Columbia University professor John McWhorter, writing in The Atlantic, has identified a reason for why foolish people, like Empire actor Jussie Smollett, are running around and claiming to be victims of racist attacks:
"Until this twist, smart people were claiming that the attack on Smollett was the story of Donald Trump’s America writ small—that it revealed the terrible plight of minority groups today. But the Smollett story, if the “trajectory” leads to evidence of fakery, would actually reveal something else modern America is about: victimhood chic. Future historians and anthropologists will find this aspect of early-21st-century America peculiar, intriguing, and sad.
Smollett doesn’t need the money he would get from a court settlement, and he isn’t trying to deny someone higher office. So why in the world would he fake something like that attack—if he did indeed fake it? The reason might be that he has come of age in an era when nothing he could have done or said would have made him look more interesting than being attacked on the basis of his color and sexual orientation."
In this day and age, which is one of so-called "intersectionality," what's so surprising about the above thesis? Not much. Because the more "oppressed" you are the more you supposedly deserve to have your voice (and thoughts and personage) amplified, so of course people will seek out an advantage by acting out that oppression. This seems to be more the rule than the exception, too, if the dozens of other fake hate crimes that have been reported and then proven to be hoaxes over the last few years is any indication.
So, McWhorter posits, if you believe you're oppressed (and Smollett, being a gay black man, may have surmised his renown would have gone stratospheric if he could become a victim of MAGA hat-wearing "redneck" white racists) you'd naturally want others to believe it as well. Even if you had to stage the proof yourself.
"For Smollett, being a successful actor and singer might not have been quite as exciting as being a poster child for racist abuse in Trump’s America."
McWhorter closes out by observing that such a desire may be saying something about where we're really at in terms of race relations today (which are a billion miles more advanced than they were when I was growing up, believe that):
"Only in an America in which matters of race are not as utterly irredeemable as we are often told could things get to the point that someone would pretend to be tortured in this way, acting oppression rather than suffering it, seeking to play a prophet out of a sense that playing a singer on television is not as glamorous as getting beaten up by white guys. That anyone could feel this way and act on it in the public sphere is, in a twisted way, a kind of privilege, and a sign that we have come further on race than we are often comfortable admitting."
"Politics is just show business for ugly people."
"Until this twist, smart people were claiming that the attack on Smollett was the story of Donald Trump’s America writ small—that it revealed the terrible plight of minority groups today. But the Smollett story, if the “trajectory” leads to evidence of fakery, would actually reveal something else modern America is about: victimhood chic. Future historians and anthropologists will find this aspect of early-21st-century America peculiar, intriguing, and sad.
Smollett doesn’t need the money he would get from a court settlement, and he isn’t trying to deny someone higher office. So why in the world would he fake something like that attack—if he did indeed fake it? The reason might be that he has come of age in an era when nothing he could have done or said would have made him look more interesting than being attacked on the basis of his color and sexual orientation."
In this day and age, which is one of so-called "intersectionality," what's so surprising about the above thesis? Not much. Because the more "oppressed" you are the more you supposedly deserve to have your voice (and thoughts and personage) amplified, so of course people will seek out an advantage by acting out that oppression. This seems to be more the rule than the exception, too, if the dozens of other fake hate crimes that have been reported and then proven to be hoaxes over the last few years is any indication.
So, McWhorter posits, if you believe you're oppressed (and Smollett, being a gay black man, may have surmised his renown would have gone stratospheric if he could become a victim of MAGA hat-wearing "redneck" white racists) you'd naturally want others to believe it as well. Even if you had to stage the proof yourself.
"For Smollett, being a successful actor and singer might not have been quite as exciting as being a poster child for racist abuse in Trump’s America."
McWhorter closes out by observing that such a desire may be saying something about where we're really at in terms of race relations today (which are a billion miles more advanced than they were when I was growing up, believe that):
"Only in an America in which matters of race are not as utterly irredeemable as we are often told could things get to the point that someone would pretend to be tortured in this way, acting oppression rather than suffering it, seeking to play a prophet out of a sense that playing a singer on television is not as glamorous as getting beaten up by white guys. That anyone could feel this way and act on it in the public sphere is, in a twisted way, a kind of privilege, and a sign that we have come further on race than we are often comfortable admitting."
"Politics is just show business for ugly people."