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Daniel Greenfield article: Santa's White
Privilege<http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/> [image:
Link to Sultan Knish] <http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/>
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Santa's White
Privilege<http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/FromNyToIsraelSultanRevealsTheStoriesBehindTheNews/~3/l1zWXaO06KY/santas-white-privilege.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email>
Posted: 14 Dec 2013 07:08 PM PST
The left accuses capitalism of commercializing holidays. Meanwhile the left
politicizes holidays. Even if we don't count the ubiquitous pitches for
ObamaCare that the White House and its army of political allies insist on
shoving into every possible occasion, including Thanksgiving family dinner,
the left obsessively politicizes every holiday that it can get its hands on.
<http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-I-mmbVgvne8/Uq0bV367ZYI/AAAAAAAANH8/p_wlPoOoQbc/s1600/santa-claus-is-a-black-man.jpg>Thanksgiving
and Columbus Day are celebrations of genocide. The Fourth of July is a
reminder that
America was founded by rich white men who didn't want to pay taxes.
Memorial Day is perfect for anti-war statements and Mother's Day is for
denouncing the heteronormative family. Valentine's Day is an occasion to
protest rape and the patriarchy and Halloween is a time to lecture students
about cultural appropriation and politically incorrect costumes that offend
minorities.
The optimist would at least hope that the left would take a month or two
off toward the end of the year. But every Chanukah brings with it articles
about how the holiday is really a nationalistic campaign against
multiculturalism (which it is) and no Christmas would be complete without a
national conversation about Santa's whiteness.
Over at Slate, Aisha Harris, its resident expert on being offended by
racist things in pop culture, suggested replacing old white Santa with a
penguin of no specific color. The little blue penguin (Eudyptula minor) and
the yellow-eyed penguin (Megadyptes antipodes) are equally welcome. So long
as they aren't the albino penguin (Aptenodytes albus) from beneath the
earth. They're too white.
Replacing old white Santa with a beady-eyed penguin has the advantage of
removing the need to have Santas of every race, color and creed, not to
mention gender, gender identity and sexual orientation, for the sake of
achieving complete and total identification. It's even easier than finding
a Maori transgender gay Santa in a wheelchair to really terrify the kids.
The penguin solution won't work for all holidays. Replacing Jesus with a
penguin will raise all sorts of theological issues and turning George
Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King into penguins will add a
whole new twist to history.
But if we're going to "penguinify" our way out of every holiday to avoid
excluding anyone... we might as well start breaking out the penguin masks.
What is the charge against Santa? He's a white male. He's not a member of
some KKK lodge in the North Pole and doesn't burn frozen crosses on tundra.
It is his whiteness that is offensive.
As Aisha Harris tells it, she grew up feeling hurt and ashamed because her
father dressing up as Santa didn't match the white store Santas. And so her
solution is to eliminate fathers being able to dress up as Santas at all;
unless they shrink to a few inches tall and learn to squawk.
Either we have a collective experience of everything or we have nothing at
all. In Aisha's world, it isn't possible to compartmentalize her experience
and those of others. They all have to be part of one big whole without
excluding anyone in any way. And the only way to do that is to eliminate
whatever it is that makes an experience special to a family or a community.
That's the trouble with endless inclusiveness. To include everyone in a
holiday, you have to erode its meaning so thoroughly that it no longer
means anything or makes any earthly sense. And that is true for more than
just holidays.
<http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-0vMXJ6yHNpk/Uq0c7NjbPiI/AAAAAAAANII/WKLUfn6BLMU/s1600/santalap.jpg>
Identities are specific. The only way to achieve total inclusiveness is to
eliminate as much specificity as possible and replace it with penguins or
anything else that is cute and inoffensive until the very existence of a
specific identity becomes a crime.
There is nothing diverse about a diversity that collectivizes the
experience of every individual to ensure mass conformity even in the
industrialization of celebration.
It's not diversity. It's conformity.
This isn't really about Santa. It's about the criminalization of whiteness
under the label of White Privilege. It's about making race into an implicit
offense by arguing that any norm that reflects whiteness in a country with
a white majority is racist.
The best evidence that we have long ago left behind actual discrimination
that can be objectively shown is the descent of civil rights efforts first
into outcome-based discrimination in which there need not be any intent to
discriminate as long as there is an outcome unfavorable to an official
minority and then into the emotional experience of otherness entirely apart
from any actual acts.
Aisha Harris's call for the penguinization of Santa is backed only by her
temporary sense of alienation as a little girl. There isn't even a
complaint that black men are less likely to be hired as store Santas or
that black children who aren't exposed to black Santas have lower test
scores. All that is left is the original doll experiment in which the
Clarks proved the psychological effects of racism to the Supreme Court by
showing that black children chose white dolls over black dolls. Despite
everything, the doll experiment hasn't
changed<http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/05/13/doll.study/>.
The penguinization of Santa is one of the nicer progressive responses to
these lingering self-esteem issues. The nastier ones counter negative
perception of blackness by pushing negative perception of whiteness. The
lead practitioners of white racism have become white liberals who hope that
hating and degrading white people will improve black self-esteem.
In this warped world, the only way to save black self-esteem is by
attacking any area where 'white' is normative. Even if it's a white Santa
Claus. If black people feel self-conscious of their differences, then white
people must be constantly made to feel self-conscious of the guilt they
ought to feel in making everyone else feel self-concious with their
normative supremacism.
Spreading hate as a solution.is all too typical of the left's belief that
it's better to redistribute misery than make things better.
Whiteness isn't the problem. The obsession with race is. The left has
turned a social construct into the definitive lens for viewing all human
relationships. And it's that lens that causes the misery. The more you look
through it, the more bitter and insecure you become.
Santa isn't guilty of white privilege. The racialists are guilty of an
obsessive resentment that expresses itself in the need to contest every
area of life on racial grounds. Changing Santa's race or species won't fix
anything because that isn't the source of the problem. Any number of white
characters, from Spider-Man to Kojak, Ironside and even Murder She Wrote's
Jessica Fletcher, have been turned black without making a dent.
<http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-NzR-S4-4n5w/Uq0dBybvamI/AAAAAAAANIQ/4DVvCXEE8mw/s1600/bad-santa-obama.jpg>Insecurity
isn't external. It's internal. And it can't be fixed externally. The
insecure can't be reassured into being comfortable with the world around
them. Every well-meaning act of reassurance is met with a defensive
reaction that is meant to reassert their neurotic status quo because that
unpleasant state is the one that they know and are familiar with. It may
not be a pleasant way to live, but it's their identity and it's all that
they know how to do.
Racial insecurity is an internal problem. It isn't caused by Santa. It's
caused by a racialized identity which thrives on paranoia and insecurity
while lashing out at black figures who aren't insecure, like Robert Griffin
III or Don Lemon, for the crime of being comfortable.
America isn't a racist country. It's a racially insecure country where the
races are taught to be self-conscious and insecure, to be paranoid and
obsessive about race and to view everything through a racial lens. Out of
that insanity, transforming Santa Claus into a penguin begins to seem like
a sensible solution. And until the day when America becomes a white
minority nation, maybe we can all don our penguin masks and celebrate the
arrival of a post-racial society in which we will no longer be black or
white, but instead black and white all over.
Daniel Greenfield is a New York City based writer and blogger and a
Shillman Journalism Fellow of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
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