Anthony Cumia, known along with Gregg “Opie” Hughes and Jim Norton as part of The Opie & Anthony Show, was fired last week after having been apparently attacked by a Black woman on the street and posting about it on Twitter. Sirius XM, the satellite radio company who had been syndicating the show, called Cumia’s comments on Twitter “racially charged and hate-filled”, evidently making them ground for Cumia’s firing.
You can look at the offending Tweets and judge for yourself, but whatever you think of them, this incident illustrates something about today’s American norms: making racially offensive comments about Blacks is seen as worse than Black-on-White violence. If Cumia and the Black woman he photographed had been reversed, we know what the media and political (but we repeat ourselves) response would have been. But in the United States of 2014, Blacks, among other groups, are a protected class, and violence from protected classes is acceptable in a way that even the mere verbal objections of Whites like Cumia are not. Protected classes are nothing new, however, as Mencius Moldbug explains:
In old Japan, it wasn’t illegal to be an asshole. It wasn’t even illegal to be an asshole to a samurai. But it was illegal to be an asshole to a samurai – if you weren’t a samurai. See how it works? You might say the samurai were a sort of protected class. A system not at all unique to old Japan. Always and everywhere, “microaggressing” against the protected class is hazardous to your health.
In old Japan, it was illegal to be an asshole to a samurai if you weren’t a samurai. In modern-day America, it’s technically illegal for anyone to attack anyone—even for Blacks to attack Whites—and it’s legal for Whites to say bad things about individual Blacks, but the former goes unpunished and the latter does not. De jure is not always de facto: it doesn’t matter whether something is legal if you’ll still lose your job for it.
But there’s a difference between Blacks in 2014 America and the samurai of old Japan: the former are not an aristocracy. If they were, would their situation really be steadily getting worse, as it has been? Besides, Blacks as a group do not make America’s administrative decisions—they’re not the ones designating who is and isn’t a member of a protected class.
If America isn’t old Japan, what is it? History is a very big place, so we must have some historical precedent for this state of affairs—but what?
Moldbug continues, and provides the precedent.
America is a communist country. For workers and peasants, read: blacks and Hispanics.
The capital-C Communists claimed to rule for the benefit of the workers and peasants, but really ruled for the benefit of themselves. The progressives—who can reasonably be called lowercase-c communists—claim to rule for the benefit of the Blacks and Hispanics, but the Blacks and Hispanics clearly don’t rule. Instead, progressives rule in their name.
Such initiatives as affirmative action and ‘diversity’ may be understood as tools to increase the power of progressivism. This works on multiple levels: first, they create a way for progressives to exercise power and create job positions that do nothing but promote progressivism; second, they provide a way to measure the conformity of an institution with progressivism; and third, there is a tacit understanding that those who claim the benefits of affirmative action ought to be progressives themselves, as was most recently shown by Harry Reid’s “five White men” slip.
The belief that progressives really are concerned with White ‘racism’ makes it difficult to explain why they do not go after those (of even their own number) who take great care to isolate themselves from non-Whites. The fact that they are concerned with things like speech and representation in Disney movies, but not with this isolation, or the fact that the material condition of Blacks has been steadily declining ever since desegregation, shows the lie: the Communist bureaucrats of the Soviet Union wrapped their drive to accumulate power and eliminate those they considered elthedish in talk of concern for workers and peasants, and the lowercase-c communists of today do much the same.
from Anthony Cumia and the Inverted Samurai of the American Ghetto