It turns out that revolutions cover a multitude of sins. Once every conversation in your country turns political, only the politicians benefit from it.
In a normal moment, the people in charge would be in deep trouble right now. The rest of us would be asking hard questions about why things seem to be falling apart — why our streets are filthy, why violent crime is rising, why nothing seems to work. We pay a lot to keep this society functioning. Suddenly, we’re not getting a lot in return.
It’s not a very good deal. But in the age of Black Lives Matter, our leaders don’t have to answer for this. They just give speeches about social justice and they’re insulated from all criticism. If you persist in bothering them about their incompetence, they’ll have you arrested for hate crimes.
So revolution is the best thing that ever happened to our political class.
You see it with perfect clarity in New York City. Just a few months ago, Mayor Bill de Blasio was a national joke. Now de Blasio is his generation’s Al Sharpton. He’s a protest leader fighting in the streets for civil rights. He no longer has to pretend to run the city.
Meanwhile, de Blasio’s public schools are failing. In New York, the biggest school system in the country, fewer than half the students are proficient in English and math. That’s a disaster, for the students themselves most of all.
Why is it happening? City officials don’t want to talk about that. Acknowledging the problem might require doing something about it. Their donors in the teachers’ unions oppose change of any kind, unless it’s a raise.
Now leaders in New York City don’t have to address their failing schools. Instead of helping kids to learn, the city can just blame racism.
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Racism might seem like a strange explanation in New York. The school population there is fully 84 percent non-White. There aren’t that many White kids to blame. But that hasn’t stopped the school chancellor. He recently issued a statement pledging his commitment to “anti-racism” and to “work every day to undo these systems of injustice.”
The chancellor wasn’t more specific than that. He didn’t specify which “systems of injustice” he was talking about. Maybe that’s because the kids with the highest test scores in New York are not White. They’re Asian.
Asian students score far higher than any other ethnic group in New York City — not just higher scores in math, but also higher in English proficiency. That seems odd. So many of these students come from poor immigrant families where no one speaks English at home.
At first glance, kids like this don’t seem to have much “privilege.” So how are they so successful? Racism, obviously. There’s no other possible explanation for it.
But it must be a very stealthy kind of racism. Indeed, this is an especially diabolical strain of racism, one that helps non-White immigrant kids most of all.
“White people are A-holes.” There you have the accumulated scholarship of Miss Robin DiAngelo.
It is a “system of injustice” that allows penniless foreigners from faraway countries to arrive here with no language skills whatsoever and still shoot to the top of the academic rankings. Obviously, what we’re dealing with here, ladies and gentlemen, is systemic racism at its most systemic.
The mayor’s wife is in charge of fixing problems like this. She is the city’s systemic racism czar. But in the end, Mrs. de Blasio wasn’t any more specific than the school chancellor had been about what’s happening here. She didn’t explain how this kind of diabolical racism actually works.
What she said — the one thing she was absolutely confident about — is that White people are definitely to blame for it.
So the Asian kids are doing better than anyone in in school. Therefore, we must tear down the statues of White people. Got it.
Suddenly this kind of thinking is everywhere.
At a meeting of the Community Education Council in Manhattan, some of the people who are supposed to help educate the children of New York City spent time attacking each other for being too white, instead of talking about reading or math.
Robin Broshi said: “It hurts people when they see a white man bouncing a brown baby on their lap and they don’t know the context. That is harmful. That makes people cry…. I take that to heart and that hurts me. I have to learn how to be a better white person.”
Thomas Wrocklage said: “I would like to know before this meeting adjourns how having my friend’s nephew on my lap was hurtful to people and was racist. Can you please explain?”
Broshi yelled back: “I’ve explained it to you. You can read a book. Read a book. Read … ‘White Fragility.’ Read ‘How To Talk To White People.’ It’s not my job to educate you. You’re an educated White man.”
OK. It’s true. They did talk about reading for a second at the end. They’d like you to read something called “White Fragility,” by Robin DiAngelo.
“White Fragility” isn’t really a book. It’s what we used to call a tract — a screed, a diatribe. It’s the kind of wild-eyed hate propaganda you push just before you decide to really start hurting people. It’s preemptive justification for abuse.
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Explaining her thesis on NBC in an interview with Jimmy Fallon, DiAngelo said: “White people are racist A-Holes.”
DiAngelo went on to say: “I’ll never forget asking a group: ‘What if you could just give us feedback on our inevitable and unaware racist assumptions and behaviors?’ And I’ll never forget this Black man raising his hand and saying ‘It would be revolutionary.’… Revolutionary that we would receive the feedback with grace, reflect and seek to change our behavior. That’s how difficult we are. … That’s how big of A-Holes we are.”
“White people are A-holes.” There you have the accumulated scholarship of Miss Robin DiAngelo. This is the same person who is probably the single most popular figure in American education right now.
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School districts around the country have made “White Fragility” required reading. Your children will almost certainly read it, or be taught by people who have read it.
Schools have been closed for months now, so the revolution underway in classrooms has been hidden from public view. But we’re all about to find out the hard way how they’ve changed.
Adapted from Tucker Carlson’s monologue on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” on July 10, 2020.
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