A celebration of black history has been replaced with both the comic and the tragic as a leading anti-racist claims the Sistine Chapel captures the concept of white supremacy and an anti-racist author insists whites are psychopaths because of their evolutionary history.
Black History Month began almost 100 years ago as “Negro History Week,” founded by civil rights leader Carter G. Woodson and the Association for the Study of Negro Life in 1926. Mr. Woodson believed a week devoted to the history of black people was essential because “If a race has no history, it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated. The American Indian left no continuous record. He did not appreciate the value of tradition; and where is he today? The Hebrew keenly appreciated the value of tradition, as is attested by the Bible itself. In spite of worldwide persecution, therefore, he is a great factor in our civilization.” The second to third week of February was chosen because it coincided with the birthdays of the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln on the 12th and early civil rights icon Frederick Douglass on the 14th, both dates that were widely celebrated by black people in America at the time. By 1929, The Journal of Negro History reported that officials in “every state with a considerable Negro population [except two]” had made the event known to teachers and distributed official materials to support the effort. The week grew in popularity in subsequent decades until 1969, when black educators and Black United Students at Kent State University in Ohio proposed extending it to an entire month and changing the name to the modern form. Black History Month became the official name that year, and was celebrated nationwide by 1976 when President Gerald Ford announced it as a national effort, declaring that Americans should “seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of Black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.” This remains, at least in my mind, a relatively easy notion to sympathize with, especially having attended school in the 1980s and 1990s when much of American history in general was simply glossed over. While it’s a falsehood that we weren’t taught anything about slavery, much less that the institution was anything except an abhorrent evil, or the civil rights movement one hundred years after the Civil War, both were generally taught at such an extremely high level, many of the important figures and events, triumphs and tragedies were completely lost.
Black History Month was created to change that fact, which seems a reasonable enough proposition in my mind, and yet it has never been without detractors even in the black community. Earlier this month, a video of legendary actor Morgan Freeman on 60 Minutes in 2005 went viral that neatly encapsulated the opinion of potential detractors. “Two things I can say publicly that I do not like. Black History Month is an insult. You’re going to relegate my history to a month?” He continued to express his concerns about why black people are labeled in general, “Also ‘African-American’ is an insult. I don’t subscribe to that title. Black people have had different titles all the way back to the N-word and I do not know how these things get such a grip, but everyone uses ‘African-American’. What does it really mean? Most Black people in this part of the world are mongrels. And you say Africa as if it’s a country when it’s a continent, like Europe.” When Mr. Freeman made these comments, it might have been debatable whether they were accurate or he was exaggerating the situation at least a little. As an avid reader of history, I tend to believe that teaching and learning more about the events and personalities that have shaped us as a people and the world at large is beneficial, and would have erred on the side of teaching more instead of less even as I also agree that labeling people by factors they cannot control can border on an insult. Two decades later, however, the focus of Black History Month has radically shifted, becoming an almost exclusively progressive enterprise targeting white people for their various sins and privilege, more self-flagellation of a nation than honoring anything meaningful. These attacks range from the comical to the tragic.
Robin DiAngelo, the author of White Fragility and a leading “anti-racist” educator who regularly earns $14,000 for services rendered in a single afternoon, provides the more comic example for our purposes. In principle, she is supposed to be a serious thinker, the kind of person who can look past her own ill-defined whiteness and grapple with the serious issues that still define us as a nation, proposing solutions that might radically improve race relations and usher in an era without racism. As a white person herself, one might imagine she is critical to the cause, able to see the other side and bring people together. In practice, however, she is a non-serious race baiter and grifter in my opinion, making money from the cause, saying what she believes people want her to say purely because she is paid highly for the effort. This trait was on full display even before Black History Month started, when she blithely declared to a podcaster that the Sistine Chapel, particularly the Creation of Adam, where God reaches out to the first man reaching up, is “the single image” she prefers “to capture the concept of white supremacy.” “God creating man,” she continued about one of the most famous and revered works of art in the known universe, an unparalleled creation that millions gather to see on annual basis, simply to gaze up and marvel at what a fellow human has produced for all time. “Y’know where God is in a cloud and there’s all these angels and He’s reaching out and He’s touching—I dunno who that is—David or something? And God is white and David is white and the angels are white—like that is the perfect convergence of white supremacy, patriarchy, right?” Setting aside that she couldn’t even properly name which religious characters were depicted and she sounds more like a teenager attempting to explain the contents of the latest viral TikTok video rather than someone who is supposed to be smart, Dr. DiAngelo is in desperate need of a history lesson. The Sistine Chapel wasn’t conceived by neo-Nazi’s, White Nationalist, or members of the “Lost Cause” in the South. It was painted between 1508 and 1512, long before the Spanish and Dutch began the colonization of North and South America, much less the slave trade, back when most had probably never seen a black person before and some might not even have been aware of their existence, except as some exotic being they’d heard about like a lion or a tiger. Italy itself wasn’t even a full fledged country yet, merely a collection of separate dukedoms and the Catholic Church, frequently at war with one another as alliances shifted. Even after becoming a truly independent country more than three centuries later in 1861, it was never a colonial power, took no part in the slave trade at all, and subjugated no one. In fact, the opposite is more likely true if you look further back in time: In 827, the Moors conquered Sicily and ruled the island for almost a hundred years, meaning black people subjugated Italians far more recently than any Italians subjugated black people. Further, the legendary painter Michelangelo, was himself a repressed homosexual and an ascetic, living a threadbare lifestyle defined only by his immortal talent, far from a member of the patriarchy. The idea that he created the equivalent of a poster advertising White Supremacy for the ages in an era before slavery is about as likely as claiming the Great Pyramids were designed to showcase Alien Supremacy and subjugate all of humanity. It’s worth noting here only to illustrate how intellectually bankrupt the leaders of the “anti-racist movement” are, but at least Dr. DiAngelo is good for a laugh, far too comically incorrect to mean anything except to those already on the woke bandwagon.
Far more troubling was a recent Black History Month event sanctioned by the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine featuring a lecture by Dante King, M.Ed on “Diagnosing Whiteness & Anti-Blackness: White Psychopathology, Collective Psychosis, and Trauma in America.” As the school described it, “Dante’s talk will be an overview of the upcoming course and book Diagnosing Whiteness & Anti-Blackness: White Psychopathology, Collective Psychosis and Trauma in America. This talk will center on the development, construction, and functionality of race and racism as psychopathology, psychopathy, and sociopathy. It spotlights White-delusion as the normalized psychological and cultural context upon which all Americans live and exist. It also highlights the psychopathic and sociopathic development of anti-Blackness as an American politic. Participants are invited to evaluate their communities’, as well as their own individual relationships to Whiteness, anti-non-Whiteness, and anti-Blackness. This experience will be the start of our journey towards building a supportive community for coping and healing.” Mr. King describes himself as an “author,” “leader,” “speaker,” and “innovator” with “many missions” including to “continue examining and educating individuals and organizations about the legal construction of colonial and post-colonial America, in order to evaluate the current legal, cultural, economic, political, and social conditions pervading U.S. institutions and society today. The goal is to create and lead informed discussions about this country’s legal, economic, and political history, that can lead to intentional and informed decisions concerning racial justice, reparations, and equity for African Americans; as well as address other forms of racism moving forward.” Like Dr. DiAngelo, he’s supposed to be a serious person with deep thoughts on pressing issues, a healer as the University of California described his talk. Instead, he’s the equivalent of a late 1800s member of the Ku Klux Klan, only the racial roles are reversed.
Thus, he might as well have donned a black hood rather than a white one when he blithely declared, “Whites are psychopaths and their behavior represents an underlying biologically transmitted proclivity with roots deep in their evolutionary history. How many of you can see the proclivity that evolved deep within the evolutionary history of whiteness?” Whether he is aware of it or not, Mr. King is repeating the same completely discredited argument of old school racists and advocates of eugenics, that some races are biologically inferior or superior to others by their nature alone, except this time it is being promoted by a supposedly enlightened, prestigious educational institution. Perhaps even worse, he continued to claim that anyone who didn’t raise their hand in support of his irredeemably racist assertion was in denial, making it clear that it’s your fault if you believe people are individuals who should be treated equally and talking about the genetic defects of billions around the world is abhorrent. “That’s called denial,” he said. “There’s no discussion about the delusion in the perversion of whiteness,” he went on to assert almost nonsensically, the words no longer having any meaning except that white people are certainly to blame, or rather “whiteness” given that white supremacy is now a mind virus that inflicts even minorities. “Say this with me, rape culture in America is a legal, economic, and moral institution. We have it written the law you can rape black women, but we’ve never been a racist country. This goes beyond gaslighting and it’s rooted in psychological delusion.” In case you are inclined to disagree with these assertions as any fair minded person who grew up at least since World War II should, Mr. King is “not seeking agreement from white people at all. I don’t prioritize whiteness or white people in that way,” because “this is the foundation of all American, all white American institutions.”
We should pause here to note how radically racist this view actually is; reverse racism barely begins to describe it, at least in the modern incarnations of racism. What Mr. King is proposing is distinct from even the traditional tenets of Critical Race Theory and intersectionality which view racism as systemic, negatively affecting all minorities and granting undeserved privileges to white people as a result of our history and laws. White people are redeemable in this view if we choose to embrace the progressives remedies they propose, and change the laws to reflect the social justice and redistributive goals of the movement. Racism is therefore an ever present facet of our lives, but one that can be removed, in theory at least, by transforming America into a socialist utopia ruled by minorities. This is what another leading ant-racist “educator,” Ibram X. Kendi, means when he says “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination.” Mr. King, however, is going one step further to insist that white people are irredeemably racist because of their biology, it is a “proclivity rooted deep in our evolutionary history,” and like any other genetic trait, it is therefore intrinsic and cannot simply be removed short of genetic breeding or engineering, bringing us back to the eugenics movement. As a result, there is no conceivable remedy for our racist past because there is no remedy for whiteness, it is a fact of life like eye color, hair color, or perhaps more in line with Mr. King’s thinking, a genetically transmitted disease. Mr. King stressed this point later, but stating flat out that “I think white people are psychopathic.” When asked what he would say to the obvious claim that his “work” is “reverse racism,” Mr. King dismissed the entire idea, saying “I don’t make room for that.” In other words, he truly is the same as a Klan member in 1890s Georgia and he will brook no argument about his racist beliefs. White people, in his completely adamant opinion, are racist by birth and the only question is how to mitigate their evil. Needless to say, if any white person, anywhere made similar claims about any minority, anywhere, much less at a school sanctioned educational event, they would immediately (and rightfully) be branded irredeemably racist and shunned from polite society. Instead, Mr. King’s audience clapped and giggled with the alacrity of a circus animal trained to respond to the crowd, being told that half the country is genetically defective, these people, the school itself, and the broader media did absolutely nothing.
Sadly, this is not surprising. There is ample evidence that black people can say whatever they want about white people, in many cases do whatever they want, with no repercussions whatsoever. The only question is whether this is truly sustainable – are we going to trade a racist culture where white people ruled over black people and insisted it was their right by virtue of their biological superiority for the inverse, or is common sense going to be prevail and we embrace the content of our character rather than the color of our skin? I cannot say for sure, but in the interim Black History Month has gone completely haywire, from the absurd and ignorant to the demeaning and dangerous, but I guess they will blame white supremacy for that as well.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 