Fox News’ Tucker Carlson decided to speak about the horrific racially motivated shooting in Buffalo over the weekend, with all of the integrity of an ingrown hair. It was already bad enough when he opened his statement by lamenting that the media had not been saying the names of the victims of violence (note: he did not name them himself), but then continued to basically deflect blame after many have pointed out that the white supremacist “replacement theory” that motivated the shooter has been shared on Carson’s show.
He split hairs about whether the shooter’s writing actually constituted a “manifesto” because “it is not a blueprint” for a future attack. Then, he decided to make an argument that labeling the shooter’s racism and racist ideology as “hate speech” is just a way for “the left” to silence people from talking about their political values. Meanwhile, he used the same moment to bash Joe Biden and the Democrats.
Even when there are Black and Brown bodies bleeding in the streets, Carson unleashes this ahistorical, strange deflection that the answer to racism is a “color-blind meritocracy.” He also brought up the Rwandan genocide and how, by not including ethnic classifications following the atrocity in the 2003 constitution, there have been “no more genocides in Rwanda.”
“There is only one answer to rising racial tension, and that is to de-escalate and do what we have done and what we’ve tried to do for hundreds of years, which is work toward color-blind meritocracy and treat people as human beings created by God rather than as faceless members of interest groups that might benefit some political party.” Hundreds of years?
Slavery has only been over, in this country, for just over a hundred and fifty years, and Jim Crow ended “legally” less than 60 years ago—well within the lifetime of my own father, and only a few years before my mother was born. Anyone with a relative over 57 years old has someone who lived during the Jim Crow era of this country. At 53 years old, Carson was literally born just a few years after it ended.
“We have a moral duty to do this,” he finished up, “because all people have equal moral value, no matter what they look like. All lives matter, period.” And in the true conservative fashion, he followed it up with a Martin Luther King Jr. quote—a man who, if he were alive and engaging in activism today, Carson would absolutely call an extremist.
The reason we don’t live in a “color-blind meritocracy” is because of white people. White people invented the weird and socially arbitrary definitions of race and ethnicity in this country. They are the ones who created the “one-drop rule” and, before that, the concept Partus sequitur ventrem to ensure that the mixed-race children of rape would not be able to gain access to rights, by connecting status to the mother rather than father.
White people are the ones who have also perpetuated ethnic discrimination against the Irish, Italians, white Jewish people, Eastern Europeans, and other non WASPs. They are the ones who have constantly had to expand those definitions of whiteness in order to maintain their majority. And those white people who were discriminated against, once they assimilated into Whiteness™, have passed along that same xenophobia and appropriated nationalism.
This isn’t about Democrats, or even just Donald Trump. It is about the racism in this country, the way it has been normalized, and how every attempt to fix it or create equality is met with people who are afraid of being replaced and who bizarrely claim (as Carlson does in his call to “de-escalate”) that the way to reach equality is to stop having honest conversations about how to get there. It is a dog whistle that not only has Tucker Carson parroted, but many others, and I have no doubt it will only continue.
The victims of the Buffalo shooting:
Roberta A. Drury, 32, of Buffalo
Margus D. Morrison, 52, of Buffalo
Andre Mackniel, 53, of Auburn
Aaron Salter, 55, of Lockport
Geraldine Talley, 62, of Buffalo
Celestine Chaney, 65 of Buffalo
Heyward Patterson, 67, of Buffalo
Katherine Massey, 72, of Buffalo
Pearl Young, 77, of Buffalo
Ruth Whitfield, 86, of Buffalo
(via The Daily Beast, featured image: screenshot)
