modernheretic

For years white Progressives colonized and warped the civil rights movement beyond recognition, and the more privileged and indoctrinated black people let them do it in exchange for self-aggrandizement and a few crumbs of attention. Charlatans co-opted civil rights rhetoric and transformed it into an empty, regressive, status symbol, something trendy they could post on social media to proclaim their supposed moral superiority while doing nothing for black people or other minorities. I repeatedly cringed in horror as they replaced our stories of strength and resilience with a narrative of weakness and victimhood.

To my Progressive friends: banding together with your mob buddies online to force people into adopting your rhetoric and hollow symbols of support is not civil rights advocacy. Accusing anyone who disagrees with you of hate speech and trying to silence them is not civil rights; it’s despotism. Stop performing your tyranny in the name of black people. We do not need to be negatively associated with your pathological desire to dominate others. Black people can no longer meaningfully discuss our sense of racial identity because you cheapened the civil rights language and robbed it of all meaning. It is you who are threatening our civil rights by making the civil rights movement as repressive and unpalatable to the masses as possible.

I am tired of trying to absolve you of wrongdoing as you pretend that your self-righteous, social justice displays are anything more than self-interested virtue signaling that you use to get others to fall in line with your pet goals. I tried to see the good in you, to tell myself that your heart was in the right place, but this past year disabused me of that excuse.

Contrary to your empty slogans, we were not all in this together. While you were hiding away in your capacious apartments and vacation homes from a virus that you erroneously believed would kill instantly all whom it touched, you let black and Hispanic people expose themselves to the supposedly fatal risk to pick up and deliver your groceries, take-out food, and Amazon deliveries. Who cared if they died? Suddenly, black lives didn’t matter quite so much, did they?

Now the very black and brown people whom you had exposing themselves on a daily basis to the virus that you feared, the people who are most likely to have natural immunity as a result of running your errands, you seek to punish and segregate from society much like blacks were segregated under Jim Crow.

And while many people lost their jobs and could not pay their rent or mortgage, you were comfortably working from home and continuing to earn your sizeable salaries. Many Americans are now on the precipice of evictions and foreclosures, but you are ready to swoop in with the capital you built these last two years so that you can now buy up their homes as investment properties and vacation homes.

How dare you pretend that we are all in this together? You impoverished classes of people and now you want to add insult to injury by ostracizing from society the very people you continually benefited from. You may have “Black Lives Matter” signs in your windows, but your white supremacist mentality quickly comes apparent when your self-interests are at stake.

As vaccination status becomes your shibboleth, “vaccine hesitancy” is quickly becoming the contemporary version of the White Man’s Burden, though you are, of course, too politically correct to use such language. For seven months now, black people have had to endure Progressive politicians and the media cast black people as ignorant and discuss “educating” us into compliance.

If you think that kind of rhetoric is okay, you are not an ally. If you put up Black Lives Matter signs and blacked out your social media last year but are silent now, you are not an ally. If you assume black people are just too stupid to or ill-informed to get vaccinated instead of as intelligent people with our own innate sense of agency, you are not an ally. If you think that it is acceptable for the government to, in disgraced Governor Cuomo’s words, put us in cars and forcibly inject vaccines into our arms or, as Mayor DeBlasio decrees, segregate us from society until we are vaccinated, you are not an ally.

You are a white supremacist who believes that you are superior and more intelligent than black people and that your supposed superiority entitles you to decide for us black people what we should do with our bodies and to socially engineer us to meet your desires, just as imperialists have done throughout history. And just like oppressors throughout perpetuity, you claim moral righteousness, couching your elitist, self-interested ideas of tyranny in the language about the public good. You made an art out of acting in your self-interest while convincing yourselves that your self-interest is for the good of everyone. The more educated you are, the more adept you are at rationalizing your oppression of others. If you cannot see this problem, that’s because you are part of it.

Simply because we blacks refuse to be obedient to the wishes of the white ruling class, like our ancestors before us, we are disdained as ignorant monsters. Your professed intention to disregard our autonomy and displace our decisions, your low regard for our intelligence, your sense of entitlement to our bodies all show that we are correct to distrust you. Since you were unable to overcome our distrust with propaganda and cheap ploys, your plan is to punish us severely for our disobedience by removing us from society altogether. We are, after all these years, still stuck in the same abusive relationship in which you see us black people as mere accessories to yourselves, not human, just objects to be controlled and removed at your whim.

No, we blacks do not need to be “educated.” We do not need to think like you and blindly trust government like you. You are not better or smarter than us. Just because you are divorced from the natural order and your own bodies does not mean we need to be. Our outlooks are not inferior simply because they differ from yours. Deviation is not deficiency. And, notably, it is your culture’s Progressive values that repeatedly result in inequities, exploitation, dependence, and the destruction of the very things that sustain life and community. No, we absolutely do not need to be like you, Progressives, paving the way to hell with supposedly good intentions.

Do you not see how incredibly offensive it is to assume the inferiority of every black person who fails to be obedient and comply with Progressive goals? And then to use that assumption to displace black people’s own “lived experiences” (in your parlance), wisdom, and beliefs? You don’t see how you are merely continuing the long legacy of colonialism by deeming our experiences and choices invalid simply because liberal elites said so?

You tell yourselves that you are on the right side of history and that this is for the public good, but that is a rationalization that all oppressors tell themselves. Nobody who ever robbed groups of people of their autonomy, disdained them, and forced their beliefs and will on them were ever on the right side of history. No one in history who dehumanized and deprived others of rights and privileges ever had a true claim on moral authority. Expressing glee at the idea of hurting and isolating us could only come from a place of cruelty and evil. Treating a group of healthy people as dirty, diseased, and dangerous is a dehumanizing tactic that has been historically used to justify subjugating that class of people as you are doing to us now. No people who ever engaged in such tactics have been on the right side of history. You are Cotton Mather, Joseph McCarthy, and Hugh MacRae rolled into one, not Harriet Beecher Stowe.

By tolerating or encouraging segregation, especially segregation that you know will have a disparate impact on people of color whom you claim to have sympathies towards, you have become not only hypocrites, but accomplices in evil.