The otherwise obscure transgender black model, Monroe Bergdorf, hit the news last week after L’Oreal, who had hired her as part of a campaign to highlight diversity, had to fire her after it emerged she had attacked the entire white race for being violent racists. In a facebook post she wrote:
Honestly I don’t have energy to talk about the racial violence of white people any more. Yes ALL white people.
Bergdorf has since been doing lots of press, to further an SJW agenda and presumably try to save what little she had of a career – including on Good Morning Britain, an interview you can see here.
In the interview, Bergdorf claims that what she meant by saying “all white people are racists” is that all white people who are not in some way helping to dismantle racism are actively working to keep social structures in place which are inherently racist. Of course, if she wanted to say the latter, why did she in fact say the former? Ignoring the complete fallacy of the argument, what Bergdorf is doing, and what the SJW left has been doing for years, is nothing less than attempting to change the English language: Bergdorf claims that “being racist” and “not actively voicing your opinion that people of colour are being oppressed” is the same. But that is simply demonstrably false: the words do not mean that. Absence of a negative is not the same as a positive. That you do not love me doesn’t mean you hate me. That you do not give me money doesn’t mean you wish for me to be poor. That you do not save me doesn’t mean you wish for me to die.
The left is doing this on purpose, because it forces everyone to take sides: you are either part of the progressive SJW agenda or you are in favour of what they claim to oppose: racism, misogyny, bigotry, etc. We saw it recently, after the Charlottesville riots, where the left was successful in getting swathes of their traditional opponents, including the Libertarian Party, to condone the view that unless you actively spoke up to denounce racism and fascism, you were under suspicion of being a racist and a fascist. We disagreed with this narrative, as you can read here.
The “progressives” are shaming us into obedience. In Thomas Sowell’s words: “It is amazing how many people think that they can answer an argument by attributing bad motives to those who disagree with them. Using this kind of reasoning, you can believe or not believe anything about anything, without having to bother to deal with facts or logic.” But just like rights is a negative concept – meaning that you have the right for me not to interfere with your person and property, but can’t put an obligation on me to help you – responsibilities are one-way only: I answer for what I have caused to happen, but not taking action against something happening doesn’t leave me responsible for it. We need to continue to speak up and challenge the left’s narrative of political correctness, before they succeed in bending words and meaning to make it impossible to argue against them.