Year: 2019

In July of 2016, I published an op-ed in Truthout,  “Changing the Subject from the Realities of Death by Cop,” based on a longer February 2016 blog entry,  “Heather Mac Donald’s Red Herring,” that, among other things, takes issue with the tactic of downplaying the disproportionate shootings of black men by cops by changing the subject to the problem of “black-on-black” crime typical of neoconservative writers. I used Heather Mac Donald’s February 2016 op-ed, “The Myths of Black Lives Matter,” published in The Wall Street Journal, as the paradigm of this tack. The online publication of Mac Donald’s piece in July and my Truthout piece led to a timely appearance on the Project Censored radio program out of Berkeley, California, where I discussed the matter with hosts Mickey Huff and Peter Philips. Mac Donald’s op-ed is based on her book, The War on Cops, published that same year.

At the time, I was defending the Black Lives Matter movement against what I perceived as a rightwing effort to diminish the movement’s moral significance. I accused them of doing this by portraying the reluctance of black leaders and white liberals to admit the crisis of black-on-black crime as revealing more of a commitment to identity politics than to protecting blacks lives against violence. The number of black men dying at the hands of others black men compared to the number of black men dying at the hands of white cops, neoconservatives argued, suggested that a genuine commitment to black lives would reflect a different set of priorities. Since publicly engaging this argument, I have had a change of mind.

Even while I was criticizing Mac Donald and the neoconservative tack, my appreciation for Black Lives Matter had already been diminished by its resort to such tactics as racially-exclusive event organizing and interfering with speaking events focused on other matters. I was troubled when, in July 2015, Black Lives Matter activists commandeered the stage at a town hall event organized by the progressive Netroots Nation conference, interrupting Martin O’Malley in order to push the issue of police killings of black men. This disruptive tactic was used again in August at a pro-Social Security rally in Seattle where Bernie Sanders was speaking. The tactic of disrupting public events runs counter to my civil rights and liberties commitments. I advocate a politics of equality based on individualism; with the exception of social class, exclusivity based on group identity disappears persons into collectivities led by self-appointed leaders or moral entrepreneurs. Moreover, he heckler’s veto interferes with the free exchange of opinion.

Then came the 2014 incorporation of BLM, which had found its voice with the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the Trayvon Martin killing and #BlackLivesMatter, into the larger Movement for Black Lives, which advocates reparations for blacks and dilutes the problem of police violence and economic injustice with postmodernist rhetoric of intersectionality. Even though the larger movement was inspired by a growing awareness of the disproportionate number of black deaths at the hands of police officer, spurred by protests surrounding the shooting of Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, the promise of BLM risked being hijacked by identitarians for other purposes. The loss of focus was evidenced, for example, by the movement taking up the plight of Arabs in the Jewish-occupied territories in Palestine. This move was not only a distraction but resurrected the old tension between black and Jewish communities (see Race, Ethnicity, Religion, and the Problem of Conceptual Conflation and Inflation).

However, it wasn’t until I watched a video on YouTube of linguist John McWhorter using death by cop as an example in interrogating antiracism that I came to understand that, all the other problems of the movement aside, the core premise of Black Lives Matters, namely that death by cop is the work of racial bias in policing, is problematic. The video is an extract of a debate organized by Reason Magazine between McWhorter, an associate professor at Columbia University, and Nikhil Singh, who teaches at NYU, recorded in New York City on November 14, 2018. You can find the full debate on YouTube, but here is the relevant portion:

I want to stress that McWhorter’s argument does not reach the conclusion I reach in the present blog entry but rather pointed me in the direction of that conclusion by questioning the soundness of the claim that racial disparities in death by cop result from cops operating on the basis of anti-black prejudice and hooking this up in an implied but compelling manner to the problem of murder in America’s central cities.

One of the points McWhorter makes that struck me in particular is how we think about black overrepresentation in welfare utilization, an issue I often address in my sociology classes when the subject turns to the problem of poverty. Consider the following statistics gathered at the height of the welfare reform debate in the mid-1990s (from Robert A. Moffitt and Peter T. Gottschalk chapter “Ethnic and Racial Differences in Welfare Receipt in the United States,” in the 2001 book America Becoming: Racial Trends and Their Consequences).

TABLE: Participation Rates of Households in Means-Tested Welfare Programs, 1994–1996 (percent)

	AFDC	Food Stamps	Medicaid	Housing Assistance
Hispanic	11.8	20.1	24.5	9.1
Non-Hispanic White	2.7	5.7	8.3	3.5
Non-Hispanic Black	14.0	23.3	27.0	15.3

I taught introductory sociology as a graduate teaching associate in the mid-1990s, and when conservative students would note black overrepresentation in welfare utilization as evidence of a deficit of black self-reliance, progressive students pushed back by noting that the majority of those on public assistance are white. I would then get into the difference between frequencies and proportions. Both groups of students we able to leave class feeling as if their arguments enjoyed support.

At first it seems as though McWhorter is about to contradict himself, since it sounds like his argument concerning police shootings is that, numerically, more whites are killed by police than are blacks, while at the same time quoting statistics showing that blacks are overrepresented in death by cop incidents. But then he notes that, because poverty affects a greater proportion of black people than white people, and that structural racism is a reasonable explanation for this disparity, disproportionality in welfare utilization is not a remarkable fact. It follows, then, that if poverty makes it more likely for a person to encounter a policeman, and if greater frequency of interactions with the police increases the probability that one will be killed by police, then structural racism, not racially-biased policing, may be the better explanation for black overrepresentation in death by cop.

I made a similar point logic-wise to reporter Paul Srubas in a March 19, 2006 article in the Green Bay Press Gazette concerning racial disparities in drug busts. In Green Bay at that time, statistics showed that blacks were sixteen times more likely to have been arrested for drugs than whites.  Srubas was asking the role of racism in the pattern of arrests. “I don’t think cops are being consciously racist,” I responded; “it’s a product of where they are patrolling.” And where cops patrol, I explained further, reflects class-based patterns of policing, which, as a matter of course, disproportionately snare blacks in the dragnet. The police official being interviewed for balance took exception to analysis saying that race and ethnicity had nothing to do with it. Clearly race has something to do with it. Scientific surveys consistently find that blacks are no more likely to use illegal drugs than are whites, yet blacks represent one third of arrests, one-half of all convictions, and approximately three-quarters of all those sent to prison for drugs. The question is how race figures into the dynamic.

McWhorter then shifts to a discussion of antiracism as religion, as faith-belief, and notes that one of the elements of faith-belief is avoidance of commentary by others, out of respect for scared topics, concerning certain problems in a community because of the expectation that they will be perceived as offensive, even blasphemous. I take it that his point is that avoiding sacred cows functions to diminish the significance of problems at the expense of members of that community.

For example, and this example is my own, recognition of the hijab as representing the extreme sexualization of male-female interaction in Islam, a burden that impacts women disproportionately since they’re the ones expected to keep the male libido in check by adhering to strict modesty rules of dress and segregation, is seen as insulting to Muslims and will kick up the ire of that community, particularly among its female adherents. Consequently, people don’t go there. But this stifles feminist critique of oppressive Islamic gender rules and that is a victory for the patriarchy. Another example (again, my own) is the inappropriateness of pointing out the impotence of prayer or the function of prayer as self-interested attempts to assuage anxiety or signal virtue. Christopher Hitchens’ observation that it is acceptable for the faithful to actively encourage deathbed conversions yet unacceptable, even downright hateful, to talk a sick and dying man out of his expectation of an afterlife, is a useful illustration of the way faith-belief is privileged and functions to protect the supposed integrity of dogma by deterring and shaming its critics. (Yet another problem is the way slogans like “Black Lives Matter” and “Support Our Troops” put critics in position of sounding like they affirming the opposite, as if they they don’t believe black lives matter.)

The failure to deal with the alarming number of black men who die at the hands of other black men, McWhorter contends, is an example of the suspension of disbelief, acting to bracket logic and substitute for it dogma that denies the problem. An etiquette comes into play when the problem of violence in black communities is raised, notes Mcwhorter, especially when trying to understand why police violence is held up as a much greater threat to black men than violence in black communities, the suppression of which is the function of law enforcement. If you bring it up at all, you’re supposed to stop pushing the matter when you don’t get a satisfactory answer. Of course, most are reluctant to even ask the question because of the risk of being criticized. Heather Mac Donald, a committed atheist, a woman particularly resistant to the power of faith-belief (see “In-Depth with Heather Mac Donald” on C-SPAN), does not suffer from such reluctance. (What one comes to understand when taking time to listen to Mac Donald on the issues is that what we today call neoconservatism is really stalwart dedication to secular liberalism of the bourgeois variety. Disagreements over which class should be in charge of society does not automatically affirm or obviate the soundness of claims being made.)

In my Truthout op-ed, I write, “The BLM protest is not about black-on-black crime, but about racial disparities in death by cop. Decrying black-on-black homicide after every high-profile killing of a civilian by a cop has become cliché for conservative pundits (and almost obligatory for liberals who want to be taken seriously). But it is entirely beside the point.” I can see now that what I am dismissing here is that black-on-black crime matters and the usefulness of questioning why a movement claiming that black lives matter would not put central to its struggle a phenomenon that causes many times more black deaths than cop shootings. It matters because of the following facts: In 2015, civilian white killers took 229 civilian black lives. The Washington Post puts the numbers of black people shot by the police that at 258. Of those, more than 85 percent were armed. In comparison, 2,380 black civilians were killed by other black civilians. Black-on-black murder accounts for half of all murder cases in the United States annually, mostly at the hands of male perpetrators. Black males comprise less than six percent of the US population. That is a crisis and dismissing it because neoconservatives point it out for whatever reason is an exercise in antiracist thought stopping. At the time I declared myself an antiracist. I have since left the religion.

Denying the extent of lethal violence in black communities by understandably resisting what may be a red herring spawned by neoconservative desire to defend the integrity of American policing is at the same time a failure on the part of a movement that claims to defend black lives to acknowledge the greater threat to those lives. Moreover, the thought-stopping exercise of attacking Mac Donald and her ilk causes observers to fail to see how both the racial disproportionality in death by cop and the extraordinarily high frequency of death of black men at the hands of other black men have the same underlying cause: structural inequality disproportionately affecting black communities. If concerted government action could bring into proportion with other murder-victim ratios the black-on-black ratio, then the racial disproportionality in death by cop would largely resolve itself since the root cause—crime and violence caused by structural inequality—would be eliminated. In other words, the attack on Mac Donald is itself a red herring.

“Note that this does not mean that the Irish, Italians, Jews, Poles, Arabs, and so on didn’t face discrimination, hostility, assertions of inferiority and occasionally even violence. They did. But historically, they were also considered white.” —David Bernstein

“Our civilization is built on two foundations. One of them is awareness of the individual human being’s absolute value independent of race, religion, and social background. The other is the freedom to think and express one’s thoughts.” —Bruce Bawer

There is no such thing as biological race. That populations share genes with greater or lesser frequency is explained by a mundane fact: people tend to mate with people they live around. As a result, their offspring will generally look more like them than they will the parents of unrelated or less related offspring. The further apart the families, the more dissimilar the offspring will appear. Yet, even in migration, people tend to reproduce with those who look like the people from the places they left. Because of this, the appearance of so-called racial types enjoys stability over time and space. The same is true with language and dialect. People who live around each other will tend to sound like each other. They will also carry themselves similarly. And so on. But that does not mean they are a racial type.

As was obvious in my recent entry about the impact Kenan Malik’s 1996 The Meaning of Race (“Kenan Malik: Assimilation, Multiculturalism, and Immigration”) had on me, awareness that there is no such thing as biological race is not a recent development. At the same time, this good news has still a ways to travel. For the definitive demolition of race as a biological entity, I urge readers to pick up Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Paolo Menozzi, and Alberto Piazza’s The History and Geography of Human Genes, also published in 1996. History and Geography appeared shortly after the appearance of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life and J. Philippe Rushton’s Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective, both published in 1994, and knocked down the premise these books share: that human variation can be explained by the three-races-of-man model (the model taken for granted in my 1970 World Book Encyclopedia). Compiling decades of population genetics research and devising a clock to date the natural history of our species, Cavalli-Sforza and associates reconstruct the origins of human populations and the routes people took to spread the genome across the planet. Consequently, they show that race is confused with ancestry.

The work of Cavalli-Sforza and associates was buttressed that same year by the publication of an expanded edition of The Mismeasure of Man (originally published in 1981), a classic work of debunking by evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould taking on the position that “the social and economic differences between human groups—primarily races, classes, and sexes—arise from inherited, inborn distinctions and that society, in this sense, is an accurate reflection of biology,” what is often referred to by proponents as “race realism.” The Mismeasure of Man was expanded to directly rebut the arguments advanced in The Bell Curve. Readers interested in this topic should also check out Richard Lewontin’s 2006 article “Confusion About Human Races,” as well as his 1984 Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology and Human Nature (along with Steven Rose and Leon Kamin) and his 1991 Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA for more in-depth treatments of the topic. (Gould and Lewontin were colleagues at Harvard and widely regarded as pioneers in their respective fields in evolutionary biology.)

This wave of debunking held for a while, but, as Angela Saini discusses in “The Disturbing Return of Scientific Racism,” published recently in WIRED UK, those who wish race were an actual biological reality keep trying to make their wishes appear as reality. It’s hard to let a useful ideology go.

I do hope readers of this blog will take some time out of their day and read Saini’s piece even if they don’t check out the other materials. Debunking race is one of the more important projects of the rational left. I have personally been involved for a number of years in thinking about the problems of scientific racism and sociobiology (see, for example, my essay “The Myth of Extraordinary Evil: A Challenge to Evolutionary Theories of Genocide and Xenophobia,” based on a paper I presented at the Mid-South Sociological Meetings in 2009). It is vital that we stay on top of this problem. Race realism is a project of the contemporary political right, espoused by members of what Eric Weinstein tagged the Intellectual Dark Web, the offspring of secular elements of neoconservatism, a stealth repackaging of the Progressive Era Anglo-Saxon racialism that inspired the lethal pseudoscience advanced by ethnic Germans during the National Socialist period in Central Europe. Social media algorithms homogenizing content have provided not only easy access to race realist discourse, but a mechanism for virtually trapping regular visitors in that universe. (See The New York Times story on Caleb Kane and Jimmy Dore’s conversation with Kane about the article.)

Debunking helps combat not only the race essentialism of the right, but also the race essentialism of the left, whose antiracism reifies assumptions about racially exclusive identities (see Adolphe Reed Jr.’s . “Antiracism: a Neoliberal Alternative to a Left”). The paradox of the postmodern left, which has abandoned class politics for identity, is to accept the premise that racial groups are an organic basis for collective action, that grouped averages stand in place of concrete individuals. While race essentialism has proven successful for rightwing politics, which effectively exploits race resentment to build popular support, it is, for leftwing politics, a disorganizing ideology, as it fractures consciousness about the material basis of a genuine emancipatory politics: social class and class struggle. As Walter Benjamin pointed out in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” the core principle of fascism is to give the people not their right, which is democratic control over the forces of production, but racial and ethnical aesthetics. It is, therefore, strange to see the left embracing identity in this way, and it explains the rise of authoritarianism on the left, seen in mobbing and violence, as well as censorious desire. The task of the left is to expose the false dogma of identity, not put it central to its praxis.

In a forthcoming blog entry, I will explore further the difference between contesting concepts for increasing their validity, on the one hand, and, on the other, the practice of making concepts slippery for ideological purposes in thinking about sex and gender. That essay will be a deep epistemological critique of third wave feminism. The current entry reflects on arguments I have made recently to clarify the concepts of race, ethnicity, and religion in order to gain rational separation from popular understandings of these notions, on the one hand, and rigorous scientific delineation of concepts, on the other. I explain how sociologists understand race as socially constructed—a human invention that is culturally-historically produced, situated, and transformed. I emphasize that my discipline of sociology endeavors to develop theories and methods that resist reification. Reification is defined as the problem of treating concepts representing things as the things themselves. It is the error of treating as real abstractions used to explain and understand concrete things. However, for some political types, contesting concepts has an ideological purpose: to make concepts slippery for ideological projects. The latter is at work on variants of the right and the left.

* * *

Applied to categories of living things, the term race first occurs in the late sixteenth century and refers to breeding stocks of animals (and plants). Thus, at its inception, it refers to biology and increasingly applied to people with the development of scientific rationalism. By the seventeenth century, we find race being used to refer to physical or phenotypical traits, as well as associated capacities and proclivities, as a core concept in the developing science of evolutionary biology. As theory, albeit informally today, the discourse of natural history conceptualizes the various species as naturally sorting into biological categories lying between subspecies and strains, varieties, or subraces. Just as different races or breeds of dogs have different capacities and propensities (hunting dogs differ from herding dogs not only in appearance), so do people possess different capacities and propensities depending on their racial classification, which is based on appearance. Both the terms describing this view applied to people, racism and racialism, appear in the early twentieth century. Race is thus a product of the practical science of animal husbandry caught up in the context of the modern scientific revolution and used by bourgeois elites to fracture the proletariat for economic and political advantage.

The application of the concept of race with respect to Homo sapiens fell away from mainstream science following the eugenical horrors of Nazi-style fascism, but remained lurking at its periphery. As a reaction to the evolution of the West towards social democracy and possibly democratic socialism in the post-war period, racialism enjoyed something of a renaissance on the political right. In the 1970s, psychologists Arthur Jensen (UC-Berkeley) and Richard Herrnstein (Harvard) used their reputations to push the argument that race was real and that racial groups were differentiated among other things by intelligence, which they held was largely innate and heritable.

By the 1990s, racialism was finding its way into mainstream thought. Herrnstein and Murray’s The Bell Curve is representative of academic-sounding scholarship that claims intelligence is unequally distributed across racial groups. Rushton’s Race, Evolution, and Behavior claims that biological race determines cultural and moral outcomes. Blacks, whites, and Orientals (his word choice)—Negroids, Caucasoids, and Mongoloids—are differentiated not only biologically (cranial capacity, density of cortical neurons, size of genitalia, etc.) but in cultural achievements, sexual promiscuity, crime rates, and so on. Claiming to operate in an objective Darwinian framework, Rushton (a psychologist) argues that blacks and whites have different reproductive strategies, the former pursuing the r-selection strategy of large litter sizes and less parental attention, the latter the K-selection strategy of small litter sizes and more parental attention. Neo-Darwinianism is a set up for the old eugenics argument that social welfare programs allow inferior racial types that would otherwise be weeded out through natural selection to artificially perpetuate their kind, producing, perhaps unintentionally, dysgenesis, or the degradation of the superior races.

There is a massive racist literature in between and following the rise of racialism and sociobiology, with evolutionary psychology representing the latest manifestation of race realism. I have considered devoting a blog entry to destroying this absurd and hateful point of view. But, then, the aforementioned—Gould, Lewontin and his army, Malik, Saini, Cavalli-Sforza and his army, and many others—have already done this, so I will for the time being direct you their way. The point I want to make here is that it is not true that the concept of intrinsic race has always been a flexible notion meaning different things in different times. It originated to describe organisms in a biological way and it continues in this usage. Moreover, the races as we understand them today, while certainly subject to social evolution, enjoy remarkably stable cultural histories, and this is what gives the racialist literature face validity. Crucially, then, the stability in racial categories over the long term contradicts the premise of whiteness studies which, with its roots in historicism, presupposes that which it claims is constructed. I next turn to the literature on whiteness and the postmodern mindscape of identity politics that lays a veneer of academic credibility over its pretensions.

* * *

According to the original chief proponent of whiteness studies, Theodore Allen, initiated by his 1975 pamphlet Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race, British colonists invented whiteness in the late-seventeenth-early-eighteenth century in the American colonies as an hegemonic strategy disorganizing the working class by manufacturing racial loyalties that disrupted class solidarity. So far so good. However, influenced by postmodern emphasis on power of discourse and narrative in reality construction, this view was expanded in a body of literature arguing that the whiteness that was at first narrowly constructed to apply to white British workers only over a long period of time came to include other Europeans (thus greatly shrinking the number of “actual” white people in history). George Lipsitz gave this a useful hook in his 1995 essay, “The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: Racialized Social Democracy and the ‘White’ Problem in American Studies” (American Quarterly, 47 (3, 1995): 369-387) that resonated among my peers in graduate school in the 1990s. Allen’s formulation was highly influential among New Left types and led to the widespread adoption of the “white privilege” rhetoric that we hear assumed by the establishment progressives.

Perhaps more than any other work, David Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, published in 1991, establishes the foundation of whiteness studies. The Wages of Whiteness was considered the go-to during my graduate school stint (1996-2000), and whiteness studies, along with critical race theory, influenced me greatly during the production of my doctoral dissertation. I reflect on this experience in the entry “Committing the Crime it Condemns,” but I want to add here that I never published my dissertation in book form because I came to doubt this literature not long after graduation. (I moreover became concerned with anti-environmentalism and the Iraq War, work that constituted the basis of my successful case for tenure at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.) I was satisfied with my historical analysis, echoed a few months later in Loïc Wacquant’s “Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh,” published in Punishment and Society (in 2001) and years later in Michele Alexander’s 2010 The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The social science in my dissertation was sound. It was the moral claims that framed what I intended as a work in interested sociology about which I became unsure.

A year after I left graduate school, in an article published in International Labor and Working-Class History (“Whiteness and the Historian’s Imagination”) the same year as Wacquant’s article on the deadly symbiosis, labor historian Eric Arnesen dismantled whiteness studies, accusing it of the historically decontextualizing practice of “keyword literalism.” Arnesen’s article greatly influenced the evolution of my thinking. He identifies why whiteness studies has proved so seductive: “whiteness has become a blank screen onto which those who claim to analyze it can project their own meanings.” More devastating is his critique of motive, namely that whiteness studies (in a way analogous to the reaction to authoritarian socialism that produced devotees to the emerging neoconservative movement in the 1960s-1970s) represents a collective reaction on the left reflecting disappointment in the failures of the socialist movement to make an ideal socialist society and of whites to transcend racism and nationalism. He notes, for example, David Roediger’s admission that his The Wages of Whiteness was written in reaction to working class support for Reaganism and the politics of the New Right. This insight helps us understand why, in response to the new wave of rightwing populism, rather than jettisoning its race (and gender) politics, the left recedes ever further into the futile politics of identity.

I highly recommend Arnesen’s article to you (it lies behind a paywall, so I suggest seeing if your local library has access to the the journals of Cambridge University Press). However, the claims of overdeveloped whiteness studies can be rather easily debunked without resorting to the academic literature. For example, in his March 2017 article “Sorry, but the Irish were always ‘white’ (and so were Italians, Jews and so on),” published in The Washington Post, David Bernstein, law professor at the George Mason University and contributor to the useful legal blog, The Volokh Conspiracy, shows how asking simple questions exposes the distortions of ideologically-driven academic literature:

Were members of the group allowed to go to “whites-only” schools in the South, or otherwise partake of the advantages that accrued to whites under Jim Crow? Were they ever segregated in schools by law, anywhere in the United States, such that “whites” went to one school, and the group in question was relegated to another? When laws banned interracial marriage in many states (not just in the South), if a white Anglo-Saxon wanted to marry a member of the group, would that have been against the law? Some labor unions restricted their membership to whites. Did such unions exclude members of the group in question? Were members of the group ever entirely excluded from being able to immigrate to the United States, or face special bans or restrictions in becoming citizens?

“If you use such objective tests,” Bernstein writes, “you find that Irish, Jews, Italians and other white ethnics were indeed considered white by law and by custom.” Bernstein goes on to note something I have pointed out to people in the past, that “some lighter-skinned African Americans of mixed heritage ‘passed’ as white by claiming they were of Arab descent and that explained their relative swarthiness,” and that this in turn shows “that Arab Americans, another group whose ‘whiteness’ has been questioned, were considered white.” Persons of African, Asian, and Native American descent, on the other hand, did not enjoy access to white institutions. These distinctions are centuries old. What Bernstein shows without explicitly saying so is that ethnicity, which emerges from cultural space-time, organized around language, custom, and a sense of national belonging, is not analogous to race, an externally-imposed hierarchal-arranged control system based on biological categories.

I hasten to add one criticism of Bernstein’s piece. Bernstein argues that his method stands apart from the ahistorical sociological method of defining “whiteness” as persons “fully socially accepted as the equals of Americans of Anglo-Saxon and Germanic stock.” Correctly, he exposes, even if not intentionally, the aim of whiteness studies: to make whites out to be a minority in the trans-Atlantic space-time by treating white ethnics as historically nonwhite, as well as the approach that allows for the conceptual slipperiness that underpins this academic standpoint. Nonetheless, in one respect, he is punching at a straw man: this is not how sociologists define whiteness. Neither racialists nor the general public define whiteness in this way, either. This is a construction of whiteness studies and works as a background assumption in the white privilege rhetoric, which enjoys widespread purchase among modern progressives. Thus the notion of attaching the exclusivity of whiteness to national groups who perpetrated colonialism and genocide has emerged as part of an ideological project, gaining substantial traction with postmodernist turn in political discourse. But just as conceptual slipperiness has a political purpose, so does maintaining conceptual clarity has a political purpose; the difference is that the latter is political without being ideological. This is the value in clarifying conceptual vocabulary and theoretical frameworks.

* * *

What we can see, then, is that, despite the concept of race referring to biological entities, there are those who find it advantageous to expand the meaning of racism to include cultural things. We see this in the selective extension of the charge of racism to smear cultural criticism the left doesn’t like. For example, if I criticize the culture of a people living in a particular geographical location, and the people living there are perceived as racially homogenous, then my criticism of the culture risks being accused of racism—if it is not directed at white people.[1] But the accusation of racism in the case of cultural criticism could only be valid if the criticism assumed that the culture criticized is an expression of the capacities and propensities of the race of the people living there. Ironically, assuming culture is a projection of race is a tenet of racism itself!

I reject the concept of intrinsic race, therefore it would be incorrect to suppose that any cultural criticism I make reflects an underlying racist sentiment. My cultural criticisms conceptualize culture—which sociologists define as the values and habits of a people living in a particular type of society—as an set of phenomena emerging from and sustained by associated historical and material conditions. This is a basic understanding in Marxism, the general framework in which I work. So, while it is racist to say that somebody should be distrusted because of his phenotypic profile, it is not racist to say somebody should be distrusted because of his cultural (or religious) orientation. For example, if I am concerned about neo-Nazis, which I most certainly am, it is not because they are, with rare exception, racially white (I am racially white, as well), but because neo-Nazis subscribe to fascist and racist culture and ideology. I moreover object to their cooptation of cultural icons and symbols, such as the incorporation of ancient Nordic imagery into racist symbology, that did not originally contain white supremacists notions. Moreover, it would be absurd to defend white supremacy on the grounds that it offends white people who subscribe to it. There is nothing racist about opposition to a fascistic, sexist, heterosexist ideology. Yet we hear all the time that opposition to Islam is racist.

Consider the blog entry I made several weeks ago in which I analyzed the problems of the Central American culture of violence and expressed concerns, based on evidence, about Central American migration to the United States and its potential to exacerbate crime rates (“The Northern Triangle, the Migrant Flow, and the Risk of Criminal Violence”). Some on the left might smear such an analysis as racist. But I make no claims about race at all in that essay. Race is not assumed or implied. Neither is ethnicity. The unfortunate reality is that some places are dangerous to travel to and a big part of the reason is the culture associated with those places. In contrast, there are regions and societies that enjoy higher levels of cultural development, by which I mean they are better for human development and wellbeing, which are safe to travel to.

In the more highly developed cultures, women are not second class citizens, homosexuals are free to be themselves, and persons can practice whatever religion or no religion at all. In these societies, group and interpersonal forms of violence are exceptional. Yet many have been intimidated into refraining from stating the truth about this for fear of being called “racist.” But one has to expand the concept of race in defiance of its centuries-old meaning to manufacture a claim that criticism of cultures inadequate to human needs and rights is automatically racist. Surely, it has not escaped the reader’ attention that those who make this claim can be extraordinarily hypocritical. Why, if it is so wrong to criticize culture, is it so easy to criticize the culture associated with white-majority societies? Here the critique explicitly goes after a race. Some left identitarians even reject science because it is the work of white culture, while accusing critics of sorcery and superstition as racist (see, for example, dreadful essay by Current Affairs writer Aisling McCrea, “The Magical Thinking of Guys of Love Logic”). What is the desired goal of this politics? It cannot possibility be to dismantle racism.

A useful instance of the suppression of a social problem by linking culture to race is found in the problem of crime and violence in the central cities of the United States. African Americans are overrepresented in property and violent crime in both of the primary data sources criminologists use to determine the extent of crime and violence. For example, according to the Uniform Crime Report, in 2017 arrests for murder in American cities were much higher for blacks (4,074) than for whites (2,701). The vast majority of those murders were committed by males (6,243 male compared to 815 female). African American males are less than six percent of the population. These facts indicate significant overrepresentation of blacks in murder (as perpetrator and victims). Robbery by blacks (34,367 in 2017) exceeded robbery by whites (26,633 that same year). Arrests for weapons possession was approximately equal for whites (49,387) and blacks (46,137), overwhelming involving males. The Uniform Crime Report has been criticized for relying on police reporting; however, the National Crime Victimization Survey, while indicating that approximately half of crimes detected by its method are reported to the police, find the measures nonetheless correspond, meaning that underreporting by the FBI does not significant affect the racial distribution of criminal violence.

However, it would be a mistake to suppose that black males are overrepresented in street crime because of their race. Black males are overrepresented in crime and violence because they are more likely to live in central city areas marked by a culture of violence and lawlessness. And this culture is the product of persistent inequalities of wealth and power not genetics. Capitalist relations of production are the root cause of the problem. Race has no effects because it is not a real thing (this is why the IQ studies must be wrong). So when the Center for American Progress warns of “The Dangerous Racialization of Crime in U.S. News Media,” they are only half right. It is wrong to suggest that it’s the mainstream media creating a false perception about the overrepresentation of blacks in criminal violence. African Americans are overrepresented in criminal victimization. The Center for American Progress is (accidentally) right to describe the reporting as “racialization” of the crime problem. However, the desire to deny black overrepresentation in criminal violence causes the Center for American Progress to hide the relationship between the inequality systematically generated by capitalism and criminal violence in America’s central cities. Thus the class dynamic is erased by the left identitarian impulse.

Can we finally admit this basic point: variable cultural conditions have nothing to with the race of the people living there? If we are non-racist we have to. (And, yes, there is such a thing as non-racism once we let go of the irrational cosmic sense of identity where you are either a racist or an antiracist.) The truth is that the West is a great place to live, which is why so many people are eager to come here, even to endure the concentration camps westerners euphemistically call “immigrant detention facilities” (see “Migrant Detention Facilities are Not Fascist Concentration Camps”). But the West isn’t a great place to live because white people are the majority; it is a great place to live, even with its faults (which are many) because of its culture of secularism and personal freedom.[2] But it is not great everywhere, and this is because we still have to transcend the inequalities of capitalism, and that won’t happen as long as the left is diverted from its historic mission by identitarian politics.

Since variability in the conditions of existence is due in large measure to the difference cultures produce and sustain through the behavior of their agents—human beings—there is an urgent problem to consider: the recklessness of ignoring the fact of humans as culture-bearing vehicles when developing immigration policies. Patterned attitudes and behavior are products of inculturation. Because human beings are the bearers of the cultures they are socialized to carry, their values and habits come with them. Therefore, it is not necessarily an expression of racism or xenophobia to worry about individuals from other cultures; it depends on the culture and the relationship of the individual in question to that culture. What else explains these tendencies? Certainly not race, since, again, race is not an actual thing. Clearly, then, smearing such considerations as racist is a tactic aiming at undermining an immigration policy that considers the culture-ideology of the place of origin in order to protect a nation’s inhabitants and advance the national interest, which would, ideally, advance the interests of working families. These are civic nationalist not ethnonationalist concerns. As I have made clear in my blog entries, consistent with orthodox Marxism, I am a proponent of the nation-state and civic nationalism. What I am not is a third worldists or a race identitarian. That racism is confused with culture and irreligious criticisms in popular consciousness is a spectacular propaganda achievement of bourgeois cultural managers.

Paradoxically perhaps, the progressive left already recognizes individual attitudes and behaviors are cultural products. However, in their way of seeing the world, these patterns are essentialized as race and the defense of them clothed in antiracist fashion. The most obvious example is the claim of “white privilege,” something that all whites have by virtue of being white. It used to be the case that those racialized as whites were seen as historically privileged and groups wanted to be included in the structures that whites benefited from by eliminating racial system and becoming recognized as individuals with equal access to the nation’s institutions (which presupposes nation-states). That was the traditional civil rights approach—the Old Left way. Now whites are seen collectively as pariah and the goal is to dismantle the culture of secular liberalism as an expression of white supremacy, while reifying race as essential. So, while we can rationally draw a distinction between multiracialism and multiculturalism, for the left these are conflated and become causal and celebrated as diversity. This is the cultural strategy adapted by neoliberalism. It is an alchemy that then allows the smearing of opponents of multiculturalism (designed to undermine common culture) as opponents of multiracialism. (In various conversations the reader can find on YouTube, conservative scholar Victor Davis Hansen admirably explains this distinction and its effects throughout history.) To make my argument clear, I have no problem with dismantling whiteness. However, I see eliminating whiteness as a step in emancipating individuals from the system of racism altogether, not as a reconfiguration of racial oppression that makes demands on individuals on the basis of race.

* * *

In the current political context, the pariah status of whiteness has produced some curious effects. Such is the perceived advantage in defining oneself as nonwhite in order to escape the collective responsibility that comes with the pariah identity, some Jews have taken to publicly denying their whiteness. Here Bernstein is right to point out that the definition of whiteness is ideologically narrowed to persons “fully socially accepted as the equals of Americans of Anglo-Saxon and Germanic stock.” Those whites are responsible for the horrors of the world. Those whites owe the world reparations, which comes also in the form of open borders, on account of this “truth” (whiteness is often assumed in claims made on the West; see “Reparations and Open Borders.”) Some Jews have felt the sting of that line of thinking and don’t want to be lumped with the racialized bearers of those alleged horrors. After all, in the white privilege view, all whites carry around their necks the cosmic albatross of racism.

Seth Frantzman, writing in The Jerusalem Post, (“Now they call us ‘White Jews’,” December 26, 2018), cautions his readers about the whitening of Jews. He calls it the “new American antisemitism” and it is a “creeping hatred.” “The labeling of Jews as ‘white’ and debates on how to ‘treat Jews,’ as if Jews are packages in a supermarket,” he writes, “is a form of dehumanizing rhetoric designed to force Jewish people into a binary of ‘white/non-white’ that is currently trendy in US discussions.” He continues, “The new toxic discussion taking place primarily in the United States is designed to label Jews as ‘white supremacists.’” Triggering Frantzman are things said by Tamika Mallory, leader of the Women’s March, to The New York Times about what marchers had been discussing, principally that “white Jews, as white people, uphold white supremacy.” Frantzman also quotes Rebecca Vilkomerson who tweeted: “We white Jews especially need to recognize that centering our own status as victims here is a power move, as well as a way to avoid self-reflection on our relative status in a white supremacist world.” The jargon of identity politics at its finest!

A March 27, 2019 Jewish Journal carried the headline “We’re not White, We Define Ourselves.” In the essay, Karen Lehman Bloch writes that she defines her race based on DNA and the “plethora of genetic research showing that, lo and behold, just like our Sephardic and Mizrahic brothers and sisters, the DNA of Ashkenazim shows an irrefutable connection to the Levant—meaning we’re not white.” Yet populations from the Levant are white according to centuries old racial understanding. Her essay is accompanied by pictures of prominent Jews suggesting that this proves Jews aren’t white. But nobody in the pictures supplied would be considered nonwhite in the West except by white supremacists which are, contrary to white privilege rhetoric, rare. Of course that doesn’t mean that race is biological. It means that a consensus formed a long time ago that people native to West Asia (and North Africa) are white. Bloch is not only claiming to define herself (something that has become fashionable in the postmodern culture); she is claiming to revise the history of racial theory in a personal way. She has so convinced herself of this that she was taken aback by Jews who criticized her for denying Jewish whiteness.

It isn’t until roughly midway through the article that Bloch’s motive becomes obvious: she experiences the same anxiety that moves Frantzman’s complaint. It’s the “current practitioners of identity politics,” Bloch writes, that have forced her to push back against the alleged whitening of Jews. “Jews have been told: We are inexorably white and thus responsible for colonialism, the slave trade and mass incarceration,” she writes. “We are white supremacists, and thus responsible for all racism and oppression.” If a person is not white then she cannot be held accountable for these things that white people did and do. “We are white and thus incapable of being persecuted—past and present.” Obviously, this is a real problem if one wants to be persecuted—past and present. There is advantage in victimhood (see McCrea’s “Reclaiming Victimhood,” in Current Affairs). By denying one’s whiteness, one can claim that advantage. Bloch then responds to Vilkomerson: “The Holocaust was a white-on-white crime and thus of little import. We should stop ‘centering’ ourselves! As part of the white European ruling caste, we are the primary beneficiaries of white privilege.”

Generalizing its anxiety, the organizers of the Woman’s March, the movement itself provoked by the success of rightwing populism in the 2016 election cycle (a success I pin on the failures of the left), stoked by elite concern about establishment hegemony, and informed by Black Lives Matter, cuts a wide swath with the white privilege scythe. This testifies to the power of the black identity movement. In 2016, Black Lives Matter included in their platform the following: “The U.S. justifies and advances the global war on terror via its alliance with Israel and is complicit in the genocide taking place against the Palestinian people.” BLM described Israel as an “apartheid state,” condemning settlements and the “apartheid wall.” Many Jews expressed concern with the pairing of BLM criticism of whiteness with the Jewish state’s national security measures. Indeed, the rhetoric surrounding Israeli security policy has widespread application. Condemnation of the security barriers in Israel is, in part, the reason why discussions of the security barrier along the US southern border, which existed uncontroversially for decades since the early 1990s, have become so shrill of late. All this has come with Nazi imagery paired with Israeli and US security policy. Joined by leftwing pro-Islamic sympathy, this rhetoric is an ingredient in the antipathies fueling an increase in antisemitism and hate crimes against Jews across the West, a phenomenon that some on the left falsely dismiss as exaggerated.

Under these conditions, especially given the conflation of Jews with Zionists and Israel, it is expected that some Jews will wish to deny their whiteness. “We are responsible for tragedies like New Zealand, especially if we dare to call out anti-Semitism (which doesn’t really exist because we are white),” Bloch writes with a palpable fear. She objects to being white because being white is a terrible thing. It implicates her in centuries of exploitation and oppression. It makes Jews responsible for the deeds of those who are classified as white by the racial theory that Bloch believes she can revise while claiming for herself the power to define her race (ask Rachel Dolezal how transracialism worked out for her). Bloch does not want to be white because it allegedly comes with privileges, and privileges used to be desirable, but now (however unevenly distributed across social class reality they are) they implicate one in having to make good on debts owed to non-whites demanding things on the basis of collective and historic victimization. Unlike many on the left, Bloch does not relish this debt. In this climate, it is therefore better to be nonwhite. So now Ashkenazim is a race. If she is white, then Bloch cannot be a victim of anti-Semitism. Moreover, if Jews are white, then there can be no anti-Semitism, she worries, thus historically racializing her religion and her ethnicity, Bloch claims that, because of race, Jews were persecuted in the Spanish Inquisition, despite the fact that racism did not exist then. At one point, Bloch asks: “do you ever hear the term white Muslim?” Since Muslims are considered white (except by some racists), the redundancy is not uttered in the West. Why would it be?

Bloch’s error is twofold. First, is the error of thinking DNA indicates race. As we have established, DNA is ancestry. Race doesn’t exist as a biological thing. We reject race realism. To be sure, while antisemitism is widely regarded as a form of racism, Semite, which is a language group, is not analogous to race, and this problem is not solved by noting that the term was never used to apply to Semitic people broadly. Historically, antisemitism emerged as a scholarly sounding word for Jew-hatred, which is loathing of Jews as an ethnic and religious group. One understand why there was a need to coin a term for the phenomenon; Jew-hatred is a special case of hatred. Instead of seeing Jews as an inferior race, Jews are feared for their cleverness as a people. Jew-hatred sees Jews as intrinsically evil, bent on controlling the world. It is a conspiracy theory inextricably bound up in theological notions that inhere in both the Christian and the Muslim world. To be sure, its intensity comes with the force of racism. But Jews are nonetheless white. Bernie Sanders is a white man. So is Joe Lieberman. And so on. Second, is the error that individuals on the basis of racial identity are responsible for the deeds of other individuals with whom they share that identity. This is an ancient and irrational conception of responsibility that must be jettisoned. An individual cannot be held responsible for the deeds of those who share his phenotypic characteristics, for these in themselves carry no explanatory power. To think otherwise is to embrace the heart of racism. Antiracism works on the same principle. (See “For the Good of Your Soul Tribal Stigma and the God of Reparations.”)

It is a testament to the irrational state of our contemporary political culture that denying whiteness is seen as a way of avoiding responsibility for things one did not do or could not have done. A far more sensible perspective on this matter is put forward by Ariel Sobel in the January 8, 2019 Forward: “Can We Finally Admit that Jews Can Be Both White and Oppressed?” One might be moved to say the same about Muslims. Or Christians. Try these identities out in the framework of the headline.

I leave this section with a disclaimer: if I have missed some deep sarcasm in Frantzman and Bloch’s work, that’s on me.

* * *

So, if I do not believe race is a biological reality, then why do I insist that Arabs are white? This was a question recently put to me. Without benefit of a lengthy explanation of my argument, it is a reasonable question (this is why I have written this blog entry). I have never claimed that anybody is white in a biological sense. Race is a meaningless construct in human biology. I have pointed out that West Asians and North Africans have historically been racialized as white. But that is a very different claim than saying they a part of a racial type. Earlier, I noted Bernstein’s observation, which I have made myself in the past, namely “that Arab Americans, another group whose ‘whiteness’ has been questioned, were considered white.” I have pointed out that mulattos, as mixed raced persons of white and black heritage were referred to in the past, often claimed to be from Egypt in order to pass as white. I have noted that both the US and UK census have, with rare exception, racially coded Arab populations as white. The whiteness of Arabs is consistent with the socially constructed nature of race, and the stability in this construction speaks to the persistence of common sense racial perception.

My concern is not with racializing people biologically. My concern is over why there is an effort to racially recode Arabs as nonwhite. I am interested in the politics of this. What lies behind the desire to redefine an ethnicity as a race? One suspects that, at least to some extent, the desire shares reasons with the desire of some Jews to deny their whiteness. But in the case of race merchants in the Arab community, there is more at work here. The related question of why Muslims are being racialized bears on this. But one cannot explore these questions, which are very current politically, without recognizing how these populations have been defined in the past and by what method they are being so defined.

Today’s left pursues the othering of Arabs and Muslims most aggressively. They do this with Jews, as well, since Jews are thought of as from this part of the world. The construct of “white Jew” is a product of this way of thinking (to because there, in point of fact, black Jews). Readers may have seen the meme floated on various social media that claims that Jesus, a brown-skinned Middle Eastern man, almost certainly a Jew, was transformed into a white man by white Christians who desperately want to make Jesus one of them (some black Churches have made Jesus out to be a black man for this reason). Europeans “whitewashed” Jesus, the claim goes. The background on this is an old but a rather exclusive story. Ernest Renan’s 1863 book Life of Jesus used the Gospel of John to claim that Jesus purified his character, purging Jewish (or Semitic) traits to become an Aryan. Renan held that the Semitic race of which Middle Eastern Jews were a part, with one exception, was inferior to the Aryan race. The one exception was the Ashkenazim. They were not Semitic, Europeans who converted to Judaism. In contrast, Bloch says that DNA evidence shows the Ashkenazim are Semitic and thus racially different from Aryans and she uses this to escape whiteness (in her own mind). Hitler saw in Renan support for his own views. But most Europeans have never deployed Hitlerian racial designations. Whatever their racial views, they regard Hitlerian racism as abhorrent (European culture is the culture that produced human rights, after all). Rather Europeans depend on common sense understanding of race. Were Jesus a real person, he would have dwelled in Palestine in the first century of the common epoch, under Roman rule, and would have been, had he not been Sub-Saharin African or East Asian, perceived by most observers as white. Same with Muhammad.

It is true that in some particularly ignorant strains of right-wing reaction we see an abstract racialization of Arabs conveyed by the term “sand nigger.” I saw this firsthand in the South as a high school student during the Islamic Revolution. My peers were angry over the Iranian hostage crisis. It afforded them an opportunity to engage in patriotic chest thumping. One night at the rock quarry, I chastised classmates who were trying to scare up a mob to go find and beat up Iranians. I mocked them: “How would know one if you saw one?” Yes, I know that Iranians are not Arabs. But my peers didn’t. Their ignorance does no damage to my point since Iranians, who are of Persian descent, are white, too (moreover, the language spoken by Iranians is European). Arabs (and Persians) are considered white unless the person under consideration has not already been sorted into another racial box. Those who are coded as nonwhite are not thought of as Arab or Persian (although they may be). Famous Arabs and those with substantial Arab descent, such people as Casey Kasem, Diane Rehm, Tony Shalhoub, Selma Hayek, Frank Zappa, and many more, are regarded as racially white. When we watched the Sinbad movies as kids, we all knew the characters were Arabs and Muslim. That was part of what was so interesting about them. The characters referred to Allah and the universe was inhabited by the region’s supernatural entities (and some from other regions–unlike Thomas Bulfinch, Ray Ray Harryhausen was not an especially deft mythicist) and carried a magical character. The actors were brown skinned. They spoke with accents. They were exotic in the Anglo-American gaze. But that gaze never cast them as nonwhite.

We see a similar thing with perceptions of Mexicans. The US census has categories for white and nonwhite Hispanics, clearly recognizing the difference between race and ethnicity. Hispanic is not a race. It is a language group. There are black people who speak Spanish and white people who speak Spanish. Of course there is an effort to racialize white Hispanics, as well. This has confused the progressive media. For example the Huffington Post complained in 2013 that “the FBI only tabulates arrest data by race, with categories for white, black, Asian or Pacific Islander, and American Indian or Alaska Native. Latinos, who can belong to any race provided they have Latin American heritage, effectively vanish from the agency’s published records.” But Hispanics don’t disappear, as they are reckoned as whatever race with which they identity. But for progressives brown is the new black. The leftwing desire to racialize Hispanics helps us understand why efforts to control immigration are widely smeared as racist even while it is obvious that immigrant is not a racial category (nor are immigrants automatically Hispanic). Much of the resistance to Hispanic culture is not because Hispanics are seen as a race, but because there are objections to values and practices attributed to them (for one thing, they are majority Catholic). However, not everything Hispanic is rejected! Hispanic food, music, and fashion are quite popular among Anglo-Americans. Thus one can be concerned about Central Americans illegally crossing the border because they are coming from the most violent culture in North America without holding any racial animus towards Central Americans as people. But beware: you may be accused of racism if you express concern over the spread of crime with the movement of these populations into the United States, even when the phenomenon is well documented. (See “What is the Relationship of Immigration to Crime?” “Democrats are Being Disingenuous on the Role of Security Fencing in Reducing Illegal Immigration and Crime,” and the aforementioned “The Northern Triangle, the Migrant Flow, and the Risk of Criminal Violence.”

The most extreme form of postmodernist expansion of the concept of race is the racialization of Muslims (“Muslims are Not a Race. So why are Academics and Journalists Treating Them as if They are?”). The racialization of Muslims comes from two main sources: (1) leftwing identity merchants who fetishize Islam because of its anti-western and especially anti-American character (whether this is universal among Muslims is beside the point) and because of a general desire to fracture the world into an ever-growing matrix of intersecting essence-boxes; and (2) Islamists who see advantage in Muslims being perceived as a racial minority, hence the propaganda term “Islamophobia,” deceitfully riffing on terms like “Homophobia” and “Negrophobia,” both terms referring to who people are, not what people believe. (See “Islamophobia has no Place on the Left.”) To be sure race, ethnicity, and religion can be intersecting identities. A man can be a black Arab Muslim. He is racially black, culturally Arab (speaks, eats, and so on, Arabic), and a follower of Muhammad. But the tactic of treating a religion or an ethnicity (nation in that sense) as a race is fallacious and propagandistic. That various segments of the public would confuse these things does not overturn scientific epistemology and the greater historical picture. We are explaining why they are confusing things.

An analogy feels appropriate here. Christians complain about anti-Christian prejudice and discrimination in order to prevent the marginalization and therefore its continued strength and relevance in the culture of Christianity and the values and habits that come with that ideology. Imagine if Christians convinced the public that they are a race or an ethnicity and then thwart irreligious criticisms by crying racism or ethnicism. We would point out with no controversy that Christians are not a race, even while agreeing that race is not biological. Indeed, Christianity is so obviously not a race or an ethnicity (it is as racially and ethnically diverse as Islam), Christians dare not work that angle, whch is why the term “Christophobia” never caught fire even in Christian-majority countries. Perhaps this is because multiculturalism doesn’t elevate Christians. But Muslims depend very much on multiculturalism to elevate their ideology and they have a receptive audience on the identitarian left.

There is a longstanding tendency on the left to make criticisms of nonwestern culture out to be a form of racism. Criticism of western culture is, on the other hand, invited and encouraged. The left does not hesitate to accept the invitation and to encourage others to join them. It tells us a lot that it would instantly be seen as ludicrous to suggest that criticism of western culture is racist. Indeed, criticism of other cultures has become one of worst things a white person can do. It is an Islamist strategy to piggyback on racial oppression to manufacture a victim status. Postmodern conceptual slipperiness allows for this piggybacking. It is insulting those—Africans, American Indians, and Asia—who actually suffer racism. Recoding Arabs as white and anti-Muslim sentiment as “racist” reflects the need to stymie resistance to Arabization and Islamization of western civilization. That you read that last sentence with some discomfort testifies to the efficacy of this tactic.

Race is not biological reality. It is a social construct, an operating feature of the ideology of racism. The system adapts over time, but it has been remarkably consistent over the centuries. If you task a computer with running a factor analysis on genetic dissimilarity, it will produce factors that resemble the racial classification system developed centuries ago. This consistency speaks not to biological race but to the persistent effects of the racial system and common sense understandings of it. Our shared racial understanding is what Thomas Kuhn would call paradigmatic. So when I say that Arabs are white, I mean they are white according to a centuries old racial classification system that in many places carries the force of law and almost everywhere constitutes common sense. Ethnicity is a cultural category that includes language, cuisine, music, art, etc. It is one of two meanings of “nation.” As with race, ancestry is a big part of it. There is anti-Arab and anti-Mexican bigotry and discrimination. But it is not racism. A religion is a system of beliefs referencing supernatural beings or forces. There is also the reality of anti-Christian and anti-Islamic discrimination. But one cannot make anti-religious bigotry a form of racism. Moreover, while ethnic prejudice is problematic, irreligious criticism is noble and necessary. This is why the construct “Islamophobia” is particularly obnoxious: it suggest that there is something wrong with criticism of Islam. It is precisely this freedom, the freedom to critique oppressive thought, that the multiculturalists seek to rob us of. 

* * *

Racists argue that there really are such things as races. But we know that race is a social-historical construct. Therefore we study not race per se, but racism, even when we are debunking the notion of biological race by climbing down into the trenches with race realists. This requires that we work from valid conceptualizations in order to study change over time. To use an analogy, people define social class in all sorts of ways, but historical materialists define social class as production relations, that is a person’s relationship to the means of production (which may locate a person in multiple relations). Then we study the changing class structure over time by using these concepts. If we keep our concepts consistent, then we not only have a basis for objective theorization of social change and group dynamics, but we can elaborate the intellectual tools to combat efforts to mainstream extreme ideologies like Islam and postmodernism, which seek to change our definitions of things, as well as our values (such as secularism and liberalism), in order to undermine them. 

Imprecision and conceptual inflation are not just the result of intellectual sloppiness but often are propaganda tactics. It is evidence of a tendency. The academic conflation of Islam with race is an obvious example. The expansion of the meaning of racism to encompass culture and religion reflects the problem of conceptual inflation. Moreover, there is obfuscation about the origins of race as a concept and racism as an ideology in order to facilitate inflation. The concept of race was initially developed and for centuries used to describe things that are biological or result from biology. In the twentieth century is was fallaciously expanded to include ethnic or cultural identities. More recently, it was fallaciously expanded to include optimistic speech that racism is not as much of a problem as it used to be (the so-called New Racism, which interferes with the guilt of original sin). And, of course, the concept of race is currently undergoing further expansion to selectively and fallaciously encompass religious identity.

There is a need to deflate the concept of racism and circumscribe its usage to what it originally referred to, namely a false theory about human variation and the practice of treating people differently—hierarchically—based on these differences, and then relegate that theory to the dustbin of intellectual history along with flat-earthism and geocentrism. We need to keep it to its original meaning to avoid the conceptual inflation that the entrepreneurs of identity politics use to either extend or deepen oppressive relations (such as racializing ethnicities in order to deprive them of their rights) or stifle criticism of things not covered under the concept (such as culture and religion). All of which keeps us from the historical task of the working class: to overthrow capitalism and replace it with democratic socialist arrangements.

Endnotes

[1] There is of course an exception. I am even allowed to racialize classist intent as long as white people are the target, hence the easy use of the “white trash” slur. It is okay on the left today to speak about white people in the most demeaning manner conceivable and to attribute racist motive to their politics (for an example of the latter see John Blake’s messy CNN article, “In the census-citizenship case, the Supreme Court may once against affirm ‘white rule’,” citing approvingly the assessment of Ibram X. Kendi, founding director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University, implicating, albeit implicitly, working class whites who suffer amid mass immigration in the white supremacist “impulse” that sustained Jim Crow segregation in the South). There has been some elite reflection on the acceptability of racializing poor white bashing. Last year around this time NPR carried the useful segment “Why it’s Time to Retire the Disparaging Term ‘White Trash’.” Moreover, the leftwing populist Bernie Sanders was loathe to embrace identity politics in the 2016 election cycle until Black Lives Matter activists, seeing an easy target, commandeered the stage at one of his political rallies (the sympathetic make easy targets).

[2] I hasten to add that my view on these matters differs from the sense conveyed by the work of Ricardo Duchesne, a historical sociologist at the University of New Brunswick who elected for early retirement in the face of a censorious onslaught for linking civic nationalism to ethnic identity. This linking is also the mark of such neoconservatives as Douglas Murray, the author of the recent The Strange Death of Europe. I do not credit secularism and liberalism to whiteness but to the unique historical and cultural trajectory of European civilization driven by the social forces associated with capitalism. Wary of making claims of inevitability, any alleged racial, or ethic group, for that matter, in the context that produced the modern West could have produced modernity. Indeed, the West was made by many ethnicities. At the same time, the cultural character of the West is unique and this is why, for example, the Islamic government of Iran views the United States as the “Great Satan”: the West promises something that, if its inhabitants are committed to its core values, will end the authoritarian religious oppression of the masses. That means that clerics lose their privileges and status along with their pathological desire to control human personality. As Barnard Lewis famously pointed out, the clerics are bent on negating the threat to their power.

Over the last few months I have had three comrades who I have known for more than two decades unfriend me on Facebook over (in order of the unfriending): (1) skepticism about the bourgeois media narrative concerning gas attacks in Syria, (2) analysis of immigration from orthodox Marxist ideas about class struggle in nation-states, and (3) identification of Islam as a motive in some terrorist attacks. I will miss seeing their posts in my Facebook feed. I friended and followed them because, while I disagree with each of them on many things, I also benefitted from reading what they had to say. They write well and are interesting and witty. I knew each of them well before the existence of Facebook. I have learned much from them over the years.

The objection to skepticism of capitalist war aims and identifying ideological motives in mass violence—taking up (1) and (3)—throws me. The latter objection is especially curious given that Marx’s first major essay was on the importance of grasping religion as an explanation for action. Marx would have fit right in with the Christopher Hitchens of the modern world. While I recognize that Hitchens and the so-called New Atheists were loathed by many Marxists on account of their support for the Iraq war (I didn’t agree with them on that issue, either), it doesn’t make them wrong on everything or, obviously, change Marxist thought. To be frank about it, I suppose I do know what explains it, namely loathing of the West and allyship with its enemies, but that doesn’t follow from Marxism, and these are Marxists (one of whom is “Unrepentant,” his blog’s name tells its readers), so it remains a curious thing.

Enough with (1) and (3). I understand more the objection concerning immigration, because Marx’s assertion that “workingmen have no country” is routinely taken out of context and used as a slogan and many Marxists are too lazy to look into it. Had that comrade hung around a bit longer, I could have educated him, albeit he would, in an honest moment, be the first to tell you he has nothing left to learn about this (or anything other) subject. I am sure my readers don’t suffer from such hubris.

Marx uttered that phrase because the proletariat had not yet overthrown the bourgeoisie and established a worker state. It is clear in the Communist Manifesto that the proletariat has first to settle accounts with its national bourgeoisie. And in other writings, Marx identified the nation-state as the locus of the emancipation of property and religion from the state that set the stage for proletarian revolution. Moreover, Marxist economic thought, as a critique of bourgeois political economy (which, preceding dialectically, only negates the wrong bits), makes unavoidable the conclusion that immigration is a lever capitalists use to undermine the economic and political power of the working class. Really, even without Marx, this should be obvious with even a cursory grasp of market forces—when ones thoughts are not confused by other commitments, of course.

In reflecting on this today, I chalk up these misunderstandings to the depth to which many Marxists have embraced identity politics and multiculturalism, such anti-worker sentiments being the result of the third worldism that many Marxists adopted in the cultural revolutionary moment of New Left turn. Given that, I wonder why they wanted to be my friends or put up with me for as long as they did, since I am actually the unrepentant one (not out of habit). My guess is that my training in international political economy and my interventions on various leftwing and progressive listservs over the decades gives the impression that I am sympathetic to progressive politics. To be sure, there was always tension there as they did not quite seem to know from where I was coming, this because I actually took the time to read the source material and the best interpretations of it and did not throw myself into journalism and sloganeering where I would have to dim my lights to be appreciated.

The last fifteen years or so does find me shifting in my politics as I have been sorting through all that I have learned and continue learning, retaining and elaborating what makes sense and jettisoning that which is inconsistent with what a reasonable person can know about the world. I loath ideology, so I am constantly engaged in self-examination. One grows through critical reflection. I guess I can understand how disconcerting it can be for people who have become habitual in thought or practice cerebral hygiene to interact with somebody who still engages in a ruthless criticism of everything existing.

The country is receiving some good news from the Uniform Crime Report, published annually by the Federal Bureau of Investigations. Rates of the violent crimes of murder, robbery, and aggravated assault, as well as rates of the property crimes of burglary, larceny-theft, and motor vehicle theft have decreased since 2017. Moreover, the rates for the crimes have dropped in cities of all sizes. These statistics cover 300 million Americans, which is the vast majority of the nation’s population. The decrease occurred in all regions of the United States. The only exceptions were rape and aggravated assault for the West and rape for the Northeast (albeit by less than a percentage point in the Northeast).

After increases in violence crime 2014-2017, the nation saw a sharp decline in 2018 in criminal violence. Moreover, the downward trend in property crime was markedly accelerated in 2018 compared to previous years. There are numerous reasons for the good numbers, but chief among them is the greatly improved economic conditions the nation has enjoyed of late. Violent crime is especially sensitive to economic pressures, especially as they affect inner city populations. It is too soon to tell whether the country is back on track with the record declines in crime and violence it has enjoyed over the last several decades, but the new figures are promising.

Note: This is a preliminary analysis.

We were warned that a Trump presidency would produce a climate of hate putting race and ethnic minorities, religious minorities, and the LGBT community at risk for discrimination and violence. His demogoguery during the campaign and after, as well as policies as president, have targeted Mexicans and Muslims. And, while his rhetoric with respect to the LGBT community has been mixed, his policies towards transgendered persons has been exclusionary. More broadly, his presence as a long-standing cultural right-winger is believed to fuel resentment and identity-group antagonisms. For example, his outspokenness on the alleged perpetrators of a vicious crime against a white female jogger in Central Park, all of whom were black, as well as his doubts about the citizenship of US president Barack Obama, a black man whose father was a Nigerian citizen, are widely seen as evidence of anti-black prejudice.

One way of gauging the effect of Trump’s rhetoric is to examine hate crime statistics gathered and published annually by the FBI. While we wait for the 2018 statistics (the FBI does not update in real time), the 2017 statistics, which cover the first years of the Trump presidency, are available for analysis. These statistics are broken down in various ways, but I am interested in the figures that represent the proportions of victims across different types of hate crimes, as well as proportions within these types. The 2017 numbers show that violent hate was directed overwhelmingly at black, Jewish, and gay male persons. By far, victims of race or ethnic hatred are the largest proportion of hate crime victims, followed by religious minorities. However, one year does not indicate change over time. Fortunately, thanks to the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009 (18 U.S.C. §249), the FBI has annual statistics from 2011.

In terms of overall numbers, there were 7,173 victims of hate crimes in 2015, 7,615 victims in 2016, and 8,828 victims in 2017. The evidence indicates that there has been an overall increase in hate crime victims. It should be noted that the number of hate crimes in both 2015 and 2016 were lower than the number recorded in 2012, which identified 7713 victims of hate crimes. Taking a longer view, hate crimes increased 14.5 percent between 2012 and 2017, declining in 2013-2015 and then increasing in 2016-2017. It should also be noted that population growth is not figured into the numbers presented. However, the US population grew by nearly 4 percent during this period; the percentage growth in hate crime victims is somewhat tempered by that increase. Crucially, by far, the large increase in proportion was for religious minorities, with Jewish victims of hate crimes comprising most of that increase. 

The following is a breakdown of data for victims of single-bias hate crime incidents for the most recent year, followed by the 2015 and 2016 data with commentary. 

• In 2017, 59.6 percent of victims were targeted because of offenders’ bias against race, ethnicity, or ancestry. Of these, 48.6 percent were targets of anti-black bias, 10.9 percent were targets of anti-Hispanic or Latino bias, and 2.6% were victims of anti-Arab bias.
• In 2017, 20.6 percent of persons were victimized on the basis of religion. Of this figure, 58.1 percent were targets of anti-Jewish bias, 18.6 percent for anti-Muslim bias, and 8 percent for anti-Christian. Christians are by far the largest religious group in the country. Within the Christian population, anti-Catholic bias crime was the most frequent.
• In 2017, 15.8 percent of victims were targeted because of sexual orientation bias (homosexuality and bisexuality). Of these, 57.8 percent of victims were targeted for anti-gay (male) bias. 
• In 2017, 1.6 percent of victims of hate crimes were targeted because of gender-identity bias (i.e. transphobic violence).

Using 2015 and 2016 figures for comparison, the Trump effect should predict significant changes the proportions of victims subjected to hate crimes consistent with his rhetoric, which was most often directed at Hispanic/Latino persons with respect to ethnicity and Muslims with respect to religion. The effect on Jews is difficult to assess. On the one hand, Trump’s praise of Jews and enthusiastic support for Israel could soften views among his supporters, who are presumed to contain a large proposition of rightwing types (the effect here would be Trump as influencer); on the other hand, his support for Jews and Israel could amplify resentment in this population. Both of these effects are plausible so it may be a wash. Trump’s rhetoric concerning sexual orientation and gender identity have been mixed, but his policies have not been supportive of these communities, so these effects should appear in 2017.

On the popular landscape, Trump as presidential candidate was only on the horizon for 2015, so that year should serve as a good baseline for comparison. We would expect lower numbers in 2015 than in 2017. Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016 featured much of the same rhetoric in question, therefore we expect that the percentages whould also be substantially higher in 2016 than in 2015. 

In 2015, for bias crimes against race, ethnicity, and ancestry, the proportion of victims (59.2 percent) is roughly the same as it was in 2017. This is also the case for 2016 (58.9 percent). Over all, the race/ethnic-based Trump effect with respect to proportions is slight and, in some instances, runs counter to expectations. 

First, on the matter of victimization on the basis of race, ethnicity, and ancestry:

• The proportion of victims of anti-black bias (52.2 percent) was considerably higher in 2015 than in 2017. Hate crimes against blacks thus declined under Trump by nearly four percent. The downward trend was notable in 2016 (50.2 percent). I do not have an explanation for the decline in the proportion of black American victims of hate crime in the short term. However, in the long term, racial discrimination and prejudice against blacks has been declining for decades. This is likely due to the gains of civil rights and the rising status of blacks in American culture. At the same time, black victims of hate cries continue to represent the largest proportion. At 12.1 percent of the US population, blacks suffer by far the worst overrepresentation among hate crimes victims. 
• At 9.3 percent, the proportion of victims of anti-Hispanic or Latino bias was roughly a percentage point lower in 2015 than in 2017. The number for Hispanic/Latino victims is the same in 2016 as in 2015. Given the level of anti-Mexican rhetoric, one would have expected there to be significant difference in these numbers, yet there is not much evidence of a Trump effect here. Hispanics/Latinos are the largest ethnic group in the United States (18.1 percent); Hispanic/Latino representation in hate crimes is proportionately much lower than their proportional representation in the population. Although there has been considerable media attention on the plight of Hispanic/Latino people with respect to race/ethnic prejudice and discrimination, it pales in contrast to ant-black sentiment, both in frequency and in proportion.  
• The victims of Anti-Arab bias constituted 1.1 percent in 2015, a figure considerably lower than the 2017 figure. Anti-Arab bias is a small proportion of hate crimes perpetrated on the basis of race, ethnicity, and ancestry; however, Arabs are a small proportion of the US population (around 1.1 percent according to the Arab American Institute Foundation). The number for Arab victims was nearly the same in 2016 as in 2015 (at 1.3 percent). In other words, for those years, there was no ethnic disproportionality in hate crime victims. Given that Trump did not target Arabs in his rhetoric per se, it might be the case that his anti-Muslim rhetoric carried over to the ethnicity most often associated with the Islamic faith. However, as we shall see, the evidence for this is contradictory.

Next, the matter of victimization on the basis of religion. For 2015, crimes of religious bias was 19.7 percent of the total number of victims of hate crime. This is less than a percentage point lower than in 2017. In 2016, 21.1 percent of hate crimes victims were targeted on the basis of religion. Again, that is less than a percentage point difference. Overall, there is little religion-based Trump effect in terms of proportion of type. However, the greatest increase in hate crime victims was for religious bias. One might expect that this increase involved Muslim victims of hate crimes, but this was not the case.

• At 52.1 percent, attacks on Jews was considerably lower in 2015 than in 2017. For 2016, 54.4 percent of victims of religious violence were Jews. Again, given Trump’s positive rhetoric regarding Jews and Israel, if there is an effect here, it is by provoking antisemitic resentment among far-right supporters of Trump. It must be stressed that there is a rise in antisemitic hate crimes across the trans-Atlantic community, driven not only by rightwing populism, but also by the increase of Muslims in the West. Antisemitism is rampant in Muslim-majority countries, and migrants from those countries bring their antisemitism with them.
• At 21.9 percent, the proportion of attacks on Muslims was higher in 2015 than in 2017, the opposite of expectation. The proportion was higher in 2016 at 24.5 percent. The sharp decline in the proportion of Muslim victims of hate crimes from 2016 and 2017 is curious in light of the increase in Arab victims of hate crimes. One would expect these to rise together. But in any case, despite Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric, a sharp rise in the proportion of victims of anti-Muslim bias is not forthcoming in the data. In fact, we see the opposite.   
• Attacks on Christians were much higher in 2015 (12.6 percent) compared to 2017. The downward trend in Christian hate crime victims was noticeable in 2016 (9.9 percent). 

Finally, bias crimes against sexual orientation fell almost two percent over the two-year frame (15.8 percent in 2017 from 17.7 percent in 2015), with 62.2 percent directed at gay males in 2015, a larger percentage than in 2017. The hate crime proportion of victims of gender-identity bias was relatively unchanged.

Perhaps the 2018 numbers will be more revealing, but based on the evidence, the claims of a Trump effect are exaggerated. What increase there is does not match expectations given Trump’s rhetoric.

In the aftermath of the attack on the US navel base at Pearl Harbor by Japanese forces, the Roosevelt administration issued Executive Order 9066 (1942) ordering Japanese Americans into internment camps. Most of those rounded up by the government were American citizens, indefinitely interred without trial. The US Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of Executive Order 9066 in Korematsu v. United States (1944). A majority of justices agreed that national security takes precedent over the rights of citizens and residents of Japanese descent. The camps were dismantled after the second world war in 1945.

A concentration camp is a facility where persecuted minorities or political prisoners are imprisoned without trial. Given this definition, which is the standard one, it is reasonable to consider Japanese Americans to have suffered concentration camps in the United States, albeit many Americas resist that equivalency. Years later, President Reagan affirmed the injustice of Executive Order 9066 and authorized the US government to compensate survivors. What the Roosevelt administration did to the Japanese people living in the United States is widely regarded as reprehensible, even after acknowledging war hysteria and contemporaneous attitudes.

Today, the question of what constitutes a concentration camp is an item on the partisan political landscape. Talk of concentration camps began in the summer of 2018 as the migrant crisis at the US-Mexico border dragged on, a concern that faded as political attention shifted to the pending Mueller report, which, the public was told, was sure to conclude that President Trump was a traitor. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez reconjured the specter of the concentraiton camp in her Twitter feed, referring to the president a “fascist.” Chuck Todd, moderator for NBC’s Meet the Press, pushed back. Immigration detention centers and concentration camps are “not at all comparable in the slightest,” he said, before suggesting that it was improper to invoke the memory of the Holocaust. Mainstream and social media voices on the left jumped to Ocasio-Cortez’s defense, emphasizing that the congresswoman did not actually refer to “Nazi death camps,” which they insisted are different from concentration camps, or, as Ocasio-Cortez calls them, “dog pounds” and “freezers” stuffed with “1000s of children.”

Are immigration detention facilities concentration camps? Because detention facilities, jails and prisons, psychiatric wards, and other places of confinement present as harsh places, it is always important to ask about the purpose or function of a facilitiy. In the second paragraph, I identified the purpose of a concentration camp, a rather extraordinary institution in the modern period, one signaling the presence of war or an authoritarian government. What is the function of an immigration detention facility?

Every country in the world regulates its borders. Borders are part of the modern nation-state, the necessity of controlling national boundaries recognized across the interstate system. Under international law, people are in principle free to leave the country in which they reside. However, international law does not recognize a right to enter a foreign country without authorization. For those seeking asylum, possible justifications identified in international law (“refugee” is defined in the 1951 United Nations Convention relating to the Status of Refugees), many countries have developed a process for determining the veracity of asylum claims.

In many countries, routine procedure involves a stint in a detention facility while claims are being processed and the situation assessed. This is consistent with international law. In 1986, the UN Refugee Agency affirmed that detention is justified for numerous and obvious reasons: “to verify identity; to determine the elements on which the claim to refugee status or asylum is based; to deal with cases where refugees or asylum-seekers have destroyed their travel and/or identity documents or have used fraudulent documents in order to mislead the authorities of the State in which they intend to claim asylum; or to protect national security or public order.”

Given limitations of resources, when persons are detained in large numbers, which can occur during surges in migration, prolonged detention and overcrowding can result. In countries with press freedom and a compassionate public, images and stories of detention facilities, with their fences and armed guards and poignant migrant accounts, provoke visceral reaction and arouse sympathy. This is not a bad thing, but the solution to a migrant crisis is not to abandon law and principle, but to advocate for appropriation of more funds to establish more and better facilities and increase the number of qualified personnel. However, ideologues see political advantage in impressions without qualification and prey on emotion while eschewing reason.

Currently at the southern border of the United States, immigration detention facilities are crowded with persons, many in poor health, most hailing from the three Central American states of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. The conditions of their detention are far from ideal. Even under generous conditions, confinement can be an unpleasant and, for some, traumatic experience. Nonetheless, persons irregularly entering the United States are afforded due process, and can, if they wish, return to their home country. Because of court-imposed limitations on how long migrants may be detained (established years ago, consistent with the spirit of international law), persons not legally returned to the border’s other side are eventually released in the United States with a citation to appear for a hearing to determine their status. More than forty percent of those released from detention disappear into the United States, skipping their hearings and evading law enforcement. Ninety percent of those who properly cross or show up for their hearings after being released from detention are found to have no legitimate claim under international law to be in the United States and are deported.

We are told that those crossing into the United States from Mexico are refugees. A refugee is defined as an individual with a “well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion [who] is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.” Central Americans migrants are not members of a persecuted minority. They are not being singled out on account of race or religion. They are for the most part economic migrants looking to work in the United States, to take advantage of the country’s comparative higher standard of living and system of public assistance (who can blame them?). Also among the migrants are members of domestic street gangs (pandillas) and transnational gays (maras), which pose a security risk to American communities. (See “The Northern Triangle, the Migran Flor, and the Risk of Criminal Violence.”)

So are immigration detention facilities concentration camps? For decades now, the nation-states of the world have practiced administrative (or civil) detention of illegal or undocumented aliens. The detention of immigrants in the United States is not arbitrary, but a matter of the rule of law. The system is a legitimate piece of the machinery of the modern democratic republics. There is no violation of international law. The situation at the border may bear superficial resemblance to Japanese American internment during WWII, just as a European prison cell may resemble that of a Soviet Gulag, but in substance, they are not comparable. So the answer is no. It is neither historically nor functionally accurate to compare immigration detention facilities to concentration camps. 

There is no misunderstanding about this for those shocked by Ocasio-Cortez’s comparison. The tone of her texts and videos calls to mind Hitler and the Holocaust. When someone as clever as the congresswoman from New York uses the words “fascist” and “concentration camp” to describe the detention facilities and US immigration policy, her intent is obvious. For all those rationalizing Ocasio-Cortez’s rhetoric, even more see clearly what the congresswoman is doing; she means to portray the current administration in a Hitlerian light, to frighten the public with the specter of Nazism, to upend reason with panic. She enjoys the corporate and alternative leftwing media at her back.

Such rhetoric leverages the emotionalism of historical memory to shame people into open borders. That is the agenda. Capitalist firms want cheap labor for super profits and to drive down working class wages (hence the aggressive push by the Cato Institute and the Koch brothers). There are gaps in the pews of the Catholic Church; a dying Church always seeks congregants. Progressive types need to virtue signal. The campaign is cynical and manipulative. Ocasio-Cortez and her supporters should make the case for the denationalizing of America straightforwardly, without exploiting irrational fear and ignorance in an attempt to sway opinion. The congresswoman knows open borders is unpopular, so she resorts to false analogy.

More than conceptually wrong and ethically problematic (I agree with those who find Ocasio-Cortez’s use of language insensitive to those who actually suffered fascist oppression, who endured the concentration camps of WWII, who lost relatives to Nazism), Ocasio-Cortez rhetoric is politically reckless if she indeed cares about the rebuilding the left in this country. Americans in the heartland know it is an absurd comparison. They understand the difference between immigration detention facilities where people are being temporary held while processed and concentration camps where people are held without good cause and are often waiting to be routed to labor camps and death camps. There are limits to Orwellian tactics. Such hyperbolic rhetoric makes the left appear not merely disconnected from reality but anti-American in disposition.  

It’s not just the legitimacy of the Democratic Party that’s at issue; the interests of the working class, at odds with illegal immigration and open borders, are further alienated from the class consciousness we need to build a popular movement that can tackle the problems we face: class exploitation and inequality, lack of health care, poverty and homelessness, global climate change, mass incarceration. Frankly, I am much less concerned about the Democratic Party than I am about the legitimacy of the left in general. Mass perception paints with a broad brush. The Republican Party is not a worker party. But Republicans are eager to accept refugees from the Democratic Party into their fold. They have been doing this for decades. It is why they control so much of the political landscape. Anti-Americanism bleeds the left of working class support. Every time an image of a leftwing activist holding a placard with the slogan “When was America ever great?” is shared on social media, sympathy for President Trump, and, more broadly, rightwing populism, grows and deepens.

How do we bring down the fever on the left? Perhaps it is useful to suggest to people that they keep in mind the fact that most countries regulate their borders more stridently than the United States, and that those nations with more restrictive policies includes some of the most democratic societies of Europe. Who would think to call immigration detention facilities in Sweden “concentration camps”? According to the Global Detention Project, there are four secure administrative centers in Göteborg and in cities around Stockholm, operated by the Swedish Migration Agency, that hold minors (accompanied and unaccompanied), adult women, and adult men. Is the government of Sweden “fascist”? Hardly. Nor is Sweden exceptional in this regard.

Of course, moral panic is not merely the result of living in a progressive bubble. It has functions, the most immediate of which is delegitimizing a president and stirring up widespread panic to mobilize voters for the upcoming election. What gives this game away?

Noting double standards can be quite revealing. Why did the left ignore the camps and immigrant deaths under Obama? Obama deported nearly half a million illegal aliens in 2012 alone, separating families in the process. Where were the howls of fascism then? Over the course of his presidency, Obama deported million of illegal aliens. But he did it with such class, didn’t he? The pictures of kids in cages used last year to spread hysteria about Trump’s handling of the border crisis were actually taken during the Obama presidency. The public didn’t recognize them because they were not put into the mass media echo chamber. But those “dog pounds” and “freezers” were Obama’s. The corpses in the desert and in Border Control custody were on Obama’s watch. (For more on this, see “Law Enforcement and Family Separation.”) Vice-president Joe Biden takes pride in the Obama administration because there was “not even a hint of scandal.” And that’s true, because it was Obama not Trump.

Ask yourself, why the focus on the immigration crisis now? It’s not as if the crisis subsided to allow Democrats time and space to gin up anticipation over the Mueller report, which turned out to be a dud, or the push for impeachment, which struggled to get any traction (it is opposed by the majority of Americans). That manufactured scandal is petering out. So we’re back to the immigration crisis dressed up with concentration camps and fascist imagery. (Ocasio-Cortez is hardly the first to use language suggesting Nazism in order to demonize the current administration. See my entry “Immigration, Deportation, and Reductio ad Hitlerum,” blogged at the height of last summer’s panic over immigration while I was traveling through major cities in Sweden and Norway witnessing firsthand the fallout from mass migration.) The congresswoman uses this rhetoric in a context that generates meaning. It is disingenuous to obscure the intent of her rhetoric.

While conditions in detention facilities along the UW-Mexico border need to be addressed (it would help if Congress appropriated funds for more and better facilities and more qualified personnel), there is a common sense understanding that border control is necessary and that this involves detaining for a reasonable period those being processed, a common sense understanding that is recognized in international law. But on today’s left there are demagogues who exploit humanitarian crises for propagandistic ends. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez assures us that she doesn’t “just throw bombs.” But it’s her style.

[H]e by no means leaves the guilty unpunished, responding to the transgression of fathers by dealing with children and children’s children, to the third and fourth generation.” —Exodus 34:7

[T]he moment you give me reparations, you’ve made me into a victim without my consent. Bill H.R. 40 is immoral and a political mistake. —Coleman Hughes

Treating race as an essential feature of human identity is not just a problem in the domain of natural history. It corrupts moral theory, as well. Notions that moral responsibility is carried on our genes or pursued by some transcendent and timeless accountant that informs race identitarianism underpins the resurgence of talk of reparations for African Americans. It is worse than a bad moral theory. It is immoral. And it is divisive.

In a 2018 essay in The Atlantic, linguist John McWhorter characterizes as religious the character of the “third-wave antiracism” that marks the post-civil rights period: “The idea that whites are permanently stained by their white privilege, gaining moral absolution only by eternally attesting to it, is the third wave’s version of original sin.” 

This could not be more obvious in the demand for reparations, a race-based scheme to transfer wealth to African Americans that numerous politicians seeking the nomination of Democratic Party climb over one another to proclaim. It is a demand the vast majority of Americans rightly reject.

A couple of days ago, CNN carried a segment with the headline: “Mitch McConnell: Obama Elected to Make Up for ‘Sin of Slavery’.” One of the guests, Robert W. Lee (a descendant of Robert E. Lee, commander of the Confederate States Army) claimed on behalf of white people responsibility for “white privilege” and lamented “the mess that white people have made” of history. Lee, who is white and a Christian minister, referenced his vocation and explicitly advanced the religious standpoint that “asking for forgiveness” is not enough to take away the sin of whiteness. To make the nation whole, white people must seek “atonement” by “reparating for the sins of the past.”

Yesterday, the House of Representatives conducted a hearing on the question of reparations. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, pushing H.R.40—Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African–Americans Act, said, “The role of the federal government in supporting the institution of slavery and subsequent discrimination directed against blacks is an injustice that must be formally acknowledged and addressed.”

She appears to have forgotten the three-quarters of a million Americans who died in a nineteenth century civil war to end slavery. Missing also is acknowledgment of the fact that in the following century federal courts desegregated schools and lifted bans on miscegenation, legislatures passed civil rights bills outlawing discrimination against blacks, and administrations implemented a myriad of positive measures to open American institutions to people of all races.

However, the religious bent of her conception of justice was confident and explicit. “God bless us as we pursue the final justice for those who lived in slavery,” she said, clutching her bosom.

The same religious spirit was embraced by Eugene Taylor Sutton, the Episcopal Bishop of the State of Maryland, who told the committee that white people must seek atonement for their sins. “When I’m talking for reparations,” he said, “I’m actually talking to my white brothers and sisters.” “You need this more than we do,” he continued. “You need this for your soul. You need this to be able to look black persons in the eye and say, ‘I acknowledge the mistake, and I want to be part of the solution to repair that damage.’”

On the issue of racism (and everything else), I was born albatross-free. I bear no original sin. I am not responsible for things other people did in the past. I have no sins for which I must atone. I don’t even believe in sin. But guilt-suffering liberal Christians and left identitarians are not satisfied with personal suffering; they wish for others to endure the stigma they have accepted for themselves, that they wield as virtue. It makes them morally superior to those who are in denial. And as long as people feel the need to signal virtue, it gives these moral entrepreneurs power over them.

Reparations depends on disappearing the concrete individual into the abstract group and holding every member of that group, really an aggregate (demography carries no agency) responsible for the deeds of some individuals. It is the mirror image of the racist act of blaming all black people for deeds perpetrated by some individuals identified as black. In the Age of Antiracism, one simply trains race prejudice on white people. All white people are guilty for the deeds perpetrated by individuals identified as white.

In “Race and Democracy” I critique critical race theory, the contemporary ideology that puts the biblical logic of collective guilt at the core of its standpoint with its reification of “perpetrator” and “victim” perspectives. In “Viggo Mortensen and ‘the N-word’: Assigning Collective Guilt through Informal Speech Codes,” I point out that antiracism is “a way of recruiting white people, in the absence of racist motive/action, in the project to affirm the claim that all white people are racist by default.” In “Committing the Crime it Condemns,” I write, “If a sin is forever and collectively and intergenerationally applied, then I can always be asked to pay penance. Repent on pain of being accused of not confessing to unearned advantages and privileges responsible for the pain and suffering of others. Unrepentant sinners are the worse. A fallen person must admit he is fallen before he can get better. To deny being a racist is to confess to being one. Resistance twice convicts.” Most recently, I take a look at the linking of reparations with mass immigration in “Reparations and Open Borders,” an angle that feeds into the false depiction of immigrants as a racial minority.

Replacing reason, the concept of racism is extended in time and space, but in one direction, to force through, via smear and sin, particular laws and policies.

At the hearing yesterday, Congressman Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, was booed as he spoke against the act of levying “monetary reparations” against the living “for the sins of a small subset of Americans from many generations ago.”

Johnson’s is the rational position; living generations are are not responsible for slavery. Causation doesn’t work that way. There is no power possessed by the living to commit injustice in the past. There is no logic beyond the primitive and superstitious to hold individuals responsible for the actions of another individuals—or to hold an entire group or population responsible for the actions of corpses—and that’s no logic at all.

Yesterday was Juneteenth, a day that commemorates the day Texas slaves learned they were free. This was in 1865, two-and-a-half years after President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation—one hundred and fifty-four years ago. Nobody who perpetrated the crime of slavery has been alive for decades.

I am well aware that proponents of reparations claim not only slavery as the sin for which white America must atone. The horrors of lynching followed. Jim Crow segregation was in existence when my father was born. Grouped inequality along racial lines still exists.

The history Ta-Nehisi Coates cites in his June 2014 Atlantic article is not disputed. What is disputed is the claim that there is a connection between history and conditions admitted to and responsibility for those things. The most charitable thing one can say about the demand for reparations is that it assumes as given what it must prove.

Ta-Nehisi Coates says, “Enslavement reigned for 250 years on these shores. When it ended, this country could have extended its hollow principles of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness to all. But America had other things in mind.”

Are the principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness “hollow”? Or are they the guiding lights that suggest Juneteenth as a national holiday?

America is not a person. It doesn’t have anything in mind. This is the fallacy of reification at its most obvious. However, America is governed by a relatively small number of people influenced by a social class to which most Americans do not belong. But where are the calls in Congress to dispossess the bourgeoisie and dismantle capitalism, the living reason for inequality? Are there no poor whites? No white prisoners?

Which brings me back to that CNN headline. Assumption grossly distorts its characterization of Mitch McConnell’s remarks. While the senator did call slavery a sin (which is giving away too much already), he did not say Obama was elected to make up for it. His point was that electing a black president showed that the United States, a work in progress, is moving forward. And he is right—and simply repeating what liberals were saying in 2008.

People of the United States have made vast strides in eliminating racist structure and sentiment over its history. To listen to Ta-Nehisi Coates, you’d think African Americans are no better off today than they were 1950s or even the 1850s. For they must bring the crimes of the past to the present to find living perpetrators. But the perpetrators are ghosts.

Exodus 34:7 is the logic of reparations. Biblical logic is antithetical to logic of the liberal and secular democratic-republic. Ancient biblical justice is primitive superstitious nonsense. Indeed, the United States is explicitly founded upon a godless constitution with a formal legal wall of separation between church and state. It’s one of the things makes the United States great. Reparations for slavery and apartheid must assume white people are born guilty, with original sin, possessing a tribal stigma, for which they must atone.

I was appalled to see a video of Democrats, on April 4, 2019 in New York City, receiving the anointing of the charlatan street preach and race merchant Al Sharpton (and his National Action Network) for confessing imagined sins to thunderous applause. One by one leading Democratic candidates for president pledged to support Sheila Jackson Lee’s bill to establish a commission on the subject. Holding people responsible for deeds they could not have done or for the deeds of others is immoral and unjust. To take time away from other things to study the problems in Congress is not merely a waste of time and resources but an exercise in mainstreaming ressentiment.

Rejecting reparation for slavery or apartheid is not rejecting the principle of social obligation. As members of a nation-state where individual rights and liberties are recognized and defended, that is as citizens in a liberal and secular democratic-republic, a people have an obligation to provide for the needs of the country. Taxation, including progressive taxation, is not reparations, but a necessary imposition to support the machinery of justice, provide for the common defense, and promote the general welfare. Good government is not a necessary evil, but the machinery of democracy and freedom.

Reparations for slavery or apartheid rests on a different principle. It is rooted in the notion that people owe other people things on the basis of abstract collective identities such as race, ethnicity, or religion. It substitutes the fallacious notion of agency by an imagined community for the actual agency and responsibility of concrete individuals for demonstrable harm caused to others. This is tribal thinking and the greatest accomplishment of the nation-state, and why democratic-republics must be defended against the denationalizing push of capitalist globalization, is the emancipation of the individual from tribal arrangements and defense against the resurrection of such arrangements.

The promise of the modern nation-state is liberation of persons from obligations to race, ethnicity, and religion. This is why we reject the racial state, ethnonationalism, and theocracy. Race, ethnicity, and religion are not yet phantoms because race, ethnic, and religious merchants still truck in imagined communities. They desire to chain the individual to mythic and unjust notions. Race, ethnic, and religious conflict persist because moral entrepreneurs are determined to sell the public an alchemy turning cosmic obligation into concrete debt. It is a movement that strikes at the rational foundation of Western civilization. This must be resisted.

Whether biological or theological, the race essentialism that underpins racism and antiracism keeps race and racism alive in the twenty-first century. This way of thinking is indeed a mistake—a mistake that fractures the proletariat, an actual collectivity resulting from the logic inhering in the material forces of production. Reparations perpetuates the irrationalism of superstitious thinking. It is a mistake we cannot afford to make anymore. It is bending the arc of history away from justice.

Suketu Mehta’s The New York Times op-ed, “Why Should Immigrants ‘Respect Our Borders’? The West Never Respected Theirs,” collapses in the second sentence when he affirms his support for reparations, a probably unworkable and, more importantly, thoroughly immoral justice claim. He then trudges through the ruins of his argument, compiling a familiar list of grievances: colonial adventures, foreign wars, global inequality (development and underdevelopment), and climate change.

The list is real and, while interpretations of causal forces vary, the historical record is not disputed. Originating in the West less than a millennium ago, capitalism spreads outward from Europe to incorporate the world by the end of the twentieth century. But how are my sons responsible for any of the items on Mehta’s list? One is a college student. The other is in high school. Hardly colonial masters. They moreover lack supernatural powers to conjure the past injustices Mehta wants to hold them responsible for.

Mehta presumes that crimes of past generations implicate the living. But there is no rational logic that will get him there. Whatever reasoning one might charitably identify would be biblical and primitive: God encodes sin in ancestral lines because (some) victims are righteous. I bear the mark of Cain in this particular theological exercise, I understand. I am a white man of European descent. There are persons in my family line who owned slaves. I am cursed.

All this is superstition. Europeans and their descendents aren’t a tribe. They are at best a myriad of what Benedict Anderson calls “imagined communities.” As such they aren’t automatically responsible for anything—certainly not for merely being. Moreover, nobody is responsible for the actions of his ancestors.

Most European natives and immigrants were not members of the social classes that organized colonial adventures. The vast majority of Europeans and their descendants were peasants and serfs, farmers and workers. They didn’t own slaves. They didn’t perpetrate genocide. Even if one supposes the vast wealth held by the rich today was acquired mostly at the expense of persons outside the West, how could the majority of Europe’s descendants be responsible for the decisions of powerful elites?

If history matters, then we must never forget that the rich got rich from exploiting peasants and serfs, the farmers and workers of North America and Europe. Mehta’s argument asks us to forget this by drawing false dividing lines. He lumps by race and culture. But history is organized primarily by social class, and these relations cut across geographical boundaries in a world economy.

Moreover, because of his method of division, Mehta treats as intrinsic to the West that which the forward thinking in the West fought to overcome: slavery, war, absolutism, and economic exploitation—all things that preceded the West, that were incorporated into the West during its expansion. For example, slavery was taken over from the Islamic world, which, unlike the West, never produced an abolitionist movement. It was the Christian West that abolished slavery. European imperialism abolished slavery elsewhere.

Mehta’s essay is a fine example of the identity politics that is so antithetical to economic justice: fractions of the working class pitting themselves against other fractions of the working class, fractionated by an ideology that those who demand reparations and open borders perpetuate through the praxis of ethnicized and racialized thinking. 

It is a fine example of the theological character of this politics, as well. Mehta judges the West to have sinned mightily against the world and demands it pay penance, collectively. He demands that the West open up its home to the world so the downtrodden may take what moral entrepreneurs like Mehta think they deserve by virtue of location of birth and accident of history.

The tragedy compounding tragedy is that these eruptions of racial and ethnic resentments are not merely unnecessary—they keep us off the road to justice. The way to deal with the problem of inequality is to replace capitalism with a socialist economy that provides access to the means of production to all those willing and able to work (with support for those who can’t) independent of race and ethnicity. 

History helps us understand the past. But is inadequate for telling the living how to solve the problems of the present. Why are people poor today? Because a handful of people have a lot money they don’t really need, and they get it from people who work. Capitalism lies in back of colonialism. Capitalism is the source of inequality in real time. 

In some sense, Mehta grasps the problem of capitalism. Others recognize this in his work. Economist, and progressive advocate of a more humane capitalism, Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz agrees, telling his audience that Mehta’s book, This Land is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto, “reveals the deep forces that propel [immigrants] on their journeys.” Refugee rights lawyer Becca Heller writes that Mehta’s book: “lays bare the structural inequalities forcing millions of migrants to flee their countries of origin.”

But Heller also praises The Land is Our Land for its “fearless and brutally honest look at the rise and inevitable fall of national borders and those who seek to enforce them.” And, really, this is what Mehta’s argument is about: open borders. Identity merchants like Mehta aim to shame the West into accepting the plunder of its resources.

Turnabout is fair play is the ethic that lies behind this; by the lights of a quasi-religious cosmology of justice, the West has long had it coming. Heller tells us that “powerful nations have an obligation to welcome those they have uprooted.”

Those who defend the nation-state are the bad guys. The “anti-immigrant forces.” The “populist ideologues.” The pages of liberal and leftwing media are full of rhetoric smearing working people who believe that governments exists to protect their rights and their livelihood.

Rather than address the problem of capitalism, Mehta turns to the ancient logic of kin punishment, giving the West a choice: reparations or open borders. He, along with Heller and her ilk, pine for the collapse of the interstate system, replaced by a world ruled by transnational corporate power that directs labor flows to undermine the living standards of those who led the world in economic and technological innovation, who advanced the superior values of secularism, liberalism, individualism, and human rights, and who sacrificed blood and treasure to defend those values against the threat of global fascism.

Since, in Mehta’s mind, I am responsible for the sins of the West, then he surely won’t mind if I answer for the West. I don’t accept his proposition.  

Yesterday, on my Facebook timeline, I reflected on the third anniversary of a massacre that occurred in a gay nightclub, Pulse, in Orlando, Florida, in which 49 human beings were murdered by a Muslim. My commemoration of this crime simply noted the facts:

New York based writer Doug Henwood, known for his newsletter Left Business Observer, among other things, wondered why I noted Omar Mateen’s faith. What was the point of highlighting his religion? he asked. The answer was obvious, I thought: Islam provided the motive for Mateen’s actions. Moreover, that Islam provided the motive was not speculation or interpretation, but lay explicitly in the things Mateen wrote and said. He declared himself an “Islamic Solider,” a “Soldier of God,” and he told a 9-1-1 operator: “Praise be to God, and prayers as well as peace be upon the prophet of God.”

Henwood and I are not friends on Facebook anymore (not my choice), but the encounter made me think some more about how weird the left’s relationship with Islam has become. I am not talking about the postmodern left. One expects them to fetishize the “other.” It was after all none other than Michel Foucault who propagandized for the Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution while working in Iran as special correspondent for Corriere della Sera and le Nouvel Observateur. But Henwood is something of a Marxist. Why would a leftwing Marxist-type take offense at naming the regressive ideology that motivated Omar Mateen’s actions? More generally, why do leftwing Marxists apologize for an ideology that oppresses and advocates violence against women and homosexuals?

I have written about the problem of Islam on this blog before (see, for examples, Orland and Religion and Threat Minimization and Ecumenical Demobilization). What I am writing today will echo some of what I have already said. But I feel the need to write down the thoughts that have been banging around in my head since yesterday because the episode provides a ready illustration of the problem secularists face in defending a free society, as well as the challenges to the building of a secular society unpinned by socialist arrangements. Antitheism is an essential part of the Marxist critique of capitalism. On February 7, 1844, in Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, Marx published these words: “The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.” Yet Marxian leftists are distancing themselves from Marx. This is a serious problem.

* * *

What I have been thinking about is double standard. When I note the religious identity of a person who takes terrorist action or commits a hate crime based on dogma associated with his identity, the response depends on which religious identity I am noting. The response is different when the person is a Christian than if the person is a Muslim.

If the person is Christian, then I will almost always be judged to have acted properly or perceived as just stating the obvious. I rarely take flak for criticizing Christianity. When I do, it is always always from a fundamentalist Christian. Folks from other religious faiths or those who are not very or not at all religious almost never object to anti-Christian rhetoric. For example, when I note that a Christian bombed an abortion clinic, this is treated as acceptable. It is not controversial that I claim the man’s religious faith probably explains why he targeted an abortion clinic. He believes that God puts souls in fetuses to make life and that he has an obligation to do his part to protect those lives.

If, on the other hand, the religious identity of the perpetrator is Muslim, then I will be judged to have acted improperly by calling attention to this fact. I violate an unspoken rule on the contemporary left when I say that a Muslim massacred people in a gay nightclub: It is okay to call out religion if the religion is associated with western civilization. Mormonism and Scientology are absurd belief systems. South Park makes fun of them. No problem. But if it is a nonwestern religion, especially Islam, then it is either an irrelevant detail or bigoted. Even when Islam is directly implicated, as was clear in Omar Mateen’s communications, it should not be characterized as causative. The motive must be found somewhere else.

We see this double standard at work in the treatment of women in religion. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, a story of the plight of women under the thumb of Christian theonomy, is celebrated by feminists, and much is made of the way the women in that story are segregated and covered, yet the same feminists celebrate the hijab and are silent on the practice of gender segregation in Islam.

In the aftermath of the Pulse nightclub massacre, the double standard confused the public about what caused the shootings. The media and the social media left told the public that the massacre was caused by homophobia (the concept of toxic masculinity also appeared). But the public was not told that target selection was motivated by a commitment to Islam, even though Mateen expressed this commitment. The public was never told about the loathing that Muslims have for western society, which Mateen explicitly referenced, a society they see as decadent and sinful because it tolerates homosexuality. It was never explained to the public that the West is a safe space for gays and lesbians compared to Muslim-majority countries. The public did not have an opportunity to contemplate that, because of immigration and the embracing of Islam, western space was becoming less safe. The cultural managers in the West did not want the public to think about the character of homophobia that led to the attack because Islam was directly implicated. These acts of omission and obfuscation put gay people in danger. Indeed, it raises the risk for everybody when the media hides the effects of Islamization on western societies and dissembles the goals of political Islam.

The attitude that Islam is incidental to the crime is crystalized in Henwood’s reflexive complaint: “Yeah, but what’s the point of highlighting his religion?” In other words, what does religion have to do with it? It’s a rhetorical question with the actual answer desperately avoided: religion has everything to do with it. Frankly, it’s a disingenuous question. People like Henwood are smart enough to know why Mateen’s religion is relevant in marking the anniversary of this tragedy: if we want to protect the gay community from violence, we have to be honest about the threat religion poses. Unfortunately, for those who mix loathing of the West in with their opposition to capitalist exploitation (a common occurrence on the contemporary Marxian left), the ethic is often “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

* * *

Without any apparent reflection on his part, the objection “what does religion have to do with it?” is almost always uttered by somebody who urges the public to blame white supremacy for the actions of persons who target places and people on the basis of racial identity. If authorities don’t make a big deal out of white supremacist identity in the perpetration of violence, for example when a KKK member or fellow traveler shooting up a black church for explicitly racist reasons doesn’t get a terrorist label, then leftists accuse the authorities of having a double standard. Eyes rolling, they put their double standard this way: “When a Muslim shoots up a gay bar, it’s terrorism, but when a white guy shoots up a black church, it’s mental illness.” I have seen this in meme form posted to Facebook or Twitter countless times. 

This way of thinking is massively misguided. The formulation confuses ideology with race. When we know a person is a Muslim we know something about this person. We know he believes in Islam. We know that Islam is anti-women, anti-gay, and anti-secular. We know that if a man takes Islam seriously, if he is committed to the faith, then he is more likely to act on its preachments than somebody who does not take the faith as seriously. Knowing a person is white, on the other hand, tells us nothing about the character or behavioral potential of that person. He may or may not be many things. Yet the left will blame whiteness for all sorts of things (while ignoring the fact that Muslim terrorists are also often white). If the person is white, skin color stands in for ideology. 

For many on the left, being white is a motive in-itself, whereas being Muslim means never having your crimes considering in the light of your beliefs. Being black means the same thing as being Muslim. Consider that the perpetrator of the last mass shooting in the United States was a black man. Has there been any public discussion about how the perpetrator’s identity in the Virginia Beach shooting (which occurred on May 31, 2019 and resulted in the deaths of twelve people and the wounding of five others) disrupts the belief that mass shooting is a white man phenomenon?

Reflexively, many westerners think religion is not a species of ideology, that it is rather something like skin color, or sex, or sexual orientation. When I note that a Muslim committed a crime on the basis of Islamic ideology, I am likely to be reminded that Muslims are peace-loving, law-abiding people who are just trying to raise families and live their lives. An entire people cannot be blamed for the actions of a few individuals claiming to act in the name of Islam, I am told. That’s the logic of racism. If belief enters the conversation, I am reminded that the actions of the terrible few represent a “perversion” of the faith, not its “true teachings.” It is a good thing that the majority of Muslims do not act on their faith. But this doesn’t make the problem of ideology go away. Ideology has consequences. Ideologies come with beliefs. Beliefs motivate action; human beings act on the basis of the beliefs they have about the world. Does that mean they will always act on the basis of their beliefs? Ask any community organizer about how apathy works against praxis. But in every community you have people who are highly motivated to action, and their actions animate their beliefs, and because the beliefs are bad their actions are bad. 

* * *

Millions of people believe doctors who perform abortion are murderers. Only a few people act on this belief and engage in violent actions in defense of innocents. The consequences are lethal. More important than the gun in a man’s hand is the reason why he is shooing the gun. We control guns because we cannot as effectively control religious ideology in a free society. But it is the ideology that is motivating the action. We excuse hateful and oppressive motives when we shut down people who are explaining behavior by its lights. In a free society we depend on criticism of ideology to minimize its harmful effects. We don’t ban it. We interrogate it.

The First Amendment grants the KKK religious liberty and free speech. They meet and perform rituals consist with their doctrine. They light crosses. They wear crosses. Most Ku Klux Klan members (comprising a small percentage of the population) are peace-loving, law-abiding citizens who are just trying to raise families and live their lives. They choose to wear the robes and hoods of the Klan because it represents their faith. People condemn and harass them. They are not allowed to wear their religious garments at work.When it is discovered that a person is a member of the KKK, they risk losing their jobs and their reputations. They may even be violently assaulted because of their beliefs. They are a persecuted minority, made to feel ashamed of their faith. Folks on the left say, “Good, they should feel ashamed. They should give up their hateful ideology.” I agree! The Klan should be blamed for racist violence by a few because their belief system informs their actions. This is why I have all my life been a critic of the KKK. I’m consistent.  

If those who use the accusation of “Islamophobia” to attack the critics of Islam were consistent they might consider calling this phenomenon “Klanophobia.” Klanophobia (along with Fascophobia) is a very real problem in America today. Yet, despite the persecution the KKK suffers, the community of faiths refuses to extend its ecumenical hand to the them. Is it because, unlike other faiths, KKK doctrine declares homosexuality an abomination? No, the Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions declare this, too. Is it because, unlike other faiths, KKK parents teach their KKK children to think of themselves as part of a group that is different from other groups? No, the Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions teach their children this, too. Is it because, unlike other faiths, KKK women are expected to assume subordinate roles in KKK family? No, the Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions have a long history of subordinating women. Why don’t folks on the left see how unfair it is to blame all KKK members for the violence committed by a handful of their members? They see the problem when Islam is blamed for the actions of a handful of Muslims. Yet the Ku Klux Klan is a terrible organization despite the apathy of most of its members.

Of course, the left would have it wrong if they accepted my analogy in the direction of lowering the volume of anti-Klan rhetoric. There is no problem blaming the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist organizations and white supremacist ideology generally for the actions of a handful of people acting on white supremacist belief. It is rational to identify the ideology that motivates terroristic and hateful violence. It is wrong to believe the things the KKK espouses and we should say so. In a free society they are free to espouse those beliefs. But we are also free to criticize them and obligated to do so because the KKK is wrong and their beliefs have effects. If we are to be consistent, then the same standard applies to Islam. Like white supremacy, Islam motivates terroristic and hateful violence, not because people pervert its teachings, but because of what the ideology preaches. We have to criticize Islamic belief because it is wrong and it has effects. It hurts people we claim to care about.

Either ideology potentially motivates violence or ideology provides no explanatory power. If you say that Islam cannot be a motive for action, then Fascism cannot be a motive for action. Nor can racism, sexism, heterosexism, etc. The double standard is the result of people choosing sides. They have chosen the side of Islam against secularism, feminism, and the gay community by treating Islam as it were analogous to such things. This is fallacious. It is a very troubling trend on the left.

It appears that the Internal Revenue Service has granted the Satanic Temple (of Salem, Massachusetts) tax-exempt status on the grounds that it is a religious organization. The Satanic Temple was moved to seek tax-exempt status after President Trump’s May 4, 2017 “religious freedom” executive order. In granting the Satanic Temple tax-exempt status, the IRS has expanded the definition of religion to include its antithesis. This is good news.

By its own admission, the Satanic Temple does not espouse a theistic metaphysics. It advocates no supernatural explanations. Nor does it express devotion to the divine. Satan, according to leader Lucien Greaves, is symbolic of rebellion against tyranny. Satan isn’t really real in his worldview (Greaves is an antitheist). However, Christians are taught that the greatest lie Satan ever told was that he is isn’t real. For Christians, Satan is using religious liberty to insinuate himself into public life and the Satanic Temple is a demonic ruse.

Satanists do not worship Satan. Why would they? Satanism is opposed to servility of any sort. Satanism is about free will and individual liberty. It’s about dissent and disobedience. Indeed, in this way, Satanism is the most humanist of religions—which suggests that it’s not really a religion at all. Demythologizing Satan makes this clear. And exposes Christianity as a ruse. Let me explain.

The disruptive force in Eden that convinced humans to disobey God is depicted as a talking serpent of some sort, but has been traditionally understood by Christians to be a manifestation of Satan, the Great Deceiver. Eden is a mythical location symbolic of blissful ignorance, paradise, the state into which God placed the first humans. The serpent persuaded the first woman to eat and share with the first man the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that grew at the garden’s center. God had forbidden eating this fruit, telling the humans it was lethal. The serpent knew this was a lie. He said, “God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will open and you will be like divine beings who know good and evil” (Genesis 3:5). The good-evil fruit is symbolic of both consciousness and conscience, those things that differentiate us from everything else in the universe. God punished the humans by ejecting them from Eden. And Eden vanished.

In Escape from Freedom, the Marxist-Freudian writer Erich Fromm puts it this way:

The myth identifies the beginning of human history with an act of choice, but it puts all emphasis on the sinfulness of this first act of freedom and the suffering resulting from it. Man and woman live in the Garden of Eden in complete harmony with each other and with nature. There is peace and no necessity to work; there is no choice, no freedom, no thinking either. Man is forbidden to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. He acts against God’s command, he breaks through the state of harmony with nature of which he is a part without transcending it. From the standpoint of the Church which represented authority, this is essentially sin. From the standpoint of man, however, this is the beginning of human freedom. Acting against God’s orders means freeing himself from coercion, emerging from the unconscious existence of prehuman life to the level of man. Acting against the command of authority, committing a sin, is in its positive human aspect the first act of freedom, that is, the first human act. In the myth, the sin, in its formal aspect, is the acting against God’s command; in its material aspect it is the eating of the tree of knowledge. The act of disobedience as an act of freedom is the beginning of reason. The myth speaks of other consequences of the first act of freedom. The original harmony between man and nature is broken. God proclaims war between man and woman, and war between nature and man, Man has become separate from nature, he has taken the first step towards becoming human by becoming an “individual.” He has committed the first act of freedom. The myth emphasizes the suffering resulting from this act. To transcend nature, to be alienated from nature and from another human being, finds man naked, ashamed. He is alone and free, yet powerless and afraid. The newly won freedom appears as a curse; he is free from the sweet bondage of paradise, but he is now free to govern himself, to realize his individuality.

Long before Fromm, Ludwig Feuerbach tackles this matter in his landmark work of materialism The Essence of Christianity (1841). “If,” he writes, “my work is negative, irreligious, atheistic, let it be remembered that atheism—at least in the sense of this work—is the secret of religion itself.” Feuerbach exposes what man calls “Absolute Being” and “God” as in fact “his own being.” Christianity tells us that God created humans. On the contrary, Feuerbach reveals, humans created god. “The power of the object over [man] is therefore the power of his own being,” Feuerbach explains. “Thus, the power of the object of feeling is the power of feeling itself; the power of the object of reason is the power of reason itself; and the power of the object of will is the power of will itself.” This is the argument Satanists make and Feuerbach speaks directly to it: “I would rather be a devil in alliance with truth, than an angel in alliance with falsehood.” Or as a Satanist would put it: Servant in heaven; king in hell. (You can read Feuerbach’s heretical tract here: The Essence of Christianity.)

For humanists, morality is a human construct. It is of earthly origin. It was not gifted to humanity by a transcendent will, but emerges from the ground established by human relations. However, at a certain point in man’s historical development, morality becomes regulated by religion and the authority of the state. Self-government and the recognition of human rights are devised by freethinkers as means to escape this tyranny. But, as Fromm explains, amid the conditions of half-freedom, of negative liberty only, humans are afraid, anxious, and insecure, uncertainty pervades their experience with the world, life becomes dread, and in their angst they display a tendency to escape the burdens of freedom. They find comfort in authority, conformity, and obedience. The desire for servility—the felt need for a father figure to take care of them, to tell them what to do, how to think, how to act—lurks in the alienated conditions of which religion is an expression. Servility is an extreme form of wishful thinking. (Sigmund Freud speaks to the problem of wishful thinking in his essay “The Future of an Illusion“). Felt powerlessness becomes a source of all sorts of authoritarian tendencies. It is expressed by a need to confess one’s powerlessness and give themselves over to a higher power. In shāʾ Allāh.

Satanists use the metaphor of Satan, or perhaps more properly, Lucifer, a rebellious angel, to represent the human struggle against fear and tyranny. Why do I say more properly Lucifer? Of the two entities, typically seen as manifestations of the same force, Lucifer is the better metaphor because of the meaning his name conveys. In ancient Judaism, Satan means “barrier.” For Jews, Yahweh places barriers in front of them, the overcoming of which moves the people to a higher plain of existence. Satan is adversity, personified as adversary, not an enemy of God, but a tool God uses to challenge humans to do better. Evil is an instrument, not a interloper. Lucifer is not a barrier in this way; he owes his character of the impact Zoroastrianism had on late Second Temple Judaism from which the Christian cult emerged, where Angra Mainyu, the god-force of evil, enters the world at the moment of creation and battles Ahura Mazda, the god-force of good, until the Great Renovation (see my essay Zoroastrianism in Second Temple Judaism and the Christian Satan). His name is the Latin name for the planet Venus and meanings “morning star” or “shining one” (in the Greek “dawn-bringer”). For Satanists, Lucifer, the light-bearer, illumniates the barriers that hold back human progress—religion being the chief one in their estimation—to help human beings overcome adversity on their own accord (without prayer, supplication, or atonement). And it is for this reason that Lucifer is the nemesis of God.

Christians view Lucifer as evil because he undermines faith in the authority of God. We are fallen, Christians tell us, because the first humans sought divinity for themselves. Because they were tricked by a devil, we live in dirt and pollution—that is, sin. Our salvation lies in submission to God and redemption by the blood sacrifice he gave us in the crucifixion of his only son Jesus. Jesus is the truth and the light, not Lucifer. In his demonstration of devotion to God, Abraham was given a ram as a substitute for his son Isaac. To demonstrate his loyalty to humanity, God sacrificed himself. Christians are taught that Satan works continually to undermine our appreciation of this extraordinary offer in order to capture our eternal souls for himself and drag us down into hell. He does this by sowing doubt—and doubt is the unpardonable sin. But this is still not enough for the Devil. Lucifer is a wicked angel who covets God’s station, seeks to replace God on the eternal throne, to be God.

Overthrowing God and putting man in God’s position—to reduce God to man—is what Feuerbach seeks in The Essence of Christianity. Demolishing religion is what Karl Marx seeks throughout his project to de-alienate human existence (see his “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of the Right“). In the eyes of the humanist, the struggle between God and Lucifer can be interpreted as a grand metaphor for replacing faith with reason, for elevating man to the exalted station sought by Satan, to become, as the serpent promised Eve, as divine beings.

When I was a child, my father was a Church of Christ preacher. I do not recall ever believing in God, but I do remember being frightened in Sunday school by the underground threat of the Devil. Seeing my fear, my mother told me there was no such thing as the Devil.

But why fear the Devil? Lucifer is the spirit of the Enlightenment. The Counter-Enlightenment—those who wish to limit us in spirit and nature—is the anti-humanist demand that, like frightened children, we rush into the comforting arms of faith-belief, that we subordinate ourselves to a transcendent authority that is really only the alienated creation of humanity, used by the unscrupulous to shape and control us.