5 Feet of Fury

David Cole: Last Stand Against the Racial State

David Cole writes:

Leftists are pursuing a “new, improved” racial state in the West, in the name of revenge. Whites “have it coming” to lose rights because in past centuries people who had skin that is somewhat light created racial states that oppressed people with skin that is a bit darker, so of course the way to remedy that—decades, indeed centuries, after the fact—is to take people whose skin resembles the skin of oppressors long dead and say, “Hah, how do you like it? This’ll learn ya!” And people whose skin resembles the skin of those oppressed in centuries past will gain self-esteem from the racial vengeance and stay in school, stop killing each other in gangs, go to college, and become doctors and rocket scientists, and one day we’ll cure cancer and have colonies on Mars. But the first step to living tumor-free in outer space is regulating the speech of white people. (…)

Make no mistake—this is a supremely important lawsuit. For a while now, the left has been directing its fire at public media companies (like WTAE) in its quest to enforce speech apartheid. It’s relatively easy to get a media personality fired for real or perceived (and it’s almost always perceived) racism, because media companies have a bit more leeway to fire employees for speech crimes due to the legitimate argument that public personalities, be they actors or newspeople, have a responsibility to maintain an image that doesn’t alienate viewers. That’s fair enough. Had Wendy Bell taken to Facebook and posted a hate screed against blacks, WTAE would have had a case. But she didn’t. She didn’t do anything even remotely close to that. She is being penalized for her skin color, and her skin color alone.

If Bell prevails in court, it will absolutely make other employers think twice before they punish an employee for being too pink-skinned to speak the truth.