Dear White People: Don't be Snowflakes
They're calling for boycotts of Netflix in protest of the series which they claim promotes "white genocide."
Does it? Hardly. Even though Yiannopoulos and other right-wing writers, bloggers and trolls have helped to run up the thumbs-down "dislike" votes on the YouTube video, the series and the 2014 movie on which it is based are so benign as to make one wonder what all the panic is about.
After all, conservatives voted for Donald Trump, admiring how he "tells it like it is." Why do these same folks feel threatened when black folks tell it like it is, too?
Sample: Biracial student Samantha White begins her radio show: "Dear white people, the amount of black friends required not to seem racist has just been raised to two. Sorry, your weed man Tyrone doesn't count."
That's from the 2014 movie. There are some tender moments, too. And some moments when -- spoiler alert -- a white character actually makes the black characters rethink their assumptions.
Most important, the movie provides solid entertainment, as I expect the new TV series will, and is very hard to capture in a quick 30-second spot.
Yet Yiannopoulos, who seems to think he's a fairly witty dude, shows a tin ear to the humor in this series.
"Netflix is following in the footsteps of Twitter, the NFL and the Democrat party," he fumed in a sarcastic Breitbart commentary, "with a brilliant strategy of insulting more than half the country in one fell swoop."
Oh, look who's talking. If anyone has insulted more than half the country at every available opportunity, it is Milo.
"Basically," he writes, "(the series is) an opportunity for spoilt (sic) brats of color to lecture ordinary Americans on how unconsciously racist they still are -- you know, just the sort of social-justice finger-wagging that lost Hillary the election and makes decent people everywhere gag and heave and run for the hills." Steady, Milo.
Too bad. I am saddened to hear that Milo has such a low opinion of his fellow white people. His outrage makes him sound exactly like a term that the alt-right invented to describe hypersensitive liberals: a snowflake.
I only use that term because I enjoy the sweet justice of using it to describe a guy who has been quite quick to use it on others.
I thought the mighty young men of the alt-right were supposed to have thicker skins than that. They insist that, after all, that provocative speech should be protected. People need to listen to one another.
I agree. But that protection isn't for whites only.
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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)
(c) 2017 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
