One of the skills that the Left
has acquired (and which Donald Trump is equally or more adept at) is branding
and framing via the use of a short word or phrase. That technique is useful because with a
single vacuous utterance, you are able to destroy a more analytical evaluation
and you put your adversary on the defensive.
Trump demonstrated his acumen at this during the 2016 campaign with
“Crooked” Hillary, “Lyin’ Ted Cruz” and “Low Energy” Jeb. And it is one of the reasons liberals
despise him.
The Left has developed a series
of these monikers that are highly effective
and, like barnacles, they stick for awhile and it takes some effort to
scrape them off. “Privilege,” especially
“white privilege” is the most prevalent.
Never mind that many of us know lots of white people that hardly had
privileged lives. They are all swabbed
with the same mop. “Toxic masculinity”
is another. Never mind that good old
fashioned raw physical masculinity comes in real handy in real desperate
straights as wonderfully depicted in the film The 15:17 to Paris, when a group of toxically masculine young men
thwarted an armed terrorist. In less
extreme cases, toxic, undeterred masculinity is useful when you get a flat in -below
zero weather on a dark highway and the grizzled guy from the service station
shows up with his jack.
But no other vacuous phrase is
quite as insidious as “of color,” which
is used to categorize any person of non-caucasian ancestry. To the Leftist postmodernists, the term “of
color” automatically connotes someone who, through their heritage, has been
oppressed and is at a structural disadvantage in our society, and therefore,
those individuals deserve special treatment to level the playing field. It lumps together Hispanics and African
Americans on the opposite side of whites and is the companion phrase to “white
privilege.” It obliterates the old
descriptive terms- “White,” “Hispanic,” “Black” or “African American,” “Asian,” “Native American,” which were perfectly functional when necessary
and instead puts whites on one side and lumps African American and Hispanics on
the other.
The term “Person of Color” is a
sneaky, divisive term concocted by the Left to further identity politics and
should be wholly rejected. It adds
nothing to our society and culture and unnecessarily builds walls between us.
The underhanded appearance of this
term became clear to me after I heard Kenneth B. Morris, the descendant of the
great Frederick Douglass speak last summer.
Morris spun out stories and his family connection to Douglass, told anecdotes
of his escape, reminded us that African slaves were inhumanly beaten, abused, and
hunted down like animals. Mr. Morris
reminded us that the existence of black slavery was not that long ago, really. Those were his people. That was his heritage. It was awful and remains a dark spot on
American history.
But the working class
neighborhood I grew up in consisted largely of Eastern European and Mexican. And many of the parents, grandparents, uncles
and aunts of my peers were Poles and Lithuanians that escaped from the
Stalinist Eastern Bloc. The best friend
of my best friend’s father was shot in the head in front of him at age 17. He himself escaped by hiding in sewers and ditches
for weeks. Another friend’s parents
escaped one of Stalin’s concentration camps in Lithuania and were hunted by
Russian thugs with guard dogs. My
neighborhood was replete with those first hand stories of Communist oppression,
and are most vividly captured in Ruta Sepetys’s novel Between Shades of Gray. Those were my people. And that is my heritage. Mr. Morris and I have more in common than at first appears.
The Lithuanian and Polish
immigrants share a great deal more with African American than with Hispanics. To be sure, they were oppressed at different
times by different people. But if you
are suffering the terror of chased through the woods by people with guns, truncheons,
and dogs with your heart racing, those experiences are quite the same whether it
is a plantation owner or a Stalinist thug..
None of the Hispanics suffered oppression of that nature at all. They simply migrated up here and took blue
collar jobs and scratched out a living like the rest of the neighborhood.
That is why I utterly reject “Persons
of Color” as an artificial, unhelpful and damaging construct. It gets the categories completely wrong, unless you want to have a discussion of skin pigmentation. But if you wish it to connote the actual experiences of a peoples, it is meaningless and misleading.
The photo above is of a Soviet work
camp. Looks pretty similar to a 1850’s Georgia
plantation, doesn’t it?
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