An opinion piece in the Washington Post last week declaring that expecting individual freedom is a “key component of white supremacy” is the latest of the effort to undermine our constitutional republic. The Blaze reports that the Washington Post is being “hammered” for the allegations in the column.
The column, written by Taylor Dysart, a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, begins by attacking the Canadian Truckers Convoy that attempted to end Covid-19 vaccine mandates on truckers. Dysart derided the truckers as “explicitly racist” and said the convoy’s stated effort to restore freedoms is “a key component of white supremacy.”
The Blaze reports that Dysart charged the convoy is rooted in Canada’s settler-colonial history.
”The convoy has surprised onlookers in the United States and Canada, both because of the explicitly racist and violent perspectives of some of the organizers and because the action seems to violate norms of Canadian ‘politeness,'” Dysart claimed. “But the convoy represents the extension of a strain of Canadian history that has long masked itself behind ‘peacefulness’ or ‘unity’: settler colonialism.”
The convoy came about to protest vaccine mandates on truckers, and mainstream media reports indicate it was a largely peaceful protest.
Dysart didn’t cite any violence occurring but he still broadly attacked the organizers.
“While the convoy’s supporters have characterized the protest as a peaceful movement, uninformed by ‘politics, race, religion, or any personal beliefs,’ many supporters have been associated with or expressed racist, Islamophobic, and white-supremacist views,” Dysart stated.
“The primarily white supporters of the Freedom Convoy argue that pandemic mandates infringe upon their constitutional rights to freedom,” the WaPo writer continued. “The notion of ‘freedom’ was historically and remains intertwined with whiteness, as historian Tyler Stovall has argued.”
According to The Blaze, In Stovall’s book “White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea,” he contends that the Statue of Liberty “promised both freedom and whiteness to European immigrants.” The book allegedly “provides vital new perspectives on the inherent racism behind our most cherished beliefs about freedom, liberty, and human rights.”
Dysart alleged, “The belief that one’s entitlement to freedom is a key component of white supremacy. This explains why the Freedom Convoy members see themselves as entitled to freedom, no matter the public health consequences to those around them.”
Conservative supporters of the convoy’s month-long protest were quick to pounce on the WaPo piece, as reported by The Blaze:
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.): “Why do conservatives want to keep critical race theory out of schools? Because it leads to the insane belief that ‘one’s entitlement to *freedom* is a key component of White supremacy.'”
Political commentator Dinesh D’Souza: “If freedom is a white supremacist notion, as this @washingtonpost article insists, what should we be aiming for instead? Unfreedom? Incarceration? Slavery?”
Reason.com Associate editor Liz Wolfe: “When you call everything ‘white supremacy,’ the term ceases to have any effect whatsoever.”