“White Supremacy?”
Earlier today I was listening to my favorite Substack-podcast, The Fifth Column. If you haven’t listened to this thrilling trio of talent, you’re sorely missing out. Michael Moynihan (previously of Vice Magazine), Kmele Foster (Freethink) and Matt Welch (formerly of Reason Magazine and currently two podcasts) run this ship. They generally critique mainstream media news, pop culture, race, ideology, Wokeism, etc. They also frequently discuss history, journalism, literature and music.
On the political spectrum they lean independent/libertarian but all three seem to hold multitudes when it comes to views, shifting between the left-right scales but generally landing somewhere roughly in the middle. In short, they offer intelligent, well-thought-through, rational analysis of both/all sides and seek not to convince you of anything but rather to discuss, dissect and discover what’s underneath the “hood” of American politics, culture and debate. I find their 1.5 to 2-hour long rants to be unusually delightful, especially in our current rancid state of affairs a la the United States in 2023.
This morning, on the podcast recorded yesterday (Sunday March 5th), they were discussing the idea of race and power, specifically this notion that, as young far-left Wokies will claim, black people cannot be racist since racism (don’t ya know) requires “power.” In other words, the claim goes like this: Because black Americans are, have been, and always will be in a state of lurid oppression, this therefore necessarily means that, as the Oppressed Chosen Few, they cannot ever be racist since racism, “by [New Woke] definition means that one group has held historical power over another group.” Ergo, since black Americans represent the very bottom of the sociological-cultural food-chain, winning the top gold award for the Oppression Olympics (held, as it were, in San Francisco), they can never, ever, under any circumstances whatsoever, be racist. (Do you feel enlightened now?)
This episode of The Fifth Column brought back to my mind a memory. Go back to around late April, early May of 2020, a couple of months or less after the Covid lockdowns hit New York. I was living back then (doesn’t it feel like a decade ago now?) in East Harlem, of all places, on 130th and 5th Avenue. It was a scary time, for sure. Everyone was isolated. People stood in long lines out of grocery stores, wearing masks, angry, being counted as they went in one by one. Police cruisers and paramedics vans blared their sirens, racing south down 5th day and night, unceasingly. I was a California boy, born and raised (Ventura, Ojai, Bay Area) living 3,000 miles away from my entire family. I’d moved to Manhattan from Berkeley just over a year before, in March, 2019, thinking I’d at last be a “serious NYC writer.” Even then—at 36—I chased my literary dreams like a child. And yet: I was glad I’d come.
Until Covid.
My apartment was a cheap two-bedroom on a third-floor walkup. A basketball court was across 130th and I heard, until they finally shut the place down, young black men constantly fighting and screaming and running back and forth on that court, playing, howling, hooting, their shirts always off, muscular bodies slick with sweat, embodied by the lovely, diabolical, healthy rage of steaming youth. (It brought back many recollections of my own wild boyhood, flaming hot with anger, alcohol, skateboarding, surfing and punk rock in Southern California.)
My area wasn’t bad. Everyone said it was “super gentrified now,” which seemed both true and not true. At night it felt sketchy. A long block west was Lenox Ave. Down at Lenox and 125 you could catch the 2/3 trains. East, down at Lexington and 125, which was much sketchier, you could catch the 4/5/6 both local and express trains. On Lenox there were cafes and laundromats and restaurants, places where you could pop in and see live jazz. Down on 125 and west a ways was the famous Apollo theatre; in 2019 I’d seen Oprah interview Ta-Nehisi Coates there.
Everything changed when the lockdowns came.
Violence seemed to swirl in the air in my neighborhood like helicopter blades chopping the air during a riot. Men glared at me with a vicious look. I felt my whiteness like never before. Several times I was certain I’d been followed. Paranoia twisted in my guts like a knife. Then I was chased one evening just before dusk. A gaggle of tall, tense teens. I escaped. Two days later I saw a massive circle of kids in Marcus Garvey Park down at 124th and saw a fist-fight within the circle. Teens. No masks. Cheering. Another night I woke to the noise of glass shattering; pulling my curtain back (it was 2am) I saw gangs of teen boys yelling in the street, hurling bottles, walking along 5th Avenue like it wasn’t a busy major road. It reminded me of the movie The Warriors.
One day, around noon, I was in the second room—my office—writing, working on some fiction, when I suddenly heard a loud male voice down on the street below. I stopped what I was doing, lifting my edgy fingers from the black detached keyboard. Casually, I glanced out the window across 130th to the closed, empty basketball court. A light drizzle had fallen earlier and the court had a thin, reflective scrim of wetness.
The male voice railed out again, shattering my reverie:
Go back to China, bitch!
I was shocked. Stunned. Stupefied. Had I really just heard that? In real life?
It came from 5th Avenue. I jumped up from my seat and jogged across the room to my 5th Ave window. I yanked the beige thick curtains aside.
There was a large black man and he looked like a total cliché, a caricature of the tough black Harlem “hood.” He must have been 6’2. Loose blue jeans and a white wifebeater. His arms were thick battering rams. His neck pulsed with anger. He had a small afro. An absurdly thick gold chain was wrapped around his neck and torso, hanging loose. Some chest hair thatched out of the low-U-shaped wifebeater.
The man pointed his big, long finger at the tiniest Asian woman I’d ever seen. She might have been 4’8. Early, mid-thirties perhaps. The worst part: She was pushing a baby carriage with a baby in it. The baby cried, squirming. The woman seemed terrified and yet she tried to appear stoic. She faced straight ahead and kept moving at a fast clip. Yet the man, gigantic beside her, kept up and continued yelling down at her. I literally saw spit flying from his mouth.
Listen you fucking Chinese bitch, you and your kind brought this fucking virus here from China. Get the fuck out of my country. You think you can come in here and bring your Wuhan Flu? Do you???
The woman did not say a word, of course. She probably feared for her life. She kept moving, eyes ahead like a robot.
Horrified, I felt my stomach tighten. I wanted to ram the window up and yell at this asshole. But I lacked the courage. Or the timing. Or both. When I finally decided to say something (or so I thought) they were just out of view, down the block. I lived here. Did I want this guy knowing which building I was in? Would he come for me? As the man’s raging, irrational voice slowly faded out, I wondered what would happen to the poor woman.
I stood by that window for a long time, gazing down at 5th, watching the cars pass lazily, as if everything were normal. Then I laid down and slept for a while. When I awoke I couldn’t focus, couldn’t write, couldn’t think. It took me a few days for my brain to get back to a level playing field.
What had I witnessed that day? Had the man, due to his skin color, only been “prejudiced”? Had he been simply confused? Or had he been racist? Had the man been white, the answer would have been obvious. Was the black man not equal to a white man? Did racism pick and choose who it embodied? Did history, power, oppression, ideology trump the very notion of racism?
Over the weeks and months in New York City and around the nation I watched as the leftist mainstream media told us again and again and again that Asians were under attack, that they were victims of racism, of “White supremacy.” And yet, when the incidents first occurred, if you spent a few seconds watching the often-recorded footage, either in the media or on YouTube, you immediately saw the backhand of reality: The attacks on Asians were, almost always, perpetrated by black men. It was an unfortunate truth. Of course the leftists would claim, Even if it was black citizens attacking Asian citizens…it was the immovable, harsh historical cloud of “anti-black racism” from white people that “caused” black Americans to attack Asians.
Right. Just like it was “Trump” who pushed white nationalists to attack non-whites. If this were true then it was also “Trump” who emboldened black Americans to attack Asian-Americans, by labeling it the “China Flu.” If we buy into this lazy, anti-intellectual narrative we’re putting our cognitive money into the bank of Determinism. This means you do not believe in Free Will. You do not believe black people possess personal agency. That they cannot, in fact, make their own choices, that they are, as it were, psychologically pulled by invisible strings like puppets yanked around by fate.
This, my friend, is racism.
A white Nazi attacking a black person is racist.
And a black man attacking an Asian woman is racist.
If this is confusing for you—if you struggle to grasp the notion of individual choice—we’ve got bigger fish to fry.
You did a great job of describing the feeling that I think fell across a lot of urban areas at that time, some of which seems to have continued to this day. The social fabric broke down in a big way and that was the result. Scary, disturbing nihilism. And yes, of course, it's a complete absurdity to imagine that a 6'2" physically imposing black man does not have "power" vis-a-vis a 4'8" small Asian woman, especially in an environment like that, not to even get into the fact that racism is a set of beliefs, it does not require power.