An Observation on the Imperialists
I’m Mexican by descent. Well, half; my dad was Mexican, my mom’s white. I’m from farm country, the viñas in Fresno County in Central California. The town I grew up in is over 80% Mexican, and…whatever. I could keep going and going. My point is just that, I’m half and aware of being half, but by and large I’ve been ‘identified’ as Mexican by everyone I know my whole life. One day I’ll break out the pictures for you.
Not that any of this matters in and of itself. It’s never mattered. But here we are in 2022, and it does matter now.
Before I moved to northern AZ in the spring of 2020, I spent about 10 years on the CA Central Coast, most of that in San Luis Obispo County. As a self-employed person and because of my work in the marketing world, I spent a lot of time in and around the business community there.
SLO County is almost 90% white, and, in my experience, the white population there is overwhelming wealthy, elite, educated, progressive, and secular. Now that’s only my experience, but isn’t it the “lived experiences” of “POC’s” that are evidently the definers of all reality and history?
Anyways, I spent the first 25 years of my life as a ‘Mexican’ around other Mexicans in the Central Valley, and then the last 10 years on the Central Coast around mostly white people (there are some unaccounted-for years in there that aren’t my focus here). And it’s anecdotal, I know, but I have ‘felt’ a major, major difference in those two environments in one specific respect: the people I grew up around (cf. Mexicans) were overwhelmingly A) religious in some sense, and B) held traditional values regarding things like gender, marriage, family, children, etc. And those people evidently haven’t changed, if my Facebook feed is any indication.
Conversely, the overwhelming majority of the white people who have made up the bulk of my environment over the past 10 years have been overwhelmingly A) secular—ranging from indifferent to antagonistic in their disposition toward religion—and, B) progressive in their values regarding things like gender, marriage, family, children, etc.
And I’m a religious person. Not because I’m Mexican (although most Mexicans are), but because I became persuaded of the truth of protestant, evangelical, reformation Christianity at the age of 25 after I left home in Central CA. To everyone I still stay in touch with or have been able to connect with back home, my Christianity is, to differing degrees, a good, respectable thing. I cannot think of a single exception to that among any of those “who look like me.”
But man, let me tell you, it is a different ballgame in that white, secular, progressive environment on the Central Coast. I’ve had a lot of coffee and one-on-ones, a lot of business meetings, stood in a lot of small circles with three, four, or five of them, and been in a lot of rooms where I’m the only “POC.” And I’ve never once felt threatened by them as a “POC”—but I absolutely have felt the temperature drop in nearly every single instance in which I’ve ever mentioned that I’m a Christian around those people in any of those environments.
• • •
A few years back I started a little merch line called Califas Apparel (if you know, you know; look it up, I won’t explain it here). One of my supporters was Danny de la Paz, Big Puppet from American Me, a movie that is basically a meme of my teenage years and was the equivalent for us in its classic weight of something like “Gone With the Wind.” And I didn’t know about “Gone With the Wind” for the first 25 years of my life, but I knew Big Puppet. Anyways, I got too busy and couldn’t keep it up, though it still exists and orders still trickle in here and there. But my point is this: if you check out the home feed on my Califas Apparel Instagram—which is followed 99.99% by people who are like me and grew up just like me—and scroll through it for just three minutes, you will find very quickly that Mexicans still believe that men are men and women are women; that religion is not only good, but important; that fatherhood and children are important; and a number of other things that at least cohere with traditional values and religious belief that I won’t take time to mention.
But among white, progressive, secular, elites? They will gladly cut you off from your livelihood for believing (for example) that men are men and women are women, because they don’t believe that. Those are the people who say that you’re backwards if you believe that pregnant women carry real people in their wombs, actual people who inherently possess humanity, life, and personal dignity by virtue of their existence—or, in non-technical terms, that there’s a baby in there and it’s precious—and that it’s a moral monstrosity to, say, dismember them alive while they’re in their mother’s womb. And I have been called backwards for believing that, by the way, by—wait for it—a roomful of white, secular, progressive elites. Those are the people who stop talking to you if your religious beliefs have actual bearing on your day-to-day life (because their secular beliefs clearly have no bearing on their day-to-day lives, clearly). Those are the people who don’t respect you because they don’t find religion respectable.
In other words, the thing that I have found so incredibly, frustratingly, hypocritically ironic about the whole anti-establishment trend in the United States today is that it is overwhelmingly spearheaded by white, western, elite, privileged, rich, progressive, secular people. At least that has been my experience.
• • •
Back in 2015 or 2016, I read portions of the results of a massive study on American attitudes on a huge range of topics. I don’t recall off-hand what that study was or who it was by, and am not going to take the time right now to try to track it down, but it was released that year—2015 or 2016—and was massive and detailed in its scope, as well as in its breakdown of the data. The portion I read was a ‘preview’ release of…I don’t know, 50 pages or so. To view the full study required a purchase, and it wasn’t cheap; the number was well over $100, if I’m remembering correctly. Maybe someone reading this post knows what I’m talking about and can link to that study…
In any case, part of the preview release contained the section (or a portion of the section) related to American attitudes on religion and covered, again, a huge range of topics. I obviously don’t recall the details, but there was a question on ‘Do you believe the Bible is the Word of God?,’ and the statistics were roughly this: 75% of African-Americans answered in the affirmative, Hispanics were second with 50%, and whites were last with only 25%. That was a statistical pattern that held throughout that section on religion.
In other words, in the United States, white people are the least religious.
(As another interesting side note, the study also broke the data down into location, and the greatest concentrations of white, secular people are found in the major coastal cities on the West Coast and in the northeast.)
Today, I came across a similar study bearing similar statistics. The most religious people are the so-called “BIPOCs”—a term I’ve been called before and find incredibly insulting, by the way, so don’t ever call me that; that’s your term, not mine—and the least religious people are white. On top of that, women across the board are significantly more likely to be religious than men.
So here we have a society full of white people who view themselves as the saviors, the Great Champions and Defenders, of oppressed people of color (and of women, for whom they have apparently constructed a special future). Yet it is those same, exact people—those white, elite, secular people—who are opposed, above all other things, to the primary thing that most people of color hold most dear, and that women are more likely to hold most dear.
• • •
Now, don’t get me wrong. There are two things I’m not saying here. First, I’m not saying that there are no progressive, secular “people of color.” Doubtless there are plenty, and there have been a few in my own experience. Second, I am not saying white people are the problem. On the contrary, that’s what the secular, progressive left says, and I despise that idea and repudiate it entirely. Nothing could be more false, more historically or factually nonsensical, or more materially racist. I hate that idea, and I repudiate it.
And let me just say for the record that, if you affirm that, you are no friend of mine, regardless of how “anti-racist” you think yourself to be.
What I am saying is that there is a worldview issue at stake in society right now, and that is the real source of the conflict and division we are seeing.
And right at the heart of that worldview divide is a disagreement over epistemological realities. One “side” essentially believes that God really does exist and is an actual person in the technical sense of the term, and as such, he has his own values which are, by nature of the case (seeing as how he’s God), regulating and binding in some sense. The other “side” holds that religion is, on the one hand, entirely and ultimately a matter of personal preference and opinion, and on the other hand, a question of abstract theories that have no implicit or applicative bearing on day-to-day life. To the progressive mind, the issue of favorite colors has more practical, functional impact on your life than your religion.
Unfortunately, the reality is that how you live your life is the natural outflow of what you believe about what the world really is. A few simple cases to illustrate the point: your favorite color determines a lot of your buying decisions, and sometimes which wallpaper you use on your smartphone; what you believe about electricity determines your behavior—and your counsel to others—around light sockets; etc. Well, so it is with your belief in God.
I have always found it surprising that CA Senator Diane Feinstein had the audacity to charge then-Supreme Court appointee Amy Coney Barrett with the following statement: “When you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws, is that the dogma lives loudly within you. And that’s of concern.” As if Senator Feinstein somehow does not live in this world in accordance with her own sincerely-held presuppositional beliefs about deity, humanity, and the nature of the world itself. What’s really of concern is that we live in a society where a prominent politician can make a ridiculously-dangerous and irrational statement of that magnitude in front of hundreds of millions of people, and no one seems to be able to see the issue clearly enough to call her on it—presumably because our society has, by and large, bought the idea that religion is nothing more than an abstract, inconsequential preference. That is of concern, and it doesn’t bode well for the future of freedom of religion in the United States.
But, of course, if religion is what a significant percentage of white people in the U.S. say it is, including Senator Feinstein—namely, an abstract theory involving nothing more than preferences that are of less practical consequence than your favorite color—then who cares what happens to freedom of religion.
• • •
We are way off-topic, but that last paragraph has brought us back on course.
We don’t need to conduct formal research to find out what “BIPOCs” in the United States believe about God and traditional values. But if we do conduct that research, the conclusions corroborate our lived experience—at least my own—namely, that people of color are overwhelmingly religious and hold to traditional values regarding things like gender, marriage, parents, and children.
And we haven’t talked about people in Mexico, where my own family is from. Or the rest of Central and South America. Or Africa. Or the Middle East. Or Asia. We’re only talking about people of color in the U.S. at this point.
(In fact, we have a kind of inverse instance of this even in the reprehensible example of someone like Snoop Dogg. His music, particularly his first solo album, was a big part of the soundtrack of my teenage years. I still remember all the words to so many of his songs, even though it’s been over 20 years since I’ve listened to any of them. But our point is that, we have an example in the misogyny, authentic toxic masculinity, and an extreme-objectification of women in Snoop Dogg that simply does not make sense apart from traditional views of gender and sexuality, even as it is a gross perversion of those views. How the left has allowed someone like Snoop Dogg to become a venerated hero in the cancel-culture, anti-gun-violence, save-women age of our current society completely blows my mind. It’s difficult to describe in words the twisted, self-defeating, hypocrisy of this—but again, we’re off-topic…)
Yet, here we are, in 2022. It’s been 530 years since the unfortunate traversal of the ocean blue by that elite, progressive white man Christopher Columbus, which was the symbolic mark of the beginning of imperialism when European elites broke in and imposed on everyone else, forcing their beliefs and values on people of color the world over, telling them to get in line or else.
And the current state of things in the west today is identical to that imperialistic situation that progressives claim to hate so much: a small minority of white, privileged, elites of European ancestry, forcing their beliefs on all the rest of us—not just here in the U.S., but all over the entire world—or else.
They have set themselves up as the measure by which all peoples now and throughout all of human history are measured, and the standard by which all are judged and to which all must be corrected.
• • •
Again, as I’ve said above, the problem is not white people. I’m half-white. My mom is white, my wife is white, etc., etc., etc. I reject entirely the dangerous, baseless, and false idea on the left that says that white people are the problem; in point of fact, it’s out of that rejection that I’m writing now.
What I am saying is this: white, progressive, secular elites say that they are opposed to imperialism, and that they are committed to paying proper penance for their sins against people of color. Yet, in the irony of all ironies, what we have in our society today is a resurgence of imperialism on the progressive left. We have a minority of white, progressive, secular elites who are forcing their idiosyncratic views—views that are specific to their particular subculture, and that are borne nowhere else except out of their own worldview—on the entirety of the rest of the world, a world which is predominantly full of colored people who, by and large, do not share their beliefs.
In light of this, here is a request for all the racist imperialists: Stop forcing your beliefs on me, and allow me to live out my beliefs in peace and freedom.