Identity politics devolves into a joke

Here’s a bad, almost cruel, joke, but nevertheless a pointed and important one:

Two men met on the street.  One looked very angry.

“What’s the problem?” asked the first man of his friend.

“I’m r-r-really a-a-ngry,” he stuttered.  “I app-ap-applied for a j-j-job as an an-an-announcer at the-the-the r-r-r-radio s-s-station and they t-t-turned me-me-me d-d-d-own.”

This statement was followed by a long pause, after which the stutter reached his own conclusions about what had happened:

“D-d-d-damned an-an-antisemites!”

With this joke in mind, please read Dennis Prager’s column today.  He talks about the racial identity politics that led to Biden’s presence at the WH beerfest.  Contrary to what you and I might have thought (I thought that the ever congenial Joe wasn’t going to be left out of a party), his presence there was a deliberate effort to ensure that the white guy (Crowley) was not unbalanced photographically by two black guys.  Joe was a prop.  (As an aside, that’s probably Joe’s best role.)

From there, Prager riffs into the liberal obsession with prejudice that it believes permeates every aspect of American.  He then relates an anecdote he tells black callers who assure him that chronic racism exists, yet are unable to provide examples of its appearance in their own lives.  Prager’s true story uncannily tracks my 50 year old joke:

Years ago driving home from synagogue, both my sons and I were wearing yarmulkes, or skull caps. A convertible car filled with young boys sped past me and yelled into the car “F— you” and called my wife a “b—ch.”

I then said to my family, “I have finally experienced anti-Semitism in America.”

I decided to follow the car and, to my shock, they screamed the same obscenities at other cars, none of whose occupants were discernibly Jewish.

It turned out that the event was not what I was certain, and had every reason to believe, was an example of anti-Semitism, but just an example of young thugs acting thuggish.

So here’s the teachable moment: Harvard historian Louis Gates talked back to a police officer because he was treated as a suspect when he felt he should not be, given his fame as a Harvard professor. The professor was certain that the only possible explanation for such treatment was that he, Gates, was a black and the officer just another racist white policeman. The professor was wrong. The president was wrong. The press is wrong. Liberals are wrong. Even most blacks are wrong.