Salon.com, which is quite White, has pretty much turned itself over to White liberals making ridiculously overbroad generalized complaints about Whites and White Privilege to get attention. David Sirota practically owns the genre.
Gawker is going there as well, and based on the number of views and comments, it seems like really good bait:
Here’s the Editor of Gawker tweeting out the post link, apparently recognizing the irony/absurdity:
The entire premise is link-bait hyperbole — as if nothing has changed since 1963 and all Whites are responsible and have to hear it from White liberal writers.
According to the post, the impetus for the sweeping condemnation of Whites was a comment made by some guy watching television at a rest stop as John Lewis was on the television, emphasis mine:
The white guy was looking up at the TV in a rest stop on the Jersey Turnpike. Onscreen, the news was showing John Lewis speaking at the anniversary of the March on Washington. “I am not going to stand by and let the Supreme Court take the right to vote away from us,” Lewis said. The white guy in the rest stop glared at the TV, then looked around the dining space. What’s he TALKING about? he asked his family or the air, the world around him. He was seething; he wanted to be heard. He HAS the right to vote.His kids—three of them, dark blond—kept eating their fast food. His female companion said nothing. His angry, stupid, would-be-superior observation hung in the air, useless.
Well, that comment sure proves that nothing has changed in 50 years, and White people still are ruining everything.
It’s a schtick in the David Sirota style, with the more outlandish the “White” headline, the bigger the bait for people to click over and complain about it. (Yeah, I took the bait too.)
This doubtless creates the proof they seek that they were right all along. The circular logic goes like this:
Make an outlandish statement about White people.Watch White people react in denial.Use denial reaction as proof you were right all along.
Of course, that logic does not hold as applied to any other race, ethnic group or religion.
The rest of the post is the usual liberal pablum.
But this paragraph held special meaning to me (emphasis added):
What white people fear, at bottom, is retribution. This is why discussion of actual injustice is supposed to be off-limits. Despite the glorious principles spelled out 50 years ago on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, they lack a functioning concept of justice. To admit the harms of the past is to invite payback. When Andrew Breitbart raised a race panic over Shirley Sherrod, the real issue was that he and his followers were incapable of understanding Sherrod’s story of transcending racial resentment. They were too trapped by rage and paranoia to get the point.
Why special meaning?
Because the embedded link at the end is to my post completely debunking, frame by frame, the leftist smear against Andrew Breitbart regarding the Shirley Sherrod tape, “The Shirley Sherrod tape was not misleading.”
Rather than address my analysis, the author merely calls it the result of “rage and paranoia.”
Just the opposite was true. Rather than react with histrionics, I analyzed the tape methodically, and thereby demonstrated that the race-baiting antics directed at Andrew Breibart were groundless.
Guess who was part of the anti-Breitbart antics at the time? You guessed it, the author of the Gawker article, when he was at Slate.com.
Don’t get mad. Just keep repeating the truth after me: “The Shirley Sherrod tape still is not misleading.”
Update: This may be just one aspect of what Ace refers to as Slate’s Outrage-Trolling Business Model, the increasing tendency of left-wing websites to link-bait through crazy articles.
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