Even as Democrats were being destroyed in Virginia and other states, they at least had a cause to celebrate in Boston — or so they thought. A left-wing Asian American female, Michelle Wu, won Boston’s mayoralty. Beantown hardly needs more progressive policy failures, but people of goodwill were at least able to recognize a milestone when they saw it: Wu is Boston’s first elected nonwhite mayor, first Asian mayor, and first elected female mayor.
But that isn’t how National Public Radio chose to cover her victory. Instead, it sought comment from so-called “anti-racist” activists who were disturbed that Wu had dared defeat black candidates for the office.
“I mean the data speaks for itself, and it’s troubling,” said a former Democratic state representative. “There’s a lot more work to do when it comes to all our isms,” said one of the election losers, former acting Mayor Kim Janey. NPR’s Twitter account pulled a line directly from the article in tweeting on Wu’s victory: “While many are hailing it as a turning point, others see it as more of a disappointment that the three Black candidates couldn’t even come close.”
It would be hard to find a better demonstration of the ugliness and toxicity of the racialist ideology that is driving so much of today’s media culture and the entire Democratic Party. What makes it even funnier is NPR’s obsequious apology afterward — not because racial resentment is a sin against one’s neighbor, but because the news organization feared it might have offended one group in the service of trying to fluff up another.
This happens because critical race theory, today’s media-dominant racial ideology, holds that the aspiration toward a society where everyone treats others equally and with respect, without regard for their race, is itself a white supremacist idea.
Unfortunately, the nation’s popular culture, one of its two major political parties, and large segments of the public education system are trying to teach people that it’s OK to resent, hate, and discriminate against others just because of their race. Their ideology, which also holds that the civil rights movement failed and today’s America is therefore just as bad as the Jim Crow South, lacks the intellectual heft to handle concepts or situations that do not one-dimensionally cause or result from the racial warfare (modeled after Karl Marx’s idea of class warfare) that comprises all history.
So when a black woman wins as lieutenant governor of Virginia for the first time in the commonwealth’s history, replacing a suspected rapist, this toxic ideology turns her into an emblem of white supremacy. And it is not just about her being a Republican, either. For when a liberal Democratic Asian woman wins in Boston, this is also deemed … problematic. Her victory is treated as a disappointment because the Left is increasingly trying to write Asians out of narratives about “people of color.”
Not all liberals have succumbed to this new ideology, thank goodness. Andrew Yang’s reaction was sensible. “The fact is, there’s a media fixation on race that ends up dividing people, pitting different groups against different groups,” he said. “This was painful for me because I know Michelle Wu. I was happy for her, and then to see her victory diminished because it wasn’t the right kind of victory just sends a terrible message.”
But the Left has been stoking resentment against Asians for years. They did it last fall in California, when they sponsored and endorsed a ballot proposition aimed at reducing the number of Asians attending state universities. They still do it at Harvard and Yale, where they openly discriminate against Asian applicants in the name of “diversity” by lowballing their personality scores during the admissions process.
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Because Asian Americans are perceived as a successful group in the supposedly racist United States, they are now targets. Revealingly, some universities want to treat them as “white.” It is this resentment, not some elusive “white supremacy” that is no more or less powerful this year than it was in 2018 or 2016, that actually caused the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes earlier this year. After all, the highest-profile crimes were not even committed by white perpetrators — an awkward fact for dimwitted commentators to explain.
It is one thing that some weird fringe activists think Wu’s election is racially problematic. It is much weirder that taxpayer-subsidized journalists at NPR thought those activists’ voices were somehow worth amplifying. As with the glaring problems at Voice of America, it is clear that taxpayers are being robbed by unethical propagandists. Defunding and house-cleaning are in order.