This is the sort of thing that actually makes me glad I don’t blog on Write.as, because I know I’d pick fights with people like this who blame “wokeness” for Donald Trump rather than blaming bigotry. Here’s the thing, though: this performative display of having roommates and a wife of a different race than their own itself is white fragility in action. You only go out of your way to bring these sorts of things up in order to use them as a shield.
There’s barely a liberal around who “cannot speak of another person without prefixing the word ‘person’ with either a word indicating skin color, or a word indicating gender”. That’s a thing simply that does not really happen. But in a society with structural inequities, sometimes you in fact do have to talk about race and gender, and not just in the abstract. A person’s race or gender might not be critical to their “character” (whatever is meant by that word), but it’s also not irrelevant to the way society is structured, and therefore is hardly unimportant.
What matters here is that this kind of “blame ‘wokeness’ for Donald Trump” itself is the actual sort of thing that led to Donald Trump, because its inherently othering, which is exactly what they claim in their post to want to do away with by not talking so damned much about race and gender all the time. It tells people that their race and their gender simply don’t matter, all of their own actual lived experience to the contrary.
Whether or not any given person sees their own race or their own gender as foundational or fundamental to their “character”, society and the way it’s put together does see them that way, and disadvantages them because of it, and no sort of “conservative kumbaya” claims to just see people as people is going to change that.
Addenda
- At least someone over there is getting into it.