Dan McLaughlin writes for National Review Online about problems associated with so-called “moral” history.
Here is something Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez said this week:
“Latinos are black. . . . We have to have conversations around ‘colorism,’ and we have to have conversations around the African and indigenous roots from which we come and how that’s reflected in systems of power.”
The above is gibberish — ahistorical, unscientific, pseudo-intellectual gibberish. In a sane world this kind of rhetoric — which is littered with completely vacuous buzzwords — would be consigned to the Xeroxed pages of a ‘zine that had been stapled together by a bunch of social-justice majors in Boulder, not repeated by a congresswoman from the nation’s biggest city.
A “system of power” can no more dictate your race than your mood can dictate your gender or your abortion decisions can dictate when life begins. AOC lives in mankind’s most tolerant era. She can be many things, but black is not one of them — functionally or otherwise.
Then again, it was Ocasio-Cortez who not long ago grumbled that Americans were too concerned with being “factually correct” and not enough about being “morally right.” It is revealing that she believes that one undermines the other.
In the progressive retelling of history, the role of both victim and oppressor is predestined according to the hue of a person’s skin. Everyone involved is stripped of agency. And every injustice is retroactively framed in the light of contemporary racial grievances.
This week, a bunch of people decided that it was time to portray Jesus, an ancient Jew living in Roman Palestine, as a man subjugated over his skin color. The activist Shaun King says “white Jesus” was a symbol of white supremacy. Jesus, he argued, fled to Hellenistic Egypt rather than “Denmark” so he could blend in with the African population. No amount of evidence will dissuade him, I’m sure.
