Tucker Carlson Projecting White Supremacy on "Liberals"

Here is some of Tucker Carlson moaning about how liberals are Nazis, from Tucker Carlson Tonight on December 14, 2022:

“So at this point, there are plenty of White people in America who are descended from slaves, and there are plenty of Black people in America who are descended from slave owners.

“So how do you know who qualifies for government reparations? Well of course there is only one way to find out: that is old-fashioned race science. Nazi race science.

“So the state will have to certify the racial purity of its citizens in order to send them money. That’s gonna have to happen. Do we really want to go there? Do we really want to do that? Amazingly, liberals really do.”

– Tucker Carlson, December 14, 2022

There are not a lot of white people descended from African-American people who were enslaved in the United States but they exist.

If we're using the racist "one drop of blood" standard from the United States that inspired the Nazis in the first place to hunt for Jewish people in distant parts of people's family trees, it is possible that nearly everyone has some "African" DNA - there were also other standards.

My 23 & Me test revealed 0.2% traces coming from around Senegal, and another 0.2% from around Kenya. Those, however are from the distant past and definitely did NOT come from victims of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. But for "one drop of blood" standards, I could be African-American - indeed, every human alive has distant ancestors who lived in Africa about 74,000 years ago. Most of my ancestors did not even arrive from Italy until after 1900 (though my paternal grandmother's parents made it to the US before the end of the 19th century)

Other standards used in America allowed persons with non-white ancestry to be considered "white" as long as it was less than 1/8 black - they even had terms for graduated distinctions of "colored" - mulatto for 1/2, quadroon for 1/4 black, and octaroon for 1/8 black - I certainly do not use these terms in ordinary conversation, except to point out the extent of more modern racism and its continuing effects.

I have seen these terms in some racial restrictive covenants that were adopted in connection with farm or estate subdivisions to residential lots, in places like Westchester and Nassau counties in New York (one in particular that comes to mind was a subdivision near Pinebrook Boulevard in New Rochelle).

For example, Thomas Jefferson's rape/relationship with his wife's half sister, the enslaved Sally Hemings (who was a quadroon in this manner of reckoning, with one-quarter African ancestry, (according to Wikipedia) one of many slaves he inherited from his father-in-law, John Wayles. Hemings's mother Elizabeth (Betty) was bi-racial, the child of Susannah, an African woman and Captain John Hemings. Sally's father was John Wayles who was the father of Jefferson's deceased wife Martha. Therefore, she was half-sister to Jefferson's deceased wife and approximately three quarters white.)

Their children were 1/8 black - or octaroons, and (according to Wikipedia) Heming agreed to return with Jefferson from France and return to slavery (as she was technically "free" in France), provided that Jefferson would emancipate their children, despite their being octaroons - while the children's children, if producing children with a white person, would have been considered to be white on their own without further need for emancipation. Regardless of percentage of "blood" all of Sally Hemings descendants would be descendants of slaves under the California proposal.

According to the NY Times on December 1st (revised on December 5th), 2022 (see:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/01/business/economy/california-black-reparations.html

the California task force deciding these things, did not recommend either a "one drop of blood" or a cutoff percentage of "less than 1/8" - which makes it different from old American laws or Nazi race laws. The article states:

Californians eligible for reparations, the task force decided in March, would be descendants of enslaved African Americans or of a “free Black person living in the United States prior to the end of the 19th century.” Nearly 6.5 percent of California residents, roughly 2.5 million, identify as Black or African American.

So - all one would need to do would be to trace a single ancestor to an enslaved African-American, or, since many slave records were poorly kept, to a "free black person living in the US in or prior to 1900."

Not all African-American people will qualify - and perhaps many people would qualify who would otherwise be "white" but for a single free black person living in the US in or before 1900 being an ancestor. At least if people can trace their ancestry to the end of the 19th century they would be able to prove their entitlement.

Needless to say, this 'system' bears no resemblance whatsoever to either Nazi race classification policies or their inspirations from American examples.

Now, let's look at what constituted "black" in America at the end of the 19th century. For me, despite Italian-Americans not being considered "white" in America until after the Second World War, until then, southern Italians and Sicilians were in an intermediate status, grouped with African-Americans in many ways - but for the purpose of these reparations, those who arrived before 1901 would definitely not be considered to be "free black persons."

So I guess it's pretty definite that I won't be entitled to these particular reparations. And I am okay with that.

One sad thing is that racial discrimination against African-Americans that resulted in keeping them "in their place' did not stop at the end of slavery. And even with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, there has still been massive discrimination in many government programs, including the GI Bill and farm subsidies, that have been disproportionally discriminatory against African-Americans.  This California proposal does not appear to address the victims those much more recent disparities and/or their descendants

Even now, attempts to even things up in the agricultural subsidies area have earned the ire of white farmers who see an even playing field as somehow unfair and reverse-racist.

Tucker Carlson and his ilk are merely projecting their own white supremacist views into the discussion, in a terribly confusing and disingenuous way. That very well-meaning California commission is far from "Nazi." The Putin-admiring Tucker, on the other hand, is much closer to that classification.