March 27, 2023
Source: Bigstock
A teacher I know was once accused by a black mother of teaching her daughter appalling racist slurs in class. The angry parent complained that her little girl had come home the previous evening full of excited yet obscene talk about how all butterflies were born from “coons.”
A 5-year-old mistaking the word “cocoon” for its close phonetic twin is perhaps understandable, but an alleged adult doing likewise suggests the cretin in question’s understanding of the magical life cycle of the caterpillar could best be described as being “superficial.” Yet, if you were to describe her highly limited knowledge of Nature using this particular word, then you really would be guilty of racist language: It’s official, the United Nations says so.
A Dark Day Indeed
According to an uppity black American female lawyer and member of the U.N.’s “Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent” named Dominique Day, who enjoyed a ten-day “fact-finding mission” (or “free holiday”) in the U.K. during January, the country she had so traumatically deigned to visit was full of “structural, institutional and systemic racism.” The U.K. government—led then as now by someone Klansmen with speech impediments might feel minded to describe as a bit of a cocoon himself—responded by calling Day’s U.N. preliminary report making this allegation a purely “superficial analysis.”
My dictionary defines the word “superficial” as likely to mean “not capable of serious thought; shallow,” “not careful, thorough or deep,” or “not significant; trivial.” Put simply, the U.K. government thought Day’s report a load of inaccurate, poorly argued crap. Day’s own internal dictionary, however, defined the word “superficial” rather differently, as a “familiar racial trope” that for her “recalled the surreality of confronting anti-Blackness, bodied as I am.”
In response, during a later March Parliamentary Select Committee Hearing, the government’s admirably non-woke Business and Trade Secretary, Nigeria-raised Kemi Badenoch, said she was “almost certain” the U.N. Working Group had “written the report before they had come here,” bemoaning its “slightly disturbing” way of “looking at us [i.e., cocoons] as homogenous,” something that only led to a “very superficial analysis.” There’s that hideous word again! Like so many Nigerians, Kemi must really hate black people.
Badenoch Was Right!
According to Kemi, “The fact is that every single country [the Working Group] visited, they found to be racist, and all those countries happen to be Western countries. They do not go where there are actually serious problems [with racism].” What evidence might Kemi have that the minds of Day & Co. were possibly made up about Britain being irredeemably racist prior to them arriving there? How about Day’s previous assertions that:
(1) White motherhood was “indispensably” racist, with its “covert, even intimate acts of caring” somehow helping “perpetuate institutional racism.”
(2) Caucasian male Apple store employees offering to help customers with purchases reflected the “chief weapon” of “the patriarchy handbook” in terms of reinforcing the false “belief that white male voices/leadership are always necessary,” even when buying small, overpriced telephones.
(3) Canines are racially discriminated against too, as “shelter dogs…with Black-sounding names [like the now-censored black Labrador of Guy Gibson from the “Dambusters”?] are adopted slower.”
“Folks just run on racism,” Day has argued. Does that include her? It depends on what you define as racism. Her Twitter handle is “Dominique Day fights racism,” but she seems to do this in the way Salem preachers fought witchcraft—by seeing it at work absolutely everywhere. According to her U.N. report, “From the perspective of people of African descent, racism in the UK is structural, institutional and systemic,” like diabolism in the eyes of Puritan Fathers.
The report bemoaned “Racialized acts targeting people of African descent,” but what if such “racialized acts” merely constituted random white families not wanting to adopt a dog called Malcolm X? “Will this ever end?” one black British victim of the “trauma” of white supremacism “lamented” during Day’s visit, to which the answer is surely “No, because it is never supposed to.” If racism becomes defined purely as something experienced “From the perspective of people of African descent, and if such individuals are methodically trained up to become professional victims who spot bigotry even in the nomenclature of innocent baby butterflies, then racism essentially now means “Whatever one of its alleged victims arbitrarily says is racism, even if it clearly isn’t.”
And what might the “solution” to this deliberately engineered problem be? How about instituting a highly racist solution, and then simply abusing the dictionary once again to redefine it as being anti-racist in nature?
Lazy Thinking
Day’s U.N. Working Group was particularly critical of the U.K. government’s plan to foster racial equality by “focusing on equality of opportunity and not equality of outcomes,” an idea described by Day as being like “twisting” reality into the shape of “a pretzel.” What this means is such persons wish to sneakily substitute the word “equity” for “equality”—that is, by replacing equality of opportunity with equity of outcome, on racial grounds.
Imagine a black child and a white child both sit the same exam. The white child studies hard and passes with an A. The black child does nothing but lie in bed and sleep, and fails with an F. That’s equality of opportunity. Equity of outcome might involve marking the white kid down and the black kid up so both come out with a middling C.
This, in reductio ad absurdum terms, is what Joe Biden seeks to achieve with his current “Further Advancing Racial Equity” Executive Order, an appalling exercise in implementing black race-radical Ibram X. Kendi’s mendacious prescription that “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.” This is “equity”—which sounds handily close to “equality,” but isn’t, so could easily be mistaken for it by a cack-handed, cocoon-confused flicker through a dictionary—which would allow our hypothetical lazy black student to get a C when he doesn’t deserve it.
This might at first seem unjust or unequal, but as Dominique Day also explained when her report was savaged by Kemi Badenoch as being “lazy,” this latter word is also inherently racist when used against blacks like her (even if used by other, more intellectually industrious, blacks like Kemi).
Perhaps Day got this idea from Devon Price, author of the 2021 volume Laziness Does Not Exist, a book that sadly does. Devon links “the Laziness Lie” back to the days of early colonial slavery, when white Americans had to “find ways to ideologically justify” forcing blacks to labor all day on cotton farms. They did so, Devon says, by rationalizing that slavery saved their field Negroes from their alleged natural indolence and thereby eased their path into Heaven after death, on the key Puritan principle that “The Devil makes work for idle hands to do,” particularly colored ones.
Well, doubtless it would indeed be racist to still say all blacks are lazy today: Samuel Little certainly wasn’t. But what about individual ones? Laziness is a personal personality flaw possessed by individuals of all colors, at least some of whom will inevitably happen to be black. Redefining racism to mean calling a lazy person lazy is extremely dubious, but dictionaries these days seem increasingly dubious by design.
Stealing the Words From Our Mouths
In 2020, America’s leading dictionary, Merriam-Webster, agreed to update its definition of racism, prompted by Kennedy Mitchum, a woke young black woman outraged that, whenever she kept on accusing people of racism in the lazy and superficial manner of Dominique Day, they were able to quote Merriam-Webster’s time-honored definition of this quality back at her to prove they were not. Mitchum complained that Merriam-Webster allowed dissenters to claim you were only racist “if you believe your race to be superior to another,” the old commonsense meaning of the term.
Yet Witch-Finder Mitchum believed in “systemic racism,” the idea that white Western society was ordered in such a fashion that, regardless of whether its white inhabitants personally acted as if other races were inferior to them or not, the civilization of which they were a small but necessary cog operated in an inherently racist fashion anyway. So, the traditional definition of racism—consciously thinking other races lower than your own—was now in itself redefined as a form of racism.
For a white person to deny they were racist—indeed, for a white person not to actually be racist—now became the very definition of white racism. White people not being racist and treating everyone equally was only another way they unthinkingly perpetuated racism, as, within a systemically racist culture, non-racist equality of treatment was just another form of racism in itself. What was needed instead was Joe Biden-style equity, or treating people differently according to their race: something which, in an old-style dictionary, would have counted as the very definition of racism. “Activism changes the language,” as one Merriam-Webster editor told the press.
Confusingly redefining racism as anti-racism, and anti-racism as racism, places the white Western citizen in an impossible quandary: When asked if they are racist, would it not now be considered racist of them to say “no”? So what are they supposed to do, then? Just say “yes,” climb a tree, and lynch themselves in the name of “equity”?
Why can’t these awful people just let everyone call a spade a spade?