Has America become racist against white people in any way that’s comparable to racial slurs against Black people or Mexicans or anything else? I think, kind of, whiteness — not a phrase I love, but I’m just kind of using it as a placeholder — has been stigmatized in our modern entertainment. And this can come from everything like “Hamilton” — which is a work that artistically, I actually like a lot, but I think can be interrogated racially, to use the left-wing term — to movies like “Black Panther.” “All right, where am I?” “Don’t scare me like that, colonizer.” And if you look at some of the racial politics around that — now, is that the equivalent of hostility of Jim Crow South in the 1950s? No, but is it there? I do think that whiteness, again, has become culturally disfavored, at least in, certainly, elite circles, in recent years. But that doesn’t seem like racial hostility. Like, if you go watch “Gone With the Wind” and you watch the portrayals of slaves in that movie, they are just racist stereotypes. Absolutely. I don’t get that vibe watching American pop culture in the current age, as regards white people. Do you? As I said, I’m not saying — I mean, I just explicitly said I don’t think it’s as extreme as it was in the other direction in the, say, early 20th century. On the other hand, and I cite some data from Annenberg, which is actually using it for opposite purposes of how I’m using it. They look at the demographics of people in every mainstream movie, and white people kind of wind up on the short end of the stick. Now, it is a big culture, obviously. Obviously, Tom Cruise is off being the white fighter pilot hero. “I feel the need — —” “The need for speed.” I’m not saying that doesn’t exist. But I think statistically that tendency is still there. And it’s OK to call that out. Is there any other area in the culture that is actually overtly oppressive? And you can — something that would affect your kids, for instance, in their in everyday life? “Oppressive” is a pretty strong word, so I don’t know that I would go that far, at least as a generality. But again, as whites become another minority in America or just one of many groups, you could see the pressures pushing in that direction over time. We’ve got to recreate a common American culture. And I think that’s frankly tricky, because we’ve had massive amounts of immigration without enough time, in my view, to assimilate them into American mores and values. And you’ve got a lot of people who benefit from creating that division.
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