TIRED OF BLACK RACISM? BLACK VIOLENCE? - A Scam From the Beginning Ibram X. Kendi’s Netflix documentary pushes racist “antiracism.”

 

The New Ebonics Movement and the Elimination of Whiteness

Mainstreaming mediocrity and demonizing excellence.

December 20, 2023 by Jason D. Hill 21 Comments

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The Back to Ebonics movement has been around for a couple of decades. It gained some traction in the seventies during the era when everything Black was pronounced as beautiful. Emerging from the ugliness of segregation and Jim Crow laws which did see the systemic evisceration of the dignity of Black individuals, the Black is Beautiful slogan was understandable from the standpoint of psychological preservation. Ebonics—the Black Vernacular that is believed to capture the unique and singular way many Blacks speak—was regarded by many as a means of also protecting the dignity of Black self-expression.

Few in academia, or in mainstream society for that matter, took the Ebonics movement very seriously. Everyone knew that if any Black person wanted—at minimum—a job as a hotel receptionist, a customer service agent in a call center, or a clerk in a retail store, he or she would need to speak standard English. The latter was the lingua franca of business and commerce, and that was not about to change. If Blacks aspired to achieve economic parity with their compatriots, then they would have to become bilingual.

Lately, the Back to Ebonics movement has morphed into a devoutly nasty and pernicious new form. It has transmogrified into a hegemonic call to replace standard English as the norm. It regards requiring Black students to use standard English as anti-Black linguistic racism. Blacks required to speak standard English are believed to experience violence, persecution, dehumanization, and marginalization. The leader of this movement, a Black professor at the University of Michigan by the name of April Baker-Bell, has sponsored a document to abolish what she calls “White Mainstream English.” She believes that Black students who are forced to write their papers in mainstream English are victims of Anti-Black Racism.

The idea that standard English speaking and writing requirements are emotionally harmful, as Baker-Bell claims, goes beyond shallow identity politics. It is rooted also in the de-colonialist and Anti-Western civilization agendas that seek to eradicate from school curricula and educational models any European universal foundations that underlie pedagogy, method and content. If reason, logic and the idea of an objective reality are declared racist, then little need be said for why language, based on objective rules of grammar, should be seen as anything but the arbitrary imposition of Dead White Men whose goals are to marginalize the speech practices of non-white speakers of English. Baker-Bell is part of a phalanx of educators who think that grammar is racist—that is, the grammar that governs the use of standard English.

If Baker-Bell (pictured above) and the promoters of “Black English” were simply advocating non-stigmatization of the language, then few would have issue with them. It is generally not advisable to induce shame in people who experience their emotions and their identities in whatever form of language in which they communicate. Few ordinary speakers of Black English outside the academy, I believe, would go so far as to call what they speak another language. They regard Black English for what it truly is: broken English, a rendition of a type of American patois. Linguists who argue that chronic grammatical infelicities, such as verb/tense and subject/object confusion with interrogative pronouns such as who versus whom, are irrelevant as a metric for differentiating between standard English and broken English are dishonest. They are operating from the principle of some kind of political expediency or political correctness.

To indict white speakers of standard English as linguistic colonizers and imperialists is untenable and empirically false. To begin with, millions of non-white and non-native English speakers voluntarily learn the language with great zeal for the simple reason that it is the global language of trade, commerce and business. There does not seem to be any bottom-up resistance to learning English from immigrants all over the world. The resistance comes from a cabal of race hustlers who are totally fluent in standard English. Most of them have good facility with the language, and they pen their academic prose condemning standard English in eloquent English. They know that Black English is incomprehensible and unintelligible in written form—as are all forms of patois.

But why would educated Blacks who write and speak standard English as well as any white person campaign for Blacks to not have the same opportunity to achieve facility with the language? What’s in it for these race hustlers who are paid large sums of money to lecture to white progressives on how they should alter their pedagogical styles and expurgate standard English requirements from their syllabi? It is not care and concern for the well-being of Blacks. It is a struggle for power, a struggle to continue creating a vast underclass of uneducated Blacks who will speak in a manner that will render them incomprehensible and lower their intelligence quotient in the minds of those with whom they speak. The goal is to indoctrinate as many Blacks as possible to see oppression and linguistic terrorism and identity annihilation everywhere—just in case they are tempted to see opportunity and upward mobility through mastery of the English language. For these race hustlers, the contempt they have for uneducated Blacks is reprehensible. In their minds, the options are clear: either the white alt-left will exercise a coercive monopoly as a managerial vanguard over Black victimization and suffering, or they will play second fiddle in the cult of victimization.

Blacks are mere pawns for white progressives who have staked their identity on Black oppression and suffering. Such whites are moral sadists because to continue justifying their existence, they wish to see Black people suffer under racial oppression. When this official oppression ends, as it already has, they cease being the masters of time and human destiny. They are more like conservationists or racial preservationists than anything else, and they are more devoted to preserving Black authenticity, race consciousness, and the very notion of Blackness which they love to pit against and contrast with themselves, since it reinforces an exotic caste system between them and the Other. Their own whiteness is brought into sharper relief, the more authentically Black the victims and their needs appear. Devoid of any such neediness in their own aspirational leanings, they are relieved of any stains of Blackness, and hence, enjoy a sense of racial purity. In assuming responsibility for Blacks, they assume a greater share of humanity and moral agency in themselves than they do for others. They expropriate the agency of racial minorities so they can speak for them, to them, and, in essence, determine who among them is qualified to count as their racial spokesperson. Just so long as he or she plays by the racial script and respects the hierarchical ordering among the designated role of advocate and victim, all will be well. In so doing, they trespass on the autonomy of Blacks and other minorities and eviscerate them of their dignity. Their sense of superiority is unmistakable. People who regard other people as their moral equals either leave them alone to make their own way, or, when they are aggrieved, address the injustice quietly and move on after it is resolved.

The new Black race hustlers will have none of this. A strange atavistic tribalism rears its ugly head. Better for them to keep their own people downtrodden on their terms. Laboring under the aegis of a strange “white envy,” Black race hustlers such as April Baker-Bell become the new slave holders of their own people. They are the most condescending set of prejudicial narcissistic elitists who know that Blacks, if taught standard English—and a basic solid education in general—could learn adequately and prosper. But where would this leave these elitists? They would not be anything special anymore. What they fear is expanding Black excellence, for it shores up their own mediocrity and renders them powerless in the world. They have no leverage over whites unless they have makeshift victims they can parade before them and taunt them into feeling collective guilt. There is no greater hell for a Black race hustler than an empty and meaningless world, meaningless without guilty whites who exist to atone for some ill-defined sins they have committed against Blacks.

Baker-Bell’s Black English and anti-standard English agenda are gaining traction. As she gives seminars around the country on linguistic racism and eliminating white standard English altogether from society, educators take notes and make pledges to alter their teaching styles and requirements. In other words, her top-down approach is making inroads among educators and administrators who create policies. Teachers will be punished for penalizing Black students who turn in essays not written in standard English. Broken English (or Spanish or French) renders one incapable of clearly articulating one’s thought and feelings. Baker-Bell and her cohorts do not want an assembly of proud Black English speakers. Such a situation would see an unassimilable group of marginalized people who would, in a crucial way, be outside the pantheon of legitimate language users.

What the professor wants is to emancipate Blacks from standard adherence to traditional punctuation and basic mechanics of grammar and enunciation. In effect, she wants to relegate Blacks to primitive backwater swamps where they sound like grunting farm animals. She will be their interpreter. On the question of who will speak for whom, she’ll be the appointed delegate. Since she thinks we should all speak Ebonics, she’ll argue that any difficulty in understanding and appreciating Black English stems from a deep-seated proclivity for seeing white standard English as neutral, normative, and objectively superior.

The sins of her agenda go deeper. Since Black English is broken English, any attempt to elevate it to a level of superiority by demonizing standard English is an attempt to mainstream mediocrity and demonize excellence. It is an attempt to reduce everyone to a statistical average, and to the lowest common denominator. Since mastering a language is an amazing achievement that requires skill and discipline, the nihilistic and lazy impulse to dispense with rules ultimately stems from an agency that was never fully civilized. Language is one of the unifying conventions that bind us in a shared identity as a people. All Americans never will speak in Ebonics; Baker-Bell knows this. Her goal is tribal. It is for groups, really, to have their own languages and, like beggars making invidious comparisons among their sores, to vie for supremacy based on an amalgam of suffering, victimization, and iconic innocence. To convince others that the broken language is the most exalted and politically superior and least oppressive among all mainstream standard languages, is to demote excellence to the level of the sub-human and promote mediocrity to a model of artificial perfection. This is manufactured stupidity which, when codified, becomes rank stupidity.  Since language is primarily a tool of cognition—one cannot think, form concepts and abstractions without formal language—the attempt to have everyone speak, and therefore think, in Ebonics is a devolutionary move; to take humanity back to the primitive stage of speech and to slide cognitively back into a primordial state of human non-development.

This agenda fits squarely with the trans-human and post human movements which, for all the vagueness surrounding their definitional status, advocates a destruction of the human condition as we know it. It finds pride of place with academic movements pushing for the de-centering and annihilation of whiteness in the universities and in corporations such as Coca-Cola.

When the moral integrity of language is undermined, with full malice aforethought, then the civic virtues that bind us as a nation-state, such as trust, social cohesion, patriotic commitment to a shared understanding of the public good, pride in country, and benevolence and good will towards our fellow compatriots, get destroyed. Factionalism and tribalism assume ascendancy. Mediocrity is enshrined. Excellence and greatness are ridiculed and demonized.

It’s not that Americans will be speaking Ebonics. It is not even the case that the majority of Black Americans will need to speak it. It is only sufficient to ensure that the language in which truth and justice, and the means of proving and protecting them, are destroyed. If the language in which the inalienability of our rights is rejected as oppressive and harmful, then the rights we enjoy will be regarded as mere privileges that were created by a bigoted minority to exclude Blacks and other minorities from the pantheon of the human community. “Rights,” therefore, will be regarded as mere social constructs that will be rearticulated according to the new Ebonics patois that, by its nature and according to its vanguards, has a built-in logic of egalitarian fairness and non-oppressiveness.

Let us not kid ourselves. Professor April Baker-Bell and her ilk are not real scholars, and their fields of studies are illegitimate. Calling for the elimination of standard English cannot be a proper field of any academic discipline. What the Governor of Michigan needs to do is sign a law into effect banning the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) policies that make it possible for welfare scholars such as Baker-Bell to be employed in higher education. This is not an infringement on academic freedom, since such work is merely hate speech and propaganda masquerading as scholarship.

If we understand that the move to raze Western civilization and make white people extinct comes in many guises, and that Baker-Bell’s demand that all Americans speak Ebonics while canceling standard English is part of a systemic and comprehensive Final Solution by avowed nihilists to genocide an entire civilization—then we won’t feel as if we are fighting lice in a vacuum in this case. We will simply be destroying part of the rot before it fully turns to fertilizer.

Jason D. Hill

Jason D. Hill is professor of Philosophy at DePaul University and a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. His latest book is "What Do White Americans Owe Black People: Racial Justice in the Age of Post-Oppression". Follow him on Substack.

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A Scam From the Beginning

Ibram X. Kendi’s Netflix documentary pushes racist “antiracism.”

December 20, 2023 by Mark Tapson 18 Comments

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In the just-released trailer for a new comedy flick coming in March called The American Society of Magical Negroes (I’m not making this up), one black man asks another, “What is the most dangerous animal on the planet?” The other character begins to reply “Sharks” when the first one interrupts to answer his own question: “White people, when they’re feeling uncomfortable.”

Now imagine replacing “white people” in that joke with literally any other demographic: black people, Asians, Muslims, Jews, etc. (actually, considering the antisemitic bloodlust rearing its ugly head among young people all across America and migrant-colonized Europe, Jews would be the other exception in this case; but the neo-Marxist Left lumps Jews in with white people anyway as “colonizers” and “oppressors”). There would be nationwide fury among the Cancel Culture mob. Executive heads would roll at the movie’s production company. The harpies on The View would blame Trump for having empowered hate and racial division.

The reason Hollywood knows it can get away with a punch line smearing whites as “the most dangerous animal on the planet” is that white people are the only racial group it is culturally acceptable today to demonize, especially among younger generations. A recent Harvard/Harris poll, for example, revealed that 79% of Americans – four out of 5 – between the ages of 18-24 believe white people are “oppressors.”

And no one alive is more responsible for popularizing that corrosive perception than celebrity “antiracist” author Ibram X. Kendi (real name Ibram Henry Rogers). At a recent screening, for example, for the new Netflix documentary Stamped from the Beginning, based on his own bestselling 2016 book, Kendi drew vigorous applause when he stated that “constructions of whiteness” have shaped the personalities of white people worldwide and prevented them “from connecting with humanity”:

When you’re not able to see yourself in other human beings, that creates all sorts of problems. But not just societal problems, but personal problems, that I think hopefully this film and this work will liberate those folks from. It’s liberating all the way around. I think it will liberate all of us because we’ve all been told a lie about ourselves and other people.

The audience applauded this condescending, racist assumption about whites because, again, we now inhabit a culture in which white people are seen collectively as oppressors, racists, and genocidal colonizers – thanks in no small measure to the influence of Kendi’s books for adults, How to Be an Antiracist and Stamped From the Beginning (he has written antiracism books for children as well, because it’s never too early to sow the seeds of a racist worldview).

Stamped From the Beginning blends news and entertainment footage, animation, melodramatic historical reenactments, and interviews with (only) black or mixed-race activists and academics to elucidate the history of anti-black racism through the lens of Critical Race Theory (CRT).

(Interestingly, all the interviewees but Kendi are female, and all the historical figures to which the film devotes extended attention – anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells, poet Phillis Wheatley, slave autobiographer Harriet Jacobs – are female. Presumably he made this choice intentionally in order to amplify “intersectional” voices, but it’s curious that in a film on the history of racism in America, Kendi would deny black men the agency to speak for themselves.)

Though CRT is never mentioned by name, the false core assumptions of this ideological weapon are all there: that America was founded not in the seeds of liberty and justice for all but in slavery and racism; that the history of our nation is one of intentional, violent oppression of blacks by a power-hungry, white supremacist elite; and that systemically racist policies and institutions are still “baked into” American society today.

The film begins with the interviewees declaring that a false narrative about black people has been constructed by white people throughout history. The documentary then proceeds to construct a false narrative about whites – that they have literally and collectively conspired to dehumanize blacks and to punish them whenever they dare challenge white power by achieving any economic or cultural success. Activist and TikTok celebrity Lynae Vanee states that “black progress is so terrifying to white Americans that they will do anything to harness the power they thought was lost.”

Brittany Packnett Cunningham says that “somewhere along the line, folks figured out ‘Hey, if we link arms under this umbrella of whiteness, then we can protect our collective interests and make sure nobody else has access to our power.’” Somewhere along the line? Where? “Folks”? Which folks, exactly? Cunningham presents no details, no evidence, no source, no citation, that such a conspiracy among white people ever happened.

The interviewees, the most well-known of whom is lifelong Communist Angela Davis, blame a grand generalization called “white people” and “whiteness” for everything blacks in this country’s history have suffered from the Transatlantic slave trade forward (there is no mention of the black Africans who actually did the enslaving and selling of their fellow blacks). The film’s participants even personify “whiteness” as if it not only exists but has agency and feelings (Cunningham refers to whiteness being “uncomfortable” with blacks who aren’t “the right kind of Negro”) and intent, and that intent is to oppress blacks.

“White supremacy has been embedded in this country since its founding,” one activist declares. George Washington and the Founding Fathers – Stamped reduces them all to “enslavers.” Thomas Jefferson is a special target of antiracist condemnation largely for his relationship with slave Sally Hemings, which the interviewees repeatedly refer to as “rape.” Vanee declares with a chuckle that the principal author of the Declaration of Independence “was full of shit.”

Not only are America and Britain given no credit for being the first nations in world history to end slavery, it’s clear that the activists who appear in the film deeply resent any implication that whites played any more significant role in ending slavery than blacks did. They make it very clear that white abolitionists were not the real heroes of the anti-slavery movement, only problematic “allies” with mixed motives. Even that Abraham Lincoln “dude was low-key racist.” A chapter of the film is given to tearing down “The Myth of the White Savior,” arguing that whites today who are committed to, say, helping impoverished black Africans are doing so only to demonstrate “See? I was nice to the Negroes.”

Kendi has stated elsewhere that capitalism is essentially racist and that racism is essentially capitalist, so naturally his film’s perspective on economics is Marxist. Stamped claims that a “small group of wealthy white elites” – here we get images of Donald Trump, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos, among others – “continue to accumulate wealth and power on the backs of everybody else.” That’s not how the world actually works; it’s not how Trump, Gates, and Bezos got wealthy; and it gives the false impression that there are no blacks among billionaire power players. Kendi also smears poor whites, claiming that they believe the source of their economic “pain” is “people who don’t look like them.”

Visually, the film is packed antiquated cartoon imagery and old footage of Ku Klux Klan rallies and pre-civil rights era bigots, as if we still live in that America. It also features misleading clips of, for example, former presidents Trump and Reagan making law-and-order speeches, presented as if they are demonizing blacks; similarly, the film shows snippets of popular films like King Kong and Planet of the Apes as if every movie with a monkey is thinly-veiled racist propaganda.

Stamped decries the historical sexualization of black women but never acknowledges that the exploiter of black sexuality and the objectifier of black female bodies today is the black entertainment industry itself, which has raked in billions from the execrable gangster rap music genre. Gangster rap, which glorifies black criminals and demeans women relentlessly as “bitches” and “hoes,” has for 40 years dominated the popularity of any other form of black music, from jazz to soul to the blues. Has any single white figure in the past done as much to reduce black women to sexual animals as profane twerker Cardi B with her pornographic 2020 hit “WAP”? It was celebrated as Song of the Year by Black Entertainment Television (BET), no less, which ought to be ashamed of itself. Where is the condemnation of this self-exploitation in Stamped From the Beginning? Nowhere, because “whiteness” cannot be blamed for it.

Then we come to the segment of the film on crime. It explains away the reality of the disproportionate percentage of violent crimes committed by blacks by saying that white America has manufactured the lie that black males are dangerous predators through the intentional “invention of black criminality.” Yale historian Elizabeth Hinton says that in this construction, “crime becomes a code word for black.” Thus, presidential calls from Nixon to Clinton to Trump to enforce law and order are viewed not as assurances to the American people – including blacks – that they will not have to live in fear of criminal chaos, but as dog whistles for keeping blacks in their place.

Predictably, the film demonizes law enforcement, attacking the perceived police “massacre” of blacks as “state violence” and decrying policies “predicated on anti-blackness.” It attacks “policies, structures, and institutions that intentionally subjugate black people.” The point is hammered home that America was founded on the white supremacist subjugation of blacks and that the so-called “white elite” – whom Kendi says are willing to lie, cheat, steal, and kill to maintain power – continue to collude against black people to this day.

The film concludes with a call to dismantle society and rebuild a social justice utopia. Antiracists want whites to embrace a collective guilt; denial of that guilt is, as Kendi puts it, the very “heartbeat of racism.” Ergo, whites are racist, whether they admit they are or not; indeed, denial is itself evidence of guilt.

Slavery, as every reasonable person in America today would agree, was and is an ugly, unconscionable practice. No decent person in the Western world today would consider it or lynching or the sexual abuse of slaves to be anything but abhorrent. America has such a cultural revulsion toward anti-black bigotry that the most deplorable thing you can be accused of today is not political corruption or pedophilia or murder, but racism.

But antiracism, as its proponents define it – requiring that white people of today acknowledge their collective guilt for racist atrocities of the past, and actively assist blacks in dismantling America’s supposedly white supremacist institutions – is a racist scam. It boosts the academic credentials and public profiles of smug activists like the ones interviewed in Stamped From the Beginning, and it showers race hustlers and cherry-picking intellectual frauds like Ibram X.Kendi and his white female counterpart Robin DiAngelo with astronomical speaking fees, bestselling books, lucrative movie deals, and accolades – all in the service of promoting a false, divisive, racist, cultural Marxist ideology that exploits black rage and white guilt to deconstruct the demonstrable racial advances of the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

(This fraudulence and intellectual emptiness was recently exposed when Kendi’s highly-touted research center imploded with literally nothing to show for its $40 million treasure chest.)

Like the debunked historical revisionism of the New York Times’ 1619 Project, Stamped From the Beginning runs everything through the distorted, reductively racist lens of cultural Marxism to further an agenda to tear down everything great this country has accomplished and built – including the advances of the civil rights movement (Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of color-blindness would mark him as a racist today). We will never get race relations back on track in this country until blacks and whites alike reject the ugly, exploitative narrative of the antiracist con artists.

Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior.

Mark Tapson

Mark Tapson is the Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, focusing on popular culture. He is also the host of an original podcast on Frontpage, “The Right Take With Mark Tapson”. Follow him on Substack.

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