Next year a racist country will celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act. Segregation has made a comeback at colleges with racially separate dorms and graduation ceremonies. Corporate employees are expected to join the affinity groups of their race and employers and activists closely scrutinize the race, gender and sexuality of officials, executives and creatives.
Call it wokeness, equity or anti-racism, they all amount to a country that has within a short span of time talked itself into constructing the most racist system since segregation. The sixties were trending away from racism while the twenties are rushing headlong into it. Boomers prided themselves on their tolerance while Zoomers make intolerance into their identity.
Rodgers and Hammerstein had a point with “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught”. Americans have been carefully taught to hate by the highest institutions of learning. No Southern educational institution at the height of slavery could have ever conceived of systemically dedicating entire departments and fields of study to asserting why an entire race must be hated.
A range of academia from ‘Whiteness Studies’ to ‘Critical Race Theory’ does just that. Students can attend Harvard or Yale and come away with little else than the knowledge that white people are a primeval evil and that everything they have built must be destroyed. When they graduate, they find lucrative careers in the DEI industry, in the media, in entertainment and in academia.
Popular culture is even worse. Minstrel shows displayed contempt for black people and blackface has been treated as entertainment’s original sin even though black people took their turn being ridiculed along with a panoply of outsiders, the Irish, the Swedes, the Jews, who were reduced to comical or grotesque stereotypes in vaudeville and in low culture. But with a few exceptions, such as ‘Birth of a Nation’, few movies actively sought to inculcate racial hatred.
That’s no longer the case. Hollywood abounds with racially remixed counterparts to ‘Birth of a Nation’: many of which have even received Oscar nominations or awards in recent years.
In a little over a decade America has become a racist country by becoming convinced that inverting racism would do away with it. The old virtues of tolerance, color-blindness and equality have been dismissed as racist, but the new anti-racism that reduces everyone to their race, that makes all of our lives revolve around race, has made racism ubiquitous by renaming it.
Americans have become incredibly racist while remaining convinced that they are anti-racist. Anti-racism has taught a generation that the less racist they are, the more unconsciously racist they must be, and that the more publicly racist they are, the less secretly racist they become.
Anti-racism appeared to have arrived with a precipitous suddenness, but that is only because it was quietly winning the debate that arose after the splintering of the segregation debate between the integrationists, like Martin Luther King, and the black nationalists, like Malcolm X. To see who won the debate, don’t bother looking at a calendar, look at the culture. MLK may have his holiday and his statues, but it’s the black nationalist opponents of integration who won.
While liberals championed MLK, leftists joined with black nationalists to build the domestic terrorist movements that tore apart the country before its members went into academia. Black Lives Matter, styled as the successor to the civil rights movement, consciously links not to MLK, but to black nationalist terrorist Assata Shakur. The police defunding movement can be traced to another black nationalist domestic terrorist Angela Davis. MLK may have a holiday, but very little of what he preached survives. “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,” has been dismissed and in some cases outright sandblasted out of existence.
Ibram X. Kendi’s anti-racism, Ta-Nehisi Coates, ‘Dear White People’, ‘Get Out’ are where it’s at. When Gov. DeSantis jettisoned an AP black history course that included Amiri Baraka, a black nationalist poet whose most famous verse was, “Rape the white girls. Rape / their fathers. Cut the mothers’ throats”, Democrats and their media erupted in outrage, not at Baraka’s racism, but at Florida’s refusal to let it gain a further foothold in its educational system.
The ascension of the Left in academia and politics swamped the fossilized remnants of tolerance and integration. Empowered black nationalists and leftists swiftly demolished them when they rose to power in the Obama era. And what replaced them was the new racism.
Obama began the process of publicly redefining racism to mean hatred toward black people while dismissing racism toward white people as “reverse racism”. Since then racism has been widely redefined by dictionaries, academics and the media to mean power. Only certain people, that is to say white people and those minorities accused of being “adjacent to whiteness”, can be racist. Replacing hate with power has made woke racists certain that their hate is virtuous. They’re not racist anymore, they’re anti-racist: hating to defeat the power of the real racists.
Anti-racism has taken a 360 degree turn from racism and imagines it’s headed somewhere new.
Where equality failed, equity will succeed, DEI tells us. But what does success look like? Equality sought to raise up minorities while equity tears white people down. Anti-racism insists that equality hasn’t worked because white people unconsciously and institutionally repress black people. White racism is embedded into how people think and everything they do. There’s no way to achieve equality for black people without destroying everything that white people built.
This deranged racist paranoia, worthy of a schizophrenic, has become the official position of the Democratic Party, leading educational institutions and the commanding heights of the culture. Every problem is reducible to white evil at a societally microscopic level and will only end when it is rigorously purged at an equally microscopic level from the psychological to the institutional.
A post-racial society is racist, but a racialist society, one that reduces everything to race, that can discover race in everything, is the only hope of producing equity, DEI practitioners tell us.
Anti-racism claims that it is rigorously scrutinizing everything, history, science, manners, body language, tropes, literature, highways, religion and fashion, to purge it of its racism when it is actually infusing racism into every area of life. The search for systemic racism isn’t discovering racism, it’s creating it. Anti-racialism racializes non-racist institutions into racist ones.
The pursuit of systemic racism has created its own infrastructure of actual systemic racism dedicated to enforcing racial quotas, demanding fealty to racist ideas and eliminating literature, art, laws, individuals, science, and entire ways of doing things because they are ‘white’.
Anti-racism is just racism misspelled with the traditional roles reversed. Like generals who make war for peace, anti-racists wage racism to end racism. But the opposite of racism is still racism.
Hating people to end hate works as well as any other way to save the world by destroying it.
Anti-racism creates monsters by pursuing them because it is a mirror image of everything it opposes. Black nationalists were motivated by racism. Leftists were convinced that only a complete overthrow of society could make the world into a just place. Anti-racism is the bastard child of racism and revolution. Its unhappy marriage of tribal paranoia and academic theory, otherism and power analysis, has festered into the paranoid racist theories of wokeness.
Liberals revolted against monarchy and other forms of tyranny under the banner of liberty. Leftists argued that the problem wasn’t tyranny, but the wrong sort of tyranny. The right kind of tyranny, a dictatorship of the proletariat, would be the only solution to class inequities. In the Civil Rights movement, liberals offered tolerance as the antidote to bigotry, but leftists argued that the problem wasn’t racism, but the wrong kind of racism. Now, just as the right sort of tyranny was tried in Russia and China, the right sort of racism is being tried in America.
Using racism to foment hate was the left’s greatest discovery post-Lenin (I know for certain that there was talk of exploiting racism in the 1920s to foment division in enemy countries but so far I haven’t come across any Lenin quotes in that area.)
It has to do with idiosyncrasies of perception, the brain uses checking algorithms to quickly identify friend or foe (checking algorithms being orders of magnitude more efficient for that purpose). Then people of a certain color or type of clothes they wear or whatever get grouped together because of the way they look.
No doubt your description our inner algorithm that quickly assesses is true. What happens AFTER that should be some better analytical thinking (if enough information is present). But lack of critical thinking seems to have been perfectly inculcated in the young. It is hard to think, but I do not see how we survive without it.
Thanks Kynarion, I may have been the first to propose that hypothesis back in the 1980s. Not through any virtue of my own, just that I got interested in problems of perception in 1967, and spent decades trying to get Berkeley psychology types to explain it to me without any luck. Then in 1982 my Prof. told me about checking algorithms and such (he may have been the first or at least one of the first to know about them) and somehow I connected the dots.
“…spent decades trying to get Berkeley psychology types to explain it to me without any luck.”
Bud, that’s because they have no clue. Jerry Pournelle called it and polysci the “Voodoo sciences.” He was an engineer.
I’m picking up that “Inner algorithm.” Those get honed it rough neighborhoods, lol.
Thanks Cowboy, they really did have no clue.
Some treated it as a game, pontificating as if they were experts, without understanding what they were saying.
Others got very upset because I didn’t follow rigorously the orthodox Freudian definitions, as if they were gospel carved in stone.
Class wasn’t working in America anymore because of the upward social and economic mobility, so the Left had to focus on race.
Thanks Daniel, excellent point.
True. The communists didn’t belive we could put such labor saving devices as clothes washers, dryers, and dishwashers in every home, when they couldn’t even put a chicken in every pot. They didn’t believe a pauper could become a prince by their own productive efforts.
I worked for a left wing magazine in the early 1980s. The articles were written for critical thinkers. Although I was not completely on board with some conclusions, I respected my cohorts. It appears left wing writers today parrot stale phrases and radical compliant orthodoxy needing to appeal to their vacuous audience — or else. Today liberals cannot sustain their movement without tyrannical tactics.
You have to admit that it’s working admirably well.
Great article Daniel, it’s a pity so few journalists have your ability.
“ Equality sought to raise up minorities while equity tears white people down. ”
This is indicative of something psychological that I don’t fully understand. I had the same thoughts growing up and a friend has them still. He won’t have his car repaired in town because all the mechanics are dumb, but he travels just 10 miles to the next town and they are brilliant. Local man bad, distant man good.
My brother in law has an obsession with red indians (almost certain to get me cancelled) they can do no wrong, they were the perfect people before us whites arrived.
English people flying our flag are racist, Welsh, Scottish, Irish people flying their flags are expressing their individuality.
If you want to attack a society, you look for divisions. And you wedge them further open. That way they can launch a takeover in their name.
Class, race, nationality, etc, always lots of options and people can be convinced to identify with the ‘outsiders’.
That’s what the Left does. It’s key to its history and successes.
I can’t think of a single instance where liberal moderates have prevailed once things get to this stage. Their record is not encouraging. People only unite under competent leadership or in times of crisis. For example under Covid we had remarkable compliance under Trump’s Covid war leadership on every issue that mattered to the war effort.
I should say Trump/Fauci leadership because Trump doesn’t really lead on anything besides media trolling and massive Obama busting spending records.
Your TDS is astounding. President Trump, IMO, is the most successful leader and president we have had. And all you do is mock, repeat leftist slogans insulting him, and divide, divide, divide. And to do this silly repetitive TDS tick of yours in a comment on an article of this Importance. That shows how harmful it is to divide. Just shameful.
Unite around the Unibrow Party if you want. There’s a reason Trump and Lindsay Graham are thick as thieves and he endorses every RINO under the sun,
Some of us have already seen how this ends elsewhere.
Absolutely true. Proverbs 10: 11-12 sums it up well. The mouth of the righteous is a fountain of life, but the mouth of the wicked (conceals violence. ) (Hatred stirs up conflict, but love covers over all wrongs. ) Hatred and anti-semitism are tools used to create divisions and wars. .
That was a fascinating oddity of history. In the late 1800s I think it was, continental Europeans had a fascination with the American West, particularly the Germans. I think academics have tried to figure it out without coming to agreement. There was one writer, German I think, who wrote hugely popular books about “Old Shatterhand” (a word Americans would never use), who was supposedly an American gunman, even though the author may never have even been to USA. Maybe his name was Karl May.
(I was replying to Mo regarding the European fascination with Red Indians. Some academics have traced that back to Karl May and his books about Old Shatterhand.)
Hitler actually wanted to plan battles around May’s books.
But if you consider that the far left and the far right both worshiped the ideal of the noble savage, it makes a lot of sense.
Thanks again Daniel, that’s another strange historical twist.
Far right? Ayn Rand was far right. Hitler was as far left as Stalin.
I got a new insight just now. A lot of these rebellions and such are the rebellion of primitive man (the noble savage) against the restrictions of logic and reason.
Thanks Alg, I’ll look him up, it might explain the dilemma
You might also look at the idealised and romanticised view of nature that was fashionable in France around the time of the revolution that still reverberates today.
They even renamed months of the year.
https://www.britannica.com/list/the-12-months-of-the-french-republican-calendar
Thanks Una, my knowledge of the French Revolution is weak, except what I’ve picked up tangentially studying military history.
Hello Daniel. As George Orwell might have said: “All racism is equal, but some is more equal than others”.
Interestingly, you say: “Students can attend Harvard or Yale and come away with little else than the knowledge that white people are a primeval evil and that everything they have built must be destroyed. When they graduate, they find lucrative careers in the DEI industry, in the media, in entertainment and in academia..”
Well, I can say I have had a head start in being pictured as a “primeval evil”.. As a Polonian – my father was a Polish para, fighting in the Polish Army (on the Allied Side I now have to add, such is the spin on the history of WW2) – so I have been put on the “unter” page (dis)courtesy of the most powerful media and academe in the world for decades now.
Poland has suffered a lot at the hands of both Left and Right, so I do not put my faith in any system of human government. As the Hebrew Scriptures warn, we were not designed to rule over each other..
America does not have race problem.
America has a problem race.
Are we sure it’s black nationalists, or is it black muslims? There is no sign of nationalism in what we see today.
On the other hand hate, violence, absolute lack of logic and reasoning, anti-Jew, anti-Christian, anti-Western Culture, the urge for destroying everything “others” have built that one is not capable of, a lust for absolute power, no compromise, bullying “others,” And many other colorful traits are sure tenents of islam. Something we see clearly in all of “black movement” today.
Racism is just an excuse and cover up word. Deception, lies and brainwash are another islamic strategies.
Why do islamic terrorist groups such as Iranian government and MB praise this movement. It serves them right to use their agents for destroying all of western civilization.
Do any of the so called black leaders have ties to NOI or black panthers and their sub-groups. The correct answer is there.
The problem is not the common black criminals who get what their deserve because of who they are and how they behave. It’s the leaders with ties to foreign islamic groups who are the true enemies of all of humanity.
The solution is not reasoning, logic or debates. It’s a heavy dose of islmist’s own medicine. Nothing short of a civil war can save the free world. That’s the only language the savages understand, and history proves it’s the only strategy that works.
White people, who’ve been the large majority of demographic in the US, have allowed this to happen. Where on earth has a minority turned things around and attacked the large majority, and are winning? Blacks are emboldened by this climate of hate towards white people. Biden throws gasoline on the fire every time he speaks about it. This imbecile talks about race as if we still lived in 1950.
Covid vaccines for minority’s (blacks) first, blacks get admittance into hospitals, regardless of the severity of the illness, over whites. Biden and General Milley talking about “white rage” and ridding white supremacy, as if it were widespread and an actual threat. You had blacks pummeling Asians, pushing them into on coming subway trains with all the video showing this. Yet, the media and Biden talked about Asian hate crimes as if it were white people assaulting Asians.
As Daniel pointed out we have our own colleges and universities allowing segregated dorms and graduations for blacks, separate “safe spaces” designated for blacks only. You have blacks outright rewriting history with the 1619 Project packed with lies about America and white people. You have corporations hiring blacks for employment and promotions with goals of a 30% increase in their dept’s.
I could go on a rant. My blood pressure is already going through the roof with this BS. A racist country where every brown and black from around the world risk life and limb to come to.
There’s still plenty of “ systemic racism to go around. The system of affirmative action with separate academic standards for blacks, separate curricula, (white studies, black studies, race studies) separate dormitories and even separate graduation ceremonies, (and a separate Black National Anthem).
Liberals denigrate any African American who does not toe their party line telling them that if they don’t vote for the latest Democrat presidential candidate “you ain’t black”. The left ignores every black life lost to black-on-black violence in every Democrat controlled city in America .
The welfare state has destroyed the black family, paying women to have more fatherless babies out of wedlock and dumping them onto the welfare rolls while keeping them in poverty.
More than all these others combined, the left promotes abortion to the black community with the result that abortion is the leading cause of Black death; more than all the others combined. In some communities more black babies are aborted than are born.
This is systemic racism.
When I went to Europe to study abroad, I once was a guest at a home in a rural area. The father was perhaps a former soldier in an NS army, and he felt spite toward the conquerors of his country. He took the initiative to tell me, Americans are the worst racists in the world. I tried to be tactful and merely said there are good and bad people everywhere, but he persisted. I was never invited there again despite my attempted tactful response. Now, I think perhaps what he said is coming true in a different way than he meant. Perhaps he meant that the Jim Crow system lived on in America, and I believed it was not so. But now there really does seem to be a growing racism in America of a different sort, one that that man and liberals in America did not anticipate. The racism described in this article, reverse racism targeting new demons and demonizing people arbitrarily in the new identity politics. One can even hear it in the speeches of our president and politicians and media people all the way down in society, politics and academia. So, it seems that man long ago was right in a way he and I did not foresee.
The Civil Rights “movement’ and laws are unconstitutional. The 14th Amendment has destroyed the US Constitution. It was passed by threatening the Southern States with further retribution from the North during Reconstruction. The Federal Government should be limited to the short list of duties it is specifically given in the Constitution. The 10th Amendment then returns all rights to the States or “The People”. I know it sounds horrible but Jim Crow laws are legal. It takes education, not a Federal dictatorship to right those wrongs. You know. That old slippery slope humans are known for.
We really need to retire the phrase “reverse racism”. It’s racism pure and simple, whether it involves whites discriminating against blacks, or blacks discriminating against whites, or purples discriminating against blues. Let’s just call it what it is and let the chips fall where they may.
There is so much truth and clarity in this article. It should be required reading in every college classroom, but of course it won’t be.
The article hollows out the bankrupt racial reasoning of the Left and peels off its intellectual veneer — designed to imbue this “right racism” with legitimacy.
We should also note that this “right sort of racism” — call it ‘white nationalism’, ‘white supremacy’ or any of the left’s preferred racially divisive terms — is now wedded to the “right sort of censorship.” The “right sort of censorship” is morally justifiable if it censors ‘hate speech’ or any speech that is deemed ‘disinformation.’
The “right sort of racism” combined with the “right form of censorship” are the weapons used by progressives to destroy the American creed. It’s American Marxism at work.