THE EAST IS…WHITE? XI JINPING IS A CRACKER? Chinese racism and imperialism is really a manifestation of Whiteness, says white Aussie broadcaster.
Stan Grant, a white guy who is a leading commenter on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (Oz’s BBC), believes that China’s hegemonic brutality is — wait for it — a manifestation of Whiteness.
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Imperialism is a White Supremacist construct, and therefore to be an imperialist power is to be a white power, even if you are, well, non-white. And say what you will about Grant, he carries this argument to its logical conclusion. Xi’s China might have represented the end of whiteness, he laments, but instead “the Chinese Communist Party itself mirrors whiteness.” How can this be? Well, it has turned out that Xi is a Han nationalist, committed to the idea that “Chinese power is ethnic Han superiority.”
Grant is probably right about this. But instead of this leading him to question his own efforts to put all forms of capitalism, including the Chinese, indeed, arguably all forms of power, into the Procrustean Bed of White Supremacy, Grant doubles down, insisting that Han persecution of non-Han is nothing less white people persecuting non-white people.
One feels as if one has entered a lunatic asylum. The Han are not white, and somehow they are. But in Grant’s world, and in this he is in no sense expressing a fringe view but rather is an emblematic figure of a very wide current of an opinion, whiteness is a synonym for power, full stop. Thus, for Grant, the tragedy of Xi’s China is that it has become what he believes historically its opposed, whiteness, of which, he says, “Xi Xinping is its champion…the continuation of white power in darker skin.”
Whiteness as metaphor, in short. It is this metaphorization of understanding, no is the deepest intellectual, and in some ways, the deepest philosophical ill that afflicts us.
Earlier: “White Supremacy:” Is there anything it can’t do?
