At least
this author gets it:
In the fall of 2016, I was hired to play in Rihanna’s back-up band at the MTV Video Music Awards. To my pleasant surprise, several of my friends had also gotten the call. We felt that this would be the gig of a lifetime: beautiful music, primetime TV, plus, if we were lucky, a chance to schmooze with celebrities backstage.
But as the date approached, I learned that one of my friends had been fired and replaced. The reason? He was a white Hispanic, and Rihanna’s artistic team had decided to go for an all-black aesthetic—aside from Rihanna’s steady guitarist, there would be no non-blacks on stage. Though I was disappointed on my friend’s behalf, I didn’t consider his firing as unjust at the time—and maybe it wasn’t. Is it unethical for an artist to curate the racial composition of a racially-themed performance? Perhaps; perhaps not. My personal bias leads me to favor artistic freedom, but as a society, we have yet to answer this question definitively.
One thing, however, is clear. If the races were reversed—if a black musician had been fired in order to achieve an all-white aesthetic—it would have made front page headlines. It would have been seen as an unambiguous moral infraction. The usual suspects would be outraged, calling for this event to be viewed in the context of the long history of slavery and Jim Crow in this country, and their reaction would widely be seen as justified. Public-shaming would be in order and heartfelt apologies would be made. MTV might even enact anti-bias trainings as a corrective.
Though the question seems naïve to some, it is in fact perfectly valid to ask why black people can get away with behavior that white people can’t...
Yet there we were—young black men born decades after anything that could rightly be called ‘oppression’ had ended—benefitting from a social license bequeathed to us by a history that we have only experienced through textbooks and folklore. And my white Hispanic friend (who could have had a tougher life than all of us, for all I know) paid the price. The underlying logic of using the past to justify racial double-standards in the present is rarely interrogated. What do slavery and Jim Crow have to do with modern-day blacks, who experienced neither? Do all black people have P.T.S.D from racism, as the Grammy and Emmy award-winning artist Donald Glover recently claimed? Is ancestral suffering actually transmitted to descendants? If so, how? What exactly are historical ‘ties’ made of?
It's a long, intellectual, well-thought-out piece and I highly recommend you read the whole thing. why is it so long, intellectual, and well-thought-out? Because the author is both educated and open-minded:
Coleman Hughes is an undergraduate philosophy major at Columbia University. His writing has been featured on Heterodox Academy’s blog as well as in the Columbia Spectator. You can follow him on Twitter @coldxman
I was raised in the South. I do think that racism exists, but I don't think it's exclusive to just white people. I have had to walk Indian girls to class so they wouldn't talk to their Pakistani boyfriends. I've had Korean kids tell me they can't sit with black kids. I've had Hispanic kids from Mexico refuse to sit or talk to Hispanic kids from El Salvador or Guatemala. Discrimination is part of the human condition. Nobody likes the otherness of those they don't know personally. That is why my parents sent me to public schools and why in spite of it all I believe public schools with diverse populations are more effective. Sadly there is money to be made in crying publicly about racism, so there are those who will use that as a wedge issue.
ReplyDeleteI saw that article a couple of weeks ago, thought it was a great takedown of the whole identity politics cancer.
ReplyDeleteIn the same vein, I always liked former Republican congressional member from Oklahoma J.C. Watts’ line about the professional racial grievance class: “race hustling poverty pimps.”
(For those who don’t know, Mr. Watts is black. In one of his runs for state office, his opponent, a white Democrat, ran a television commercial where Watts’ high school yearbook picture was prominently displayed, showing Watts with a major Afro. Of course, no rebuke from the national Democratic Party was forthcoming. Watts won the election anyway.)