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Home Santa's White Privilege

Santa's White Privilege

The left accuses capitalism of commercializing holidays. Meanwhile the left politicizes holidays. Even if we don't count the ubiquitous pitches for ObamaCare that the White House and its army of political allies insist on shoving into every possible occasion, including Thanksgiving family dinner, the left obsessively politicizes every holiday that it can get its hands on.

Thanksgiving and Columbus Day are celebrations of genocide. The Fourth of July is a reminder that
America was founded by rich white men who didn't want to pay taxes. Memorial Day is perfect for anti-war statements and Mother's Day is for denouncing the heteronormative family. Valentine's Day is an occasion to protest rape and the patriarchy and Halloween is a time to lecture students about cultural appropriation and politically incorrect costumes that offend minorities.

The optimist would at least hope that the left would take a month or two off toward the end of the year. But every Chanukah brings with it articles about how the holiday is really a nationalistic campaign against multiculturalism (which it is) and no Christmas would be complete without a national conversation about Santa's whiteness.

Over at Slate, Aisha Harris, its resident expert on being offended by racist things in pop culture, suggested replacing old white Santa with a penguin of no specific color. The little blue penguin (Eudyptula minor) and the yellow-eyed penguin (Megadyptes antipodes) are equally welcome. So long as they aren't the albino penguin (Aptenodytes albus) from beneath the earth. They're too white.

Replacing old white Santa with a beady-eyed penguin has the advantage of removing the need to have Santas of every race, color and creed, not to mention gender, gender identity and sexual orientation, for the sake of achieving complete and total identification. It's even easier than finding a Maori transgender gay Santa in a wheelchair to really terrify the kids.

The penguin solution won't work for all holidays. Replacing Jesus with a penguin will raise all sorts of theological issues and turning George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King into penguins will add a whole new twist to history.

But if we're going to "penguinify" our way out of every holiday to avoid excluding anyone... we might as well start breaking out the penguin masks.

What is the charge against Santa? He's a white male. He's not a member of some KKK lodge in the North Pole and doesn't burn frozen crosses on tundra. It is his whiteness that is offensive.

As Aisha Harris tells it, she grew up feeling hurt and ashamed because her father dressing up as Santa didn't match the white store Santas. And so her solution is to eliminate fathers being able to dress up as Santas at all; unless they shrink to a few inches tall and learn to squawk.

Either we have a collective experience of everything or we have nothing at all. In Aisha's world, it isn't possible to compartmentalize her experience and those of others. They all have to be part of one big whole without excluding anyone in any way. And the only way to do that is to eliminate whatever it is that makes an experience special to a family or a community.

That's the trouble with endless inclusiveness. To include everyone in a holiday, you have to erode its meaning so thoroughly that it no longer means anything or makes any earthly sense. And that is true for more than just holidays.

Identities are specific. The only way to achieve total inclusiveness is to eliminate as much specificity as possible and replace it with penguins or anything else that is cute and inoffensive until the very existence of a specific identity becomes a crime. 

There is nothing diverse about a diversity that collectivizes the experience of every individual to ensure mass conformity even in the industrialization of celebration.

It's not diversity. It's conformity.

This isn't really about Santa. It's about the criminalization of whiteness under the label of White Privilege. It's about making race into an implicit offense by arguing that any norm that reflects whiteness in a country with a white majority is racist.

The best evidence that we have long ago left behind actual discrimination that can be objectively shown is the descent of civil rights efforts first into outcome-based discrimination in which there need not be any intent to discriminate as long as there is an outcome unfavorable to an official minority and then into the emotional experience of otherness entirely apart from any actual acts.

Aisha Harris's call for the penguinization of Santa is backed only by her temporary sense of alienation as a little girl. There isn't even a complaint that black men are less likely to be hired as store Santas or that black children who aren't exposed to black Santas have lower test scores. All that is left is the original doll experiment in which the Clarks proved the psychological effects of racism to the Supreme Court by showing that black children chose white dolls over black dolls. Despite everything, the doll experiment hasn't changed

The penguinization of Santa is one of the nicer progressive responses to these lingering self-esteem issues. The nastier ones counter negative perception of blackness by pushing negative perception of whiteness. The lead practitioners of white racism have become white liberals who hope that hating and degrading white people will improve black self-esteem.

In this warped world, the only way to save black self-esteem is by attacking any area where 'white' is normative. Even if it's a white Santa Claus. If black people feel self-conscious of their differences, then white people must be constantly made to feel self-conscious of the guilt they ought to feel in making everyone else feel self-concious with their normative supremacism.

Spreading hate as a solution.is all too typical of the left's belief that it's better to redistribute misery than make things better.

Whiteness isn't the problem. The obsession with race is. The left has turned a social construct into the definitive lens for viewing all human relationships. And it's that lens that causes the misery. The more you look through it, the more bitter and insecure you become.

Santa isn't guilty of white privilege. The racialists are guilty of an obsessive resentment that expresses itself in the need to contest every area of life on racial grounds. Changing Santa's race or species won't fix anything because that isn't the source of the problem. Any number of white characters, from Spider-Man to Kojak, Ironside and even Murder She Wrote's Jessica Fletcher, have been turned black without making a dent.

Insecurity isn't external. It's internal. And it can't be fixed externally. The insecure can't be reassured into being comfortable with the world around them. Every well-meaning act of reassurance is met with a defensive reaction that is meant to reassert their neurotic status quo because that unpleasant state is the one that they know and are familiar with. It may not be a pleasant way to live, but it's their identity and it's all that they know how to do.

Racial insecurity is an internal problem. It isn't caused by Santa. It's caused by a racialized identity which thrives on paranoia and insecurity while lashing out at black figures who aren't insecure, like Robert Griffin III or Don Lemon, for the crime of being comfortable.

America isn't a racist country. It's a racially insecure country where the races are taught to be self-conscious and insecure, to be paranoid and obsessive about race and to view everything through a racial lens. Out of that insanity, transforming Santa Claus into a penguin begins to seem like a sensible solution. And until the day when America becomes a white minority nation, maybe we can all don our penguin masks and celebrate the arrival of a post-racial society in which we will no longer be black or white, but instead black and white all over.

Comments

  1. You're f*^%$g brilliant Off topic .Surely you must have favorite authors that you could recommend reading Fiction or non fiction i personally enjoy Saul Bellow, John Updike, Ian Mcewan and Richard Ford Do you ever take a break from the heavy lifting that you do so well. Cheers.

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  2. I haven't really read modern fiction in a while. But I liked Updike, Bellow and Ford. McEwan not really.

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  3. Horace Staccato15/12/13

    America NEEDS to become an overwhelmingly White country again. If it doesn't it will not only no longer be America; it will no longer even be civilized. That is simply a fact that must be faced.

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  4. Critical Race Theory and Identity Politics are to blame for this. The whole "inclusiveness" thing started because some persons of color felt "left out" like the last kid to be picked for dodge ball at recess (or the kid that was told they couldn't play for whatever reason). I get that people want to feel "included" in things, but turning Santa into a black person where it doesn't make sense (Santa lives in the frozen North, and for centuries there weren't that many persons of color other than native Indians/Inuit living that far north). In fact it would probably make sense to portray Santa as Inuit if anything, though there is no precedent for that in Inuit culture, and Saint Nicholas upon whom he was based was decidedly a pale shade of ghostly pasty white.

    But if it's proposed that some "black" character from some African based legend be portrayed as white, they'll whine that it's "Cultural Appropriation" and "racist" because for some reason the Majority is doing something evil when they're doing that because they're the majority and it's oppressive and not fair. Doing it to whitey? Fair game, they have it coming!

    And that is why Critical Race Theory is completely insane.

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  5. I think I recall actor Morgan Freeman being asked why racism was such a problem in the country. His answer, as near as I can recall, was, "If people would just shut up about it, or stop talking about it, there wouldn't be a racism problem." Freeman is a mixed bag in his politics, but that was an apt answer. It also describes the left's obsession with race. They've got to accuse someone of something, otherwise they'd have nothing else to talk about.

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  6. Yes, yes, yes. The more they scream for DIVERSITY the more they campaign for SAMENESS. But I am beginning to see the inevitable (if not purposefully baited) mounting build up of push back. Yesterday my daughter and family were out and about and saw standing on the corner near the mall a festive group gathered holding up signs, HONK TO IMPEACH OBAMA and HO HO HO OBAMA MUST GO HE LIES MORE THAN PINNOCHIO.

    Dare I say the coming civil war will look as though it’s about race but that’s just the cover. The real agenda is to eliminate all opposition to godlessness. The race thing is a red herring in this story.

    “Merry Christmas!” She said, and then she winked, as they hauled her off to a reeducation camp. No one ever saw her again but some never forgot her smile. It wasn’t so much defiant as it was peaceful, as though she was assured completely how it all would end–no matter what they wanted everyone to believe.

    http://bagsallpacked.blogspot.com/2013/12/in-bleak-mid-winter.html

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  8. My ancestors arrived here in the US @1910 to escape tyranny and persecution for what they were. They did not bring or harbor any hatred toward anyone, much less the Blacks they identified with as victims of prejudice, too.
    That lack of hatred continues through the generations of our family. We do not experience the White guilt or any guilt for the success of our family, as it was only achieved through hard work and dedication.
    Black Santa/White Santa is just another grasp of the group looking to find a reason for the lack of success of it's members. In their zeal to find racial discrimination at every utterance or deed, they foster discrimination against Whites, not for their actions or words, but for the color (or lack of color) of their skin.
    Then, we should ask, why can't Santa be an Asian? Oh. Asians aren't ______.
    Of course.

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  9. Anonymous15/12/13

    The inmates really are running the asylum, aren't they. The photo of what's his name is perfect and I can only hope that he's up to at least three packs a day.

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  10. Anonymous15/12/13

    Speaking of books...your insights are so prodigious and incisive, and your writing is so facile and prodigious...looking forward to the book-format. I hope it's going well.

    On topic...your observations on hatred---and how it is used by evil---are spot-on. America is not comfortable in its own skin, owing in no small part to racial hatred. But hatred is a strange thing. While we do tend to hurt, in some way, those who we hate; it's also true that we tend to hate (as a means of self-justification) those whom we have hurt. We hurt first, and then hate---and then hate, and then hurt.

    I've been married to a black woman for twenty years (I'm white); and the stories I could tell. Had I not been a first-hand witness to the insidious ubiquity of racial prejudice and its attendant slights, I would be skeptical, I think, to the protestations of so many black Americans. It's kind of like the old joke, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean someone isn't after you."

    Ultimately, we must decide what we will do as individuals, about the Gordian Knot of hatred. Black Americans that have overcome (throughout American history) the insidious madness of racism, have rejected hatred as an organizing principle in their understanding of the mystery that is "identity".

    Progressives can't and won't relinquish their self-righteous claim to the high-ground of hatred---their weltanschauung is void without it.

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  11. The left is interested in artificial constructs (like same sex "marriage"), not anything grounded in truth and reality. Santa Claus is a secularized spinoff of the real historical figure of St. Nicholas, the bishop of Myra in Lycia, which is in present-day Turkey. He was of Greek ethnicity, so I'm taking a wild guess here, but he probably wasn't a penguin or "person of color." I'm basing that on my knowledge as a Catholic that we don't consecrate penguins as bishops or canonize them as saints and my personal observation that Greeks aren't black.

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  12. Lucille Ricardo15/12/13

    I am imagining a film about Martin Luther King with a Caucasian or Asian man in the lead role. I wonder if we could transcend race for that one?

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  13. "Every well-meaning act of reassurance is met with a defensive reaction that is meant to reassert their neurotic status quo because that unpleasant state is the one that they know and are familiar with."

    They know it and are familiar with it because deep down, they hate values, all values. So as long as anybody holds a value, it sets off their neurotic insecurity.

    (White) Santa, Christmas, these are cherished values to many people in many ways. Therefore the Left attacks and attempts to destroy them in the only ways it knows how. Calling them racist. Calling them commercial. Etc., etc., etc.

    A Black Santa, a non commercial Christmas, won't placate the Left. Only universal slavery will do so.

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  14. Anonymous15/12/13

    I don't have a problem if somene wants to change the color of their Santa to suit them. So now what about Kwanzaa Can we declare that was a Northern Europe holiday?

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  15. Bill Gates might complain about the penguin thing (so anti-Microsoft)...and then there is the whole Wallace & Gromit thing. We'd all have nightmares for the whole 12 days of Christmas.

    Why don't we just paint everything with a nice shade of magnolia, outlaw speech and sell white people into slavery.

    Alternatively, we could all agree that some of the things in the past were bad and just learn to get along in spite that history. I suspect this would not be a welcome thing for those among us that would use every dry blade of grass they can find as a spear or kindling to charge relentlessly into their political revolution and burn down any vestige of traditional Western Culture left to be found.

    Brad Ervin

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  16. Anonymous15/12/13

    Great article Daniel. Calling America a racially insecure nation hits it perfectly. Those who want penguin Santa don't really believe they can do better than race card scamming although I'm sure that women knows plenty of people in her own family who can. As for Horace Staccato I would like an explanation of how that is when the Socialist ideas these people use come from white Europe, the Occupiers are overwhelmingly white and the Democratic elites (except for the specifically airbrushed Obama are white as well). When Europeans come to Brooklyn and plenty have recently they are decidedly Leftist. You better have a good definition of what you mean by white or we'll be taking orders from Norwegian human rights courts and those courts sound a lot like Norwegian human rights courts.

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  17. Yes to everything except for this:"Every well-meaning act of reassurance is met with a defensive reaction that is meant to reassert their neurotic status quo because that unpleasant state is the one that they know and are familiar with."

    It is not because they are familiar with it. It is because if you can identify as the victim, you get to be enraged and to hate guilt-free. The self-identified victim loves the feeling of self-indulgent, self-righteous rage because it feels better than anything else they can feel. They can't feel real love because they are so enraged. So, they create an endless loop of hurt, victim, rage, hate...repeat forever. This process is acted out as guilt-free spite...which is why it is so seductive, and basically incurable until the idiot looks in the mirror and realizes she is the source of her own misery. It's not that complicated.

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  18. @Horace Staccato It's not the color it's the culture. The Nazis where all white........

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  19. Anonymous16/12/13

    Yet another self-conscious White supremacist who thinks he has a sense of humor but, as there are no intelligent racists, there are none with any wit.

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  20. Anonymous16/12/13

    It is becoming a racially insecure nation. All kids really care about re Christmas is getting gifts from a guy in a red suit. So any person of any color can don the suit, and put on the white beard.

    Keliata

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  21. Is there anyone besides me , who is getting pretty bloody upset about White people losing their jobs because of supposed "Racial Remarks?" The blacks are always making racial digs. WHEN are Whites going to say: ENOUGH !!!???

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