Let’s face it: Most writers in 2023 hold back from saying what they really think. Some don’t; some absolutely push full steam ahead. But I think it’s more or less axiomatic that, especially since 2016, and especially especially since 2020, it’s become some form of “taboo” to let the capital-T Truth rip.
What do I mean by this?
Well, here’s an easy example, and I’ve written fairly often about this already but here it goes again.
It’s spring, summer 2020. Asian hate attacks are dumbly, sadly on the rise. We’re being told by the liberal media—New York Times, WaPo, Vox, MSNBC, CNN, etc—that this is due to a Trump-inspired rise in “white supremacy.”
Look: it sounds good. Trump, bad. Racism, bad. White people, evil (we’d been told). So, sure, why not: 1 + 1 = 2. Right?
Wrong. I lived in Manhattan, New York City, where the bulk of these anti-Asian attacks occurred, especially in the early months of the pandemic. I saw several with my own two then-37-year-old, perfectly good eyes.
It was always Black men doing the attacking.
I know. It’s an uncomfortable truth. You don’t want reality to work that way but, damn it, it just does, at least in this case. I remember living in East Harlem and watching a 6’2 Black man with a wifebeater, gold chain, and muscles bigger than my head, walk right up to and scream at a tiny 4’10 Asian woman walking her baby in a carriage down 5th Avenue at 130th. What did the man scream?
Go back to China, bitch!
Yep. You heard me right. I am not pulling this out of my ass. Watch the YouTube videos of anti-Asian attacks. Almost all exclusively Black men. There was a new recent one on the NYC subway…and the attackers were Black women.
Progressives try to then swerve the narrative either into determinism-land (they’re Black and so couldn’t help themselves because they exist as non-whites in a racist white capitalist society), or else they take this tack: Due to Trump’s racist rise, the attackers have “internalized” white supremacy. (A fancy way of saying: Don’t blame them, they’re victims.)
My bigger point with all of this above is not to pick on Black people—there is no “Black people” anyway, just as there’s no “white people” but only broad populations and individuals within them—but rather to demonstrate that when bullshit arises, whether from the Left or the Right (plenty on the Right: Just watch the absurdist dark comedy that is Fox “News”), from media or from Substack or from fiction or nonfiction, Black, White, Brown or Asian, etc: It’s absolutely, 100% got to be called out.
January 6th was anti-American, illiberal horse-shit; I have ZERO problem saying that.
Trump’s a malignant narcissist asshole.
The obsession with White Identity Politics and “anti-Wokeism” on the far-Right is ridiculous and deserves nothing but mockery.
I am perfectly content with the above statements.
But you’ve also got to call out the extremism on the other side. It takes two to tango. The Right’s extremism doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Acting like a toddler and decrying the other side—“them”—and saying, But…but…THEY started it gets us absolutely NOWHERE.
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