"Yeah," we used to say, "it's all very well for you bigfoot journalist types with your big fat salaries and air-conditioned downtown offices. The illegals aren't coming after your jobs. You'd be singing a different song if they were! It's the workers at the bottom, the construction laborers and landscapers, the meatpackers and fruit-pickers, that are taking the hit, not you guys."
We had seriously underestimated the depth of elite white ethnomasochism. That snippet of humor fell apart in 2011 when Washington Post reporter Jose Antonio Vargas, who'd shared in the Pulitzer Prize for reporting a couple of years earlier, confessed that he is an illegal immigrant from the Philippines.
In a self-respecting country under rule of law, Vargas would have been hustled onto a plane back to Manila right there. Instead he became a celebrity. He even got his picture on the cover of Time magazine. Such strange times we live in.
It helped that Vargas is a diversity twofer: as well as being an illegal alien, he's also a homosexual. With the Homintern backing him up (as it were), he is completely untouchable.
So much so that instead of gushing his love for this country and his admiration for the founding stock that established and built it, which is the strategy followed by less — what's the word? less … privileged — illegals, Vargas is advertising his contempt for us on nationwide TV. He has put together a show that will air on MTV July 22nd, titled White People.[If You're White and Feel Discriminated Against, Jose Antonio Vargas Wants to Talk to You, By Inae Oh, Mother Jones, November 21, 2014]
Some quotes from the show's website.
Quote: Race isn't biological — it's a social construct.
My comment: Race most certainly is biological. It's what you get when different populations of a species are separated and left to inbreed for many generations. They diverge. Ask a dog breeder. Race is also in part socially constructed. A half-black, half-white person might be considered black in Iceland but white in the Congo. Biology and social construction are not mutually exclusive. If you think they are, present an argument. [Crickets.]
Quote: In America … white people are often given unearned advantages.
My comment: So are nonwhite people. We call it "affirmative action."
Quote: In the late 1800s, groups we now think of as white, like the Irish, Italians, and Jews, were looked down upon … Once whiteness was conferred on these groups, those unearned disadvantages went away.
My comment: Yeah, WASPs could be real snooty. However, after a generation of the Irish, Italians, and Jews showing that they were willing to work hard, support their families, respect the law, and fight for the country if asked, the snootiness died out. Funny how that happens.
Quote: Racism keeps people of color in the limelight and makes whiteness invisible.
My comment: Does it? That's funny. One of the classics of Black Grievance Literature is Ralph Ellison's 1952 novel Invisible Man. Ellison, a black guy, says he feels invisible in America. Quote from him: "They see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination — indeed, everything and anything except me." So is it whites who are invisible, or blacks? I can't keep up with this stuff.
Here is a word to Mr. Vargas: whatever problems we have here in the U.S.A. we'll sort out ourselves, lawful citizen to lawful citizen. If we want advice from foreigners, which is not likely, we'll ask for it.
Now go publicize and try to fix some of the problems of your own country. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.
