The viral description making the rounds, however, reads, “Michelle Obama says she is mindful to try to avoid white-owned brands…”
The question is whether what she actually said matches that description.
Let’s find out. Watch:
Credit: @EndWokeness/X.com
At a superficial glance, just hearing her words verbatim, you’d probably have to say the viral description isn’t entirely fair. Nowhere does she explicitly say “don’t shop at white-owned brands.” Nowhere does she say “shop at black-owned brands and not white-owned brands.”
[snip]
But here’s the problem: she injects race into the decision. She’s saying, “If I like their stuff, and if it’s black-owned, then I especially want to buy it.” And when she says, “If you have the money to buy Chanel, you have the money to buy everybody,” she very carefully stops short of finishing the sentence. She doesn’t say “black-owned brands.” She says “everybody.”
What she’s doing is trying to privilege the black-owned brand while avoiding the explicit consequence of that choice. She wants to be a racial identitarian when it comes to the positive act of buying — of supporting a business — but she doesn’t want to be a racial identitarian when it comes to the negative act of not shopping somewhere else.
[snip]
It’s a kind of gobbledygook. And that’s why, ultimately, I think the viral description is basically fair, even if it’s not perfectly precise.
It’s like the IQ bell curve meme. At one end, people say she told people not to shop at white stores. In the middle, it’s “she said to shop at black stores but also shop at white stores.” And at the other end, what she’s really saying is: shop less at white stores. Her minor premise is wrong. She says if you have the money to buy Chanel, you have the money to buy everybody.
That’s simply not true. Money is a finite resource. Just because you can afford one expensive brand doesn’t mean you have infinite money. And even if you did have infinite money, you have finite closet space. You have a finite number of dresses you’ll wear. A finite number of days in the week. Where are you going to wear all these clothes?
[snip]
But affirmative action in practice means something very concrete. There are a finite number of spots at a university. A finite number of jobs. When you give an advantage to black people simply for being black, you are necessarily disadvantageous to someone else — often white people, or Asian people in the case of college admissions. There is discrimination happening. There is an injustice that comes with that, too.
The same logic applies here. When you say, “I’m going to shop at the black brand,” you are necessarily saying that, at the margin — the last dress that fits in your closet — you are not going to shop at the white brand. You are choosing not to go into that shop, not because you dislike the dress, but because of the race of the person who owns it.
That is discrimination on the basis of race. That’s what Michelle Obama is saying — without saying it. She doesn’t want to go all the way, but there is no other conclusion you can reach from her premises.
[snip]
Dr. King famously said, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
And yet his successors say that in order to achieve that dream, we need affirmative action, DEI, and diversity ideology. Which, in practice, means judging people — especially white people — by the color of their skin.
Taken to its extreme, it means not shopping at white-owned businesses. And even if you agree with MLK’s premise, you are completely undermining it with these practical consequences.
[snip]
Tell people explicitly: shop at black businesses. Don’t shop at white businesses. Define what counts as ownership — 50% plus one ownership? Board seats? Stakeholders? I don’t know. But say it clearly.
And if you’re not willing to say that, then just buy the dress you like.
* Original Article:
https://www.dailywire.com/news/michelle-obama-and-the-logic-of-mindful-shopping