Word Salad

 I don't know Jason Whitlock personally so I have no idea whether he actually believes the stupid shit that comes out of his mouth. There are more than enough media provocateurs out there who will say anything to attract comment because it raises their profile (and income) so it's hard to discern.

Maybe Whitlock is one of them. Or maybe he actually thinks the murder of George Floyd was a "race hoax." Maybe he still believes Derek Chauvin will never be convicted. Maybe he really thinks losing weight is better than any vaccine for preventing COVID-19. I don't know.

Yesterday, though, he went on Twitter with the following word salad:

LeBron James, like other elites, is using racial division as a distraction as elites reshape America to be more like communist China. Elites prefer communism. Millionaire elites are protected by communism. They're the "Talented Tenth" W.E.B. Du Bois promoted. You're being played.

What? Where do you start with this? I have no idea who this is even meant to appeal to. If you can make any sense of it, consider his follow up:

Du Bois = communist elite. Communism = hostile to all religion. Communism makes it nearly impossible to rise above your birth class. Maybe you'll hit genetics lottery and become a pro athlete... Democracy-capitalism-freedom-America more class elevation than any other country.

Again, huh? 

There are no victors when we engage in a battle of wits with the unarmed. I will make the following points, though:

• The phrase "talented tenth" originated with white Baptist missionaries like John D. Rockefeller
• When Du Bois embraced that term (his essay "The Talented Tenth" was published in 1903) he was a staunch anticommunist
• By the time Du Bois became a communist (he joined the CPUSA in 1961, at the age of 93) he had long rejected the idea that African Americans should follow the leadership of their most privileged strata
• Marxism advocates a classless society. China is a one-party state led by people who like to call themselves communist as the US calls itself a republic while actively suppressing voting rights and incarcerating five times more people per capita than China.
• The US ranks only twenty-seventh in the world in social mobility, below all of the social democratic countries.

The trope that says racism is primarily a distraction, created by the ruling class to divide us, is mainly a feature of the white left. The right tends to alternate between actively propagating white supremacy and arguing that there is no racism. The meeting point between those two is their bizarre charge that the only racists are those who call attention to racism, those who - in their revealing expression - "play the race card."

Among leftists, on the other hand, (at least nowadays, they were worse 100 years ago) there is a general acknowledgement that systemic racism exists and that it is bad. But there is also a strong trend that believes that its main purpose is to keep the working class divided. These people look at slavery and imperialism and somehow miss the fact that capitalism itself is based on defining some people as religiously or racially less than human, people who can be murdered, raped, and robbed with impunity. They fail to see that capitalism was and is based on the superexploitation of a class of people with "no rights a white man is bound to respect" as Chief Justice Taney wrote in the Dred Scott decision.

Leftists who are blind to the fundamental role of racism in capitalism see it only as dividing the working class, allowing white people to identify with the capitalist class and Black people to think capitalism will be just fine if it includes them. When these class-issues-first leftists insist on muting discussion of topics they consider "divisive" (skin privilege, police impunity) they turn themselves into propagandists for white supremacy, whether they intend to or not.

Jason Whitlock, though, represents another phenomenon entirely. He is pro-capitalism and denies the existence of racism. He somehow conflates the Du Bois of 1900 with the Du Bois of 1960 to pretend that Chinese crony capitalism's dependent on fighting for Black lives!!?? He somehow thinks that US corporate capitalism is egalitarian (?!) because it allows 1% of Americans to own one-third of all wealth in the country while half of Americans own less than 2%. He somehow believes that LeBron James, who has parlayed his talent on the court to spectacular wealth of roughly $500 million (a fortune which fails, by far, to get him onto the Fortune 400 list) is - apparently because he believes that Black Lives Matter - more of an "elite" than all the people who are on that list. 

I would like to ignore tweets like the ones above. I would like to believe that they are too bizarre to matter. But I found myself writing this anyway. I hope that doesn't reflect too badly on me.