In the left’s mythology, there are white people and “people of color.” White people are bad; “people of color” are good. Racism is bad unless you’re mocking, stereotyping, and discriminating against white people, which is simply redress for centuries of white supremacy. White people are always oppressors in every case, and “people of color” are always noble victims. One of the hosts of the cringefest known as “The View,” however, got a rude awakening Tuesday, in the form of a reminder that reality is not really that simple.
Fox News reported Thursday that Sunny Hostin, one of the far-left harridans who host “The View,” was “shocked to discover her family’s hidden history in a new episode of the PBS documentary show ‘Finding Your Roots.’” The bleached white skeleton in her familial closet is the apparent fact that “one of Hostin’s ancestors on her maternal side was likely involved in the slave trade in colonial Spain.”
Historian and Obama pal Henry Louis Gates noted gravely that Hostin’s “third great-grandfather also ‘owned at least one human being.’” All this time Hostin, whose mother is Puerto Rican and father is black, thought she was on the right side of the great divide between the righteous and the unrighteous, that is, the divide between whites and “people of color,” and so she admitted that discovering this was a massive jolt.
“Wow, I’m a little bit in shock,” Hostin said. “I just always thought of myself as half Puerto Rican. I didn’t think my family was originally from Spain and slaveholders.” It was a comfort to Hostin, amid the crisis that ensued after she discovered that there was sin in her familial line, that her husband Manny also has familial roots in Spain.
Hostin, trying gamely to adjust to her new status as a white oppressor, made the best of an impossible situation by focusing on her nuclear family: “I think it’s actually pretty interesting that my husband and I have shared roots, so I do appreciate that, and I think it’s great for our children to know this information. I guess it’s a fact of life that this is how some people made their living, on the backs of others.”
Yeah. It is. Gates, trying to help Hostin adjust, observed wryly that her white ancestry had to have “come from somewhere,” and then asked her light-heartedly “what she had against Spain.” Hostin responded with all the jocularity of someone who had just discovered she had leprosy: “Just the colonization of other people. I’m surprised that they were enslavers, actually. That’s disappointing.” She assured the world that her mother “certainly identifies as Puerto Rican and non-white, actually,” but then added with a hollow laugh: “So I hate this for her.”
The news wasn’t all bad, however. Fox noted that Hostin “received happier news later in the show”: one of her great grandfathers was a slave! Now that’s more like it! That gives Hostin coveted victimhood status and places her again on the side of the good, the brown, the oppressed, rather than the white, the oppressors, the evil. Gates “presented her with her third great-grandfather’s Georgia voter registration card from 1867. The show host said Hostin’s ancestor was likely born into slavery in 1835.”
Hostin was impressed, exclaiming: “Wow, that’s cool,” and beginning to tear up. “That’s amazing,” she said. “In 1867 to register to vote… that’s amazing.”
What’s really amazing is that Sunny Hostin is just one of the multitudes of Americans today who have this shallow and superficial understanding of history, as well as of human nature. Americans are far less Christian than they used to be, and Sunny Hostin is likely unaware of the Christian doctrine of the ancestral or original sin, the idea that no one is perfect or behaves perfectly all the time, but “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). Not just white people, who are not all evil, any more than “people of color” are all evil.
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The toweringly courageous Soviet dissident Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, a devout Orthodox Christian and enduring hero of freedom, expressed it this way: “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
When Solzhenitsyn said this, it was taken for granted as axiomatic all over the West among Christians and non-Christians alike. But now it is being forgotten or rejected with jaw-dropping rapidity. The underlying assumption of Critical Race Theory is that there are evil people who are insidiously committing evil deeds, and they are the white people. Racism, or whiteness, is the original sin.
This is the core assumption of Sunny Hostin and of so many others like her. No wonder she treated the news of her slaveholding ancestor with such dismay and chagrin. She thought evil had not touched her or her family, but that she came from a long line of noble, brown, oppressed victims.
This is what people of all colors are taught in schools today. It’s not only false, but it’s dangerous, as it leads to acts of violence against the demonized group. If the left continues on its course, and there is no indication that it won’t, such violence will be a regular feature of our unhappy land in the near future.