How George Zimmerman became white—and how whiteness became something bad

Guess how many times, prior to the emergence of George Zimmerman as America’s Most Wanted Man, the New York Times used the phrase “white Hispanic”?

Five times.

Ellison Lodge, writing at Vdare (“How George Zimmerman Became White”), informs us of that remarkable fact.

This makes sense, as the notion of white Hispanics (e.g., many U.S. Cubans) would not have been helpful to the Times’ agenda of promoting nonwhite minorities against the racist white majority.

In the old days, Lodge continues, groups such as Mexicans were generally considered nonwhite and wanted to be considered white. But now that America has gone through a racial revolution, and whiteness has become something bad while nonwhites automatically get various significant privileges from our racial-socialist government and other institutions, it is greatly to one’s advantage to be considered nonwhite.

He concludes:

In other words, privilege in the U.S. has gone 180 degrees from the days when LULAC fought for Hispanics to be considered white.

It is now undeniable that in today’s America, [as Enoch Powell predicted in his famous 1968 speech,] minorities have the whip hand over the white man.

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LA writes:

Notice the apparent contradiction between my use of the word “revolution” and Ellison’s reference to a 180 degree change. The original meaning of revolution is a full, 360 degree circuit, e.g., the revolution of the earth around the sun. When “revolution” began to be used in a political sense, the word still had that metaphorical meaning. Thus the men of the American Revolution took as their model and precedent the English Revolution of 1689, which they considered as a return to a previous condition: the Stuarts had deprived the English of their historic liberties, and the Revolution of 1689 returned England to its earlier state. (Leave aside whether this account was true; it was the way the American revolutionists saw it.) But with the French Revolution, coming just a few years after the American Revolution, the word revolution took on the meaning, not of a restoration of a lost earlier state, but of the complete toppling of the historic and existing order of a society, which is the meaning the word still has today. And that explains how a revolution is now thought of as a “180 degree” change.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 29, 2012 10:57 PM | Send