‘White People’ Isn’t a Thing

I n the wake of the Daniel Penny verdict, the soon to be departing, progressive member of Congress Jamaal Bowman addressed a thread on X to “Dear White People.”

What followed was typical dreck. “I don’t know why I feel the need to keep talking to you,” Bowman opened his missive. “I don’t know why part of me still has hope for you and for us.”

What was most notable about this sorry little exercise was that Bowman thought writing a note to “white people” made sense in the first place. It’s a little like beginning a letter, “Dear Earthlings.”

That’s a salutation that might show up in science fiction when the aliens arrive and present a big enough challenge to unite all the people on the planet. Otherwise, “Earthlings” is obviously such a broad category as to be completely meaningless, and so is “white people.”

“White people” encompasses the Daughter of the American Revolution and the recent immigrant from Lithuania, the fentanyl addict and the master of the universe, the progressive and the conservative.

White people as a whole didn’t protect subway passengers on that train — Daniel Penny did. The vast majority of white people — and people of any race or ethnicity — presented with that situation would have looked at their shoes and hoped the next station arrived as soon as possible.

Daniel Penny’s whiteness didn’t determine what he did that day. No, what did more than anything else, surely, was his service in the Marine Corps, a disproportionately diverse American institution that instills values and capabilities that transcend race.

Now, Jamaal Bowman is a buffoon, of course, so too much shouldn’t be made of anything he says or does. But his way of thinking pervades the Left and elite institutions. It very likely led to the indictment of Daniel Penny in the first place. It is a poisonously reductive worldview that is used to justify ongoing racial discrimination and is inadvertently insulting to the people it supposedly lifts up.

Imagine thinking that there is something inherently “white” about a brave protector of fellow subway passengers and something inherently “black” about a mentally ill man with a long rap sheet.

Most Democrats might not go as far as Bowman or express their views as crudely, but one reason that they lost in November is that they have long attributed so much significance to ethnic and racial census categories that obscure more than they enlighten.

Sure, Eva Longoria, the go-to Hispanic at Democratic conventions for years now, may show up in the same census category as a welder from the Dominican Republic, but, other than that, they have nothing in common in terms of socio-economic status or, in most cases, in terms of values.

One reason that the Penny case didn’t turn out the way the Left’s racial obsessives hoped is that most Americans don’t see everything through a prism of race — they didn’t on that subway car, and they didn’t on the jury.

Facts and individuals still matter, even if there is a powerful drive on the Left to subordinate both to a clumsy and illiberal racialism.