Evil comes in all colors
The hashtag #White Supremacy is trending this week in the Twitterverse. That is due to the horrific murders of eight Asian Americans in Georgia. They were likely hate crimes. In fact, any crime is a hate crime, but there’s ample evidence that the shooter of those innocent women was motivated by hostility against Asians.
Asian Americans have often been among the most vulnerable populations in the United States. Until recently, they didn’t have the lobbying groups and voices that spoke out on behalf of other minorities, and suffered from the perception that they were so successful they didn’t need protection. It was the misguided idea that Asian students were smarter than others, that Asian families worked harder, that Asian citizens didn’t use up public benefits the way that other groups did.
Whether this is true or not is beside the point. Asians were basically out there, on their own, and anyone who pointed out that they were endangered by the same sort of hatred that targeted Blacks or Hispanics or members of the LGBT community were dismissed. I was dismissed many times when I made the same claim. I remember one particular instance when a Korean grocer was gunned down in his store in West Philadelphia by an African American, and when I mentioned the fact that there was a lot of hostility between the Asian and Black communities in the city, I was called a racist.
But now, it’s not racist to suggest that Asians are being targeted by “White Supremacy.” Now that everyone has a new hashtag to use, a new philosophy to exploit, a new narrative to push, we don’t have to worry about pointing fingers. The blood that was spilled in Georgia this week was apparently spilled by a man whose skin color identified the content of his character. Whereas my suggestion that hostilities between Asians and Blacks in Philadelphia was met with the “you’re a racist” mantra, I am certain that I will be applauded if I step up and join the throngs condemning “white” evil.
And we slip further back into the muck of civilization, the gravitational pull downward toward blaming hatred on skin color as opposed to ideology,
E. Jean Carrol, the journalist who accused Donald Trump of raping her in some ladies’ dressing room a few years ago, tweeted out on Wednesday afternoon “F—-k White Supremacy.” I tweeted back at her, “F—k Supremacy, and stop the virtue signaling.” I haven’t gone back to look at the replies, because I know they’ll ruin my dinner. My point is that using “white” anything as this overarching tent under which we can shove all the evils of the world is so 2020. It’s old, it’s pretextual, it is a way to make some people feel that they are doing the moral heavy lifting when they don’t know what that really means, and it’s laughably naïve.
Evil comes in all sorts of packages, including the obvious ones that you can see from a mile away. The Nazi swastikas, the Stalinistic purges, the Cultural Revolution of Mao, the killing fields of Pol Pot and the jails of Fidel Castro are all forms of evil. They are clear and blatant instances where some men felt that they were better than others, and so decided to eliminate the “lesser humans” from existence and circulation.
They chose domination and annihilation over reconciliation and acceptance. And the men at the head of those movements represent all the colors of the rainbow, a somewhat perverted Rainbow Coalition.
Is this an attempt to deflect attention from the fact that the murderer of these Asian victims was a white man? Absolutely not. If he targeted the ethnicity of his victims, he committed a hate crime. And if he was one of those people calling COVID the “China virus” and blaming foreigners for ruining the country and spouting off about how the people at the border are bringing leprosy and other diseases along with them, his is, in fact, a bigot.
But his skin color and race do not define him, just as the skin color of the Black robber in West Philadelphia does not set him apart from any other killer on the streets. This idea that we have to use labels to distinguish “hate crimes” from other garden-variety offenses is, in and of itself, offensive. And it gives a very easy out to the people who have “Hate Has No Home Here” signs on their lawns in eight different languages, but who are quite willing to swallow the idea that “white hatred” is unique.
It’s not. Any time you have someone targeting someone else because of their identity, that is a form of supremacy. I see it all the time in my immigration practice, and I’m really tired of hearing folks whine about how only a certain sort of human, white and conservative and religious and poorly-educated with only a few dollars in his bank account, is capable of rage.
You can disagree with me, and you can say that white supremacy is a thing, and that our country is being destroyed from within by people who wear red hats and cling to their guns and religion (yeah, so 2008 I know) and you can measure the value of a human by his level of melanin, and you can perhaps feel virtuous while doing it.
But while you are doing it, you are doing a grave injustice to the people who were gunned down in Georgia, because you are using them to advance your own political and philosophical agendas.
And you are too blind to see it. Color blinded.