Anti-racism: Is the Left going too far?
Here in “the Year of Stupid,” said Kyle Smith in NationalReview.com, protesters are even threatening to give “the Saddam Hussein treatment” to a Washington, D.C., statue of Abraham Lincoln and a freed slave, and drag them off their plinth. “The Great Awokening” has unleashed a wave of mindless rage equivalent to the French Revolution, as leftist intellectuals, online mobs, and violent street protesters seek to retroactively scrub our nation and our history of any resistance to their new anti-racist standards. The cultural torchbearers this week extracted anguished apologies from comedians Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel for decades-old blackface skits. Terrified TV networks and streaming services promptly announced that episodes of 30 Rock, Scrubs, and The Office will now be removed for instances of racial humor that caused no fuss at the time. One episode of The Golden Girls was banned because two main characters wearing facial mudmasks tell a black family, “We’re not really black.” The “left-wing offensive” is now even targeting statues of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, said Daniel Henninger in The Wall Street Journal, because these Founding Fathers owned slaves before the practice was abolished. As the wild-eyed zealots of wokeness run amok, “why is there so little resistance to what is going on?”
“Change is happening,” said Spencer Kornhaber in TheAtlantic .com, so get over it. What defenders of the status quo decry as a nihilistic “cancel culture” is really a “culture of accountability.” Activists are trying to make Americans understand systemic racism by holding performers, corporate executives, editors, and managers accountable for the supposedly “innocuous” words and deeds that have made racism so insidious and widespread. If anything, said Renée Graham in The Boston Globe, we may be letting people off