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During the World Economic Forum’s annual conclave of plutocrats last week, the attendees enjoyed an exotic display of indigenous culture and their own virtue signaling of their love for “diversity.” The Catholic News Agency reports, “as part of a plenary session on Wednesday titled ‘Climate and Nature: A Systemic Response Is Needed,’ Chieftess Putanny Yawanawá of the Amazonian Yawanawá tribe . . . performed a shamanic rite.” Resplendent in her tribal garb and face-paint, she stood close to each of the several panel members’ faces, coughed, then blew on their foreheads.
This show captured perfectly the condescending, patronizing attitude of the DEI mentality of the progressive left, who make the world’s real diversity into occasions for cultural slumming, and preening their superior cosmopolitan “tolerance,” at the expense of the POC’s full, complex humanity.
Such displays have for decades characterized the progressive left’s treatment of what they now call “people of color,” that superficial, vague category that simplifies, idealizes, homogenizes, and politicizes the world’s vast, intricate ethnic diversity by turning them into “mascots,” as Thomas Sowell put it in his 1995 book The Vision of the Anointed. These symbols of the cognitive elite’s lofty virtue and sensitivity are celebrated at the same time Western elites promote energy policies that make it harder for developing nations to improve their lives.
Idealizing the exotic “other,” particularly by peoples who are technologically and civilizationally more sophisticated and advanced, goes back to antiquity. The Greeks idealized the barbarian Scythians to their north, and the imperial Romans extolled the Germanic tribes east of the Rhine, usually in order to contrast Greek or Roman decadence and corruption, with the simple, hardy lives of formidable tribal warriors.
These are the roots of the “noble savage” trope, which in the Age of Discovery frequently typified the indigenes of the New World––“guiltless men, that danced away their time/Fresh as their groves, and happy as their climes,” as the 17th century British poet John Dryden, who invented the phrase, called them.
Then too, these noble savages were usually wielded as sticks for beating Western civilization’s crimes, corruption, and vices, especially its self-imposed exile from the natural world. French essayist Michel de Montaigne’s famous essay “Of Cannibals” (1580) argued that the indigenes’ wild savagery and barbarism reflected their close connection to nature: “it is those that we have changed artificially and led astray from the natural ‘wildness’ that we should rather call ‘wild.’” The Indians live in a “state of purity,” with a “naturalness so pure and simple,” free of all the alienating sins of European civilization such as private property, laws, trade, wealth, crime, war, corruption, and vice.
These cultural and literary ideals have had a powerful influence on the West. In the postwar world, they informed the decolonialization movement, which was directed by the Soviet Union to extend communism’s global influence. Europe’s working class may have failed to play its part in Marx’s “scientific history,” but fashionable Third-Worldism among Western leftists made Europe’s colonies the new sites of the Marxist revolution, “where the concentration of contradictions,” as Leszek Kolakowski wrote, “was greatest, i.e. on the fringe of the capitalist world, in backward, colonial, or semi-colonial countries.” As Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in the introduction to Franz Fanon’s influential The Wretched of the Earth, “Natives of all the underdeveloped countries unite!”
This rewriting of the Marxist script, moreover, exploited the earlier “noble savage” cultural tropes and idealizations of the dark-skinned “other,” who now became the vanguard of socialist history. It also fueled the cult of non-white “diversity,” influenced lax immigration policies, and stoked the West’s suicidal self-loathing obvious in the West’s foreign policy of permeable borders, retreat, and appeasement.
Moreover, such policies are predicated on the doctrine that “every Westerner,” as Pascal Bruckner writes in Tears of the White Man, “is presumed guilty until proven innocent,” for we Westerners “have been raised to detest ourselves, certain that, within our world, there is a certain essential evil that must relentlessly be atoned for”––imperialism and colonialism.
Finally, with the help of Cultural Marxism and propagandists like Howard Zinn, black Americans were now treated as an “internal colonized” people whose freedom and rights, like those of other colonials, would come not from Martin Luther King’s non-violent protest founded on Christian doctrine and the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, but from violent revolution and subversion.
Hence the budding black identity movement was hijacked by Marxism’s legitimizing of violence. And added to the sins of the “white man” was the “systemic racism” which, like colonialism, had vitiated the American Founding, and still today lurks within every white person––a textbook definition of real racism.
American blacks also became the “noble savages” of our times, as can be seen in Norman Mailer’s objectively racist 1957 essay “The White Negro.” For Mailer, the nobility of the “savage” comes from his instinctual passions and appetites, a notion that once underlay the vicious smears of actual racists. And the same disdain for civilization that Montaigne expressed also reappears: given America’s “bourgeoise conformity and depression,” only the black man or his white imitators can escape this capitalist prison and find an authentic and meaningful existence as a “rebel. . . a frontiersman in the Wild West of American nightlife.”
Moreover, because of inveterate violent racism, the black man “has stayed alive and begun to grow by following the needs of his body where he could . . . and could rarely afford the sophisticated inhibitions of civilization.” Thus he “lived in an enormous present” and “subsisted for his Saturday night kicks, relinquishing all the pleasures of the mind for the obligatory pleasures of the body.” I’m old enough to remember when racists called all those vicious stereotypes “jungle instincts,” one of the many racial slurs that justified Jim Crow segregation.
This pattern of building identity on historical grievances has come to define all self-styled liberationist identity politics, whether based on ethnicity, sex, or sexual practices. These are the politically favored identities that have been historically victimized by “white males,” the “cancer of history,” as Susan Sontag wrote. Even affluent, government sanctioned victims are allowed to leverage their historical grievances for greater privilege and power.
So we have an absurd spectacle like the disgraced president of Harvard, a consummate academic mediocrity from a wealthy Haitian family, who blames “racism” for her fall, while still drawing her nearly $1 million salary, and movie producers are offering her $15 million for the rights to tell her story.
Meanwhile, the black working-class struggles, while the underclass is trapped in a malign nexus of addiction, broken families, and gang violence, all serially ignored by our “woke” cognitive elites and the regime media.
No good has ever come from reducing human beings into “mascots” of one’s virtue or hatred. Stripping people of their agency and individualism, which is to say their human dignity and freedom, has always been the predicate for inhumanity, from the sex slavery and forced labor on our southern border, to the genocide and terror of the left’s “mascot” Hamas’ savage attack on Israel––all the while the global elites revel in their superior virtue as they stroke their “mascot” clients.
In the end, it’s all about class status and superiority. For as the African proverb has it, “The hand that gives is always above the hand that receives.”
Thanks Bruce, excellent history and analysis.
Most people of “color” that I personally know are much smarter than that. Is that not amazing?
Very well said, thank you.
The Western world is slipping and sliding into paganism. Soloman, in his wisdom, said, “there is nothing new under the sun.” All of this kind of stuff has happened in the past. The thing is, God’s Holy Word is TRUE. And it has been the greatest civilizing force in the history of the world.
We now have the perfect division, people of colour vs white people.
Well done to the anointed elites who rule the world.
Black vs White
Perverted in some way vs cis
Men vs women
These, unlike the class wars, can never be fixed, ever.
People criticise me when I say that we’re over educated.
Brought to you by Barack Hussain Obama, the self-loathing former POTUS. I don’t know if he hates being born half black or half white, but either way, he’s been doing everything he could to start a war between the two and halt decades of civil rights movement.
Well what do you expect from the Democrat , Progressive, Leftist, Communist !!!
Keep this in mind. White people are a planetary minority. White people made it possible for all the wealth enjoyed today. Might be time to suggest that lesser peoples do not kill the golden goose.
So Japan, Korea, and Taiwan never played a role? Is India not a rising power? It would seem ore a matter of work ethic, and culture, then melanin levels in the skin.
What makes you say that it can never be fixed, ever? The narrative is already falling apart, the women who bought into the feminist track of going to uni, becoming a professional, and then have a family, but only after becoming success have been sold a bill of goods. Fortunately many of them realize that the biological clock is ticking by their mid to late 20s, and that if they don’t act soon they will sacrifice their family for a career, permanently. Naturally the only profit they will receive for misandry is to become a childless spinster, so most will learn to dump that as well.
The black verses white fight is also falling apart, BLM is basically bankrupt, and viewed more as a fraud even among blacks. Between rampant and rising crime in black neighborhoods, causing more and more local businesses to permanently close, and the influx of illegal immigrants causing housing issues, cynicism is on the rise against authorities allowing it.. More and more blacks are rejecting the old canards, though so many still accept them, it is slowly changing now that they realize that the purpose of cradle to grave welfare is to keep them in their place, and voting DNC.
I never too the LGBT+ nonsense seriously, especially the gender theory aspects, I view it more as a product of corrupt members of the medical profession in partnership with corrupt members of big pharma. Other then causing some social upheaval it really has no staying power, other then for those who have been surgically, and chemically altered, permanently.
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I saw this on tv and it was one of the weirdest things I have ever seen.
The stooges on the WEF stage had no idea that they were playing with the occult – the female pagan from the Amazon jungle dressed like a clown blowing on these stooges with her demonic ritual could have easily left the stooges demon possessed.
I saw a demon possessed person one time and the torment inflicted on the victim is worse than sticking your hand into a fire.
“pattern of building identity on historical grievances”? I call it keeping them on the plantation Bruce.
PLEASE go to this link of a Native American group based here in Albuquerque. Scroll down to their Mission Statement.
THEREDNATION.ORG
Hmm, went there, and that was predictable.
From TheRedNation.org
Revolutionary Socialism
Third General Assembly formally adopts revolutionary socialism and liberation as the primary political ideology of The Red Nation. While incomplete, the purpose of this proposal is to articulate the basic principles of revolutionary socialism and Marxism and its connection to Indigenous socialism and communism. Read in full.
Indigenous Feminism
TRN is a queer- and femme-led organization. We recognize that women, femmes, and LGBTQ2+ relatives have been marginalized and silenced by their own communities and by colonial heteropatriarchy. Because our membership and leadership is majority femme and queer, we are obligated to address the disproportionate violence that femme and queer folks face because of colonial heteropatriarchy. Read in full.
Palestine Will Be Free
Palestine is the moral barometer of Indigenous North America. While there is widespread agreement among Native people that European colonialism and Indigenous genocide is criminal and immoral, there are a surprisingly high number of Native politicians, elites, and public figures who don’t extend the same sympathies to Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims. They range from outright Zionists who support Palestinian ethnic cleansing to liberal centrists who don’t support Palestinian rights of protest and resistance. We, The Red Nation, pledge to fulfill our commitment to Palestinian liberation. Read in full.
Not exactly mascots, they’ve been designated as instruments to be used by lefties to demonstrate their moral virtue.
The first person on my street who had an Obama lawn sign was a “Karen” who had bumper stickers touting environmentalism on her car (a diesel Mercedes). She also had Chemlawn over constantly to treat her lawn and her recycling bin was full of dozens of small plastic bottles of drinking water, which clearly read on the side “Source: Louisville Municipal Water Supply”- the same source as what came out of her tap. She would threaten anyone whose pet strayed on her pristine lawn. More to the point, when she saw African American kids playing in the street (the street was one block long, had no through traffic nor sidewalks, and had a cemetery behind it) she actually called the cops.
There should be more to life than just coming, and getting high.
Life should require more than getting high and/or coming. For almost all of human history, and almost all people it did. The “sustainability” people have put us on an unsustainable trajectory.
What?? That sideshow at WEF was flabbergasting. Am I the only one who doesn’t want to pretend the so-called shaman from the Amazon was indeed a shaman? We are indeed stupid if we blindly acquiesce to such nonsense. Meanwhile, the WEF women were flashing their golden bracelets and tres chic oversized earrings while pretending to be “moved” by the baiser from the shaman in red face paint. Come on, it was a huge outrageous farce!
They are INDEED “Mascots” ie CARICATURES of real people that have no real power and
are often MOCKED!
The WEF and America are now the embodiment of the observation that ….
Money and Power corrupt ….
and vast wealth and absolute power corrupt absolutely.
Woke leftist DEI CRT America has gone berserk and depraved.
Probably nothing now can be done to reverse and recover the damage and harm done to America and US citizens.
The elite political and corporate and cultural leaders have betrayed and abandoned America and US citizens.
I would even go further. Every pet owner loves their pets, just like white leftists have their favorite pets, black people. It used to be they enjoyed getting love back from their pets, not so much lately. It turns out nowadays that their pets are telling them that they are guilty, flawed to the core based on their white skin. They can’t even protest their innocence and virtue any more because the pets are telling them, even giving seminars proving to them that their friends and family’s refusal to cop to their guilt is proof of their guilt. It’s apparently a no win situation, all the virtue preening gone to waste, it was all for nothing, or worse than nothing because their pets no longer recognize their virtue, and in fact consider them guilty and maybe even laugh at them.
I’ve always been surprised how racial minorities are so willing to get on board their own political exploitation. Maybe it’s because whatever payout they think they’re getting is worth all the groveling. Comparing them to mascots is much to kind. If I were getting that kind of patronizing treatment I’d be livid. I can take a little condescending abuse every now and then, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to be some elite’s decorative trinket hanging from their dashboard mirror.
Great report on POCs.
Excellent essay. Sowell also said in regards to “multiculturalism” that “you can praise any culture in the world except Western culture–and you cannot blame any culture in the world except Western culture.” The self-loathing of Westerners for their own culture helps to assuage them of their guilt of feeling superior toward non-Westerners. That virtue signaling can go off the rails when there is tolerance of Evil that normally would be considered uncivilized, barbaric, genocidal, cannabalistic, pedophiliac and inhumane. Explains why Hamas massacre is defended by the academic elites. They lost their moral compass of Christian Western Civilization and its basic human rights.
Globalist Marxists take advantage of POC for racial divisiveness in place of using the ‘oppressed’ worker that incited the Communist revolution. They use it to annihilate European Western Capitalist countries in order to establish Globalist tyranny.
Sham shaman? Pretendian? A good chance.
I think “expendable pawns” or “useful idiots” might be more appropriate to describe how the marxist elitist globalists think of “people of color” or other minorities