The New York Times has a ‘Holiday Gift Guide’, with pages covering all kinds of things, from the “10 best books of 2009″ to “Holiday DVD’s” [sic] to ‘smartphones’ from each of the major carriers in the U.S.
And then they have a page of gift ideas for colored people.
Oh, no, wait, pardon me. ‘Colored people’ is of course a euphemism from the 1800s that is now considered fairly offensive. The Times‘ gift guide is for ‘people of color’, which is somehow different even though the entire point of the phrase is to lump together people of drastically different histories and cultures and pretend that they’re the same thing. Because doing this is not, somehow, racist. Yeah, whatever.
What do ‘colored people’ like, according to the New York Times? Apparently:
- Children’s books about Barack Obama
- Children’s books about Sonya Sotomayor
- ‘Wise Latina’ t-shirts
- Gospel cruises
- Bindya scarves
- ‘Baby Jamz’, a ‘hip-hop and rhythm-based toy line’ that includes a ‘Mix Master Music Chair that allows children to be their own D.J.’s’ [sic] and a ‘Jammin’ Microphone’.
Comments
Well, when you put it that way, of course it sounds racist. What’s amazing is that no one at the oh-so-sensitive NY Times sees it.
It’s not about sensitivity, it’s about whether you consider that someone’s skin color tells you anything important about the person underneath.
In a lot of cases, it does. It gives you information about their family background, which in turn gives clues — no more than clues — about their culture, some of their values, etc., etc.
But to suggest that e.g. African-Americans, Latinos, and ‘Asians’ are in the same group requires obliterating these people’s actual cultures and substituting one in which the most important thing about them is that they’re Non-White.
I’m telling you: take away the Che T-shirts and give ‘em white hoods: it’s frightening the degree to which the views of the modern left and the old KKK are basically indistinguishable.