For some members of a rising black elite, white people can be the whipping boys who mitigate their guilt over their success and their sense of inauthenticity. The obsession with microaggressions and white privilege among successful minorities is a comforting reassertion of victimhood without any of its negatives. It’s oppression without the actual oppression. A theatrical martyrdom that resolves internal contradictions and opens countless political and financial doors. Black fragility is the real black privilege.
What do you do when you aren’t a victim anymore? You can move on and take ownership of your choices. Or you can manufacture byzantine racial theories and pretexts to cling to a familiar role.
Barack Obama had convinced Americans that he was ready to be the post-racial president they needed only to revert right back to the Victim-in-Chief. Men like Coates and Butler have no interest in even trying to be anything else. They replay the civil rights movement as farce. While the black middle class struggles with its identity, they pander to insecure white liberals who are not ready to see black people as equals and to that slice of the black middle class that wants the economic privileges of equality without ever taking on any of the responsibility. They want the terrace and the garden, the chef’s kitchen and wedding cake moldings, but they also want to blame white people for everything.
Read the rest here...