OPINION:
Once upon a time, the idea of taxing white people for their skin color was the stuff and nonsense of satire — or, at the very least, of the rantings of the radical left, mostly minorities, seeking payback for America’s dark days of slavery and racism. Even then, it was dismissed.
But the idea is moving mainstream.
Believe it or not, there are actual groups of people who seriously think white people are so privileged as to justify creating separate categories of pricing and taxing based on skin color. This goes beyond the normal Democratic-slash-socialist redistribution of wealth schemes that take from the rich to give to the poor — or, more to truth, to give to the non-working, non-producing, snowflake-like class of whiners.
This is bluntly: Pale people pay more.
Who’d have thought America would ever see this day.
Detroit’s AfroFuture music festival organizers are selling early bird concert tickets for “POC,” or people of color, at $10 per piece and early bird tickets for “NONPOC,” or non-people of color — meaning white people — at $20 each.
Why?
“Equality means treating everyone the same,” concert organizers explain on their Eventbrite page. “Equity is [e]nsuring everyone has what they need to be successful. Our ticket structure was built to [e]nsure that the most marginalized communities (people of color) are provided with an equitable chance at enjoying events in their own community (black Detroit).”
Festival organizers, facing death threats, decided this week to drop their pricing scheme and charge an across-the-board $20 per ticket, no matter the purchaser’s color of skin. But the fact that the disparity made it to the sales counter at all is eyeball-raising.
This is blatantly racist.
Not to mention a clear-cut violation of federal Civil Rights’ laws.
Not to mention offensive — and not just to whites. Are we really to believe that blacks aren’t skilled or talented or employed enough to pay for their own concert tickets? Blacks are that inferior?
But there it is, the mindset of today’s misguided American. A race to victimhood. A sick deranged mental disease that’s dangerously spreading.
“[Beto] O’Rourke suggests using tax code to transfer wealth from rich whites to African-Americans,” Fox News reported in May. The Washington Examiner reported it similarly that same month: “Beto O’Rourke: Tax wealthy whites to transfer money to disadvantaged blacks.”
More than two years earlier, in February of 2017, The Daily Caller ran with this headline above a story summarizing another’s opinion piece: “White Men Should Pay 5% Extra in Taxes Because They’re Privileged.”
Taxing whitey.
The viewpoint comes from long-simmering resentments and frustrations over natural and mostly explainable economic disparities that are then exploited by far-left forces seeking political gain and cultural power.
In October 2018, The American Prospect covered the President Donald Trump tax cuts this way: “Think the GOP Tax Cut Was for the Rich? Actually, It Was for the White and Rich.” And that article included this quote, from Jeremi Greer, Prosperity Now’s vice president of policy ad research: “Anytime you concentrate benefits at the top, you are either consciously or unconsciously deciding that you are going to make a larger share of investments in white households,” he said.
In late 2015, Inequality reported on “How Taxes Have Kept Wealth White,” with a story that opened this way: “From the days of slavery to the 21st century rebirth of the poll tax, our tax system has been concentrating wealth at African-American expense.” It includes this quote, from author and then-Delaware Law School teacher Andre Smith: “Slavery as a 100 percent tax on labor remains a principal reason why blacks in America remain disproportionately without wealth to this day. The billions of dollars extracted from slave labor represent tons of missing wealth from the black balance sheet,” he said.
Reparations, anyone?
That’s what several Democrats now seeking the high White House office say is necessary in order to right the wrongs, balance the books, rectify the injustices. And really, what are reparations but another way of taxing whites by a different name?
These are anti-freedom sentiments that preach reliance on government, and that have no basis in this country — in the one country of the world with DNA that recognizes the talents and potential of the individual over that of the collective.
Only when America’s far-left lets go the thinking that this county is inherently racist will minorities come to their senses and both see and realize the fullness of their opportunities.
It’s not skin color that makes the man or the woman — or the money. So what is? Here’s a clue: It’s the seed of God. Which knows no bounds.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley.
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