This excerpt is from “The Desecrators: Defeating the Cancel Culture Mob and Reclaiming One Nation Under God” by Matt Schlapp and Deal W. Hudson (Tan Books 2022).
Would anyone who lived through the civil rights conflicts of the ‘50s and ‘60s have ever predicted that one day the “aspects and assumptions” of “whiteness” would become a subject for display in a national museum? For many white Americans, the day August 28, 1963, was a turning point in their racial attitudes. The speech by Martin Luther King Jr. on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial transformed white confusion and bitterness into a new understanding of the civil rights movement. King made clear what his demonstrations had been about: not to pose a threat to white America but to challenge them to help African-Americans to fully realize the promise of the American founding — human rights and dignity — to all Americans. “I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”
Throughout the nation, some fairly hardened-hearts nodded in agreement. For those of us who did not grow up during the segregation era, the major takeaway of America’s cruel race history is that since one can’t control what race one is born into, it is dehumanizing to shame one because of their race or due to stereotypes about their race. Many bought into the idea that acceptance along racial lines would dissipate our differences and strengthen our national unity. Sadly, we have learned over the course of these decades that in order to achieve greater racial harmony, we have to blunt those who at every step try to exasperate racial divisions.
In the summer of 2020, the National Museum of African American History, part of the Smithsonian, posted a graphic in its “Talking About Race” portal describing fourteen categories of “white dominant culture, or whiteness.”
Native Alaskans, it is said, see many variations of what we call white, and one website has listed fifty-two variations of the color, from “Abbey White” and “Abstract White” to “Whitest White” and “Whitewash.” The contrast between the shades of actual whiteness and the monochromatic whiteness of National Museum of African American History is instructive. One-size-fits-all generalizations of ethnic groups is nothing less than prejudice, no matter who is generalizing or what is being generalized.
The graphic was ultimately taken down, but not before it caused a furor among some and a wake-up call for far more. The average person, white or black, had no idea that the academic community had cooked up a racist description of white people.
This covert attempt to cook up shame on a mass scale — white guilt or any guilt associated with any skin color — is repellent. Those who begin to buy into the museum’s account of whiteness will soon discover their supposed “white privilege,” meaning their participation in the oppression of African Americans. Of course, if anyone denies this alleged whiteness or privilege, the museum has a diagnosis for that too: it is called “white fragility.” According to this, whites make “defensive moves” in the face of racial stress
Stated another way, if you don’t accept the National Museum of African American History’s narrative about whiteness, you are in denial and guilty. That is one way, for sure, to inhibit rational dialogue about the issue of racism: simply label those who disagree as hiding from the truth about themselves. In other words, shaming.
The museum’s outline of “whiteness” falls into five categories: “Rugged Individualism,” “Family Structure,” “Emphasis on Scientific Method,” “History,” and “Protestant Work Ethic.” Is it wrong to acknowledge that people across racial and ethnic communities can see the virtues associated with these concepts? If we can’t find common ground in these virtues, then what will unite people who come to this country in an effort to build a better life?”
Such qualities and attitudes are hard to fault, but within the museum’s typology, there is an implied critique; namely, why should we “privilege” the nuclear family, Western history, rational thinking, hard work, and self-reliance?
Meanwhile, this racial stereotyping is doing damage. An associate dean at Arizona State University, Professor Asao Inoue, published a 358-page book asserting that grading student writing is both racist and a consequence of “white supremacy.” He writes that the very notion of “ranking” is “part of a much longer racist, and White supremacist, tradition in Western intellectual history.”
Therefore, educational standards are wrong because the “systems” they exist within are racist, etc.
The introduction to the museum graphic asserts these attitudes have become “standard practices in the United States,” and we have all internalized aspects of “white culture” — including people of color. Of course, internalization is a very good thing when it leads to good moral and intellectual habits. Internalization of similar values is precisely what a society desires if it’s to retain a strong unifying identity.
We would like to ask the gurus at the National Museum of African American History what they would suggest is better than habits such as self-reliance and hard work. Perhaps more importantly, we would ask what’s a better place to raise children than in a family. As for their critique of “rational linear thinking,” the museum writers employ it quite well. All of their arguments are based upon the same kind of rational discourse they accuse of “whiteness.”
The desecrators are very clear about defining the rules of what is appropriate when it comes to race. Even movies that helped change society to be more racially tolerant are now considered off-limits because they are too focused on the white commercial audience (the very audience they wanted to impact). Take the case of the actor Sidney Poitier. Turner Classic Movies recently hired a desecrator, film historian Jacqueline Stewart, to go through the massive film library to identify those films “troublesome or problematic.” One of the films she wants taken out of circulation is Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), starring Sidney Poitier. Directed by the very liberal Stanley Kramer, the film was intended to break down racial barriers by presenting an engaged couple — a white woman and a black man — arriving at the woman’s home to meet her white parents, played by Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn. The film caused a sensation and was very well received by critics and the movie-going public.
Stewart expresses appreciation of the career of Poitier, a black actor who succeeded in becoming mainstream in a predominately white film industry, but there’s a problem, she says: “there are aspects of his films that are clearly oriented primarily to white audiences. That opens up all kinds of complications for black viewers who felt that he wasn’t a representative of the race as a whole.”
In other words, Sidney Poitier was too white in his appearance and manner.
To advance theories of “whiteness” is a racist act and should be condemned with the same confidence and ferocity of the nineteenth-century abolitionists.
