Few movie stars have been more exalted than Tom Hanks. You'd never expect a guy with his nice-guy branding to get a strong slap in the face in the political arena. But Hanks penned a "guest essay" for The New York Times lecturing on racism, which opened him up for a shaming from the left.
On June 4, Hanks boasted about how he bores people at parties with his historical knowledge but lamented growing up in the schools of Oakland and never hearing a word about the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. It was "systematically ignored, perhaps because it was regarded as too honest, too painful a lesson for our young white ears."
He admitted they were taught about slavery and Harriet Tubman, Crispus Attucks, George Washington Carver, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Ku Klux Klan. It wasn't a "whitewash."
Hanks sounded like a liberal who makes documentaries for CNN: "When people hear about systemic racism in America, just the use of those words draws the ire of those white people who insist that since July 4, 1776, we have all been free, we were all created equally, that any American can become president and catch a cab in Midtown Manhattan no matter the color of our skin, that, yes, American progress toward justice for all can be slow but remains relentless. Tell that to the century-old survivors of Tulsa and their offspring."
Talk about constructing a straw man! Almost no white American who reveres the Fourth of July and feels proud about our racial progress since the Civil War or the Civil Rights Act suggests our history was all sunshine and roses and racial harmony.
Then Hanks was lined up for the dunk tank. On June 13, NPR television critic Eric Deggans penned a piece for their website titled "Tom Hanks Is A Non-Racist. It's Time For Him To Be Anti-Racist." Deggans proclaimed that he liked Hanks and his work ... but as a subhead warned, "He's built a career playing righteous white men."
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https://townhall.com/columnists/timgraham/2021/06/18/nprs-ritual-shaming-of-tom-hanks-n2591147
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