HEATHER MAC DONALD: Tyre Nichols and the new black-cop white supremacy.
Had the officers been white, their race would have led every report on the incident. But since all were black, such reticence bought time until a new racism reporting protocol could be developed.
CNN commentator and Obama White House veteran Van Jones initiated that new protocol. Connoisseurs of academic identity politics are familiar with the nostrum that only whites can be racist, since, according to black studies ideology, racism equals power plus privilege (and blacks allegedly lack both).
But that “blacks can’t be racist” line has changed. Now we learn from Van Jones that blacks can be racist, too — at least as regards other blacks.
“It’s time to move to a more nuanced discussion of the way police violence endangers black lives,” Jones wrote on the CNN website last Friday. “It is the race of the victim who is brutalized, not the race of the violent cop — that is most relevant in determining whether racial bias is a factor in police violence.”
In other words: anything bad that happens to blacks is a function of racism, determined solely by the race of the victim, not by the intentions or identity of the perpetrator.
Only cops are subject to this new “the victim alone determines the reality of racism” rule, however. Those black teenagers who shoot at their gang rivals on a near daily basis and who regularly take out young black children as collateral damage are not deemed “anti-black” by the mainstream media and its academic sources.
The rest of the race industry quickly coalesced around Jones’s lopsided definition of racism, from which whiteness has been provisionally suspended (to be restored the next time a white cop is caught on videotape using force against a black suspect).
Meanwhile, Whoopi Goldberg bellowed on The View, “‘Seems things don’t seem to make sense to people unless it’s somebody they can feel or they can recognize. But how many times do we have to – do you we need to see white people also get beaten before anybody will do anything?’ Goldberg wondered during her opening screed. She followed up by claiming she wasn’t suggesting what she was clearly suggesting. ‘I’m not suggesting that. So, don’t write us and tell me what a racist I am,’ she whined.”