Stop Tolerating The Toxic Ideas Of Black Radicals

Social media has an annoying habit of ablating any remaining desire for good intellectual hygiene, so I recently clicked on a video of Joy Reid. Since being dumped from MSNBC, Reid has been making the podcast rounds. And the 40-second clip is vintage Reid; she accuses white people writ large of not being able to invent anything, rewriting history, and caps it off with a bizarre rant about Elvis that, well, completely rewrites history:

Elvis grew up in housing projects in Memphis alongside black people, credited black artists and showed them nothing but respect throughout his career, and generally did wonders for civil rights. As for Elvis stealing “his main song” from an “overweight black woman,” Reid simply doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Yes, Big Mama Thornton did record “Hound Dog” a few years before Elvis, but she didn’t write the song. It was written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, two Jewish white guys.

Thornton had a long career, albeit one hampered by pretty serious alcoholism, and died at 57. Big Mama Thornton deserves real credit for her contributions to the blues and rock and roll, but she was no Elvis, and he didn’t steal anything from her. “Hound Dog” has been recorded more than 250 times, including by several other artists in the four years between the release of Thornton and Elvis’ versions. Suffice to say, there’s plenty of reasons besides race why Elvis sold 10 million copies of “Hound Dog,” even if the 500,000 Thornton sold was nothing to sneeze at.

Anyway, “Joy Reid is an idiot” is a long running series, and that basic observation is not what struck me about this clip. It’s that Reid is spouting the most divisive ideas of black radical leaders, rooted in broad brush anti-white racism. Which is not to say that racism didn’t exist; there’s a lot that Reid could have said that would have been both shameful and fair. For instance, Thornton claims she was paid only $500 for selling half a million copies of “Hound Dog,” a common problem for black artists of the era. Instead, Reid accuses one of America’s greatest artists, who is overwhelmingly responsible for enriching and mainstreaming black artists in the decades to come, of only being successful because he “stole” from black people. And she mangles the facts in the process.

Yet, this kind of toxic ideology is treated as if it’s justifiable mainstream sentiment. Or at least it was at a major news corporation such as NBC, which for years reportedly paid her an annual salary as high as $3 million. Of course, NBC could only tolerate this for so long. Aside from jettisoning Reid earlier this year, MSNBC is being rebranded “MS NOW” so as not to be associated with its corporate parent.

Not every media outlet, however, is waking up to this problem. Another big controversy has been raging online this past week, involving a New Yorker staff writer, Doreen St. Felix. It seems internet sleuths have unearthed a bevy of tweets from 10 years ago, where she rants against whiteness and white people in explicitly racist terms. It’s pretty outrageous stuff. Naturally, The New Yorker has responded with total moral cowardice, and to date has said nothing about their employee’s hateful comments. Many have suggested that this should all be forgiven because she expressed all these racist sentiments 10 years ago when she was a mere 23-year-old graduate of Brown, and therefore didn’t know any better. (Perhaps worth mentioning that Reid is a Harvard grad. Education seems to be an obstacle for eliminating racism, rather than the solution.)

The real problem is that St. Felix doesn’t appear to have demonstrated any real growth since her tweets a decade ago. Her latest contribution to The New Yorker is a column earlier this month on the Sydney Sweeney “jeans/genes” ad that was the subject of largely invented controversy. St. Felix’s otherwise soporific and overwritten article — to be fair, I blame the largely unreadable mess that is the contemporary New Yorker for that, rather than her — refers to Sydney Sweeney as an “Aryan princess” and claims she is “terrorized” by the fact that advertisers exploit the fact attractive blondes are attractive.

If I wanted to explain what’s going on here, well, one of St. Felix’s old tweets offers a startling clue. At one point, she offered her opinion that, “It’s tricknological, when white people invoke the holocaust. allows them to step out of their whiteness and slip on fake oppression [sic].” Those two sentences are more pregnant with meaning, albeit mostly unintentional, than anything published in the New Yorker in years.

But let’s just zero in on the obvious. In case you were wondering, Yakub, the black scientist from Mecca who created the white race 6,000 years ago, empowered them with science of “tricknology,” which allows them to deceive, steal ideas, and hide their true history from black people in order to oppress them. At least that’s what the Nation of Islam teaches. I don’t have any idea whether St. Felix is a serious student of the Nation of Islam or is merely invoking the concept. It’s bad enough that she’s saying Jews invoking the Holocaust is fake oppression. But if she is a disciple of Louis Farrakhan, the good news is that the NOI teaches that the reign of tricknology ended in the oddly specific year of 1914, so black people are no longer under our spell.

You’d think there would be plenty of concrete reasons involving America’s awful legacy of racism that might result in vestigial oppression, without creating entire mythologies to suggest these things are driven by the supernatural. Yet, in nearly every public debate involving black Americans, fantastical notions of trickery, theft, or hidden forces rear their ugly head. And many of the most prominent black commentators and politicians unironically believe this stuff.

In college, the 1619 Project’s Nikole Hannah-Jones once wrote that “the white race is the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager, and thief of the modern world.” She also believed in bizarre afro-centrist theories like the notion that Africans had been to the Americas before Columbus and peacefully gave them new technology. And again, there’s no evidence of personal growth here. In 2020, she apologized for spreading a conspiracy theory that “government agents” were setting off fireworks “to disorient and destabilize the #BlackLivesMatter movement,” and there’s many more crazy things she’s said she hasn’t apologized for.

Even Barack Obama seems to have bought into the black conspiracy nonsense. Biographer David Garrow, who Obama cooperated with, reported years back that one of his girlfriends broke up with him when he refused to condemn a black mayoral aide who “accused Jewish doctors in Chicago of infecting Black babies with AIDS as part of a genocidal plot against African Americans.” You will be unsurprised to learn said mayoral aide was mixed up with the loathsome Louis Farrakhan.

The good news is that there’s ample evidence that many black Americans recognize these arguments for what they are. The same week that Reid was spouting off and the St. Felix controversy was raging, Jubilee released another one of their infamous videos, “1 Black Radical vs 20 Black Conservatives.” You can see pretty plainly in this format how these “oppression is an unexplainable magic force that cannot be overcome” narratives don’t survive contact with reality.

And at the same time, there’s a belated, and perhaps insincere, recognition on the left that the recent rise in white identity politics is almost entirely predictable and reactionary and race radicalism is politically damaging to boot. The left is losing minority voters, and I would venture it has something to do with the patronizing sentiment that they are all at the mercy of larger forces controlled by “whiteness” hiding the truth from them. This is not just a hateful mentality, it’s a recipe for loserdom. I may be white, but when I say I want all Americans to believe in themselves and succeed on the merits — I don’t think that’s the tricknology talking.

Mark Hemingway is the Book Editor at The Federalist, and was formerly a senior writer at The Weekly Standard. Follow him on Twitter at @heminator