Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. We’ve talked about the challenges to big multiracial democracies like the United States, India, and Brazil. The other two, the latter two, don’t do very well because they accentuate a caste or a racial or an ethic spoils system. The United States is the only one in history that has been somewhat successful, very successful. But it depends on everybody looking at their own identity as incidental to being an American, rather than essential.
So, why am I talking about this? Recently, Joy Reid, who was an anchorwoman at MSNBC and let go, I think, not for any other reasons, because of poor ratings, but she has a podcast and she blasted, collectively, white people. And she said that “they can’t invent anything.” And then she went into a diatribe about American music, that it was solely the domain of black people.
But what I’m getting at is, we’re getting very dangerous in this DEI movement, as it starts to emit its death throes, as it’s challenged for being racist, which it is. It’s racial essentialism. People who defend it double down, and they double down in a way that’s very injurious for the rest of the country.
So, Joy Reid is basically saying that black people are cognitively superior to other people. I wish this was an isolated incident. But remember, we’ve had this controversy before, about the president of Sacramento State, Luke Wood, who, in his past, was an African American intellectual activist, as he self-describes himself. And he said he wanted to ”eliminate”—that’s a bad word to use, given the history of it in the 20th century—“eliminate whiteness.” Again, no repercussions.
Lately, a major writer for The New Yorker magazine, that’s a marquee magazine among bicoastal elite intellectuals, she said some things that prompted people to look at her social media account. And a few years ago, she posted, quite regularly, about white people.
What was very disturbing was she said she’d hated them. She didn’t like them, collectively. And then she started to get into some bizarre, pseudoscientific stereotypes about white people. She said they were, basically, “dirty” and they’re “responsible for plagues” in history. And she said it seemed like everywhere they were, they brought disease.
We know that has a bad history in the 20th century, claiming that one particular group brings disease. We know who did that in the Third Reich.
But of course, if she’s talking about big cities of the medieval period in Europe—Constantinople, for example, or Paris—that had never been done before. Bringing up to a million people in a crowded area hadn’t happened in the New World. It hadn’t happened in Africa. There might have been a place or two in Asia. But it was possible because of the classical tradition of aqueducts, sewage systems, and the importation of massive amounts of food to support an urban populace of a million. So, she just seems to be as well historically ignorant.
She seems to think that white people have all these advantages in this world, 65 years after the onset of the civil rights movement. But as I said before, if you look at income, so-called white people are about eighth. Ethnic groups, other than whites, are doing better. If you look at hourly wages, it is true that on average, white males make more than black males, but Asian males make far more than white males.
So, what am I getting at? We have zero tolerance when racists, who are white, say such things about other groups. But in a truly multiracial, tolerant society, people who not only attack a group, collectively, and stereotype it, but they do so from positions of influence and power—like The New Yorker magazine or a former MSNBC anchor—they can do a great deal of damage, unless they’re called out for it.
And if we’re gonna make it as a society, everybody has to drop this idea of ethnic and racial chauvinism. And just because a person declares themself a historical victim of past oppression does not give them a free hand in indulging in the utter and most vile forms of racism, which is collectively demonizing a whole group of people on the basis of their superficial appearance.
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