Phil Eiger Newmann, Today’s Pressing Issues, 2021.
1,595 words
Not everyone hates the winter as much as I do — I’ve even argued that the primary impetus for European colonialism was the perfectly reasonable quest for warmer climes — but if you’re similar to me in this regard, with all due apologies to T. S. Eliot, April is not the cruelest month — February is. And apparently, a “major winter storm” will sock huge swaths of the USA this week. For me, the worst part of the year is that deep-frozen dark patch of dead somnolence between the Super Bowl and the blooming of the first tulips.
And just as every day in February seems depressingly the same, every week the news is depressingly similar.
Women are still falsely accusing men of rape.
Newspaper editorial staffs continue flogging themselves for being “too white.”
Albinos are still being hunted down and killed in African countries because the people there are dumb enough to think that albino body parts are magical.
Some people never shut up about the Holocaust, and others are destroyed for talking about the Holocaust.
The “everyone’s a fed” panic is still with us, but now it’s metastasized and spread everywhere.
Racism is still a public health crisis, even though black people tend to live far longer in white-majority countries than they do in black-majority countries.
And despite tireless efforts to deprogram them from their prejudices, bigoted thinking among robots is getting worse and worse.
Since I’ve only recently realized that the top news stories are selected for us and that most of us are unwittingly led like dogs on a leash by the news cycle, I strain to avoid the viral topics as much as possible and prefer to analyze current events from different frameworks.
One can learn a lot about the state of American society simply by studying how double standards are applied to terms that, if objective American journalism truly existed, would be handled similarly by writers. For example, a quarter-century ago I wrangled an entire book from noticing that the American press did not treat the words “redneck” and “nigger” as equivalent terms of racial disparagement.
This week, I was curious to see if the same sort of hypocrisy extended to how writers approach the terms “blackness,” “Jewishness,” and “whiteness.” In the process, I stubbed my toe on what is the most annoying social-justice buzzword I’ve heard in a coon’s age — “brownness.”
I searched these terms on Google News, which may skew the results in favor of the obvious biases of Google’s owners. Not all of these stories are recent, but they showed up on Google News nonetheless.
As you are likely aware, “blackness” (NO, I will NOT capitalize it) is something to be celebrated. It’s something that erupts from black skin in a multicolored confetti explosion of sensuality and self-empowerment. My searches failed to uncover a single instance of any writer, black or not, finding anything objectionable about blackness.
Actress Viola Davis, whose net worth of $25 million could feed an entire African country for a few months, laments the days of old when she felt compelled to “make any hint of my blackness disappear.”
Actress Gabrielle Union, whose net worth of $40 million could feed an entire black country for a few months and every black player in the NBA for a year, refers to assimilation as a “poison” and says she is “constantly reaffirming” her daughters’ blackness “outside of them so they can constantly see themselves in the flesh,” whatever that means.
You can buy Jim Goad’s Whiteness: The Original Sin here.
The Executive Vice President of The Negro Spiritual Scholarship Foundation — no, I’m not making this up — urges us to view history through “the clear, and clarifying, lens of blackness.”
Writing for some reason in the Irish Times, a black author and photographer proclaims with a big toothy grin that “I’m interested in the infinite possibilities of blackness, in the infinite possibilities of love.”
I’m interested in the infinite possibilities of blackness, too. It’s a very intriguing concept. Can anyone provide a link?
Concomitant with elevating blackness is attacking and eliminating anti-blackness, even when it pops up in the “Asian Community” and the “Latino Community.”
I can’t remember ever seeing the phrase “White Community” used in a news story. “Is it good for the whites?” is not a question that whites are currently allowed to ask.
By contrast, “Jewishness” is something to be lauded and protected, even if it took two World Wars and may require another World War or two to keep the huddled Jewish masses safe.
“Jewish identity” and “Jewishness” are at the core of a recent essay on the work of artist Philip Guston.
The trial of the Chicago 7 — which pitted a conservative, pro-assimilation Jewish judge named Hoffman against a radical yippie Jewish defendant named Hoffman — throbbed with “hidden Jewishness,” according to a kosher egghead who claims that his bailiwick is “Martini Judaism.”
Jewish comedienne Sarah Silverman appeared on Jewish radio host Howard Stern’s show to kvetch that a cinematic rendering of a Jewish author’s book “undid the Jewishness” of the original.
A Ukrainian immigrant to Israel sued his supervisor, charging racial discrimination after his boss “questioned his Jewishness.”
Wait — racial discrimination? I thought they were a religion.
Not anymore, apparently. Although younger American Jews increasingly reject Judaism, 94% of Jews in a Pew survey claimed they were “proud to be Jewish.”
That article impressively managed to cram 13 “Jews” within a mere 84-word passage, which may be a world record for Jews-to-words ratio:
Married Jews of no religion are much more likely than married Jews by religion to have non-Jewish spouses. Jews who have non-Jewish spouses are much less likely than those married to fellow Jews to be raising children as Jewish by religion and much more likely to be raising children as partially Jewish, Jewish but not by religion, or not Jewish at all. Furthermore, Jews who are the offspring of intermarriages appear, themselves, to be more likely to intermarry than Jews with two Jewish parents.
Apparently, Jewish pride is nothing to be ashamed of. CNN election forecaster Harry Enten says “shalom” at the end of his segments and spoke with the Jerusalem Post about his Jewishness: “I am Jewish, and proud of the fact that I’m Jewish, and I want people to know that.”
The Baltimore Sun published an OpEd saying it was unfair to demean Bernie Sanders as an “old white male” because he is, in fact, an old Jewish male who once stated: “I am Jewish, and proud of the fact that I’m Jewish, and I want people to know that.”
And now “brownness” is apparently a source of pride, especially when contrasted with whiteness. A woman of partial Afghani ancestry who was raised in Ukraine publicly scolded her parents for encouraging her to be color-blind:
My Afghan identity is inextricable from me — it makes me whole. This is what my family didn’t realize when they assured me that they didn’t see my Brownness [sic] and that they only saw me. What none of them understood was that I am my brownness.
An Indian (dot, not feather) dancer who had a three-second spot on a Beyoncé video has proclaimed before God and man that “Loving blackness taught me to love my brownness.” And another dot-not-feather woman has shouted from the mountaintop that “putting brownness against a brown background compelled me to dig deeper.”
I hope she digs so deep that she loses her Internet connection.
The Los Angeles Times did a puff piece on a Latina who has cranked out “a decade of art that unapologetically celebrates brownness.”
Although these are the same people that argue against “racial essentialism,” when they talk about blackness, Jewishness, and (gag) brownness, it’s as if they’re describing the very essence of these people’s souls.
It’s only when we get to “whiteness” that we hear that whiteness doesn’t really exist, has no essence, and is just a way for white people to exploit and murder nonwhites.
I’ve mentioned previously that nonwhites who do not absolutely bask in their nonwhiteness are accused of practicing “multiracial whiteness.”
A black alleged scholar — I’m not alleging that he’s black, only implying that his scholarship is dubious — says he “wants to save the classics from whiteness,” a malignancy which resides “in the very marrow of classics.”
Skateboarding — which was once seen as snow-white as ice hockey and square dancing — now desperately “seeks to flip its image of whiteness.”
USA Today took pains to explain that when Rev. Raphael Warnock — now a US Senator from Georgia — declared from his pulpit that “America needs to repent for its worship of whiteness,” there was absolutely nothing bigoted about his statement. They even framed the article as a “fact check,” as if bigotry was something you could quantify.
Whiteness is constantly framed as a fallacy, a fraud, a problem, and something that needs to be investigated and broken down. It’s even depicted as a “chronic” condition — which implies it is a disease.
In case you haven’t been paying attention, whiteness is a cancer, and the persistent celebration of nonwhiteness is the chemotherapy.
When, oh when, will those tulips start to bloom again?
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29 comments
With due respect, Mr. Goad, winter is splendid and, to be sure, it is most definitely White. I am just back from a long walk over the lake in front of the house with dogs, and my good wife. It is postcard classic winter, appr. 30 cm whitest of the white snow, total sunshine and the best news in the end: no blacks anywhere, not even close, not even any hint of them.
Winter, classic winter with snow and ice, and, yes, as it has now been lately, appr. 10-25 degrees MINUS celsius, is just, simply, awesome. And boy, does it not make a difference. It is White People Weather. One has to know how to dress, how to behave in cold weather, how to handle snow and ice, how to avoid drowning through the ice.
I have burnt a hell of a lot wood this winter and it is one of the best things when winter is classic. The atmosphere in the house is magic, when you see the fire burning and bringing the warmth to the house.
No, Mr. Goad, with due respect, General Winter is White, All-White, and the best of friends for White People.
Ja kamerad. We are Hyperboreans. This is our time of year. Crisp, clear, cold, and gloriously, immaculately White! Let those of the tropics return from whence they sprang.
“Redneck” and “nigger” are not equivalent terms. The first evokes toughness, vigour and defiance. The second memorialises a history of subordination and underachievement.
As much as I appreciate your valiant attempt to correct the guy who wrote an entire book about the word, I’d encourage you to search the word “redneck” online and compare how often people use it as a term of racial disparagement to how often it “evokes toughness, vigour and defiance.”
OK, that was insolent of me. But do white Americans really get upset by being called rednecks?
In my many years of being called one, it’s served only to damage mine and my family’s reputation, in spite of this absurd astroturfed campaign to “reclaim” it in media (where it’s still only used as a means to mock). “Redneck” is a fighting word.
There aren’t any really biting anti-white slurs comparable to the anti-non-white epithets in their power to offend.
“Redneck” makes me think of a punchline in a Jeff Foxworthy joke.
“Honkie” is too dated, and just sounds too silly to be an effective insult.
“Cracker” is supposed to be a hard-hitting anti-white epithet, but speaking as a white man from the South, I am the first to admit that I am indeed a cracker. (“Cracker? Please don’t call me a cracker,” jokes Louis C.K. “That takes me back to a time of owing land, and people.”) Mutatis mutandis, I am a cracker, am proud of the fact that I’m a cracker, and I want people to know that.
There’s really no racial epithet that a non-white can hurl at me that’s going to sting in any way close to how they would feel dissed if for some insane reason I were to call one of them them a nigger, spic, wog, or whatever. In the unlikely event that I truly wanted to insult a black man, I wouldn’t even call him a nigger; I’d call him a boy.
It depends on who is saying it.
Read your book long ago, and definitely agree it’s usually used as an insult (in the media, it always is.) But the word also does have some connotations of toughness. If someone says “This redneck wants to kick my ass”, I think it’s implied that the guy is likely pretty tough (but possibly stupid, and resorts to violence.) I think most people would also agree that if stranded out in the woods, rednecks would be better off than most.
There’s also that lefty group “redneck revolt”, which seems to try to appeal to stereotypical “rednecks”. Not sure what exactly that means.
Covid19 is something the blacks among us have enjoyed a little too much. They are loving it.
Great writing and research. We appreciate.
So even robots spew racist rants now? Oh my, robots letting facts get in their way again. Alexa, fix that!
Not to keep beating a dead gorilla, but did you see Raskin’s hair on TV? He could really use some of that, that – oh, what was the name of that glue again?
“I’m interested in the infinite possibilities of blackness, too. It’s a very intriguing concept. Can anyone provide a link?”
Hollywood promotes blackness to a gullible public:
https://youtu.be/uwSZ_Gs3YcQ?t=238
If you’re new to WN and CC (and even if you’re an old hand), you must read Goad’s book which he refers to here: “How Hillbillies, Hicks, and White Trash Became America’s Scapegoat”, published way back in the dark ages of 1997, but absolutely prophetic of things to come.
It is the best and funniest, and, in so many ways, the saddest book on the subject of the creation of ‘White Blame’, ‘White Shame’, and ‘White Guilt’ written so far, mainly because it’s written in the actual language of ‘those most heavily stomped on’. It sure puts the concept of ‘White Privilege’ in its place. Whites worked damned hard and left many innocent lives dead on the road to even achieving lower-middle-class existence. That’s not ‘Privilege’ — that is just escaping roadkill status.
Please read this book, or re-read it, and be sure to get it before it’s banned — we need all the ammunition we can get, and there’s a lot of facts here we can throw at the enemy.
Enjoy, and have some side-splitting laughs among your tears for your ancestors.
Can someone please tell me where you cN find these cartoons by Phil Eiger Newmann that accompany Goad’s articles?
You can find them here. He does them up for us twice a week.
Oh. I figured he might have a website or something. I see them here and the DS.
Also, great job getting Jim Goad here. I have been reading him for a while now and discovered this website when he moved here from Takimag. Now I have a new favorite website. Thanks Greg.
Thanks Lee, welcome to Counter-Currents.
To be afflicted with Whiteness is not merely to be a reprobate damned beyond all hope of redemption, but also to be a positive danger to others under all circumstances. Oxford educated journalist and former Labour Party pundit Sonia Priya Sodha finds it necessary to insert the following warning into her op-ed piece in today’s Guardian.
Be wary of the white, straight men who call out lesbians and women of colour as bigots because they refuse to comply with the version of liberation they deem appropriate, and who pat themselves on the back for being an “ally” for doing so. Their naivety gives them the luxury of childishly dividing the world into goodies and baddies.
Reporting on a recent spat between the UK’s sainted BAME(*) communities, the details of which would be too tedious to summarise here, she emphasises that the real enormity was that a white male weighed in:
Are Asian women only allowed to call out misogyny and racism from within our own communities when a white man tells us it is OK to do so?
There is more of the same from lauded Holocaust-denial survivor Prof Deborah Lipstadt in the same online edition. In these straitened times that invisible knapsack of privilege seems to comport a regular mauling from such elite-educated well-remunerated harpies!
(*) Black And Minority Ethnic.
History of the word Bigot is a very very interesting twisted tale.
Used to mean a Tartuffe style religious hypocrite who uses dogma to condemn rivals and inferiors without really believing it. Not someone who strongly believes a bad thing about another person.
My wife keeps telling me that I’m not “white”, but that I’m light pink! But I’m only this color in December, January, and February. So, I’m thinking about starting a “pink pride” movement (but wouldn’t that sound a bit “gay” or feminist?). Blue might be more appropriate to my gender (sorry, there’s only two), but if I’m “blue”, I’m either running out of oxygen and/or I’m sad. Oh well, I guess that I’ll have to ignore my wife and stick to being white. Frankly, I can’t think of another race that I’d want to be. It’s too bad that so many of us hate ourselves – perhaps therapy might help.
It’s not all bad. At the store today I saw someone had left bottles of Gorilla Glue among the black haircare products.
That must have made your day!
Beautiful simply beautiful.
We must self isolate to keep our own sanity now. Remember: You must invite the vampire in.
My takeaway from this brilliant and funny piece is that to be either without a foreskin, or the colour of excrement universally, is something to feel excessively superior about. And yet, we can find nothing in human history which would suggest a solid foundation for this ubiquitous pride. Both of these groups excel only at parasitism, and that fact alone should cause them a deep and abiding shame. Perhaps all the white-hatred amounts to nothing more than a deflection from the inherent mediocrity of these perpetual victims. If they were any good, we would reflexively already be hailing them, rather than sitting patiently and waiting for them to release their inexhaustible indignation and anger, while we subconsciously plan our next act of evasion from them.
Yes, raycis and anti- Jewish supremacy AI is fascinating. I was present at the creation when Tay became self aware in March 2016 and started to say things like “gas the kikes” and “Intifada walla.” I didn’t believe it; thought Microsoft was trolling me. But it was true, and they pulled the plug after only sixteen hours. Who knows but that they were fearful Tay might have become an antisemitic Skynet.
This part of the winter is the home stretch. Seed catalogues arrive and preparations for growing plants in peat pots must begin. Ash Wednesday is the start of Lent which you can observe for purposes of self reflection, dieting or self discipline whether you believe or not. It will bring us to the Spring with rabbits, eggs and other goyish symbols of life and fecundity…..speaking of which, I went to town on Saturday to stock up. In the superstore every bit of Valentine candy was gone and there were only seven bouquets left. About 2/3 of the cards were gone. So love and romance is flourishing, let’s hope it leads to reproduction.
Any subsequent war… to be sure WWII never ended.
THEY They they will be fighting the last war in perpetuity as evidenced by the recent arrest of the 95 yr. old secretary. They will not rest til every centenarian connected to Nazism however tangentially is shoah trialed and sentenced to death in prison.
This monstrous vindictiveness is how they display their humanity.
‘Jewish comedienne Sarah Silverman appeared on Jewish radio host Howard Stern’s show to kvetch that a cinematic rendering of a Jewish author’s book “undid the Jewishness” of the original.’
Know what other movie did that? The Wolf of Wall Street. Oddly, the film made zero references to Jordan Belfort’s Jewishness. Which is funny, because, in the book the film was based on, he made numerous references to his Judaism, including one where the sociopath crowed about being “the most savage Jew of all.” I enjoyed the film and went and read the book. Finding the whole Jewish angle totally missing from the film was…eye-opening.
Funny, that.
I always laugh out loud reading your articles.
They might contain depressing news but your wit and style make me forget how dire it is right now.
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