Charles Blow Learns That Non-Whites Can Be Racist, Too

By Nate Hochman

Sunday, October 16, 2022

 

One of the oddest orthodoxies of modern “anti-racist” doctrine is that only white people can be racist. (Or, as a Vice writer declared in October 2016, “It’s literally impossible to be racist to a white person.”) When the journalist Sarah Jeong was engulfed in a controversy over a series of old tweets lambasting white people — “Oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men” — her defenders on the left “were quick to say that the statements Jeong made could be skewed as racist only if the culture, history and current sociopolitical context of the United States were ignored,” the Washington Post wrote.

 

In the summer of 2020, the New York Times reported that the Merriam-Webster dictionary was planning to update its definition of racism after an activist complained “that white people sometimes defended their arguments by cutting and pasting the definition from the dictionary” — racism, activists argued, was not merely prejudicial attitudes toward members of another race, but “prejudice combined with social and institutional power.” New York Times columnist Charles Blow seemed to echo a version of this line himself in 2019:

On Wednesday, however, Blow penned a column titled “A Revealing Racist Rant in L.A.,” a reference to “a recording of Latino leaders in Los Angeles — three City Council members and a labor union leader…comparing a colleague’s Black son to a monkey and appearing to insult Oaxacans — people from the disproportionately Indigenous Oaxaca region of Mexico — by calling them ‘little short dark people’ who are ‘ugly.’” The rant was indeed racist, and Blow says as much. (“Intra-minority racism is complex in some ways, but simple in others”). But he also argues that the Latino politicians — all Democrats — “ were doing the work of white supremacy”:

 

The unfortunate reality is that anti-Black white supremacy is not confined to white people or to Republicans, even though they court it and coddle it. Martinez is a Democrat in an overwhelmingly Democratic city.

 

The fallacy is to believe that every person in every community that has been oppressed by white supremacy will reject it. That’s simply not true, for some see oppression as having a perch: You must be elevated to perform it. In that way, being in a position to oppress becomes aspirational; being anti-Black — and being able to skirt most anti-Blackness — becomes a sorting device. It is an achievement. It is most American.

 

It’s always somewhat amusing to watch a certain kind of anti-racist progressive reckon with the fact that various non-white groups can dislike one another, and that the way that that animosity manifests is — at least in the contemporary United States — often far more bitter and explicitly racist than white racism itself. Blow doesn’t explain how or why the anti-black racism of the Latino L.A. councilmembers is “the work of white supremacy” — these are the kinds of things that are asserted, not argued — but then again, recognizing that ethnic conflict and tribalism exist everywhere, across time, place, and race, would be deeply inconvenient for a number of progressive premises about America and the logic of intersectionality. 

 

The fact is that non-whites are often every bit as racist as whites, for reasons that have far more to do with the brokenness of human nature than any abstract system of white supremacy. Blow himself has acknowledged this in the past — in response to a 2016 story about a Chinese detergent commercial promoting its product’s ability to turn a black man into a fairer-skinned Asian one, the Times columnist thundered: “Anti-black racism is a GLOBAL scourge!” In fact, the United States is far less racist than other comparable multiracial societies — Hollywood movies hoping to make inroads in the Chinese market infamously diminished or fully cut out black characters to appeal to the country’s antipathy to blackness. But I don’t expect Blow to reckon with those contradictions anytime soon. If you’re a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.