There is a problem for progressives, who artificially have divided the world based on skin color, with a clean split between “whites” and non-whites (variously called “People of Color” or “BIPOC”). This artificial split presents problems when it meets reality. Hence, George Zimmerman in the Trayvon Martin shooting had an ideologically inconvenient Hispanic heritage, so the media invented the term “white Hispanic” to describe Zimmerman.
Something similar is happening in Los Angeles.
Latino Los Angeles city council members were caught on audio belittling other ethnic and racial groups, particularly blacks.
So just like George Zimmerman magically became a “white Hispanic,” the Latino Los Angeles council members have become “lite” according to Charles Blow in The NY Times, A Revealing Racist Rant in L.A.:
I have a theory about the future of America that I don’t want to come true.It is a theory that worries me and that I have written about: that with the browning of America, white supremacy could simply be replaced by — or buffeted by — a form of “lite” supremacy, in which fairer-skin people perpetuate a modified anti-Blackness rather than eliminating it.The racist comments revealed this week on a recording of Latino leaders in Los Angeles — three City Council members and a labor union leader — did nothing to allay those fears….They were doing the work of white supremacy. And not because they see white power as one and the same as their own….Intra-minority racism is complex in some ways, but simple in others.Racism is perpetuated by those who benefit from it. Anti-Black racism benefits those whose appearances are least Black. White supremacy benefits those who are white, or those are white-adjacent in both appearance, culture and affect….The unfortunate reality is that anti-Black white supremacy is not confined to white people or to Republicans, even though they court it and coddle it. Martinez is a Democrat in an overwhelmingly Democratic city.
This is what happens when you take a (Ibram) Kendi approach to society, where everything is about race.
That’s David Brook’s take, This Is What Happens When Race Is Everything:
Their first assumption was that America is divided into monolithic racial blocs. The world they take for granted is not a world of persons; it’s a world of rigid racial categories.At one point Martinez vulgarly derided someone because “he’s with the Blacks.” You’re either with one racial army or you’re with another….The second assumption was that these monolithic racial blocs are locked in a never-ending ethnic war for power. The core topic of their conversation was to redraw Council districts to benefit Latino leaders….Those two assumptions didn’t come out of nowhere. We have had a long-running debate in this country over how to think about racial categories. On the one side there are those, often associated with Ibram X. Kendi and others, who see American society as a conflict between oppressor and oppressed groups. They center race and race consciousness when talking about a person’s identity. Justice will come when minority group power is used to push back on white supremacy. “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination,” is how Kendi puts it.On the other side, there are others, like Thomas Chatterton Williams, Coleman Hughes and Reihan Salam, who argue that racial categorization itself can be the problem. The concept of systemic racism is built upon crude racial categorization….If we use rhetoric that assumes that we’re all locked into rigid racial blocs and that group conflict is the essential element of public life, then group conflict is what we will get — Balkanization on a continental scale.
Ibram Kendi is not happy about being called out by Brooks.
The racial balkanization we see on campuses and society creates more need to balkanize. Hence, terms like “white Hispanic” and “lite” supremacy.
So is this Progressive or Parody?
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