‘The Root’ Blasts National Review Article As ‘Black History According To White People’ — There’s Just One Problem…
What happens when you elevate an ideology above anything else in your life? It warps your senses and blinds you to the truth. Sometimes, in spectacular fashion.
The Root is a left-leaning website/publication that, to its credit, is honest enough to own its biases. They center their ideas around what they consider issues and topics important to their own racial demographic… namely black readers.
They are also pretty open about their left-leaning bias.
But even honesty about what your biases is only part of the issue.
The OTHER part of integrity is deciding what to do with information that contradicts your own assumptions. When a writer for the National Review Online wrote an article critical of the (widely criticized) NYT propaganda series ‘1619’ viewing ALL of US history through a lens of slavery, The Root’s recent faceplant provided an example of how NOT to handle it.
They employed the typical Leftist tactic of discrediting the messenger to destroy the message. They ‘smeared’ him by suggesting that, as a white man, his opinion of NYT’s depiction Black history in the context of American history is irrelevant. BECAUSE he is white.
For one thing, that’s absurd on its face. An idea is true or false, regardless of who says it. That’s the moral of the story in ‘the Emporer’s New Clothes’ for crying out loud. But they every got the smear wrong.
Peter Kirsanow isn’t actually white.
Peter Kirsanow, a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and a former member of the National Labor Relations Board, argued in a piece published Thursday that the New York Times‘s 1619 Project has an “obsession” with slavery at the expense of the rest of American history. Michael Harriot, a senior reporter for the liberal African-American publication The Root, responded in a piece titled, “Black History, According to White People.” Harriot referred to Kirsanow as white throughout the post.
“As white people are wont to do, Kirsanow framed his argument in the context of Martin Luther King Jr.,” Harriot wrote. “White people love to quote King because he is a mythical figure who has been whitewashed by the very version of America that Kirsanow wants to perpetuate … ‘The 1619 Project’s obsession with race, standing alone, is bad enough,’ Kirsanow writes, whitely.”
Delicious: @NRO publishes a blistering critique of the 1619 project by African American lawyer/civil rights commission member Peter Kirsanow@michaelharriot (who has never found a problem he can't blame on race) writes in response:
"Black History, According to White People" pic.twitter.com/pVxdw7uxzn
— Saagar Enjeti (@esaagar) January 17, 2020
The author of the Root article didn’t prove what he set out to prove. Instead, he told us two things:
1) He’s got a serious bias against white people. We used to call such a bias ‘racism’.
2) He has what you might term a ‘Colonialist’ view of how people with a skin color of a certain tint somehow owe a debt of fealty to sharing his opinion and politics.
He seems to think as though black American citizens are something less than free men and women with just as wide a range of viable political options spread out before them as any white dude has.
But go on, tell us more about how white devils conspire to enslave the minds or some such.