Someone Sent Me This Federalist Article About Immigration On Twitter, Here’s Why It’s Dumb
While on Twitter, I always try to keep an eye on my notifications. Hey, maybe someone could be sending me something important or correcting a mistake I made in a Tweet. However, this time was different.
A guy by the name of @AubreyLaVentana had sent me an article from the right-wing news website The Federalist involving a controversy revolving about Professor Amy Wax.
Basically, a writer from Vox named Zack Beauchamp claimed the Professor had said something during a panel on immigration at the National Conservatism Conference that was “an outright argument for white supremacy.”
Beauchamp then posted what he claimed was a transcript on Twitter through two pictures. It should be noted The Federalist only bothered to embed the Tweet with the first of them.
Here are the pictures Beauchamp uploaded:
Call me a bit of a Chicken Little, but when I hear someone talk about how “the First World . . . remains mostly white . . . And the third world . . . contains a lot of non-white people,” I can at least understand how someone could take that the wrong way. It also makes the statement made by David Marcus, the author of this piece, “that [the] transcript makes clear . . . Wax is not basing her argument for admitting more foreign citizens from Western and first world countries on race at all,” really dishonest.
The article doesn’t really debunk the claims this idea is one of white supremacists. Let me be clear: I’m not saying it doesn’t try, I’m simply saying it doesn’t come to succeeding.
Here’s one:
Wax is addressing the exact and wrongheaded allegation of racism against her argument. She acknowledges that her policy prescription will, at least in the short term, lead to more white immigrants and fewer non-white immigrants, but effectively shows that this is a correlation, not a cause. That is to say that the change in the racial makeup of immigrants is a byproduct of her policy, not at all its intent.
First off, what do you mean by “in the short term”? What year will Wax’s proposed immigration policy not result in fewer non-white immigrants?
Also, can we talk about how bad a standard “you must declare yourself a racist” is? I’ve pointed this out before, but not even David Duke considers himself a racist. I know “I’m not racist but,” has become a bit of a meme, but it happened for a reason. There are a lot of racist people who don’t declare themselves racists.
Although, I would find it interesting to here this writer tell me what he considers “actual, egregious white supremacist ideas that focus on the concept that white people are inherently better than others because of their whiteness.”
Here’s the other part that annoyed me:
Under Beauchamp’s ridiculous definition of white supremacy, any policy that disadvantages any people of color is white supremacist solely based on the outcomes.
That’s not the issue with her statements. Disadvantaging everyone equally makes you a bad person, but not a racist. Disadvantaging one race way more than you disadvantage other races, or even while building up other races, does make that policy racist.
But that ended with this greatness:
By this rubric, one could argue that welfare and affirmative action, policies that have not succeeded in uplifting all non-white U.S. residents, are two of the most white supremacist policies ever.
I’ve actually seen compelling arguments that welfare and affirmative action are racist policies. After all, the Great Society was created by Lyndon Johnson and Affirmative Action was created by Richard Nixon. Not exactly people I’d call champions of equal rights.
So, if you want to send me more articles like this, my Twitter is @EphromJosine1.
