The social justice warrior's every waking moment is consumed by racial resentment. The latest example: the radical leftists at Salon have deconstructed the classic holiday movie A Christmas Story as an example of white racist nostalgia.
Salon's Chauncey DeVega alerts you from the get-go that he's going to ruin your Christmas movie-viewing experience by pointing out that film and TV are very revealing in terms of "what stories are told and which ones are not? Who gets to speak? Who is silenced? What groups are placed front and center in American — and global — popular culture? Which groups are marginalized or at the periphery? Whose experiences are erased?”
He admits to enjoying the comedy A Christmas Story as a child, but as he grew older he wondered why it wasn't more about people of color like himself. As DeVega notes, there are black characters in the film but they "remain peripheral. They have no real voice or agency." Perhaps that's because they aren't the principal characters. This isn't their movie; it's little nine-year-old Ralphie's movie, and Ralphie happens to be white, as does the radio broadcaster whose semi-autobiographical story this is.
The black characters "are shown in an perfectly inoffensive and neutral fashion," DeVega observes. Perhaps that's because the movie isn't racist.
That's not enough for DeVega, who complains that the movie doesn't depict "the way Ralphie’s hometown was created by racist housing practices" or the history of the KKK in Indiana where the movie is set. DeVega isn't clear how those elements should be incorporated into a movie about a boy's obsession with getting a BB gun for Christmas.
DeVega goes on to describe the black characters as "a perfect depiction of the nonwhite 'other,' tailored to the conservative and superficial 'color-blind' politics of the post-civil rights era." Gee, that's confusing. Isn't being "color-blind" about race a good thing? Isn't it a good thing that black characters in the film aren't presented stereotypically as gang members or slaves or gangsta rappers, but as no different from anyone else in the film?
Well, it's not a good thing to the race-obsessed left, which demands that race be in the forefront of everyone's consciousness at all times, and insists that people of color must always be viewed through the lens of white oppression even when they're not being visibly oppressed.
"People of color are present [in the movie] in a way that does not challenge the cultural and personal psychology of white racial innocence," DeVega continues. "They are present without being objectionable or intrusive in any way; they present no threat to the way whiteness and memory combine to nurture a nostalgia for a 'simpler' time that in actuality did not exist."
Or maybe it's just a Christmas movie. Maybe not everything in the world is about white racism. But no, DeVega claims that such an explanation is merely my "white privilege" talking, that "white folks" don't appreciate it when our "fun and pleasure are disrupted by a person of color’s questions or interventions... 'It’s just a movie!' and similar rebuttals are all too often a refusal to look at what is just below the surface."
Or maybe it's "folks of color" like DeVega who are seething with so much racial animus "just below the surface" that they see racism where it doesn't exist.
