Bill Maher has had his fill of self-loathing whites, and he has an idea of how to slap it out of them: “If being white is really this toxic for society, let’s tax it.”
On Friday night’s “Real Time” on HBO, Maher said there is an epidemic of “self-loathing” among white liberals that’s not helping anyone. “Lifting up those who society has cheated or forsaken, that’s liberalism,” he said. “Hating all things white is just tedious virtue signaling.”
The comedian went on to jeer comments on Twitter by those he calls the “white sub-genre on the internet.”
“Rosanna Arquette tweeted, ‘I’m sorry I was born white and privileged it disgusts me and I feel so much shame.’ Exactly,” he mocked. “Do you think it’s hard being a black man in a white man’s world? Try being a white woman who feels bad about you being a black man in a white man’s world.”
Maher said that the self-hatred just brings the attention back to themselves.
“White people certainly should acknowledge they’ve had an easier go of it. But black folks are not asking whites to always be flagellating themselves because it makes everything awkward,” he said. “It puts the burden on black people to absolve you. It’s really asking black people to, again, do something for you, forgive me, absolve me, recognize that I’m one of the good white people. Jesus, haven’t black people suffered enough? Slavery, Jim Crow and now I got to make some yuppie feel better about himself.”
He said that if white liberals “really feel this bad about the whole race thing… Let’s tax whiteness.”
“We’ll do it like carbon offsets. We’ll calculate your exact level of white blameness,” he said. “We will come up with just the right dollar figure to offset the exact amount of you being a f—ing loser.”
But seriously, he admitted that racism is number one on the list of bad things America has done, and that we as a country are not done with it. “And yet black and white increasingly intermingle. We get to the finish line on race by just being with each other more.”
Watch his commentary in its entirety in the clip at the top.