Last week presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden found himself in hot water for comments he made about diversity of thought (or lack thereof) among black Americans compared to Hispanic Americans.
“What you all know, but most people don’t know. Unlike the African American community, with notable exceptions, the Latino community is incredibly diverse community with incredibly different attitudes about different things.”
And once again, all he did was say the quiet part out loud.
The truth is, no black Americans — especially black liberals — should be pearl clutching or feigning offense at what Joe Biden said because he was right.
Don’t get me wrong. Black people exist outside of Twitter and academia. I remember going out with a friend for Halloween a month before the election in the suburbs of Massachusetts wearing a Trump visor with my slutty baseball player costume, and multiple black men coming up to me not to criticize me, but to tell me that they liked Trump too. I remember wearing a Trump choker out with some of my coworkers one night in the suburbs of New York and another black guy coming up to me to tell me he liked Trump.
But diversity of thought is overwhelmingly shunned in the black community. As a black woman who’s been involved in the conservative movement for almost my entire adult life, I know that better than anyone.
You don’t have to dig that deep into my social media to get an understanding of what I’m talking about. Just look at the comments under any of these posts.
Granted, the majority of these comments came from bored teenagers that think mental illness is a personality trait, so they have to be taken with a grain of salt, but they’re indicative of the bigger picture. These are the most recent examples, but this low level line of thinking knows no age restrictions.
There’s something particularly infuriating about the way so many on the Left operate in these conversations. It’s rarely ever about debating the substance or merit of an idea itself. It’s “YOUR SKIN IS DARK!!! YOU HAVE A VAGINA!!!!!! HOW CAN YOU THINK THIS?!!?” There’s an assumption that either your life was harder than it was because of your immutable characteristics, or you’ll be a good little negress and pretend it was to push the woke agenda.
Black people are expected to vote and think one way. We’re expected to let one aspect of our background dictate our political identities. We’re expected to believe the government is the solution when we have almost a century of evidence to the contrary. We’re expected to vote for the same people and shitty ideas over and over and over again because “republicans are racist” despite Democratic policies playing a major role in the poverty and violence facing so many black Americans today. We’re expected to ignore the overwhelming positive effects that Trump’s presidency has had for ALL Americans because he retweeted a video without listening to the audio. We’re expected to discount our own success in this country and claim a narrative of oppression no matter how great our lives are because anything bad that happens to a black person proves America is horrible and racist but anything good is an “exception to the rule.”
It’s ironic because I see all these think pieces and threads about how “black people aren’t a monolith” and we can have our own personalities and unique interests and like classical music and anime and yoga. But when it comes to politics, there’s only one appropriate way for a black person to think.
And black people have reinforced this standard so zealously that people of every race think it’s acceptable for them to chastise and berate any black person that falls out of line.
Once again, all Joe Biden did was say the quiet part out loud. Black Americans shouldn’t be upset because he said it, we should be upset because it’s true.
what do you think?