This New Woke "Socially Conscious Monopoly" Brings CRT to Ruin Your Fun
Yes, this is, unfortunately, a real game. “Blacks & Whites” is a new form of what WIRED calls “Socially Conscious Monopoly,” or rather, “Woke Monopoly.” Because even your recreation should revolve around Marxist politics. My brother was recently told that he had more privilege than Barack Obama’s daughters, purely because his skin tone happened to be lighter. It seems this new game operates on the same principles. Critical race theory (CRT) is no longer just in school. Now it can ruin your fun, as well!
“Blacks & Whites is similar to Monopoly, but with a twist: The character’s race is crucial to the player’s success in the game. The privilege is clear from the get-go, when white characters are granted a sum of $1,000,000 to go and purchase property with. Black characters, encouraged to pool together their assets in a form of collective action, are given just $10,000 (that’s 40 grand short of the cheapest two properties). In my first turn, playing as a Black character called Rico, I rolled a 10 and landed myself a round detained at the police station. Had I been white, I could have posted $20,000 in bail, rolled again, and pretended it had never happened.
From then on, things only got harder. Players can land on opportunity spaces, draw a card and get an advantage or disadvantage. But card stacks are segregated, and the stack reserved for Blacks contains more bumps in the road than the one for whites. For the first many rounds of the game, Black characters are only allowed to buy property in two of the four property zones (the Ungentrified Zone and Integrated Zone) while white characters can also buy in the remaining two (the Suburban Zone and 1% Zone) from the start—not that I could afford it anyway.”
I sure wish I started off adult life with a million bucks. I wonder what black Americans like Clarence Thomas, who truly started in extreme poverty in a racist area and became a SCOTUS justice, would have to say about this game’s premise. Or Obama, who went to an exclusive Hawaiian high school entirely due to the efforts of white people. And frankly, as we all know, many universities and institutions now have “racial quotas” which they are all-too-eager to fill. I’m not saying racism doesn’t exist—I’m saying racism’s reality looks very different from the nonsense in this game. In fact, this game is itself racist, because it is fixated on the purely external human attribute of skin color.
“There are a few ways to get a foot in the door of the Suburban Zone: buying privately from a white player, jumping at the opportunity to bid at a white player’s bankruptcy auction, or lucking into an opportunity card that permits them to buy there. Additionally, Black players can only buy into the 1% Zone if they own $1 million in assets. A long way up from the starting $10,000.
My own best chance happened when I accidentally applied too much sunscreen, got to play the next three turns as a white player, and was granted $100,000 just because—woo!
‘It addresses something very serious and very not-funny in a way that is extremely antithetical to that—boardgames. It’s family friendly, it’s a fun time, it’s lighthearted,’ says Nehemiah Markos, the Black half of the comedy duo Neversad. The other half is constituted by the ‘very white’ Jed Feiman, and together they take on difficult topics like race and inequality in a humorous way to start conversations about privilege.
‘We thought it could be effective in kind of making people laugh, but also making them think,’ Markos tells me.”
Yes, my sides are aching with laughter. Or maybe it's my stomach cramping with nausea. Hard to tell.
This is one of the problems with all modern art. Artists no longer strive to be original and creative. They simply try to figure out what previous art or entertainment they can corrupt with wokeness. This game is not clever or original. It is CRT Marxism. When is the last time an original script blockbuster movie that wowed with its memorableness came out? When was the last time a poet was celebrated for being a genuinely good poet instead of someone breaking up ugly leftist babble on a page? And now the woke crowd has to ruin Monopoly. Woke Marxists want to monopolize everything.
(Photo courtesy of WIRED.)