Progressives need to admit their toxic co-dependent relationship with racism

The first step in healing is admitting you have a problem

I have no intention of watching either Amazon’s new Lord of the Rings thing or HBO’s new Game of Thrones thing, for the simple fact that I don’t really like to invest what little recreational time I have watching re-hashed, warmed-over appendixes to well-worn franchises. The Lord of the Rings books are fine, the Peter Jackson movies were very strong, and that was enough, there’s lots of other things out there to read and watch. Same with Game of Thrones, which was, you know, good in its time, but it ended and honestly it was enough, we didn’t need to go back to Westeros anymore, it was done. It’s okay to just do one good thing with a franchise and then leave it at that.

But in any event, though I have no interest in these shows I gather that there’s a lot of controversy brewing around them because the creators decided to include a bunch of nonwhite actors and actresses in these new productions and that’s reportedly brought out a “racist backlash” against the shows. So now we’ve got a backlash to the backlash where all the stars of the shows—and also the stars from the older shows and movies in the franchise—are standing up and offering their “support” to the nonwhite cast members who are allegedly having to endure with avalanche of racism. This is driving entire news cycles and only got bumped off the front pages of most major news websites by the death of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth this week, may she rest in peace.

You can kind of roll your eyes at the predictable tedium of all of this, but actually there’s something more outrageously stupid here then the standard glut of progressive posturing. It’s this: Nobody is offering any evidence of what this “racist backlash” looks like or if it even exists. You would think that examples of the racist deluge in question would form a key part of all of the reporting and online commentary about this, but they don’t.

I mean, here’s a Reuters story on the Lord of the Rings cast “call[ing] out racism against cast members of color.” The closest they get to anything even resembling an example of this “racism” is the claim that nonwhite cast members were “met with immediate backlash based on the color of their skin” when their roles were announced, and that after the series premiered, “comments have emerged across social media rejecting the show’s diversity.” This major news organization offers absolutely no examples to support these claims, not even one. Here’s Esquire citing racist backlash to a black actor being cast in the Game of Thrones prequel. It cites alleged “critique[s]” that the character “ought not to be Black,” but it does not provide even one of those critiques; the closest it comes is when it links to a meandering Screen Rant article that also does not cite any examples. Here’s the New York Post reporting on the Peter Jackson cast’s response to the “racist attacks,” attacks which the Post for some reason didn’t actually describe in any way at all. Here’s the BBC referring to “non-white actors [being] trolled online for portraying a range of white fictional characters.” But of course the BBC doesn’t actually provide any examples of…well, you know.

It seems rather obvious what is happening here. There’s been a sizable negative reaction to, at the very least, the new Lord of the Rings series, probably because it’s pretty lame. There’s also been some awkward but well-meaning criticism of the choice to cast nonwhite actors in the types of roles that have historically gone to white actors; these criticism are wrong on the merits but they’re not racist. Then there’s been a comparatively very small amount of racism directed at nonwhite cast members by fat, acne-studded, virgin men using anonymous accounts on social media.

That’s it. But of course we have to pretend like the lattermost controversy is the dominant one, to the point that there’s now a tiresome and boring campaign underway to pretend as if anyone of any consequence truly cares at all about the skin color of someone playing a metrosexual elf.

What is in play here is actually little more than the Left’s chronic addiction to racism: They’re obsessed with it, they love it, few things animate and excite the modern progressive base than allegations of racist behavior. Much of the last 30 years of progressive political identity has been built around the proposal that racism is insanely pervasive throughout society, that it is lurking around every corner and the only thing holding us back from a literal return of slavery is the strong bulwark of progressive activists bravely “calling out” alleged racism wherever they see it.

The problem, of course, is twofold: One, racism is simply not as prevalent as they believe, and two, they’ve nevertheless become so fixated upon it that it now more like a reflex or a muscle memory rather than something driven by true cognitive processes. It’s why major movie stars, for instance, are taking to the Internet in corny ear shirts without ever once stopping to ask if the thing they’re protesting is actually real. That sort of thoughtful forbearance is inimical to the racial politics of the Left—somebody said “racist,” and that was enough.

This type of political behavior is electorally advantageous for a lot of liberal politicians, so you can’t really expect them to give it up anytime soon. But for the rest of us, it should be easy enough to avoid falling into this melodramatic trap. I think we can all agree on a few principles to try and avoid these regular histrionic demonstrations: Yes, it’s fine if a production’s cast is multi-racial, even if the source material might have dictated otherwise. No, it doesn’t constitute a “backlash” if a few sweaty, Cheeto-munching Internet people send some mean messages to some famous celebrities. Yes, it’s good to be proactively non-racist but it’s also fine if you just live your life without acting like every second has to be a recreation of Bloody Sunday or something.

Liberals: You can kick this habit. It doesn’t have to control you. Trust me, you’ve hit rock bottom and it’s time to start considering recovery.