhood as Rachel Dolezal and so many other white, almost exclusively female, black wannabes have done. White women might be arguably ‘oppressed’ by black social justice activists because even white men are permitted to step outside their ‘oppressor’ class when they appropriate womanhood.
I jest, but only somewhat.
The fact that white women are far more likely to appropriate other racial ethnicities (consider the plethora of ‘pretendians’ like Buffy Ste. Marie), certainly suggests the existence of ‘black privilege’, given that it’s easier to get a job that way, and because you receive the elevated status of now being ‘oppressed’, and the concomitant sympathy and attention that follows, while snatching cushy jobs away from actual black women.
That’s bad, somehow, in the same world where womanfacers become Woman of the Year, easily ‘win’ trophies in female athletic competitions, and get Vanity Fair covers.
I challenge black privilege when I state that if ‘some women have penises,’ then ‘some black people have white skin’.
It’s otherwise discriminatory, racist and misogynist.
So I argue, tongue poking through my cheek, that if women are forced to accept people they don’t regard as women (males), then black people should be forced to accept the self-pigmenting into their own communities. By federal fiat, if necessary. We must be allowed to change our racial identity on passports and other government documents, just as the self-womanized do. We must be allowed into all black-exclusionary social groups and committees, and if they resist we’ll file lawsuits and accuse them of being TERDs (Transracial Exclusionary Radical Discriminators).
It’s not, at this time, possible for black people to turn White Like I Used To Be. That remains the only real objection ‘antiracist’ activists have for white people joining the woke Come As You Aren’t party. But self-identity rules, and I’m quite certain cosmetic medical science (or maybe just Revlon) is working on a ‘cure’ right now for black skin.
Just as transgenderism ‘cures’ males of oppressorism.
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