We have reached a point in the evolution of our national psyche where it is permissible for a news organization to run an article with the headline “What it’s like to take a vacation away from white people.” Needless to say, any substitution for the adjective white — black, gay, or the name of any other protected class — would be unthinkable and dismissed as bigoted.
So why isn’t it bigoted to single out white people? When one sees a headline like this, all the usual liberal rationales come to mind. Chief among them is so-called white privilege. There is the related notion that whites have “been in charge” for so long that now it is time to give other groups, including women, whether they are white or not, a turn.
But none of those are reasons that Vice News’s Antonia Hylton cites for why blacks might want to escape from white people. Her article begins:
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
At a time when white supremacist groups march out in the open, and the president disparages African countries as “shitholes,” it’s not surprising many black Americans are feeling isolated and unsafe in communities and workplaces.
There are two myths here. One is that white supremacists marching out in the open is a new development. In point of fact, white supremacist groups have been far more “out in the open” in the past than they are now. The Ku Klux Klan was far more visible — and a far greater menace — in the late 1800s and early 1900s and continued to demonstrate through the middle years of the twentieth century.
If there is one supremacist group that has been in the nation’s face in recent years, it is black supremacists. Think the “Million Man March” or even Black Lives Matter. If a black person sitting and brazenly staring at you during brunch is not an act of black aggression then what is?
As for the mention of President Trump’s “sh*tholes” remark, however imprudent that may have been, it was not limited African countries. Hylton is either ignorant of or ignoring that reality because it fails to conform to her narrative.
In subsequent paragraphs of Hylton’s galling travelogue, she mentions “self-preservation” as a motive for vacationing “away from white people” and even mentions locations where whites are “specifically banned.” But it was precisely that sort of burden that was visited on black people up until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Do Hylton and others of her ilk not see the bitter irony of reviving such practices?
