PrintWhat view on race does the Elizabeth Warren campaign share with apartheid South Africa?
The answer: a really important and deeply racist one. Specifically, Asians can be “honorary whites.”
The racist South African regime, which enraged the civilized world and ultimately fell, acted on pragmatic grounds and granted “almost all” rights and privileges of whites to a growing list of Asians, starting with the Japanese (who were very good customers for South African mineral exports). Similarly, the Warren campaign appears to have had a practical motive in mind in classifying Asian billionaires as white: in order to hype her criticism of the United States as “racist.” She expects political profit from false accusations of racism.
Photo by Gage Skidmore
Peter Hasson explains for the Daily Caller News Foundation:
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s campaign website labeled Asian-American, Indian-American, Iranian-American and Pakistani-American billionaires as “white.”
The Massachusetts senator’s campaign website includes a page on “wealth inequality,” which featured a since-deleted graphic breaking down the 400 wealthiest Americans by race. The graphic included three categories: black, white and Latino (the campaign uses the left-wing term “Latinx”).
Wait a minute! Hasn’t Warren heard that there are “white Hispanics” ever since George Zimmerman was falsely accused of murdering Trayvon Martin. The New York Times invented the term. Latino or Latinx is the same as Hispanic - a linguistic characteristic, not a racial one.
According to the graphic, only six of the top 400 wealthiest Americans are non-white — but that’s not accurate. The campaign appears to have classified at least 14 American billionaires of Asian, Indian, and Middle-Eastern descent as “white.”
A Daily Caller News Foundation review of Forbes’ list of the 400 wealthiest Americans, which the campaign relied on for its findings, includes many non-white billionaires the Warren campaign classified as “white.”
Pierre Omidyar, for example, is ranked 36th on the Forbes list. Omidyar, the founder of eBay, is the son of Iranian immigrants. Pakistani-American billionaire Shahid Khan, the owner of the NFL’s Jacksonville Jaguars, is number 61 on the list. Number 85 on Forbes’ list is Patrick Soon-Shiong, who was born in South Africa to Chinese parents.
Taiwanese immigrant David Sun, the co-founder of Kingston Technology, is number 119 on the Forbes list with a net worth of $5.5 billion. Sun is tied at 119 on the list with his business partner, Chinese immigrant John Tu.
Unconsciously, the Warren campaign is declaring that Asians are white because they are, on average and at the high-income end of the spectrum, successful earners. Identifying financial success with Caucasian status is as racist a belief s one can imagine.
As is obvious to anyone who is honest, so-called “racism” is not enough to preclude individual or collective success given the opportunities our market economy provides. Asians have historically been seriously discriminated against in this country, including exclusion of Chinese immigration in the 1920s, and internment of Japanese Americans in the 1940s (thanks to Democrats FDR and California Governor Earl Warren – no relation to Liz). The "anti-racism" industry, however, cannot admit this. Thus, the scramble to define Asians as white.
