The White Face of Black Supremacy
O brave new world, That has such people in't.
Michael McWhorter (who should never be confused with the eminently respectable and often brilliant John McWhorter), a social media influencer and filmmaker known online as “tizzyENT,” has close to 6 million followers on TikTok. On Instagram, this middle-aged warrior for Social Justice has 330 thousand followers. Twitter? Mr McWhorter — who can safely be described as white as a debutante’s taint — has over half a million followers, to whom he offers such wisdom as this:
There’s no such thing as white pride in part because there is no white culture. You can have pride based on your ethnicity — Scottish, German, Irish — and even have regional pride, like Southern pride. These things usually apply to your cultural identity, like how you grew up, etc. I had some people argue that “well, other colors have pride.” No, they don’t. Chicano, Latino pride, Asian pride. Those are not colors. The one exception is black pride, and that’s because they had a unique experience no one else has. Black Americans were robbed of their culture. They don’t know where they come from. Two black Americans meet: they could have come from warring African tribes. They don’t know. What they do know is that their American experience was similar.
There’s more to the video, but I’ll spare you the remainder of his cocksure lecture, which is predicated on a series of absurdities, falsehoods, retrograde “scholarship,” and historical illiteracy that borders on the surreal. The point is, it’s an absurd, false, retrograde, historically illiterate, and intellectually unsophisticated narrative being presented to multiple millions of people — many of whom are eager to find some meaning in life —as a narrativized certainty, a truth, one whose cause is worth taking up with street-level political activism run through critical social consciousness pedagogy in order to elevate and ultimately institutionalize the authoritarian demands of Cultural Marxism. This struggle is necessary should we wish to bring about “equity,” and who, besides vulgar, hyper-capitalist robber barons, could possibly be against that?
What “tizzyENT” is arguing here comes directly out of Kimberlé Crenshaw and her acolytes in — and offshoots from (“anti-racism,” “whiteness studies,” etc.) — Critical Race Theory, and was later made explicit by “race theorist” Noel Ignatiev, among others. “Whites,” McWhorter assures us with the air of high erudition, do not have a culture — presumably because “white culture” is synonymous with American and Western European culture, which has oboarded what it likes from the various subcultures it comes into contact with (envisioned as “authentic”), while simultaneously rejecting those parts of the various subcultures it finds less appealing (resulting in a program of cultural genocide). White culture, that is, is but a compendium of the various instances of cultural theft — or “cultural appropriation” — the dominant cultural discourse, “whiteness,” has gathered up from actual cultures, which McWhorter describes as largely color free. Chicanos and Latinos (many of whom erroneously think of themselves as “brown”), along with Asians (many of whom believe themselves to have distinct and identifiable hereditary genetics, presumably not realizing the extent of their noxious idiocy until tizzy helpfully set the yellow morons straight) can — along with such groups that identify around national borders or regions of countries — express pride, McWhorter allows; but the pride they are expressing isn’t a pride tied to skin color. Because alone among all the peoples of the world, blacks are the one group that can lay claim to cultural pride tied directly to a colored racial identity.
Though I very much doubt he’s conscious of it, just as I very much doubt he has any real understanding of critical pedagogy and the Theory which it produced, the move McWhorter is making here is a move Crenshaw made in the early 1990s, whose itemized theoretical particulars are beyond the scope of this essay (for an overview and critique, see here). The offshoot of her efforts, though, are of importance — namely, a rehabilitation of, and, soon after, the preeminent place of praxis in, identity politics, ordered around the concept of intersectionality that she’d popularized.
On its face, what McWhorter argues — aping CRT but lacking its verbal agility — is ludicrous: no, blacks have not had a “unique experience no one else has,” and no, they don’t “know” upon meeting other blacks that they’ve each shared a similar American experience. Black American culture, in the sense McWhorter means, was never “stolen” — and in fact, Thomas Sowell traces that “culture” back to white Scots and Irish of the outer Hebrides who emigrated to the American south, where redneck culture settled and was picked up upon by poor blacks, who transferred it with them into urban centers.
To make the claims McWhorther makes, then, one must of necessity cast blacks as a monolithic group — the monolithic racial group, in his benighted telling — whose members somehow, via the holy alchemy of skin color and hermeticism, share otherwise unrelated historical and temporal experiences separate and apart from all other humans who have ever lived in non black bodies. This is the trope of the “Magical Negro”— a mythologizing of the African diaspora that posits blacks in the US as descendants of warrior kings, never pedestrian bushman, or mere tribal members caught by competing African tribes and sold into the trans-Atlantic slave trade. To tizzyENT, it’s as if he sees in blacks a separate species entirely, a strange blend of homosapien and Monarch butterfly, driven by genetic memory — one whom he is compelled, out of a sense of Social Justice and crippling White Guilt — to “give a voice to,” because lord knows the poor dumb animals, who also happen to be the noble descendants of African chieftains and exotic martial clans, can’t be trusted to express their own interests effectively without the help of racially conscious folk like him.
This is a decidedly Rousseauvian perspective, with blacks cast both as Noble Savages and a reified racial group — Higher Beings born of Unique Suffering and Unique Positionality. For his part, McWhorter is both White Savior, responsible for taking up the cause of blackness, and white simp, deferential to the superiority of blacks whose neo-cultural supremacy is the direct result of the redress he wishes to grant them for their victimization and marginalization at the hands of the white power structure — if not on the level of the individual, then on the level of tribe. Whiteness is synonymous with oppression. And under Theory, the victimization and marginalization it leaves in its wake is permanent: inasmuch as racism is the oppressive state of social affairs under the meta-narrative of Whiteness, White Supremacy, and structural racism, it is always dominant and always self maintaining.
I bring all this up as a backdrop to my final words on the “CitiBike Karen” affair. The facts, to the extent they continue to matter, are not in dispute — especially if what we are after is an accurate presentation of how to contextualize the 90-second viral video that threatened to ruin the life of Sarah Comrie, a white physician’s assistant, whom the left set about to turn into an objective correlative of white “Karenicity,” of female whiteness weaponized as a means to consciously control and subjugate black men.
McWhorter was and continues to be one of the driving forces of this narrative, having recently appeared on TYT to once again bemoan the racism of Ms Comrie and the dangers she posed to black men as a direct result of her whiteness. Responding to Guest Host Sharon Reed’s leading prompts, McWhorter claims that he “never cared about a stolen bike” (he did), but instead, that what he saw that’d “alarmed” him was Ms Comrie’s response to having the bike she rented taken away from her by “black teens, which response — calling out for help while they were trying to take her property — put their lives in jeopardy. Comrie’s life, conversely, was never threatened, nor does she have any right to even perceive it as such; after all, as a pregnant white woman surrounded by several black teenagers cursing at her and laying hands on her bike, to believe herself unsafe is merely proof of her implicit biases and her latent racism. She has nothing to fear from black teens throwing f-bombs her way; whereas they had every right to fear for their lives. Because black on white crime in New York is simply not a thing, whereas a white woman calling for help — and here McWhorter invokes Emmett Till — leads to instantaneous lynchings of black youth in 21st century New York City, the contemporary urban equivalent of 1950’s Selma, Alabama, or Jessup County, Mississippi, circa 1964. I mean, do you even sociology, bro?
To hear McWhorter tell it — and again, this hipster doofus reaches over 6 million people through his various social media presences, which is why this matters — the viral video led not to the vilification of Ms Comrie, but rather to a “narrative” and a “press push” that “vilified” the black teenager whose name has still not been released, whose job has never been threatened, whose family has never received deaths, and whom local media, as well as a host of national outlets, didn’t immediately label a racist and a thief, nor demonize for his skin color.
Or, to put it another way, McWhorter is full of shit — and the left seems intent on trying to rewrite history right before our very eyes, while the history is quite recent, and the story, ongoing. And they do this without shame, because they believe — as it’s clear McWhorter does — that the reach of their platforms, combined with the force of their personalities, can both create and solidify a narrative that, while not the truth, will stand in for it just fine, and at the very least “problematize” the history as “oppressors” wish to tell it. More, this effort is a completely legitimate and even noble undertaking by the Cultural Marxist, because “truth” is merely a construct born of the social power to declare it, with the goal of getting others to accept that declaration as “true,” if only conditionally so. Thus, McWhorter is on the side of the neo-Marxist angels, fighting for the Greater Good, which for the left is increasingly determined by which identity group you align with in any given conflict. Facts may not care about your feelings, but feelings likewise don’t care about your facts — and feelings currently control the epistemological infrastructure.
Maybe I’ll sell a mug for conservative tears.
To help solidify his narrative — and I recommend you watch the TYT appearance to witness for yourself in real time how McWhorter raggedly and haltingly lays down the brush strokes necessary to paint the surrealist picture — our bearded Race Bro expresses concern that “no one bothered to talk about the fact that [one of the black teens] was a seventeen-year-old high school kid who acted more like an adult in that video — in my opinion — than [Ms Comrie] did. […] No one was sharing his story. No one was being a voice for him.”
— And that is precisely where Mr McWhorter comes in, you see. Oafish and hirsute, this racialist Dudley Do-Right mounts his white steed, Auntie Racist, and gallops to the rhetorical rescue, which seems to involve “doing the work” of patronizing the very people he claims to be championing. Because it’s not that the black teen who took and intentionally uploaded the video hadn’t come forward voluntarily to explain the racial maelstrom he’d caused that could possibly be responsible for “his story” not being shared. No. That would suggest that black people have individual agency, and such an idea is ludicrous to the white leftist anti-racist Savior. Instead, the problem, as Mr McWhorter recognizes it, is that no one has stepped up to provide an intelligible voice for this vilified black teen — and who better than his fat white ass to do so! — resulting in Ms Comrie and her hideous whiteness running roughshod over a marginalized person whose only real crime is his blackness. This teen’s poor upbringing and non-existent manners — screw you, Karen, I may want to use this bike later!— are very very adulty, unlike the behavior of the woman coming off a twelve-hour hospital shift in a neonatal ward. Explained the ridiculous Cracker, whitely.
So it goes. This is how Social Justice narratives gain cultural purchase, and with that purchase, political power. And this happens regardless of their accuracy from the standpoint of empirical reality, which is itself characterized as a construct of power dynamics controlled by the dominant discourse of Whiteness and White Supremacy.
— That is, if we allow this type of critique to proceed unchallenged, or even on its own terms. But we need not. Nor should we. The truth is, it’s perfectly okay — nay, it’s crucial and necessary — to reject the premise that “truth” is contingent on power, or that blackness carries with it a special and magical resistance to constructivism because shut up, racist!
A thorough assessment of the CitiBike facts as we know them have been laid out quite nicely in the video below:
The creator of this video summary, Nate the Lawyer, is correct that this saga should not have been a story, much less a national story centered around racial conflict, which I myself noted when criticizing Ms Comrie’s employer, who “put her on leave and released a statement condemning ‘discrimination’ over what turns out to be a property dispute whose racial component was entirely ginned up by leftists who need desperately for systemic racism to make itself visible.”
But it is that latter point Nate doesn’t grant a proper degree of causality — while tizzyENT very intentionally foregrounds it as the story: the facts of the bike rental are one thing; the facts of the subsequent social fallout of the filming, uploading, and viral reach of the video — along with its presentation, explication by media, and then commentary by those all along the political axis — is another. And those facts — whether they should be or not — turned the story, intentionally so, into a story of racial oppression, “Karenicity,” abhorrent whiteness, the dangers black men face in Emmett Till’s New York City, and so on.
Nate tries to adopt a “both sides”-support-their-“team”-critique, much as did Dustin Siggins before him in USA Today. Conversely, tizzyENT has no time for such narratives of reconciliation. Instead, he continues to maintain that the only useful part of this story is its unveiling of structural racism, which it locates in the reaction of a white woman to a black teen, itself a product of whites like Ms Comrie not being sufficiently race conscious, or “Woke.”
What the former critique fails to take into account in its desire to distribute blame more or less equally — and why it fails — are the various points of intent that generated this story to begin with: the intent by the black teens to gatekeep the bike; the intent to shame Ms Comrie, by way of filming her, into surrendering to this gatekeeping — importantly, using race and victim culture as a weapon of offense, one that today can only ever militate against whites; and finally, the intentional publication and distribution of that victim narrative, which led to Ms Comrie’s doxxing, threats on her life, cessation of active employment, emotional distress, and defamation against her, with public accusations, shared with those who live in her apartment building by NBC News, that she is both a racist and a thief.
Make no mistake: the black teens who filmed Ms Comrie and uploaded the video knew what the reaction would be among those they were appealing to. They knew precisely where their power lay. And they exercised that power in order to punish Ms Comrie for daring to stand up to their behavior. They knew Ms Comrie had a right to the bike; they knew she had rented it in accordance with Citi Bike policies. But they wanted to keep it, and she was standing in their way. They assumed the threat of turning her into a racial pariah was a way to get her to relent, which she eventually did when she was offered another E Bike. Still, either she was going to bow to them — as Mr McWhorter has, even as he treats them as pets in need of his care — or they were going to unleash a racially hypersensitive public, whipped up by a progressive media into a racialist lynch mob, to destroy her. That was the point of filming the incident in the first place. That was the point of uploading it, even as the situation had been resolved.
These facts are made clear in the videos produced by someone purporting to be the sister of the black teen whose account was being used to rent the bike, whom McWhorter has featured on his platform several times. Her account of events — including production of her brother’s receipts — show very clearly that he was in the wrong, and in fact show equally as clearly that he had taken Ms Comrie’s property, just as she said he did. He stole from her. But facts are irrelevant — another construct of rationality and empiricism that help safeguard white privilege at the expense of black experience — so consequently there’s no suggestion anywhere in her appearances that she’s embarrassed having literally proven Ms Comrie’s account of events correct.
Instead — and like Mr McWhorter — she, too, is insistent that the entirety of the story is the racism of white women who remain insufficiently race conscious, of whom Ms Comrie is both a useful and convenient example and a ready-made scapegoat. That sister and brother believe exactly the same thing, and adopt exactly the same tactics, is therefore no surprise. But it is instructive: the sister, like her brother (and like Mr McWhorter), seem to know how a particular narrative will play with the public. Therefore, they insist upon advancing it, because it is that narrative that gives them power and, now, rewards them with riches from debased whites so aching to signal their race consciousness that they’ll subsidize the kind of behavior that would not only deny a pregnant women use of bicycle, but would seek to destroy her for having the audacity to question the absolute cultural authority of a marginalized person cognizant of how to weaponize his “marginalized” status.
To put it more simply: the struggle over who gets to rent the bike is entirely subordinate to the framing of that struggle, which is what the left actually — and only — cares about, both here and elsewhere. How they can craft a narrative from these visible signifiers framed by the events as filmed — that is, what meaning they map to the text — then use that narrative to garner support and increase their power, is the entirety of their goal here. To the black teen and his sister, they are operating on a micro level, with the narrative they craft useful to their own personal, local gain; anything else is cultural gravy. But McWhorter and those like him are crafting the narrative to suggest that the micro narrative of the bike conflict is but one of an infinite number of such instances making up the macro meta-narrative — namely, that systemic racism flows from “whiteness” not properly examined by critical race consciousness, nor as yet upended by the strategic racism that anti-racist pedagogy and CRT not only allows, but insists upon.
To the left, this story was never about a bike. It was never about theft. It was always and only about reinforcing certain Cultural Marxist notions of race and power.
When certain conservatives, in response to this attempt by neo-Marxist Theory to once again center a narrative of “white supremacy” as normative and ubiquitous in order to accrue social power for supposedly marginalized groups, reacted in a way that rejects those premises, that reaction was not one of supporting a “team” but rather one of supporting the very ideological system upon which Westernism is located and rooted.
The left keeps their eye on the prize. We must be every bit as vigilant — and beat back their hamfisted attempts to capitalize on our very real exhaustion with their tactics. Removing their institutional power would lessen this burden, of course, but alas, we paid too little notice while they were busy capturing the seats of cultural sway to have any say now in their timely removal, at least on a grand scale. So we endure sleepless nights, hoping our kids won’t have to pay the price for failures of vigilance and invitations to cultural demise.
This is our doing. We allowed it in, then stood by as it flourished. Now we must correct those errors.
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Update: Aaaand SCENE!
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