By Peter Burrows -elburropete@gmail.com 3/13/23

A couple of years ago a friend of mine recommended one of my articles to his daughter, who replied, "Oh Dad, I don't have time to read something by an old white guy."

I wasn't offended in the least. We all make quick judgements like that. We categorize people to save time and effort. There are probably very few old white guys who have anything interesting to say, and quite a few people think that includes me.

But in this case, I think it also reflects something more basic. This gal, who's in her 40s, is a liberal who has been told all her life that white guys are evil, especially dead white guys, a group I will someday join. Surprisingly, this is NOT a recent phenomenon.

"The demonizing of white men" reads the headline from an article in U.S News & World Report dated April 26, 1993. It was for John Leo's column, "On Society" which he wrote for 17 years and syndicated to 140 newspapers. Here's the first paragraph, which could have been written 30 minutes ago, not 30 years ago:

"Attention, men of the Caucasoid persuasion. Have you made a terrible mistake by being born white males? Consider these recent items from the press: A New York weekly newspaper fired a columnist because a higher-up decreed that the paper "should began getting rid of these middle-aged white men." (Sexism, ageism and racism.) A group called Women, Men and Media honored a black female columnist for her assaults on "the male and pale" media powers. (Casual racism, melanistic feminism.) The catalog for the biennial art show at New York's Whitney Museum suggests that whiteness is a "notion" or "fallacy." (Logically stupefying artistic racism.) And Newsweek published a strange and jeering cover story on white males. (Sexism, racism, institutional sophomoricism.)"

Did you catch "melanistic feminism?" John Leo was good!

Not all of his article reads as if it could have been written 30 minutes ago. He didn't foresee that white women would soon be demonized along with white men, and while there was "no grand alliance of non-whites against white men" back then, there is such an alliance today against all whites and, incredibly, some of that alliance includes whites!

In the recent Rasmussen poll that got cartoonist Scott Adams in such big trouble, only 81 percent of white people thought it was okay to be white, meaning that 19% didn't think it was okay to be white or had some reservations about it. If this degree of self-loathing had been apparent among whites back in 1993, I think John Leo would have
mentioned it.

Most of the other points he made back then are still right on the money. For instance, here's Leo's number one objection to the demonizing of white men:

"It's wrong to attack or fire people because of race and gender, even if they happen to be white guys. And no one who is serious about social justice in America thinks it's a good idea to divide up teams by skin color or gender and set them against one another."

Here's another of Leo's still apt observations, just change "white male" to "white people":

"The race and gender people are basically using a Marxist analysis of society, with the role of capitalist suppressor now played by the white male. This is a weird distortion that forces believers to argue that all white males are privileged, even ones who clearly aren't. I would hate to be the race-and-gender special agent dispatched to Appalachia to explain how socially powerful white males are ---."

Here's Leo's last paragraph, which I've edited and paraphrased somewhat to bring it up to date:

"The current wave of attacks on whites are expressions of a hard-edged race and gender ideology now seeping into the general media. We are getting into the ugly phase of attacks on whites. The race-and-gender folk will bear watching."

That was 1993 and guess what folks? We weren't watching. Today, the 1619 Project and the vile Critical Race Theory are legitimizing hatred of whites, and transgenders and cross dressers are being paraded in front of grade schoolers. In case you missed it, First Lady Jill Biden just celebrated International Women's Day by presenting the International Woman of Courage award to a biological male.

Thirty years ago, not only would this have been unimaginable, it would also have been unbelievable, and yet here we are today with this reality staring us in the face.

How did this happen? I blame our media. Journalism today is a far cry from being society's objective watchdog, It used to be called the "fourth estate," which recognized the importance of a free press to monitor Congress, the Judiciary, and the Executive branches of government. Today, unfortunately, it is more accurately a "fourth branch" of big government.

This is because journalists are all products of a dumbed-down and indoctrinated educational system that has been dominated by progressives for the last 30 years or so. Progressives view government as a force for good, especially big government, because it takes the power of big government to right the injustices of a cruel and unfair world.

A prime example is Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and War on Poverty programs started back in the 1960s which ushered in affirmative action, quotas and an era of BLACK privilege, all of which was going to right the wrongs committed by racist whites. Today, black privilege is stronger than ever yet it is completely ignored by the press, which continues to push non-existent white privilege.

Also ignored is the utter failure of LBJ's policies and the enormous harm done to blacks by "black privilege," aka affirmative action, and all its nuances.

More on that in Part 2

p.s. I like to provide links to my sources, but I couldn't find this article by John Leo on the internet. If anybody would like a hard copy of the article, it will cost you a cup of coffee at The Buzz.