“Ultimately, it’s just about resentment and hatred of white people. There’s nothing more to it than that.”
That was my immediate response to the cover of the September 9 edition of the New Yorker when I saw it a few days ago. The more I look at it, the more I feel my instinct was right. This isn’t harmless. Far from it.
Americans are subject, on a daily basis, to levels of anti-white propaganda that would shame Radio Rwanda in its squalid prime.
Of course, if you asked the artist or anybody at the New Yorker what the cover’s supposed to mean, I’m sure they’d say something along the lines of:
“Oh, this is about the ‘invisible labor’ performed by persons of color in support of white middle-class Americans, without which white middle-class Americans would not be able to live their lives of comfort and privilege. We believe this is a particularly important moment to remind white people of the value of the tireless work performed by persons of color, and in particular immigrants, because of the divisive rhetoric of Donald Trump and his supporters …” and so on.
You get the idea. We’ve all heard it before. It’s trite.
But I think there’s more to it than that.
The message I get is much darker: Life would be so much better without white people and, in particular, white children. Which is to say, white people shouldn’t reproduce.
Just look at the African-American lady sitting on the bench. She could be having coffee with her high-achieving son — a true high achiever, because he hasn’t had the unearned benefits of white supremacy — but instead she has to babysit someone else’s blonde-haired, blue-eyed child.
The symbolism, down to the blonde hair and the blue eyes, is deliberate.
Symbols always exist within a broader web of other symbols. An image like the New Yorker cover can’t be interpreted apart from all those other symbols and collections of symbols that give meaning to anti-white hatred in America today.
America is a nation where, perhaps more than any other Western nation, anti-white hatred has become an essential part of the dominant ideology, if not the dominant ideology itself. Americans are subject, on a daily basis, to levels of anti-white propaganda that would shame Radio Rwanda in its squalid prime.
And let’s not forget the actual harm white Americans suffer too: the humiliation, the workplace discrimination, the attacks, robberies, rapes, and murders.
There’s even a special government department, the Community Relations Service, that exists solely to get white people to pretend anti-white racism isn’t real when one of their loved ones is killed in a clearly racist attack. I’ve written about the CRS at length.
Saying white people shouldn’t reproduce is an acceptable message. In 2017, CUNY professor Jessie Daniels, a white woman, wrote a series of tweets in which she said “the white-nuclear family is one of the most powerful forces supporting white supremacy” and families “reproducing white children” are “part of the problem.”
She received plenty of angry responses, of course, and five minutes in the media spotlight, but she didn’t lose her job. People like Jessie Daniels “educate” America’s children. There are thousands of people like Jessie Daniels in schools and universities across America.
Personally, I don’t think anybody at the New Yorker is that naïve. They’re imagining a world without white people, and they think it would be a whole lot better.