Anyone who fixes his social frustrations on the Academy Awards needs a new mode of protest. Followers of the frivolous #OscarSoWhite campaign confuse film-industry flattery with justice (“justice,” another currently misunderstood word). Sadly, all this nonsense is a continuation of the millennium’s misunderstanding of what exactly “civil rights” means 50 years after passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. The Oscars are not fun anymore, and protestors have misjudged their priorities.

It’s bizarre, but perhaps inevitable, that well-heeled African Americans from Jada Pinkett-Smith to the Reverend Al Sharpton (who both called for Oscar boycotts) consider that their personal class achievements entitle them to many more, additional honors. They mistake a dearth of trinkets for all the other issues that beset African Americans — as if awards were the same thing as freedom. The encouraging facts of black social progress are ignored, and disrespect for serious black struggles has run amok. The real social progress that African Americans have earned — evident in the un-Oscared movies Sweetback Sweetback’s Baadasss Song, Sounder, Amistad, Beloved, Life, Next Day Air, and others — has been taken for granted this century. To conflate contemporary social frustrations with the nagging paranoia resulting from historically based awareness of past injustices is idiocy. Contemporary race hustlers such as Pinkett-Smith and Sharpton are naïve, and twittering students don’t appreciate what rightful struggle and personal dignity mean.

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The #OscarSoWhite campaign doesn’t deserve to be labeled “political.” It derived from a conceit of black bourgeois privilege and from the self-righteousness of the white-owned media that promote the #BlackLivesMatter “cause” for no other reason than to prove their liberalism. It’s snootiness and sanctimony combined.

In practical terms, this false “politicizing” of the Oscars demonstrates an ignorance of recent Hollywood history. Think back to 2008: Eddie Murphy, who was ignored for his extraordinary performances in the Nutty Professor movies then — finally — got an Oscar nomination for his way-late SNL shtick in the dreadful but highly promoted Dreamgirls. And he still lost. Later, Murphy got little media support for indignantly walking out of that year’s Oscar ceremony or for his principled refusal of an Oscar-hosting stint in 2012 when his colleague and producer Brett Ratner was vilified by the Academy for perceived political incorrectness. This forgotten history shows the current protests to be both ahistorical and unethical.

#related#Oscar race hustlers still don’t understand the prejudiced underpinnings of cultural ideology — the standard procedures by which industry executives routinely give advantages to their own kind and studios continue to operate with white preference (as 2014’s Sony hacking exposed). These problems get repeated in the mainstream media’s unacknowledged biases: In recent years, liberal Hollywood has frequently awarded Oscars to only the most demeaning black performances.

This is the same false liberalism behind Spotlight, the Catholic Church–bashing movie that celebrates crusading journalists and, with six nominations, is an Oscar favorite. Let’s see if Spotlight wins any of its undeserved recognition. It would ceremoniously confirm Hollywood’s ongoing sanctimony.