More Americans believe it's okay to be racist against white people
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On the night of her election as Boston's first Asian mayor, Michelle Wu proclaimed defiantly: 'We are ready to become a Boston for everyone. We're ready to become a Boston that doesn't push people out, but welcomes all who call our city home.'
It was a rallying cry for unity and inclusion from a young, idealistic politician who was determined the capital city of New England should shed its conservative image and embrace its increasing ethnic diversity.
But two years later, Wu is in the extraordinary position of herself being accused of racism after hosting a Christmas party on Wednesday night exclusively for 'non-white' members of the city council.
Her decision has stoked a nationwide row over 'reverse racism' and exposed once again a deeply polarised American electorate that once put Donald Trump in the White House because they shared his contempt for wokeness, and may well do so again.
The debacle began on Tuesday when the director of city council relations, Denise DosSantos, sent an email invitation — on behalf of Mayor Michelle Wu — to an 'Electeds of Colour Holiday Party' on December 13 at the historic, city-owned Parkman House.
Two years after being elected as Boston's first Asian mayor, Michelle Wu is in the extraordinary position of herself being accused of racism after hosting a Christmas party on Wednesday night exclusively for 'non-white' members of the city council
Seeing as the email had been sent to all 13 Boston city councillors, including seven white members, the invite caused all sorts of confusion. But all would become clear just 15 minutes later when another email from DosSantos landed in councillors' inboxes.
'I wanted to apologise for my previous email regarding a Holiday Party for tomorrow,' wrote DosSantos, a black woman herself. 'I did send that to everyone by accident, and I apologise if my email may have offended or came across as so. Sorry for any confusion this may have caused.'
And so it dawned on the seven white councillors that not only had they been disinvited to the bash, but they were never supposed to be there in the first place due to the colour of their skin.
Unfazed by the embarrassing faux pas, Mayor Wu went ahead with the event the following day, even stopping outside the venue to speak to the assembled Press. 'I assure you, everyone on the Boston City Council has got an invitation to multiple types of events and holiday parties,' Wu gushed.
Earlier in the day she had described the erroneous email as an 'honest' mistake, apologising for the mix-up but not for the party itself.
Pressed by reporters, Wu's calm demeanour appeared to crack and she became more defensive: 'We celebrate all kinds of connection and identity and culture and heritage in the city,' she pleaded.
'Just yesterday we hosted our official City Hall Hanukkah lighting.
'We have had tree lightings, and we want to be a city where everyone's identity is embraced, and where there are spaces and communities we can help support.'
In many corners of America — and her own council — Wu's words sounded more like a desperate bid to save face than a conciliatory explanation.
Wu, 38, a child of Taiwanese immigrants, was educated locally at America's top university — and bastion of wokeness — Harvard. Its embattled president Claudine Gay is currently facing claims she plagiarised her PhD type dissertation francais and only got the top job because she is a black woman.
Furthermore, she has been criticised for failing to say whether students calling for a genocide of Jewish people should be disciplined. Wu, herself a champion of transgender rights, has been tipped as her successor.
All but one of the city's white councillors have been loath to criticise Wu and risk being labelled racially insensitive — or worse.
However, city councillor Frank Baker, who is white and about to step down anyway, was not impressed. He told the Boston Herald he wasn't sure what reasoning lay behind the mayor having a separate party based on racial lines, but described it as 'unfortunate and divisive'.
Given recent tensions on the council, sparked to some degree when white members were accused of racism for suspending a Hispanic colleague accused of sex offences, it wasn't a 'good move', he said.
Baker's sentiments were echoed by former five-term Boston city councillor, Michael McCormack, who argued that Wu's predecessors would never have hosted such an exclusionary event. 'It's not something that anyone in the mayor's office should be proud of,' he added.
However, the fallout continued with black council colleagues rushing to defend their mayor, claiming it had been her 'turn' to host the party for an organisation that has been operating for at least a decade. Some even insisted there was no need for her even to apologise.
'Your email should not offend anyone and there is absolutely no confusion,' said black councillor Tania Fernandes Anderson, before adding that the party was 'not about excluding anyone' but 'about creating spaces for like-minded individuals to connect'.
Unfazed by the embarrassing faux pas, Mayor Wu went ahead with the event the following day, even stopping outside the venue to speak to the assembled Press
To many, Anderson's rhetoric perfectly illustrates the double standards over race that are increasingly common in America.
For one can only imagine the outrage of politicians like Wu and Anderson had a white mayor thrown a party just for his white colleagues.
Many on social media responded by mocking Wu and her non-white allies. 'Mayor Wu is NOT dreaming of a white Christmas,' joked local radio talk show host Howie Carr. 'And she will NOT be serving white wine tonight. Or white-meat chicken.'
However, for others the hypocrisy sweeping the U.S. is no laughing matter. A country where racial discrimination is technically illegal is seeing an increasing number of schools, universities and large businesses creating 'safe spaces' where ethnic minorities can 'escape white oppression'.
There have even been calls for black people to get racially-segregated 'safe spaces' outdoors so they can enjoy activities such as hiking and camping without suffering 'harassment' and 'trauma' from white people, while also subverting stereotypes that African-Americans don't enjoy such pursuits.
Critics counter that safe spaces amount to racial segregation and some parents have even launched legal challenges against safe spaces in schools, claiming they violate the Civil Rights Act.
At the same time, white Americans increasingly feel that they are the ones suffering discrimination.
In recent years, successive polls have shown that while both blacks and whites believe discrimination against African-Americans has declined over the past few decades, a majority of whites (some 57 per cent according to a major 2019 survey) believe that discrimination against them is now at least as bad as it is against black people.
And not only is it common, some add, but, as far as much of the U.S. academia, media and political classes are concerned, anti-white discrimination is not only acceptable but even laudable.
In fact, the term 'racial equality' is now considered outdated on the Left. All the way up to President Biden, Left-wingers are instead talking about racial 'equity' —defined as 'the condition that would be achieved if racial identity no longer predicted, in a statistical sense, how people fare'.
If the rules and institutions of U.S. society are intrinsically racist, so the theory goes, discrimination against privileged groups — namely whites — is fine. In other words, racial 'equity' permits excluding white people in order to compensate for institutional racism.
In the words of one Boston 'anti-racist' academic, Ibram X Kendi, (whose work on deeply divisive 'critical race theory' is studied religiously in schools and colleges): 'The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.'
In short, it's entirely fair or 'equitable' that the boot is now on the other foot. It's OK to be racist against white people.
Conservatives say Michelle Wu's exclusionary Christmas party is just one example of this theory in action. But there are many others.
In 2021, a school district in Wellesley, Massachusetts, reportedly excluded white students from a 'healing space' after shootings in which eight students — six of them Asian-Americans — were killed. The email announcing the event read: '*Note: This is a safe space for our Asian/Asian-American and Students of Color, *not* for students who identify only as White.'
In the same year, black mayor of Chicago Lori Lightfoot — under huge pressure over her city's appalling black-on-black murder rate — announced she wouldn't allow white journalists to interview her on the two-year anniversary of her inauguration.
Insisting she wanted to address a racial imbalance in the media, Lightfoot said she'd only talk to 'black or brown' reporters, and not even Asian-Americans.
Democrat congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard called on her party leaders, up to Joe Biden, to condemn the 'blatant anti-white racism' and force Lightfoot to resign, adding: 'Our leaders must condemn all racism, including anti-white'. But there was silence from Washington.
And there are far uglier examples of such shameless double standards. In 2018, for example, South Korea-born technology writer Sarah Jeong was hired by the Left-wing New York Times as a member of its prestigious 'editorial board' of senior writers.
But then critics found some of her old tweets on white people and they weren't a pretty sight. 'Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like grovelling goblins,' she wrote.
In another, she confided: 'It's kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men.'
Others included '#cancelwhitepeople', 'f*** white women lol' and 'White people have stopped breeding. You'll all go extinct soon. This was my plan all along.'
As outrage grew about what could surely only be interpreted as horrendously racist comments, the Times shockingly insisted it had known about them before hiring her and had accepted her claim that she'd simply been responding to harassment from online trolls by imitating them.
Opponents snorted with derision. Try substituting 'whites' in her tweets for 'Jews' or 'blacks', they said, and imagine what the famously self-important newspaper's response would have been.
Jeong's career would have gone down in flames (as indeed did another Times journalist, sacked within hours of her bosses learning she'd retweeted a slur about African-Americans). Instead, Jeong nowadays writes columns for the New York Times and the Guardian in the UK.
Also still doing very nicely is U.S. academic James Livingston whose historic offences — criticism of which was again dismissed by the Left as an invidious attack on free speech — included saying on Facebook that he 'hated white people' invading his black neighbourhood in New York's Harlem.
His favourite restaurant, he whined, had been 'overrun with little Caucasian assholes who know their parents will approve of everything they do . . . f**k these people'.
Such are the lunatic extremes of wokeness in American academia that nobody was too shocked to learn Livingston himself is white.
He later wrote an article insisting he couldn't be accused of anti-white racism as it didn't exist. 'Racism is the exclusive property of white, mostly European people in this part of the world (the Western hemisphere),' he intoned.
Protesters hold up a Black Lives Matter banner in a demonstration in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd
His university, Rutgers in New Jersey, initially ruled that his comments had been 'reverse racist' but later rowed back on its decision to sanction Livingston, who remains emeritus professor of history there.
Nearly 60 years after racial integration became law in the U.S., segregation is getting worse.
According to a study by the University of California, more than 80 per cent of large metropolitan areas in America were more segregated in 2019 than they were 33 years ago in 1990. It found, for instance, that while the city of Detroit was 80 per cent black, the adjoining suburb of Grosse Point was 90 per cent white.
Michelle Wu's Christmas fiasco clearly speaks to a wider trend across America.
Whatever sanitised image of integration Hollywood puts out to the world, this is a country divided: across state lines, income disparities and, without doubt, by a racially-charged culture war.
More and more Americans believe it's okay to be racist against WHITE people - and segregation is getting worse
ChristmasDonald TrumpWhite House
It was a rallying cry for unity and inclusion from a young, idealistic politician who was determined the capital city of New England should shed its conservative image and embrace its increasing ethnic diversity.
But two years later, Wu is in the extraordinary position of herself being accused of racism after hosting a Christmas party on Wednesday night exclusively for 'non-white' members of the city council.
Her decision has stoked a nationwide row over 'reverse racism' and exposed once again a deeply polarised American electorate that once put Donald Trump in the White House because they shared his contempt for wokeness, and may well do so again.
The debacle began on Tuesday when the director of city council relations, Denise DosSantos, sent an email invitation — on behalf of Mayor Michelle Wu — to an 'Electeds of Colour Holiday Party' on December 13 at the historic, city-owned Parkman House.
Two years after being elected as Boston's first Asian mayor, Michelle Wu is in the extraordinary position of herself being accused of racism after hosting a Christmas party on Wednesday night exclusively for 'non-white' members of the city council
Seeing as the email had been sent to all 13 Boston city councillors, including seven white members, the invite caused all sorts of confusion. But all would become clear just 15 minutes later when another email from DosSantos landed in councillors' inboxes.
'I wanted to apologise for my previous email regarding a Holiday Party for tomorrow,' wrote DosSantos, a black woman herself. 'I did send that to everyone by accident, and I apologise if my email may have offended or came across as so. Sorry for any confusion this may have caused.'
And so it dawned on the seven white councillors that not only had they been disinvited to the bash, but they were never supposed to be there in the first place due to the colour of their skin.
Unfazed by the embarrassing faux pas, Mayor Wu went ahead with the event the following day, even stopping outside the venue to speak to the assembled Press. 'I assure you, everyone on the Boston City Council has got an invitation to multiple types of events and holiday parties,' Wu gushed.
Earlier in the day she had described the erroneous email as an 'honest' mistake, apologising for the mix-up but not for the party itself.
Pressed by reporters, Wu's calm demeanour appeared to crack and she became more defensive: 'We celebrate all kinds of connection and identity and culture and heritage in the city,' she pleaded.
'Just yesterday we hosted our official City Hall Hanukkah lighting.
'We have had tree lightings, and we want to be a city where everyone's identity is embraced, and where there are spaces and communities we can help support.'
In many corners of America — and her own council — Wu's words sounded more like a desperate bid to save face than a conciliatory explanation.
Wu, 38, a child of Taiwanese immigrants, was educated locally at America's top university — and bastion of wokeness — Harvard. Its embattled president Claudine Gay is currently facing claims she plagiarised her PhD type dissertation francais and only got the top job because she is a black woman.
Furthermore, she has been criticised for failing to say whether students calling for a genocide of Jewish people should be disciplined. Wu, herself a champion of transgender rights, has been tipped as her successor.
All but one of the city's white councillors have been loath to criticise Wu and risk being labelled racially insensitive — or worse.
However, city councillor Frank Baker, who is white and about to step down anyway, was not impressed. He told the Boston Herald he wasn't sure what reasoning lay behind the mayor having a separate party based on racial lines, but described it as 'unfortunate and divisive'.
Given recent tensions on the council, sparked to some degree when white members were accused of racism for suspending a Hispanic colleague accused of sex offences, it wasn't a 'good move', he said.
Baker's sentiments were echoed by former five-term Boston city councillor, Michael McCormack, who argued that Wu's predecessors would never have hosted such an exclusionary event. 'It's not something that anyone in the mayor's office should be proud of,' he added.
However, the fallout continued with black council colleagues rushing to defend their mayor, claiming it had been her 'turn' to host the party for an organisation that has been operating for at least a decade. Some even insisted there was no need for her even to apologise.
'Your email should not offend anyone and there is absolutely no confusion,' said black councillor Tania Fernandes Anderson, before adding that the party was 'not about excluding anyone' but 'about creating spaces for like-minded individuals to connect'.
Unfazed by the embarrassing faux pas, Mayor Wu went ahead with the event the following day, even stopping outside the venue to speak to the assembled Press
To many, Anderson's rhetoric perfectly illustrates the double standards over race that are increasingly common in America.
For one can only imagine the outrage of politicians like Wu and Anderson had a white mayor thrown a party just for his white colleagues.
Many on social media responded by mocking Wu and her non-white allies. 'Mayor Wu is NOT dreaming of a white Christmas,' joked local radio talk show host Howie Carr. 'And she will NOT be serving white wine tonight. Or white-meat chicken.'
However, for others the hypocrisy sweeping the U.S. is no laughing matter. A country where racial discrimination is technically illegal is seeing an increasing number of schools, universities and large businesses creating 'safe spaces' where ethnic minorities can 'escape white oppression'.
There have even been calls for black people to get racially-segregated 'safe spaces' outdoors so they can enjoy activities such as hiking and camping without suffering 'harassment' and 'trauma' from white people, while also subverting stereotypes that African-Americans don't enjoy such pursuits.
Critics counter that safe spaces amount to racial segregation and some parents have even launched legal challenges against safe spaces in schools, claiming they violate the Civil Rights Act.
At the same time, white Americans increasingly feel that they are the ones suffering discrimination.
In recent years, successive polls have shown that while both blacks and whites believe discrimination against African-Americans has declined over the past few decades, a majority of whites (some 57 per cent according to a major 2019 survey) believe that discrimination against them is now at least as bad as it is against black people.
And not only is it common, some add, but, as far as much of the U.S. academia, media and political classes are concerned, anti-white discrimination is not only acceptable but even laudable.
In fact, the term 'racial equality' is now considered outdated on the Left. All the way up to President Biden, Left-wingers are instead talking about racial 'equity' —defined as 'the condition that would be achieved if racial identity no longer predicted, in a statistical sense, how people fare'.
If the rules and institutions of U.S. society are intrinsically racist, so the theory goes, discrimination against privileged groups — namely whites — is fine. In other words, racial 'equity' permits excluding white people in order to compensate for institutional racism.
In the words of one Boston 'anti-racist' academic, Ibram X Kendi, (whose work on deeply divisive 'critical race theory' is studied religiously in schools and colleges): 'The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.'
In short, it's entirely fair or 'equitable' that the boot is now on the other foot. It's OK to be racist against white people.
Conservatives say Michelle Wu's exclusionary Christmas party is just one example of this theory in action. But there are many others.
In 2021, a school district in Wellesley, Massachusetts, reportedly excluded white students from a 'healing space' after shootings in which eight students — six of them Asian-Americans — were killed. The email announcing the event read: '*Note: This is a safe space for our Asian/Asian-American and Students of Color, *not* for students who identify only as White.'
In the same year, black mayor of Chicago Lori Lightfoot — under huge pressure over her city's appalling black-on-black murder rate — announced she wouldn't allow white journalists to interview her on the two-year anniversary of her inauguration.
Insisting she wanted to address a racial imbalance in the media, Lightfoot said she'd only talk to 'black or brown' reporters, and not even Asian-Americans.
Democrat congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard called on her party leaders, up to Joe Biden, to condemn the 'blatant anti-white racism' and force Lightfoot to resign, adding: 'Our leaders must condemn all racism, including anti-white'. But there was silence from Washington.
And there are far uglier examples of such shameless double standards. In 2018, for example, South Korea-born technology writer Sarah Jeong was hired by the Left-wing New York Times as a member of its prestigious 'editorial board' of senior writers.
But then critics found some of her old tweets on white people and they weren't a pretty sight. 'Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like grovelling goblins,' she wrote.
In another, she confided: 'It's kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men.'
Others included '#cancelwhitepeople', 'f*** white women lol' and 'White people have stopped breeding. You'll all go extinct soon. This was my plan all along.'
As outrage grew about what could surely only be interpreted as horrendously racist comments, the Times shockingly insisted it had known about them before hiring her and had accepted her claim that she'd simply been responding to harassment from online trolls by imitating them.
Opponents snorted with derision. Try substituting 'whites' in her tweets for 'Jews' or 'blacks', they said, and imagine what the famously self-important newspaper's response would have been.
Jeong's career would have gone down in flames (as indeed did another Times journalist, sacked within hours of her bosses learning she'd retweeted a slur about African-Americans). Instead, Jeong nowadays writes columns for the New York Times and the Guardian in the UK.
Also still doing very nicely is U.S. academic James Livingston whose historic offences — criticism of which was again dismissed by the Left as an invidious attack on free speech — included saying on Facebook that he 'hated white people' invading his black neighbourhood in New York's Harlem.
His favourite restaurant, he whined, had been 'overrun with little Caucasian assholes who know their parents will approve of everything they do . . . f**k these people'.
Such are the lunatic extremes of wokeness in American academia that nobody was too shocked to learn Livingston himself is white.
He later wrote an article insisting he couldn't be accused of anti-white racism as it didn't exist. 'Racism is the exclusive property of white, mostly European people in this part of the world (the Western hemisphere),' he intoned.
Protesters hold up a Black Lives Matter banner in a demonstration in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd
His university, Rutgers in New Jersey, initially ruled that his comments had been 'reverse racist' but later rowed back on its decision to sanction Livingston, who remains emeritus professor of history there.
Nearly 60 years after racial integration became law in the U.S., segregation is getting worse.
According to a study by the University of California, more than 80 per cent of large metropolitan areas in America were more segregated in 2019 than they were 33 years ago in 1990. It found, for instance, that while the city of Detroit was 80 per cent black, the adjoining suburb of Grosse Point was 90 per cent white.
Michelle Wu's Christmas fiasco clearly speaks to a wider trend across America.
Whatever sanitised image of integration Hollywood puts out to the world, this is a country divided: across state lines, income disparities and, without doubt, by a racially-charged culture war.
More and more Americans believe it's okay to be racist against WHITE people - and segregation is getting worse
ChristmasDonald TrumpWhite House
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