Today I’ve got two stories of the racial craziness that is poisoning our nation, but both of them are funny.
For those of you who say that PBS is a lefty network partially funded by American taxpayers, and which uses that money to regularly insult and lie about half of those taxpayers – the conservative half – you are absolutely right.
PBS does have some decent shows – Austin City Limits, Rick Steves’ travel programs and This Old House are good, for example. Still, it’s aggravating that they produce so much politically biased content, especially when they use taxpayer money to do it.
(Can you imagine the looks on the faces of the talking heads at PBS if it was announced that they’d henceforth be forced to pay part of Tucker Carlson’s or Sean Hannity’s salary?)
But last week, PBS aired my favorite hour of television this year.
It came on the program “Finding Your Roots,” when host Henry Louis Gates presented guest Angela Davis with the results of genealogical research into her ancestry.
If you don’t know who Davis is, consider yourself lucky. As an old prof, I am well acquainted with her history as a radical Communist, racialist demagogue, and widely published “academic.” And I’ll save you the time and aggravation of reading her many screeds and polemics by summing up her world view: whites are evil, blacks are entirely virtuous victims, America is terrible, and every blood-soaked Communist dictatorship you’ve ever heard of is great.
You’re welcome.
Davis clearly went on Gates’ program expecting to learn that her ancestors were all oppressed and victimized by evil whites. At the age of 79, this woman has been wearing ideological blinders so long that they seem to have melded with her skull.
So it was great fun to watch reality give her a sustained, devastating, rhetorical beat-down. (Those blinders ensured that she could never see the shots coming!)
First she found out that both of her grandfathers were white. I don’t abide by the crude racist categorizing of the identity-politics left… but it was sweet to see this whitey hater find out that she’s at least a quarter white!
When Gates reported that one of her grandfathers was a prominent and successful member of his community, she immediately snarked, “Was he also a member of the Klan or the White Citizens’ Council?” (Oddly, while she confidently stated that he must have “thoroughly embraced white supremacy,” she never mentioned that he was certainly a Democrat, since he was an elected official in Alabama in the 1920s and ‘30s.)
Then she finds out that farther back in the chain, one of her ancestors also fought in the Revolutionary War. When Gates tells her that her ancestor was a “patriot,” she looks very uncomfortable, before blurting out, “Well, the American revolution should have gone very much further than it did.”
She tries to rally, and counters the slur of having a patriot in her lineage by saying that many people have often called noble “fighters against racism” such as herself “un-American,” and she says, “I’ve always insisted that the best way to pay tribute to this country is to try to change it…”
(She’s made a career of judging our country purely by its worst moments – and exaggerating even those – and she thinks the best way she can acknowledge the country’s virtues is to change it. And for some reason, people call her un-American? It’s a mystery!)
The closest she can come to praise is that in some sense, “I can identify with the identity of the patriot, but it has to be a radical identification.” But then Gates revealed that after the war, that patriot owned 6 slaves.
On the one hand, this should have been good news for Davis, since she’s always on the lookout for an oppressive white guy to castigate. Except that this one was her ancestor. In her most honest moment, she confesses, “I always imagined my ancestors as the people who were enslaved.”
Yes, you did. And you imagined wrong.
But it got worse for Davis, when she found out that her other grandfather was also white. When told that in the 1920s, her grandfather had sold 22 acres to her grandmother for $200, Gates suggested that this might be evidence that the two were closely bonded. But Davis is not one to miss a chance to impugn any white guy’s motives.
“I’m thinking, why didn’t he just give it to her?” Gates responds that “we don’t know where the $200 came from,” and that he might have given it to her to create a staged transaction that would give her rights to the land. (Which, on the face of it, sounds more likely than a poor, black, single mother saving a large sum of money on her own in the 1920s.)
But this suggestion didn’t please Davis, who looked down, frowned, and shrugged, grudgingly saying, “That’s true.” Sensing her discomfort, Gates quickly says, “I’m not trying to cut him some slack.”
After a few more stories that pleased Davis more – because they featured black ancestors treated badly by white folks – Gates gave her the final blow. One of her white grandfather’s ancestors came to America on the Mayflower!
To someone who loved America despite its flaws, and who didn’t have the racialist, far-left ideological animosity of Angela Davis, finding that one ancestor was a patriot who fought in the Revolutionary War, and that another came over on the Mayflower would be good and exciting news.
Gates keeps presenting the details as if Davis would be glad to hear them: Your ancestor was a patriot! Your ancestor was one of the 101 people on the Mayflower!
But Davis shakes her head and smiles uncomfortably, saying, “No, I can’t believe this. My ancestors did not come here on the Mayflower.” Gates repeats it, as she says, “No, no, no, no.”
He pushes it farther, “Did you ever in your wildest dreams think that you may have descended from people who laid the foundation of this country,” but she just keeps shaking her head and saying, “Never, never, never.”
It’s hard not to enjoy watching a hateful person get an arse-whipping by inconvenient facts, whether that person is a klansman who just found out that he’s partly black, or a racist like Davis discovering that she’s descended from “colonizers” and slave-owners.
The second story involves the “chief equity, inclusion and culture officer” of a social justice group in Philly named Raquel Evita Saraswati. As a “queer Muslim” of Latin, South Asian and Arab descent, Saraswati checked so many identity politics boxes that she was almost too good to be true.
Well, it turns out that “Saraswati” might be Arabic for “Gotcha, beeyotch!”
Because Saraswati’s mother revealed that she is actually a white girl named Rachel Elizabeth Seidel. Mom said that Rachel is of British, German and Italian descent, and that “I’m as white as the driven snow, and so is she.”
If I can be permitted to make that excellent quote just a little bit better, mom should have said, “I’m as white as Elizabeth Warren, and so is she.” (#wemustneverstopmockingher)
Like race-faking white girl Rachel Dolezal before her, Rachel Seidel pulled the wool over the eyes of a woke lefty group and made them look as ridiculous as they are. What’s more disturbing is their reaction.
A representative of the group says that they don’t “require any employee to prove their heritage as a condition of their employment, or in order to be valued as a member of our team.” The clear implication is that no one who is white could be hired by them, or valued as a member of their team.
Is it just me, or does that sound… I don’t know… racist? And super-creepy?
To add insult to bigotry, some group members are now attacking Rachel because she reportedly went on “right wing tv shows” after 9/11 where she was presented as “a ‘moderate’ Muslim critical of Islamic extremism.”
One anonymous official said, “Imagine the trauma of people who confided in her, trusted in her… thinking that she’s a person of color. And now all of a sudden, it’s a white woman with a right-wing history. It’s scary.”
Indeed! It’s tough to tell what’s more scary: someone who dared to criticize the jihadi freaks who had just perpetrated the worst terrorist mass murder of modern times, or a (shudder) “right-wing” white lady!
I’m encouraged by recent indications that more and more Americans are seeing through the lies of the leftist grifters pushing CRT and a bigoted racial spoils system.
But if the identity-politics leftists ever get their way, there would still be one silver lining:
Watching Rachel Seidel and Angela Davis writing reparations checks!
“Dr.” Jill Biden/Rachel Dolezal-Saraswati, 2024!
Martin Simpson 