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NYT Op-Ed: White People Are Violent Racists

Elite black law professor says of whites: 'You can't trust these people'
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Back in 2012, John Derbyshire was fired by National Review for this column in Taki’s Magazine in which he listed the things he told his children so that they could protect themselves from black violence.

Now, in 2017, The New York Times publishes an essay by Ekow N. Yankah, a Manhattan-based law professor, saying … well, read these excerpts:

As against our gauzy national hopes, I will teach my boys to have profound doubts that friendship with white people is possible. When they ask, I will teach my sons that their beautiful hue is a fault line. Spare me platitudes of how we are all the same on the inside. I first have to keep my boys safe, and so I will teach them before the world shows them this particular brand of rending, violent, often fatal betrayal.

“Spare me platitudes of how we are all the same on the inside. I first have to keep my boys safe… .”

That is the black version of what John Derbyshire said.

Yankah says it’s Trump’s fault:

Of course, the rise of this president has broken bonds on all sides. But for people of color the stakes are different. Imagining we can now be friends across this political line is asking us to ignore our safety and that of our children, to abandon personal regard and self-worth. Only white people can cordon off Mr. Trump’s political meaning, ignore the “unpleasantness” from a position of safety. His election and the year that has followed have fixed the awful thought in my mind too familiar to black Americans: “You can’t trust these people.”

It’s true that 58 percent of white voters voted for Donald Trump. I didn’t, but I know plenty of people who did, and the idea that these people are a physical threat to black people is hysterical. There were lots of reasons people voted for Trump. According to this post-election research published in The Atlantic, the white working class voters who provided the margin of victory for Trump voted for him not to spite black people, who weren’t even on their radar. They voted Trump out of 1) anxiety about cultural change; 2) opposition to immigration; and 3) what they regard as for them, the end of the American dream (defined as “if you study and get a college education and work hard, you can get ahead”).

According to NBC News’s exit polling, Trump did better among blacks and Hispanics than good old decent Mitt Romney. Of course Romney was running against a black president, but still, Trump drew eight percent of the black vote, and 29 percent of the Hispanic vote. My point is simply this: there was a lot more going on in the Trump election than race. Using Yankow’s logic, conservative Christians who felt directly threatened by Hillary Clinton’s policies should withhold their friendship from people who voted for her, because you can’t trust those people.

That would be crazy. Still, Yankow says to Trump voters: “I assure you we cannot be friends.” And that’s not all he says:

For African-Americans, race has become a proxy not just for politics but also for decency. White faces are swept together, ominous anxiety behind every chance encounter at the airport or smiling white cashier. If they are not clearly allies, they will seem unsafe to me.

Sure they will, Professor Yankow, because you are a racist.

So, let me get this straight: The New York Times published an op-ed by a black man who says that all white people look alike, and seem like they are a threat, even if they treat him kindly. If a white man wrote a column saying that all black people look alike, and seem like a threat to him, even if they treat him kindly, do you think The New York Times would publish it? The question is absurd.

One more bit from the racist pomposity of Prof. Yankow, who earlier in the piece denies that he writes with “liberal condescension”:

We can still all pretend we are friends. If meaningful civic friendship is impossible, we can make do with mere civility — sharing drinks and watching the game. Indeed, even in Donald Trump’s America, I have not given up on being friends with all white people.

What a jerk. Why would any white person want to spend time with a guy who thinks he’s doing them a favor by granting them the absolution of his friendship? “If [particular whites] are not clearly allies, they will seem unsafe to me,” he writes. How does a white person signal clear allyship? Why should any white person take the risk of being friends with this guy, knowing that if she says something that offends him politically, he will immediately consider her a racist threat, and withdraw friendship?

How threatening is this law professor’s living and work environment, really? Ekow N. Yankah, graduate not of Baton Rouge Community College, but of Columbia and Oxford, teaches law at Yeshiva University. He lives in the West Village, one of the most bourgeois liberal neighborhoods in Manhattan.

Here’s how New York City voted in the 2016 presidential election. Eighty-six percent of Manhattan voters went for Clinton over Trump. In New York City overall, the Clinton vote was 79 percent. The only one of the five boroughs in which Clinton didn’t get at least 75 percent of the vote was Staten Island, which gave Trump 57 percent of its votes.

Staten Island is separated from Manhattan by a miles-wide stretch of water. Observe below. Where it says “St. George,” that’s the upper tip of Staten Island. Manhattan is the peninsula in the upper right hand of this map detail. That’s a long way for Tony Manero’s mullet-wearing grandsons to have to swim to threaten Prof. Yankah’s body:

Prof. Yankah’s law school is in the West Village, as is his home. It’s a ten-minute walk from his home to his office. Are we supposed to believe that Prof. Yankah assumes that every white person he meets in his daily life in one of the most famously liberal quarters in the United States is guilty of crypto-Kluckery unless proven otherwise?

That column was a manifestation of hysterical anti-white racism. But because it was written by a black person who is also one of Manhattan’s elites, it found its way into the pages of The New York Times, a publication that can be profitably read as a field guide to the social psychoses of America’s liberal elites. Maybe some crotchety old white lady will push Yankah in line at the Angelika,, which will put him one Times op-ed away from a MacArthur Genius Grant.

You know what? Many white people who might have been Prof. Yankah’s friend will now choose to keep away from him, because they feel judged by him, or they will be afraid to speak around him. He will take that as a further sign of racism. And if white children shun the Yankah children because their father has taught them that whites are not to be trusted or befriended, the Yankah kids will understandably take that as a sign that their father was right. Well done, Dad, well done.

John Derbyshire lost his job at a leading conservative magazine because he wrote a column on another website detailing his strategy for helping his children protect their Sino-Anglo bodies (Derb is a British-born man married to a Chinese-born woman) from violent black people. I didn’t see that Derb left NR editor Rich Lowry much choice but to fire him. Some things you simply cannot publish without serious consequence, even if they express honestly your fears, well-grounded or not. If you’re white, that is. But if you’re black, you can submit a column to The New York Times saying that all white people are violent racists unless proven otherwise, and that blacks should not be friends with whites, and it will be published, because that is what it means to be a right proper American liberal in 2017.

Imagine what it will now feel like to be a white student in Prof. Yankah’s law class. Do you feel compelled to declare yourself an “ally” of your professor the next time class convenes, out of fear that if you don’t, he will see you as a potentially violent threat, by virtue of your skin color? How can a white student not fear that Yankah will punish him on his grades because of his (Yankah’s) anti-white prejudice — which the law professor stated in the pages of The New York Times? In liberal colleges and universities across this country, conservative professors are being harassed and even driven out by left-wing militants who see racism, homophobia, and other forms of bigoted aggression in the mildest expressions of dissent from the Social Justice Warrior line. But law professor Ekow N. Yankah, graduate of the Ivy League and Oxbridge, resident of one of the most privileged neighborhoods in America, gets to shout his actual racism from the rooftops, so to speak, and you watch: if anything, he’ll be lionized for his “bravery.”

I keep saying that the Left’s obsession with identity politics is legitimizing white nationalists and other unsavories of the alt-right. This is a perfect example of it. Donald Trump really is driving Americans apart on the basis of race and other forms of identity politics — and so is The New York Times. But not all its readers. I offer you the common sense of David H. Eisenberg of Smithtown, NY, who left this comment under the Yankah column:

The article illustrates two sad things. One is the shift in what once was a civil rights movement from the dream of Martin Luther King, Jr. that people be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin to one that seeks to solely judge others by skin color and a sense of victimization second to none. There is more than one of these articles in today’s NY Times.

The second is the hysteria over Trump that seeks to bring him into every subject and blame him for everything. Whatever delusions Democrats had about Bush (2.0) and Republicans about Obama, the delusions about Trump in articles and comments is, if not unprecedented, were never so extreme in a long, long time (I say this, despite the fact that I also find Trump completely unsuitable to be president). I’ve read articles or claims where people believe that they can’t have a relationship because of Trump or that they have to medicate themselves b/c of him. I can feel sorry for these people and their kids who will learn hatred from them, except when they become part of the “resistance” and take part, support or even ignore the prejudicial, police-hating, window breaking, car burning, political rally interrupting, first amendment destroying “protesters” on their side, as if it is somehow justifiable if the president is bigoted. They are 10 times more frightening than Trump whatever their skin color.

Yes, and their race and class hatred is calling up more of the same from the fever swamps of the Right. They will never, ever see it.

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