The ‘Whiteness’ Smear Is Really An Attack On Private Life, Relationships, And Universal Values

The following is an excerpt from the author’s new book, “The Weaponization of Loneliness: How Tyrants Stoke Our Terror of Isolation to Silence, Divide, and Conquer.” (Bombardier Books, Post Hill Press.)

As social wounds fester, identity politics spawns social distrust and dysfunction. Political correctness cuts us off even further from open conversation with others. The agitation of mobs intimidates people into greater isolation. All these processes erode civility and grow the worst primitive instincts in people.

These mechanisms promote the narrative that revenge is justified. And, voilà, a mob can be mobilized by stimulating that destructive passion. The mob can now dish out punishment to anyone associated with the offending act, no longer to individuals who are guilty as charged according to a rule of law and due process. While identity politics segregates blacks by constantly reminding them of former oppressions, it aims to humiliate “whites” by constantly accusing them of their presumed ancestors’ role, demonizing them for things they did not do themselves.

Many willingly accept the punishment since the propaganda maintains an illusion of majority opinion. This seems to be a weakness of the so-called white demographic, particularly those in well-to-do suburbs. Working-class whites have had a lot more activist venom directed at them in recent years because of their association with populism and the 2016 presidential campaign during which Hillary Clinton labeled them a “basket of deplorables.”

Constant propaganda that threatens to mark whites as domestic terrorists or white supremacists takes its toll. Many become defensive and succumb to the threat rather than push back. Such were the probable internal dynamics that caused a thousand residents of an affluent white suburb to take a loyalty oath to the Black Lives Matter movement because of its superficial claims of being antiracist. Yet by doing so, they marked themselves as eternally guilty of racism by accepting the BLM definition of white.

But what comprises a white identity, anyway? Advocates of identity politics have made an industry of defining the term for us. The irony is that they use the same methods of propaganda and social pressures that advocates of Jim Crow laws used in the past to get Americans to accept racism.

A century ago, “whites” in America were viewed primarily as having a White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant background. Back then, the demographic did not include the great waves of European immigrants who came to America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Those immigrants experienced much discrimination, even the pale-skinned Irish, who were often called “white-washed n-words.”

The term “white” would not have included my Southern Italian grandparents, who came to America to escape poverty. Nor would it have included my maternal grandparents, who survived the Armenian genocide in Ottoman Turkey.

But today, I’m lumped in as white simply because my grandparents’ descendants assimilated to America’s language, culture, and traditions. Or, as critical race theorists would put it, we “whitened.” And so it goes for everyone assigned as white in the critical race theory narrative. Even if you are

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