05/09/2017
A reader in Virginia saw this sign in the northern part of Arlington County, a very nice part of the Washington, D.C. area. He wishes to nominate it for Virtue Signal of the Year.
My reader:
• North Arlington County is over 80 percent Ice People, i.e. white and East Asian. (It would have been way more appropriate to replace the Arabic with Mandarin.) The small number of blacks are middle-class federal-government employees.• A modest three-bedroom house sells for a million or so. A house known to me that was built and sold in 1997 for $350k, was recently purchased by a builder for $740k as a tear-down! Any immigrants living in our neighborhood are not like the Somalis that are ruining, e.g., parts of Maine.
• Arlington County is overwhelmingly liberal (Trump share of the vote less than 18%), and has a many-decades-long history of tolerance — the first Virginia school that integrated is a five-minute walk from my house. I've had children in the local schools for 18 years, and the only "racial" incidents that I know of involve Hispanic gang violence.
• I have not heard of a single anti-immigration/immigrant incident in Arlington County in all my years living here. (I’m sure the owners of these signs could drum something up, but suffice it to say that this is not a hot bed of nativism and xenophobia.
• And why is the middle panel in English? Are English immigrants the target of nativist hate in Arlington County VA? (One could argue it is directed at black Americans, but see above.) Instead, what this is is blatant virtue signaling. If, say, they had taken part of my advice and replaced the English with Mandarin, they would have reached a much larger pool of non-native residents, but where would the fun be in that? At least 80 percent of local residents would have no idea what the sign said or meant. Blessed virtue signaling.
Given all of these circumstances, and knowing my neighbors, I'd like to offer a compromise sign that I think we all could get behind:
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