There are no such things as demons and devils, those unseen spirit forces that infect or possess people. I know people who subscribe to those particular religious standpoints that posit such things are convinced that such things are real. There are also religious standpoints that believe in such mystical notions as that guilt is inherited and carried in the blood. But whether demons and devils and all the rest of it are to be taken seriously, these can affect no law and policy in the United States of America because it is a secular republic. In America, the freedom to believe in metaphysical things comes with the freedom from the imposition of such beliefs.
I want to make a comparison and then pose a challenge to conclude this little essay. During the Middle Ages, the Inquisitor tortured those accused of demon possession or suspected of having inherited guilt from their ancestors or their tribe to extract from them a confession. A confession was often necessary because the Inquisitor usually had no way of objectively demonstrating the presence of a demon in the accused. The only evidence may be stigmata, that is the mark of the devil, or bizarre behavior (the cause, of course, a matter of interpretation in light of doctrine). But not everybody carried stigmata. And not everybody behaved in a bizarre manner. The truth of the presence of a demon could then only come from the accused confessing to such a presence.
In the case of blood guilt, there may be nothing about many Jews to suggest they were of the tribe that murdered Christ. Moreover, because they were part of that tribe, the success of Jews as a group implicated every Jew in justified feelings of resentment. Of course, as with blood guilt, the resentment of Jews for their success was also an irrational sentiment and no justification at all from a secular point of view. In any case, Jews were often tortured ahead of the stake and their wealth subject to confiscation.
Today, white Americans are confronting circumstance logically similar to those of the Inquisition. Antiracists believe that whites are possessed of an unseen force, an implicit bias that directs their behavior in a manner than harms others. Antiracists believe in the mystical notion that guilt is inherited and carried on the genes. Antiracists believe not only that there really are such things as races, but also that there should be such things and individuals should be rewarded and punishment on the basis of them.
Antiracists express resentment over the success of whites. The success of whites as a group implicates every white person in justifiable feelings of resentment. Every white person stands metaphysically condemned in the eyes of the Antiracist for the alleged actions of his ancestors and the attributes of his tribe (by alleged we mean assumed without proof). Even when no direct link can be made through the genealogical line to a past crime (no less an irrational exercise), the accused is condemned by his race. He is condemned by simply being born as a member of the tribe.
And, of course, aside from a handful of devil worshippers (there are still a few white supremacists around), white privilege is best affirmed by having the accused confess to his sins, to admit to be possessing by race privilege, whether he thinks he is possessed or not. The Antiracist’s struggle session is no less in principle the Inquisitor’s torture cell. It’s still an interrogation. If the accused resists the label, like the accused mental patient who rebels against the diagnostic label of a psychiatric manual, he is denying the truth of guilt manifest in his tribal stigma: his skin color and his ancestry. There is, as well, his ordinary behavior (re)interpreted in the light of doctrine.
Critical race theorists, the theologians of Antiracism, a new religion (and the new racism), believe that the rational system of adjudicating guilt and responsibility based on individual human agency and intentionality is the “perpetrator’s perspective,” so called because it conceals the truth that the racist actions of an individual who is white is really a crime committed by all whites. Social justice deems that all whites should pay for the crimes of the individual with the tribal stigma of white skin. His ancestry condemns him. The white man is to pay not only for others like him, but for the corpses he resembles.
This formula critical race theorists call the “victim’s perspective.” It assumes that all black people (and any other group deemed historically disadvantaged, which is sometimes difficult as we have seen with Asian-Americans), no matter how successful, are victims of the racism of the perpetrator, whites collectively, who are responsible for that collective suffering. Because of the collective suffering, the oppressed group is entitled to an epistemic and moral privilege, assuming a superior position from which to judge other people and history and, finding them guilty as charged, holding them to account, confiscating their wealth, and condemning their history (and thus their future).
So here’s an exercise for you. Take the formulas of the Antiracists and, substituting the words “white” and “whiteness” for “witch” or “Jew” and “witchcraft” or “Jewish,” see if this sounds like justice or if it sounds like a dangerous, destructive, and potentially lethal ideology. Let history be your guide. That’s what the Antiracists recommend.
* * *
There is another superstitious element in Antiracism (which I am capitalizing because it is a religion) that one can find in other religious and cultural systems, namely the practice of scapegoating. Scapegoating is closely associated with witchfinding, so the explanation works for both.
Scapegoating is where a community, not understand why things haven’t been going well for them, takes an animal and loads it up with problems, defined as sins and the like, and then sends the animal to die in the wilderness, hoping that the sins will die also there in the wilderness. Witchfinding is a practice where the problems of the community are located in a person and the person is sacrificed and the community is purged of evil.
The anxiety felt by the community that manifests in scapegoating and witchfinding is often caused by some real disturbance—biological, climatic, cultural, economic, political, and so forth—but it is interpreted in terms of a doctrine that invents entities that embody these problems and explains their effects, whatever their actual causes. In other words, the unseen forces invented by the religion or the cultural system. The priesthood are there to translate phenomena in doctrinal style. A moral panic is engineered and mass hysteria spreads. Soon animals, including human ones, are punished, tortured, banished, and killed.
This is what is happening in the West. Globalization is the cause of the actual disturbance. It manifests itself in very concrete ways: work disappears, wages decline, careers are lost, homes are foreclosed on, neighborhoods are disorganized, traditions smashed, governments rendered ineffective, and so forth.
Without a sophisticated understanding of international political economy, or absent a democratic populist politics that articulates working class interests, and trapped inside racial and ethnic and other identitarian bubbles, the masses are susceptible to religious-like interpretations of their anxieties and trepidations, and rituals of scapegoating and witchfinding become the order of the day. The civilians turn on each other, and in the religiously-proscribed ways.
We are experiencing a moral panic engineered by the priesthood and pushed by the congregation of Antiracism. It translates the problems of ordinary Americans in racial and ethnic (and even religious) terms, finding witches in white people (excluding those identified as Muslim) and scapegoating them, heaping upon them what their religion defines as the transgenerational sin of wicked history in a world polluted by whiteness, and then banishing the animals to ignominy.
That’s the point of the ritual anyway. And the zealots will have their way as long the witches put up no resistance.
Ahmad Al Aliwi Al-Issa killed ten people, one of them a police officer.
You know the establishment media wanted a white Christian shooter to be the perpetrator in Boulder, Colorado. They wanted a white man taken alive, shot in the leg, so they could exclaim, “Had he been a black shooter….” They waited to hear the excuse: “He was mentally ill.” Were there Asian-Americans in the store? Hispanics?
The media waited for a long time to tell us the name of the shooter. They had to come out with it because the Internet is still too open. They will likely never tell us that Al-Issa had ISIS sympathies and loathed homosexuals (or was anti-Trump). Facebook scrubbed Al-Issa’s pages and the screenshots taken by smart citizens journalists will likely never make it to the mainstream.
Al-Issa’s brother gave the media a different motive, if we can call it that: Al-lissa is mentally ill. The Daily Beast carried the headline this morning: “‘Very Anti-Social’: Suspect in Boulder Supermarket Massacre Was Paranoid, Brother Says.” Since Arabs are white, perhaps this can be thrown into “white shooters are always mentally ill” complaint after all. Anything but Islamic terrorism. That might make people wonder where Islamic terrorism went and whether Trump had anything to do with its (temporary) disappearance.
Have you seen this bit of woke leftist propaganda? By “white violence,” I assume violence committed by white people. It could mean, more abstractly, racist violence that results from white supremacy. Leftists are sharing the meme in the wake of the Atlanta shootings, crimes portrayed by the establishment media as a manifestation of white supremacy, so perhaps there’s a bit of both in the slogan. The Atlanta shooting is not an instance of anti-Asian bias crime, however, so that piece lies in the imaginary (see How Establishment Dissembling on Atlanta Denies Real Problems).
First, the idea that white crime is excused is false on its face. As I will document below, blacks are many times more likely than whites to perpetrate criminal violence, yet the media rarely cover it. The media pushed instead a narrative for months that police officers disproportionately kill black men in the face of decades of research showing that this is simply not true (see The Myth of Systemic Racism in Lethal Police-Civilian Encounters; The Far Podcast: The Myth of Systemic Racism in Lethal Police Officer-Civilian Encounters). The narrative depended in part on the public not knowing the extent of criminal violence perpetrated by black men, which, along with other contextual factors, explains the racial disparities in lethal civilian-officer encounters. However, when whites perpetrate criminal violence, the media is quick to report it.
Consider the long list of white perpetrators of violence that have become household names: David Berkowitz, Lizzie Borden, the Boston Strangler, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, Ed Gein, Edward Kemper, Charles Manson, Gary Ridgeway (the Green River Killer), Jack the Ripper, Aileen Wuornos, the Zodiac killer. The list is far from complete. I haven’t included any school shooters. I haven’t included mass murderers.
If you read that list and thought of names of serial killers I forgot to include, then you understand the point. You probably thought of Columbine and Sandy Hook and all the other school shootings. You probably know the names of those shooters. You certainly know their race. You thought of Anders Breivik, Charles Whitman, Dylann Roof, Craig Paddock, and James Holmes, didn’t you?
For all the news stories, books, documentaries, and movies about the real-life killers, even more books, movies, and television shows have been made about mass murderers who never existed. Are the killers in those movies black or white? Was Jame “Buffalo Bill” Gumb a real or fictional serial killer? (Jame was a clerical error on his birth certificate.)
If no or few black perpetrators of mass murder came to mind, you get the point even more. Or Muslim. Did you forget Omar Mateen (Orlando)? Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik (San Bernardino)? Nidal Hasan (Fort Hood)?
Ahmad Al Aliwi Al-Issa would make the notable mass murderer list had he been white Christian and named Bobby Ray Jones.
According to Statista, “Between 1982 and March 2021, 66 out of the 121 mass shootings in the United States were carried out by white shooters. By comparison, the perpetrator was African American in 21 mass shootings, and Latino in 10. When calculated as percentages, this amounts to 54 percent, 17 percent and eight percent respectively.”
Whites are between 67 and 73 percent of the population. Blacks are less than 13 percent. Since most Latinos are white, we might assume that increases the white percentage. At the same time, given the overrepresentation of blacks in mass shootings, it possible that those Latinos carry a black identity. But you get the picture. Why do you falsely think that mass shooters are disproportionately white?
Second, it is not excusing “white violence,” to recognize that, given the nature of the crime, a person is likely suffering from a mental illness. Indeed, the claim that whites are falsely excused by mental illness (the notion that the excuse is an expression of “white privilege”) is betrayed by research conducted by Grant Duwe who compiled an exhaustive set of numbers for mass public shootings, identifying 160 cases between 1915-2013. Of those, 97 involved shooters who had either been diagnosed with a serious mental illness or showed signs of one. “The 61% is actually a minimum estimate,” writes Duwe (see Mass Murder in the United States: A History).
That the circumstances surrounding Atlanta suggest mental illness is just being honest about the fact pattern. Why should we deny fact patterns because others have an agenda to make killings by white people fit a particular narrative? Because they call the facts racist? Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa’s brother says he was mentally ill. Is that allowed? Ahmad was described as white in early news stories (he still is, according to standard race theory).
Here’s another meme that twists the truth. Shaun King is spreading this one. It doesn’t show you armed black men taken alive and unarmed white men killed by police. You wouldn’t know from everything you hear through the establishment and legacy media that twice as many white men are killed by the police than black men every year even though black men commit half of the most violent crimes—homicide and robbery—in America. This propaganda has been thoroughly debunked but it keeps coming. It manufactures an illusion of systemic racism, a thing that does not exist. The system of racism was dismantled more than half a century ago.
The charge of racism is because the memes are debunked by fact patterns. If we speak in the manner of the left, where everything is about race, but speak with facts, it becomes clear that the establishment media and progressives on social media suppress reality while elevating a manufactured narrative concerning crime in America. If they want a conversation about race, then let’s have an accurate one.
For a detailed analysis see my Mapping the Junctures of Social Class and Racial Caste: An Analytical Model for Theorizing Crime and Punishment in US History. The statistics are dramatic. Black men are more than six times more likely to murder than white men. The most dangerous places in America are black-majority inner-city neighborhoods. White men are underrepresented in the commission of homicide. Because blacks murder at much higher rate, and because of the intraracial nature of murder, many more blacks are murder victims than whites. Black lives matter? The woke left doesn’t care about that. Those victims do not advance their narrative. Inconvenient facts. The left cares about black people like the Chinese Communist Party cares about the Chinese people. (“If They Cared.” Confronting the Denial of Crime and Violence in American Cities)
Black men are less than six percent of the population overall, but in raw numbers, they commit more than half of all homicides. The United States is the most homicidally violent county among advance industrial societies. Moreover, black men are more likely to kill white people than white people are to kill black people (Why are there so Many More White than Black Victims of Interracial Homicide?). Black men commit more than half of all robberies. To be sure, most robbery is intraracial, but the fact is that white people are far more likely to be the victims of robbery committed by black people than the other way around (and not by a little). Black men commit approximately one-third of all aggravated assaults. These are the most serious assaults. In other words, less than six percent of the population commits one third of all aggravated assaults. One wonders whether telling black people that their troubles are due to white privilege has anything to do with blacks targeting white people for homicide, robbery, and assault. How much of these crimes are in truth bias crimes? It plays no role in target selection? Reparations? Retribution? We heard this justification in rioting.
The media cannot wait for the next mass murder committed by a mentally ill white person so it can hypostatize white supremacy. But where is the reporting of the routine mass murder committed by gangs in America’s inner cities? Do the children caught in the crossfire of gang violence not matter? Do bystanders in drive-by no matter? Apparently not, because the left wants to defund the police. If you don’t see why this is relevant, understand that mass murder is defined as the killing of three-four people in a single event including murders occurring in multiple locations over a short temporal period but involving the same perpetrators. If you know anything about gang violence, you will know that mass murders occur routinely in America’s inner-cities, and the perpetrators are not often white, and these crimes are rarely reported.
The media loves a good story about the lone white person committing a heinous crime, but where is the reporting about the cartels operating north and south of our border murdering people on a daily basis? Have you been following the reality of the transnational trade in human beings supported by the Democratic Party and the Catholic Church? You should. If you care about people. Where is the reporting on China, which is committing genocide and is responsible for the mass murder of millions of Chinese and the forced abortions of hundreds of millions of fetuses? We’re told that it’s racist to criticize Central and South American and Chinese criminals.
When it comes to violence against Asian immigrants and Asian Americans, all the rage in the establishment media at the present moment, the vast majority of those who perpetrate such crimes are black. This gets virtually no media attention. Telling folks that Asians are a “model minority,” the implication that they are responsible for black poverty and suffering, lurks behind violence against Asians (see The Rise in Anti-Asian Hate Crimes. Trump-inspired? Not Quite). As suggested above, it lurks behind anti-white violence.
The media makes it sound as if there is a crime wave of whites committing violence against minorities. It’s not true. The media are smart enough to know it’s not true. That makes it a lie. It’s propaganda. We hear endlessly about the January 6th “insurrection,” and how the greatest threat to the republic is white supremacists and white nationalists, while we hear constantly downplaying and rationalizing about the months of criminal violence committed by BLM and its left allies that the establishment encouraged. When we discovered that the vast majority of people milling about the Capitol that day, many of whom were invited in by the police, were not members of any extremist organizations, selected experts told twisted this to mean that threat wasn’t from extremist organizations, but from ordinary conservatives (“A New Kind of American Radicalism”: The Campaign to Portray Ordinary America as Deviant and Dangerous).
Whites are underrepresented either or both absolutely and proportionally in the most serious violent crimes. So why are we being subjected to these memes telling us to stop making excuses for white violence? The left is playing the race card hard to delegitimize the American republic, which they equate to whiteness, which they reduce to white supremacy. Crime by whites is amplified or manufactured, while crime by blacks is downplayed or ignored. The truth is flipped. The memes are designed to present an inverted truth. They make this about race to dissimulate and drive the dismantling of the nation.
Anti-white propaganda is a corporatist strategy to ingratiate the capitalist elite to minorities by manufacturing a fake enemy and making the machinery of liberty and democracy appear as oppressive tools of white supremacy. Identitarian education and training is designed to make minorities feel like their exploiters care about them and see their comrades as their adversaries. The corporatist propagandist manufactures an enemy—this time white people—to distract from the real adversary, namely the corporate elite who exploit minority labor and control their life chances.
The objective in all this is to keep minorities from recognizing what they share in common with the majority, namely membership in the working class. Simply put, it is divide and conquer. But the same power that exploits minority labor and controls their life chances also exploits the labor and controls the life chances of the majority.
The old racism covered the exploitation of minorities by giving whites race privilege (whites were not slaves and enjoyed superior facilities). Dismantling the system of white privilege forced a modification in the ideological system. The focus was shifted to make whites the target of racial resentment. This is the new racism. Same as the old racism. Put another way, the revolution-from-above is no revolution at all. Same boss.
The promise of civil rights and national integrity was to produce a unified cultural foundation for the organization of collective political consciousness and action around social social class. The corporate elite weren’t about to let that happen. So, antiracism, the ideology the depicts whites as privileged racist violent oppressors.
* * *
I want make sure people understand something. When I say that 54 percent of murderers in America are black men, I am not saying that most black people are murderers. Heavens no. In fact, only a small percentage of black men are murderers. It’s like when I say that most poor people in America are white, I am not saying that most white people are poor. Most white people are not in fact poor (neither are most black people).
With respect to murder, it is an important question to ask: Why are black men so drastically overrepresented in murder? Black men are drastically overrepresented among murder victims, as well, their murderers mostly other black men, so it is indeed an important question if black lives matter. Whatever the reason, it’s not poverty, as the analog I just used makes clear. If poverty were the reason, white men would be overrepresented, not underrepresented in murder.
Facts aren’t racist. If one hears the statistics of black overrepresentation in serious crime and thinks these statistics are offensive, it’s because, in possession of racial consciousness, that person feels the statistics reflect poorly on the black community. A lot of blacks feel they do. And many people think we should start talking about it and do something about it.
I was raised to worry about sharing facts like these because I was taught that there is an epistemic and moral privilege to be granted historically-oppressed minorities. This privilege runs in a perverse direction. Indeed, progressive whites are supposed to cover up uncomfortable facts. (For example, the poor academic performance of blacks as a group compared to Asians and whites. For example, the number of black children born out of wedlock. There are lots of facts like these.)
It was part of my indoctrination to believe I enjoy a race privilege I never possessed and that, for this reason, I have a special responsibility to keep quiet about such things as a tax on my alleged inherited advantages. In other words, history has already paid me to be silent on certain subjects. When you re told you can’t say certain things because you are white, that is exactly what that means.
I write about such things because (a) I am a criminologist who studies such things (race, class, crime, punishment, etc.) and (b) there is a political campaign to make white-as-a-group appear as privileged racist violent oppressors. (a) Means I have a professional obligation to frankly speak the facts. Because I am a criminologist, I know (b) isn’t true.
I know that, as a white man, this defamation potentially affects me and my family. It already enlists our participation in programs that assume was are racists or the beneficiaries of racism. The fact that there is no systemic racism perpetuated by the white majority and that whites are underrepresented in criminal violence demolishes the campaign’s truth claims. That’s what makes the claims libelous and slanderous: they’re false and malicious. But it doesn’t stop whites from being punished for them.
If it were true that whites were these terrible things, even though I am not these terrible things, there would be no defamation (except to the extent that I should have to suffer for the actions of other people) and I would wonder what was going on with white people. In fact, when I believed these things were true, I wondered this. But these things are not true and everybody in my line of work either knows it, isn’t very good at grasping demographic and crime statistics, or—like the old me—deceiving themselves by rationalizing the statistics.
To the extent that whites may be thought of as a community—and it seems the academy and the media very much want whites to think of themselves as such—one might expect that, as soon as enough whites learn the truth and stop apologizing for their race, the entire progressive structure, built as it is on a multitude of false assumptions and claims, will be delegitimized and crumble.
The problem with the notion that only you can know your truth—this woke leftwing “lived experience” narrative—and therefore nobody can speak for you or your situation except perhaps some moral entrepreneur who looks like you (or maybe some ally who claims to know your pain) is that really there is only one truth and it lies outside of you and your situation and billions of other people live in that truth with you. Moreover, the “lived experience” jive precludes the reality that some people understand your situation better than you do. It’s a dumb subjectivity they’ve created for you. They teach this to keep you ignorant. Or because they are.
Among other things, C. Wright Mills taught us in the Sociological Imagination, that, on the one hand, there are personal troubles, i.e. the local, immediate, phenomenological experience of your situation, while, on the other hand, there are public issues, the objective structures that surround you—the economic, legal, and political systems that shape the former—and that shape even your subjectivity. You have to grasp the latter to understand the former. You have to locate your biography in that one and only reality. It’s not that your life experiences are irrelevant. Biography matters. But biography is a result of a constellation of social, psychological, and other forces that bind many biographies together into a society. You are never really alone.
For example, if you are jobless, you may blame your motivation or your skill level or your personality. Maybe there is something to one or more of these. Get motivated. Develop your skills. Work on yourself. But maybe what is also going on is a business recession and there are millions of your fellow citizens thrown out of work on account of that. You are among them because you belong to that same social class. Or maybe your government has thrown open the borders to cheap foreign labor and there are noncitizens working the jobs you used to do. Or maybe the government has facilitated the offshoring of your job, so now foreign workers do the job you used to do in some other country that you tax dollars go to in foreign aid. Or maybe government policy and big corporate power has ruined your small business. Whatever it is, you won’t be able to confront it with a “lived experience.”
In the final analysis (if you do the analysis), you are going to need to join with others who share an objective situation with you, find solidarity with them, become politically conscious, become politically organized, and rise up against the forces that are screwing you over.
Withdrawing into ethnic and racial categories while failing to grasp your relationship to others beyond those limiting categories is a failure to grasp your species-being, that is the fact that you and everybody else are the same animal but that some of your brothers and sisters, perhaps even you, have been thrown into cages, made ignorant, trapped in your own constrained subjectivity. The “lived experience” angle is designed to get you to define your biography in terms of race or other limiting identities and subjectivities. It teaches you to deny your species-being and see yourself as a category. You are alienated from yourself and others.
This is problem the founders of the American republic confronted when they established the truism that we are all created equal and endowed by our creator with inalienable rights, among these life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This is the point of a free republic: a constellation of public institutions that articulate, defend, and advance the common interest—which includes individual liberty and rights—over against the narrow interests of business and the like. It’s the way we collectively preserve our individuality. This is why it is so important to be a nationalist: to understand that a common language and culture and creed constitute the essential basis for preserving the political-legal machinery that protects your essential liberties and rights—a machinery you can affect through rational deliberation and democratic engagement.
Those who want to keep you in racial and other boxes tell you nationalism is racist. The truth is the opposite of this claim. It is antiracism and multiculturalism that fracture humanity. And the powers-that-be want humanity fractured to control people.
The freedoms made possible by republicanism cannot exist under global corporate governance. Big banking and corporate power is private tyranny. Even the public sphere is captured by this power under the terms of corporate governance. Your taxes pay for your own subjection. State monopoly capitalism is asking you to allow them to dictate your life. They want you to vote for living, not work for a living. They want you to think like a serf. That’s what the welfare state is all about. That’s the point of a guaranteed income. They control your finances, they control you. What working people need are jobs, and the only way they can have jobs—and decent paying jobs—is to stop corporations from shipping our jobs overseas and importing cheap foreign labor.
Those who seek to dismantle the nation-state and reorganize our society into racial categories and ethnic enclaves, the disuniting ideologies and practices of antiracism and of cultural pluralism (or multiculturalism), mean to control people by circumscribing consciousness and narrowing horizons. It’s a plantation life.
We are meant to be citizens of a republic. Corporate power is turning us into the neoliberal subjects of quasi-private estates—estates controlled by transnational corporate power. This ideology and the transnational project that underpins work to prepare the masses for integration in a global neo-feudalist order. You are being prepared for serfdom. And the “lived experience” narrative is big piece of that preparation.
Babies see difference, but they don’t see race. They see skin color. They note eye shapes. Hair color and texture. But race is a definition of a person based on an ideological system called “racism” or “racialism.”
Some might push back and ask whether learning to see race is the same thing as learning racism. Leftwing race identitarians, for instance, argue that, in order to combat racism, children must be taught racial identity and, moreover, to assume racism all around them, not only in those with whom they interact, but in their culture and in their social institutions—and in the legacy of history that determines the present and the future. To fight racism one must first see race, seems to be the angle.
For example, implicit race bias is said to be learned through ordinary socialization in a world in which white supremacy is ubiquitous, and therefore children need help developing and elaborating race consciousness in order to combat unconscious bias. In this sense, one is not taught racism, but rather one learns it by virtue of being immersed in world characterized by systemic racism. To combat this, children must be taught a form of racial consciousness and practice called “antiracism.”
One assumption in this view of things is that all white people are racist and enjoy race privilege. Race privilege is an invisible but no less real advantage that operates automatically or normally—precisely because it is invisible, woven into the warp and woof of Western society, the overarching culture of which is white supremacy. Since individuals do not normally assume that all whites enjoy race privilege, given the overwhelming objective evidence to the contrary, for example seen in the fact that most whites are working class (exploited labor) and not a small proportion of the white working class is poor (in fact, most poor people are white, and not just by a little), this form of racial thinking requires indoctrination or, as the indoctrinators who assume the existence of some thing for which evidence is otherwise rationally required like to put it, “consciousness raising.” (You see this notion in strains of feminism, as well.)
Of course, antiracism is a form of racism. Racism is an ideology in which it is supposed that the human population is meaningfully and usefully divisible into categories based on superficial phenotypic characteristics and ancestry and that these categories exist in a hierarchical structure with creativity, dispensation, obligation, rights, sensibility, and so forth differentiated by this hierarchy.
In light of this way of thinking, one way that we could create a world in which children were not taught racism, or otherwise learn it, would be to stop teaching them to see themselves and others, as well as rights and responsibilities, in racial terms but rather in colorblind terms of human rights, which rests on universally shared species-being, and individual responsibility. Human rights and individualism constitute the humanist path to equality and justice. The way of eliminating racism lies along this path.
One does not get rid of racism by doubling down on it. Beware those who teach you to think of human variation along lines of skin and eye color, hair texture, facial features, and ancestry as constituting some thing called “race,” that it is essential, that is owns culture, and so on. Whether it hails from the left or the right wing ends of the ideological spectrum, the construct of race is false, dangerous, and pernicious. The new racism (antiracism) is an especially pernicious form of racism.
Aaron Long was visiting Atlanta’s massage parlors, or spas, for explicitly sexual reasons. Several people have attested to this fact. Atlanta has a considerable sex industry. There are many Asian sex workers there. Some of the workers are part of the large and complex networks of human trafficking enabled by globalization and progressive immigration policy. Long targeted the massage parlors because he believed they were a source of what he described as “relapses.” Long was being treated for sex addiction. He spent months at Maverick Recovery, an Atlanta halfway house that provides space for those with addictions of various sorts. His parents were tracking him with a GPS device. There’s a history here.
What Long did was horrific and wrong obviously, but there is no evidence that his actions were driven by anti-Asian bias or were acts of terrorism. Some suppose that the fact that the majority of his victims were Asian (Korean, specifically) builds racism and even terrorism into his act (his mug shot helps their narrative). This supposition is a product of a particular ideology presently prevailing in the West. We know that Long did what he did because he held beliefs that shamed him for desiring and being intimate with women. He was obsessed with sex and pornography. Long would feel remorse after acting on this obsession. He targeted the source of his shame and remorse. He blamed women for what he was taught and what he believed was moral indiscretion and perversion. He felt guilty in the eyes of God and, in a perverse attempt to remove sin, he removed the temptation to sin. He was an ambitious agent of his religion. Had law enforcement not stopped him, he would have killed again and again. He was a sick person.
I am now reading articles attempting to associate sex work with exploitation (see, e.g., The Washington Post) and racism (e.g., The Independent), depicting sex workers as victims, with Asian-American sex workers depicted as the special victims of racist exploitation (paradigms from the usual suspects Buzzfeed and CNN.) Abstract theories of the exotic. Talk of fetishes. Etcetera. While it is certainly true that some sex workers are exploited—and that immigrants and the victims of human trafficking are superexploited—exploitation under capitalism is hardy special. Rather, it is systemic (a word progressives very selectively apply). Capitalism is an exploitative mode of production. So the questions we should be asking are these: Why is sex work per se portrayed as specially exploitative? Why is the exploitation of immigrant labor assumed to be intrinsically racist? Why is Asian and Asian-American bias crime assumed and depicted in a manner than shifts attention from the actual character of the crime and identity of the perpetrators to a narrative politically-useful to suppressing criticism of China? Whose interests are advanced by the prevailing narrative and who is harmed by it?
I am troubled by the way in which women, especially racialized women (we should see people as individuals and women as universally human first), are depicted as having no agency, as if no women would engage in sex work if they were not in some way victimized by the desire of those who purchase their services. The suggestion here is that women in pornography, for example, who occupied Long’s consciousness, never enjoy their work, that they are compelled for some reason to engage in sex work against their will. (We should not forget the men in porn and other sex worker. What compels men to perform porn? Are men to be granted agency but not women? What about so-called “ladyboys,” otherwise known as kathoey or phuying, or other genders in porn? A lot of stories deploy the word “fetish” to describe these things. Is that fetishism in a Freudian sense or a Marxist one? Why is finding Asian women attractive a fetish and not a preference?)
If we are going to talk about exploitation, then why is renting one’s body for sex any different than renting one’s body for any other exchange relation? Labor is exploited when a portion of the surplus value produced by that labor is appropriated by somebody who did not perform that labor. This is no less true for somebody working the assembly line at a manufacturing firm than somebody working in the back rooms of a massage parlor. The owner of a temp agency is analogous to a pimp; he rents to clients the labor he controls and derives his income from this practice. If prostitution is wrong because it is exploitative, then most work in a capitalist economy is wrong for the same reason. If voluntarily selling one’s labor, i.e., renting one’s body to another person is not exploitative, then how is voluntary sex work exploitative?
Why is prostitution illegal while pornography is legal? Pornography is prostitution that enjoys a First Amendment pass. Whether in front of a camera or not, a woman or a man is paid for having sex either way. Why isn’t porn merely photographic evidence of a crime? Because it’s acting? So what is prostitution? According to Statista four percent of websites are porn and 13 percent and 20 percent of Internet searches and mobile searches are for porn respectively. Assuming the Marxist view of things, is sex work always exploitative? What about independent contractors? Cooperatives? What if I decide to receive money for sex on my own? What if I form a cooperative with other men and women to sell sex for money and distribute the proceeds among us on the basis of who has need?
Why is prostitution depicted as wrong and immoral but other forms of work consider dignified and virtuous really? The characterization of sex work as immoral apart from its presence under capitalism and in human trafficking is not because it is intrinsically exploitative but because of religious notions of women that still haunt modern secular society. We need to have this conversation. Or, more accurately, people need to get over their sexual hang ups. Puritanical values inherited from our Christian past and sustained by our Christian present inform the loathing of women and sex. It’s not sex that makes a person feel guilty. Sex is a natural pleasure of our animality. Thank evolution for that. Animals like to fuck. It’s man-made religious strictures that make a person feel guilty for having sex. It’s what makes a young boy feel shame for masturbating or for having sex with other boys in route to discovering his sexuality. It’s likely why women have trouble achieving orgasm. Etcetera. Puritanism denies men and women their animality and their experiences. That is what is perverse in all this.
These are the same religious notions that moved Aaron Long to commit these heinous acts. A social construction prepared the crime and mental illness propelled it. To be sure, there are many people with possessed by the same religious notions. It moves them to decry pornography and criminalize prostitution. Sex workers are rounded up and their clients publicly shamed. Many of the people advocating oppressive social control over sex are unaware of how deeply such religious ideas have penetrated their moral and political attitudes and actions. It’s how the right and left can come together to develop law and policy in a desire to dictate human behavior. Yet, of course, they do not commit homicide. They ruin lives in other ways.
However, these beliefs combined with certain psychiatric maladies may result in the horror of Atlanta. One of the hallmarks of paranoid schizophrenia is hyper-religiosity and an obsession with sexual morality and heightened sexual self-perception. Given Long’s age and mental health history and especially the presence of extraordinary parental surveillance, it is shaping up as a fairly typical story of paranoid schizophrenia. Long’s parents apparently knew exactly what was happening. They gave the police the GPS info they had. They were tracking him. Long, on his way to Florida to deal with the porn industry, was delusional. (Most schizophrenics are not violent. At the same time, aggression and impulsivity is common and, combined with delusions and paranoia, make this disorder potentially dangerous.) Maybe it is not such a good idea to fill the heads of young men with notions that sex is sinful?
While establishment and progressive voices make Atlanta about race to serve their political ends of smearing Trump and the populist critics of China—tying Long’s crimes to COVID-19 and the January 6 “insurrection”—in a move that hides the actual dynamic that lies behind anti-Asian bias crimes (see “The Rise in Anti-Asian Hate Crimes. Trump-inspired? Not Quite”), other things are also being hidden: the misogyny and objectification of women, that is the treatment of women as things and not as human agents, as human beings incapable of deciding for themselves how they will use their bodies, as well as progressive immigration policy that enables transnational human trafficking.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” —The Declaration of Independence.
I’m sure Thomas Jefferson and the signers of the Declaration of Independence recognized individual differences.
Men and women are, on average, different, but they are equal if there is no discrimination based on sex in our educational, legal, and political institutions.
Equality is about treatment of individuals in law and policy. Equal treatment rests on the moral claim that individuals, whatever their differences, are not to be treated unfairly. This is a justice claim.
It’s time again to remind people that equality and sameness are therefore not synonymous. Otherwise, we cannot determine when a standard presumed to apply equally is unjust.
Consider the ability of a wheelchair bound man to enter a building to vote. Is there a ramp? No? Then difference results in an inequality. That is unfair. Yes? Then he is different from but equal to a man who is not wheelchair bound. That is fair.
Life can be fair (just) for citizens if the government considers individual differences in light of the principle of equal treatment across our educational, legal, and political institutions.
Civics education and social studies should be devoted to helping citizens understand this foundational—and humanist—principle of liberal secular civilization.
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. Their very kindness stings with intolerable insult.
— C.S. Lewis
Those who argue that the Seuss estate or Disney can censor or cancel products under their control are missing the point. Those who argue that And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street isn’t popular anymore (so unpopular that copies are currently going for $218.98 on Amazon) or that nobody would watch Disney’s Song of the South anyway are missing the point.
Cartoon from Dr. Seuss’ If I Ran the Zoo
Why did the Seuss estate cancel these books? That’s the point. It isn’t a mystery. It’s because of the censorious culture of hysterical identitarians and the possibility of the work of Seuss being boycotted and his reputation maligned. There are moral entrepreneurs and woke busybodies at work. They mean to eat our joy and steal our liberty under the guise of political correctness and inclusivity.
There has been a whisper campaign for decades that Seuss was a stealth bigot. We live in an age where Mark Twain and Harper Lee are removed from library shelves and attempts made to cut Shakespeare from curricula. It’s not rightwingers who are clamoring to censor these great works of Western civilization. It’s the woke left. Their zealotry is why Hasbro changed the name of its Mr. Potato Head brand. And unless we stand up to it it will continue until our culture is completely sanitized from a particular point of view. It’s a point of view to which the vast majority of us do not subscribe. Religious liberty protects us from having to.
Complaints about the many examples we’re confronted with on an almost daily basis now is not about the worth of any particular example but about the authoritarianism intrinsic in cancel culture, authoritarianism manifest in efforts to boycott, censor, and cancel books, film, art, and music. If you see books being burned, you must ask, “Why is this happening?”
The question of the privilege of property owners in a capitalist society or the popularity of titles in a market economy (it’s weird to see leftists so faithful to the economic imperatives of bourgeois culture yet so hostile to its liberal freedoms) are irrelevant to the discussion. When they saw the police repressing civil rights activists in the 1950s and 1960s, forward thinking people didn’t say, “Hey, the police have the power to enforce the rules.” Who said they didn’t? The question was this if you cared about human freedom: “Why these rules?”
Free thinkers don’t rationalize censorship by imagining few people would read the book, watch the movie, view the art, or listen to the music in question. Freedom of speech and expression aren’t based on the popularity of what is spoken or expressed. Free speech and expression are based on the principles of open and free societies. Nobody is saying the Seuss estate can’t discontinue If I Ran the Zoo or that Disney must release Song of the South from the vault or leave Dumbo or Peter Pan uncensored or unlabeled. It’s a distraction to make this controversy about such things.
Disney’s Song of the South
The controversy is why books, plays, film, art, and music are disappearing from our culture. A lot of us know why this is happening. There are people who want to make sure others don’t wise up to the situation so they tells us that it is expected, that’s its no big deal, that it’s to protect children, to make society a more decent place for everybody (except those who consume culture those with power deem offensive). That’s why you see all these distracting rationalizations: its part of the authoritarianism that undermines censorious desire.
The frenzy over Dr. Seuss books and Warner Brothers’ Pepé Le Pew are symptomatic of the rot of woke progressivism. The left in the West has become authoritarian. Telling us that political correctness is no big deal, that folks are overreacting, is a massive gaslighting move. Tyrants work this way. For those who don’t see it, they will be not getting it all the way to unfreedom. Of course, unfreedom is what woke busybodies want. Erich Fromm called this “escape from freedom.” It’s rooted in a fear of freedom. The pathology is one of the chief characteristics of fascism.
Social media memes attempt to paint China as a victim of Western capitalism, as if China played no role in the appearance of the vast industrial plantations, known to economists as export processing zones (EPZs), that enslave millions who produce the gadgets and widgets upon which consumers in the West depend and desire. Economists call the practice of shipping production overseas or across borders “outsourcing.” Along with mass immigration, it is one of the two main methods used to undermine the working classes of the West.
One might suspect Chinese propagandists plant those memes. Perhaps they are behind some of them. But the woke left is eager to serve the interests of the Chinese Communist Party. They don’t have to be told what to do. They know what to do. Maoist influence on the New Left from the sixties onward has built sympathy for the CCP and a loathing for Western values of liberty and human rights into woke leftism.
Outsourcing is very much driven by Chinese imperialism and its running dogs among the US corporate class, e.g., Silicon Valley. China’s long-range plan is to control global supply chains and produce debt-encumbered nations that are easily bullied by the People’s Republic of China. The CCP has no love for the Chinese people, either. The ruthlessness of China’s external behavior is surpassed by the ruthlessness of its internal behavior. The Communist Party enslaves tens of millions of Chinese and herd China’s ethnic minorities, for example the Uighur people, into concentration camps. How could China’s rulers have any love for the Chinese masses? Without the love of liberty, there is no real love at all. One does not love those whom he enslaves.
The CCP is directing Chinese corporations globally, stealing intellectual property across the First Word, luring Western investment to its EPZs, leveraging the pension funds of Western workers, assuming control of the periphery and semi-periphery by indebting those countries via its Belt and Road initiative, buying up property throughout the world.
The Chinese Communist Party is pursuing what military strategists Qiao Jiang and Wang Xiangsui, colonels in the People’s Liberation Army, identify as “unrestricted warfare.” Jiang and Xiangsui are very clear about what unrestricted warfare is meant to accomplish: it’s a master plan to destroy American and rule the world.
Traditional thinking about war is that offensive action is reducible to military action. Liang and Xiangsui identify alternatives to direct military confrontation: its Confucius Institutes, economic warfare, such a theft of intellectual property, international policy, sabotage, such as attacks on digital infrastructure and networks, and terrorism. Indeed, traditional approaches to military preparedness, such as focus on the development of new weapons systems, crowds out consideration of the tactics of unrestricted warfare.
The PRC pursues unrestricted warfare because it is presently not powerful enough militarily to use kinetic warfare. But why would the PRC need to when the corporations of the West are working with the CCP to build a global neo-feudalist system of industrial plantations—even turning the United States into one?
Transnational corporations (TNCs) have no country. TNCs globe trot to amass wealth and they see China’s authoritarian model as optimal. This is why we see the shift in rhetoric from class to race among leftwing intellectuals in the West and the switch from free speech to speech codes among the rank-and-file of the progressive countermovement.
The woke left is decidedly illiberal in consciousness and practice. Whereas Marx believed in free speech and sought to inspire the proletariat to rise up and seize the means of communication to maximize free transmission of working class expressions, the woke leftist works with global corporations to restrict the free flow of ideas, even taking over free market rhetoric of private power to justify censorious desire.
As the corporate form is a manifestation of bureaucratic collectivism, it differs little in terms of its social logic from the bureaucratic collectivism of “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Both are forms of state monopoly capitalism, with globalization having replaced imperialist motion in the West.
There is no real national interest held by the respective political establishments in the West because corporatists are the ruling class of the trans-Atlantic realm and their interests in the context of late capitalism lie in importing to the West the surveillance apparatus of the state capitalist model of China. We know this as the managed decline of America and the West, which involves giving up national sovereignty and turning Western countries into Third World countries.
China’s action express an imperialist intention to spread the PRC’s brand of state capitalism across the planet. The CCP uses globalism as a means to an end. There are plenty of elites in the West eager to betray their countrymen for the privileges that come with tightening authoritarian control over the population. We don’t have to infer this. It’s the long-standing goal of Chinese Communist Party to spread the PRC model globally. It’s open about it.
Chinese imperialism and Western integration with the global system is an existential threat to West. The CCP is totalitarian. The Chinese people are slaves the CCP sells to the West. Transnational corporations are China’s customers. The CCP is exploiting transnationalist aspirations to take over the world. As midwives to the birth of a new order, the First World globalists, defended by the progressives of North America and social democrats of Europe, are moving to fuse the world economy and its legal structure with the logic of Chinese corporatism.
This is why the effort to stop the trans-Atlantic populist-nationalist movement has been so aggressive. It’s why popular democratic movements organized around economics and glass are smeared as “xenophobic,” “racist,” “nativist,” and “fascist.” But these popular democratic movements have arisen to confront the destruction of the West.
I don’t want any readers to be confused about which movements I’m talking about. I’m not talking about such “movements” as Black Lives Matter. BLM is a corporate-backed anti-working class movement designed to stand in place of a genuine working class movement. BLM is a barely concealed ruse. That these movements reflect Maoist sensibilities straightaway reveals their purpose. The Communist Party USA and the Democratic Socialist of America are also faux-working class movements. That these organizations work hand-in-hand with progressives in the Democratic Party tells you everything you need to know about where their sympathies lie.
Capitalism as it operated under internationalism is in trouble. Depletion of resources, overshoot and collapse, a chronic realization crisis, a legitimation crisis, mass economic migration, rising populism and nationalism—the world elite are moving to a different model to preserve their wealth, one that is already seeing global inequality worsening as more and more wealth is accumulated in the upper echelon. (To know what they are up to, see the World Economic Forum.)
In this context, the memes progressives share on social media represent pro-CCP propaganda or the thoughts of persons clueless about the geopolitical and international political economic situation. China is the most serious threat to humanity since Nazi Germany. As I have said, Biden is the Chamberlain of our time.
The PRC is particularly dangerous at this time because China is ascendant in the moment of managed decline of the American republic and the trans-Atlantic system. This is the model the transnational corporations are embracing—and the TNCs are calling the shots—and the Democratic Party is their party. The inverted totalitarianism Sheldon Wolin describes in Democracy, Inc. (despite misidentifying the midwife) is a new mode of totalitarianism, no less evil just more sophisticated.
Observers are estimating that China’s one-child policy, a program of forced abortion, has resulted in the termination of 400 million pregnancies. Female fetuses were overrepresented among those aborted, and now there are some 20 million young Chinese men who are bachelors. In other words, cannon fodder. Two of the three pillars of unrestricted warfare are in play—economic and information warfare. All that remains is kinetic warfare. China has the men to wage it. They await the opportunity.
* * *
Having mentioned the Communist Party USA, I feel it is necessary to write about my own history with this group. In the mid-1990s, as a graduate student at Middle Tennessee State University, a colleague and I established a small leftwing organization, the Committee for Social Justice, which published a short-lived journal Theory and Praxis: A Journal of Free Thought and Revolutionary Action. This and work on public interests shows for cable access at VIACOM drew the attention of the Communist Party USA who sent an organizer to Tennessee to organize a communist club (the name the CPUSA uses for its cells). We got a nice write up in what was then called the People’s World Weekly (formerly the Daily Worker). I still have a signed copy of Gus Hall’s Working Class USA which the organizer had brought with him to give me.
In order to be a member of the CPUSA, one must organize a club and actively recruit others to the CPUSA. It was this cult-like practice that kept me from becoming a CPUSA member. However, the CPUSA tapped me for some articles for its paper, which had been renamed the People’s World, the most notable of these, “The Victims of Capitalism,” published on June 23, 2007.
Another reason I disassociated myself from the group was its shift from working class socialism to woke leftism and its increasing ties to the Democratic Party. In the 1990s, the CPUSA still advocated, at least rhetorically, what Hall called “bill of rights socialism.” This is not the case anymore.
Today, the CPUSA and the DSA are effective fronts for the Chinese Communist Party and it is through these fronts that the CCP manipulates the policies of the Democratic Party when the Party is not directly serving the interests of the PRC. If you are curious to know how this happens, just look at who in the Democratic Party openly declares membership in the Democratic Socialist of America.
Long ago I repudiated the CPUSA. If I could deny any past association with this group I would. I find my flirtation with this group mildly embarrassing. But the Committee for Social Justice, the journal Theory and Praxis, my meetings with the CPUSA organizers, and my articles in the People’s World are all matters of pubic record and part of my biography, so I will have to own them. At least I can say that I am not and have never been a member of the Communist Party.
On March 5th, an ABC News headline warned, “Rise in anti-Asian American hate crimes may lead to mental health crisis.” I finished the article with this thought: Not telling me who the perpetrators are makes it difficult to understand what’s going on. I waited to see whether more stories would enlighten me on that very important piece of the puzzle. (I know what that puzzle piece is and I promise not to tease you more than a few paragraphs.)
Four days later, Newsweek provided a clue in an editorial by Helen Raleigh: “Asian Americans Emerging as a Strong Voice Against Critical Race Theory.” “Critical race theory (CRT) is a divisive, discriminatory ideology that judges people on the basis of their skin color,” writes Raleigh. “It has penetrated our society—it’s in federal agencies’ and federal contractors’ ‘bias training,’ in school curricula and many corporations’ ‘diversity training.’ Few are willing to speak out against it for fear of being labeled racists or white supremacists.” But there’s good news: “Asian Americans, however, have emerged as a powerful voice against this pernicious ideology.”
Asians know what’s it’s like to be on the bad end of the CRT stick, including the violent end. CRT, announcing itself as an antiracist ideology, is the gospel of racial division and resentment. Policy based on antiracist ideology functions to divide the population in the way traditional racism functioned to divide the population: categorizing individuals by superficial phenotypic features and demanding requiring that some categories enjoy privileges that are exclusive to others. CRT is thus best described as the “new racism” (the new racists tried to get the jump on that term by defining criticism of the new racism as the new racism).
A moment ago I made the observation that, without identification of perpetrator characteristics, I did not know what to think about anti-Asian bias crime. I told you that I wouldn’t make you wait long. It’s a polemical way of saying that the media is not telling us who the perpetrators of anti-Asian bias crimes are because the media agenda is to blame the attacks on those who correctly identify the source of COVID-19, namely China, and may go on to suggest that the totalitarian government of that country does not have American’s best interests at heart (nor is it fond of the Chinese people). In other words, the establishment needs the public to assume that MAGA people are attacking Asians because of things Donald Trump has said about China and anybody who would do that must be MAGA (i.e., racist, xenophobic, and other bad names).
Looking at the data since the early 1990s, offender race is significantly variable across bias crimes perpetrated against Asians, blacks, and Hispanics, and the overwhelming difference is that bias crimes against Asian Americans are more likely than bias crimes against either African Americans or Hispanics to be committed by nonwhites, primarily black American. I want to make sure the reader understands this: it is not mostly whites who perpetrate anti-Asian bias crimes; it is mostly nonwhites, especially blacks.
Anti-Asian bias crimes have been happening for decades and that obviously means it has little to do with the term “China virus” fundamentally, albeit COVID-19 and its origins in China may has something to do with spurring violence. It’s not just because anti-Asian bias existed long before COVID-19 that I say that; despite the inroads Trump made into the black community in terms of popular support, there aren’t very many MAGA hat wearing black Americans. While COVID-19 may have increased incidents of violence, it is not the underlying cause any more than changing cotton prices in the postbellum South were the underlying cause of lynching. The underling cause of racial patterns in lynching was racism (I have published scientific papers on this, for the record).
One might object that CRT is a new thing. But CRT and its influences have been around for quite some time. We have known for decades that violence against Asians is driven by animosity toward Asians as a “model minority.” The “model minority” idea is a stereotype assuming that Asian success in economics, education, etc., represents a threat to the success of other nonwhite racial groups, which in turn leads to resentment that may manifest in bias crime. This is the same argument was (and to some extent still is) made about Jewish economic and educational success in Europe and America. Jews are a “model minority.” Nobody doubts that antisemitism lurks behind a great deal of violence against Jews. This is also the argument that we hear today concerning “white privilege” and “white supremacy.” This same resentment likely feeds violence against whites in the form of robbery and other crimes in which racist motives are rarely admitted.
Anti-Asian bias manifests in other ways beyond violence, such as race-conscious policies restricting access to Asian applicants to Harvard University. In 2014, Students for Fair Admission filed a lawsuit in US federal district court against Harvard claiming that university discriminates against Asian-American applicants. The suit was rejected in 2019, a decision upheld in the First Court of Appeals, but the plaintiff has asked for a hearing before the Supreme Court. In 2015, a coalition of several dozen Asian-American organizations filed a complaint with the US Education Department and Justice Department against Harvard demanding a civil rights investigation in Harvard’s race conscious policies. The Obama Administration rebuffed the group, but the Trump Administration reopened the investigation in 2017. With the 2020 election, it is unclear what will happen to the investigation. However, under Biden, the DOJ, citing the appeals court ruling in the Harvard case, dropped a similar investigation into claims Yale discriminates against Asian students.
Why would the media keep from Americans by not reporting the identity of those who perpetrate anti-Asian bias crimes? Three reasons are obvious, I think.
First, corporations and the Democratic Party frames social problems to their advantage. Favored minorities perpetrating violence against other minorities, as the progressives say, is not a good look. The look they’re going for is blaming the white majority for the woes of minorities, since this draws minority votes to the Democratic Party. Thus the Democratic Party, as the party of big corporate power, plays a major role as moral entrepreneur in perpetuating the myth of white supremacy. Democrats use the white supremacist boogieman to manufacture fear and resentment among Americans. They use it to justify building a wall around the Capitol while maintaining a porous southern border (open to more potential voters). They use it to justify weakening voter integrity law and policy. Etc.
Second, the Democratic Party is the political force leading the legislative and policy pieces of the transnationalization project (otherwise known as the managed decline of the American republic) and this means hiding from sight the fact that the Chinese Communist Party, which controls much of the global supply chain and is buying up property around the world, exploiting the pension funds of the American worker to finance it all, is the single greatest threat to the health, safety, and wellbeing of working class Americans. By blaming MAGA for anti-Asian bias crimes they marginalize nationalist criticism of the role played by the People’s Republic of China in globalization. Progressives smear populist politics as xenophobic and racist.
If Americans were to blame China for unleashing COVID-19 on the world, especially if Americans learn about the evidence that the virus was the result of gain-of-function research organized in Wuhan and other Chinese labs by none other than Saint Anthony Fauci (however justified for public health purposes, experiments indistinguishable from biological weapons programs), this will draw public attention to the vast industrial plantations transnational corporations use to produce their gadgets, to Chinese imperialism in Africa and Latin America producing the conditions that lie behind mass migration, and to the ongoing genocide of the Uyghur people.
Third, critical race theory is ubiquitous in the institutions of the United States. Administrators, managers, and educators swim in the ideology of racial division and antagonisms, which they transmit to employees and students who then take these ideas to their family, friends, and neighbors. They double-down on racial division and conflict in the wake of the success of the civil rights movement in the 1960s began not long after the foundation of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream of a colorblind society was established. This program, when the framing is not deliberate, produces a blindness of its own, in which the fact of inter-minority antagonism and conflict eludes awareness. That reporters can’t provide images of MAGA hat wearing perpetrators of anti-Asian bias crimes is mystified by the absence of any perpetrators at all. The ethereal creeping hand of anti-Asian bias shoves elderly Asian men to the ground.
Any of you who were around during the 1992 Los Angeles riots will likely remember the situation of Americans of Korean descent. (If you wanted a preview of a world where cops stand down and permit rioting and looting, Los Angeles 1992 was surely it.) At the time of the riots, many businesses in majority-black neighborhoods in South Central were owned by Korean immigrants. The immigrants were able to purchase the business as white owners who leaving the neighborhood because of high crime and violence. When police abandoned the neighbors to rioters in the wake of the acquittal of police officers charged in the beating of Rodney King, Korean business owners and residents were left to defend themselves.
Armed Korean storeowners during the 1992 riots.
Distracting Americans from the problem of social class, Democratic politicians (who are mostly white) divide the world into whites and honorary whites, on one side, and people of color (whom Democrats used to call “colored people”), on the other. They appeal to white creatives and professionals, i.e., privileged workers in the culture industry and administrative apparatus, and ethnicized/racialized minorities for votes, while marginalizing white working class and rural voters.
To shame people into silence, the media and Democratic Party dissimulate the actual cause of anti-Asian bias and blame it instead on frank talk about the role of China in crushing 60 percent of small business and throwing millions of Americans out of work. Progressives blame Trump and MAGA to gin up fear of those who wish to preserve the American republic. The rise of anti-Asian bias crimes is useful to the power elite only as long as the fact that the perpetrators are mostly black is not well known.
To the extent that COVID-19 provides any motive for anti-Asian violence, (a) failing to provide a honest context in which it may be explained to the public that Asians in America are not to blame for the actions of the Chinese Communist Party, indeed that the Chinese people themselves are victims of the CCP (and global corporatism), (b) failing to expose the real reasons Asians in America are the victims of bias crime, namely the progressive preachments of racial resentment, and (c) obscuring the truth of (b) by blaming anti-Asian bias crime on criticism of China, the Democrats and the media perpetuate the suggestion that there is a link between Asians generally and COVID-19.
In the spring of 2017, CNN wrote a retrospective on Los Angeles 1992 and pushed it into the network’s unrelentingly anti-Trump frame. “Asian immigrants, once a conservative bloc, have steadily moved to the center and left of the political spectrum, especially as their US-born children identify with more liberal beliefs,” writes Kyung Lah, in “The LA riots were a rude awakening for Korean-Americans.
“In 2016, exit polls showed Asian-Americans broke 65% for Clinton to 27% for Trump. As the country’s fastest-growing immigrant group, the trends don’t bode well for the GOP, who lagged behind the Democrats in Asian-American engagement in 2016.” CNN interviewed Robert Ahn, a LA planning commissioner, who told them that Latinos, African-Americans and Korean-Americans have “a lot more in common than differences.” The tone of the article makes it clear that that common interest is antithetical to populist-nationalism. “What I’m hearing from Trump and the rise in hate crimes in this country is scaring me,” Chang Lee, one of CNN’s interview subjects, said. “Los Angeles had this painful past. Now it’s time for minority ethnic groups to talk to each other, stay bound together, understand and support each other.” Nowhere in the story is the other point of view voiced. Odd given that more than one if four Asian-Americans voted for Trump.
So, you may wonder, how can Joe Biden come before the nation and tell us that COVID-19 was met by silence and denial for days, weeks, and months? Does Biden think he has a Neuralyzer in his pocket? I was there. I remember what happened. I was blogging about it in March 2020. I watched the Democrats telling us to go to Chinatown, calling Trump a racist and a xenophobe for banning travel from China. But it was administration official Peter Navarro who put Fauci in this place when Fauci tried to talk Trump out of the travel ban. Biden smeared Trump as a racist for banning travel. I remember Fauci telling the country we didn’t need masks—in fact, he said masks would only make things worse because the proles would be fiddling with them.
Biden’s address to the nation the other night began with a lie. He then went on to talk about hate crimes against Asian-Americans as if identifying the origin of the virus (China) is the reason for anti-Asian bias crime. He is simultaneously suggesting perpetrators while making anti-Asian bias appear acute rather than Chronic. The Biden administration dropped the investigation of anti-Asian discrimination at Yale University. Biden, a running dog of the Chinese Communist Party, has one overarching goal: to keep the public from talking about the role of China in the COVID-19 pandemic.
Update (03.11.21): Jerusalem Demsas and Rachel Ramirez, writing for Vox, in confronting the evidence that most perpetuators of bias crimes against Asians are black, blame the history of tensions between Asian and black Americans on white supremacy. One can expect such attempts at rationalization will likely be suspended in light of the shooting of massage parlor workers in Atlanta, many of whom were Asian. Now they have a presumptive white supremacist to hold up.
However, the suspect, Robert Aaron Long, may not have committed a bias crime. Cherokee County Sheriff is reporting that there is no indication of racial motivation in the deadly spa shooting, but rather the perpetrator had issues with sexual addiction. Long apparently frequented the establishments he targeted in the attack. The Atlantic Journal Constitution, in “Cops: Shooting suspect says he targeted spas because of sexual addiction,” is reporting, “The 21-year-old man accused of killing eight people at three metro Atlanta spas said it was a sexual addiction—and not the race of victims—that led him to the alleged crime spree, police said Wednesday.
Returning to the Vox story, the authors admit therein that “anti-Asian sentiment in the United States is not new.” Demsas and Ramirez ask the reader to “just look to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned Chinese immigrants from becoming US citizens, and President Franklin Roosevelt’s executive order in 1942 that put Japanese Americans into internment camps.” The authors also admit that “the attacks that have gained widespread attention have featured Black assailants, and have threatened to inflame tensions between Asian Americans and Black Americans.”
However, not bothering to look at data I shared above (and there’s more: “When ‘white supremacists’ aren’t even white”; “Dirty secret of black-on-Asian violence is out”), the Vox article claims to have “found no evidence that Black Americans are predominantly responsible for this rise in attacks, or that they are particularly hostile to Asian Americans relative to the rest of the population.” Yet the authors go on to write that “the narrative of Black-Asian hostility is rooted in immigration and economic policies.” Then the article explains everything in light of overarching white supremacy. It other words, the authors shift the discussion from the capitalist practice of using immigration to undermine working class communities to blaming white people for what capitalists do.
Having disregarded the material fact of capitalist mode of production in favor of an ideological construct, the authors wax hopeful: “There is already a long history of Black-Asian solidarity against oppression and structural racism, which has been obscured by these recent fissures. In the late 1960s, for instance, Black and Asian activists led the Third World Liberation From movement to establish race and ethnic studies in college and university curriculums in California.” And this is how mainstreaming an ideology by designing academic curricula around it that functions in the corporate-university alliance to systematically dissimulate the material fact of class exploitation reframes oppression as social justice.
“It’s not that Asian-Black tensions or racial hierarchies don’t exist today but that there is a failure to remember what got America to this place: white supremacy.” That black Americans are assaulting Asian Americans does not obviate the ubiquity of white supremacy. “The fact is that Black Americans are native-born Americans, and, like all native-born people, they are susceptible to xenophobic and nationalistic sentiments that can place blame on an ‘other’—in this case, Asian Americans, who can be seen as ‘forever foreigners’ even if they, too, are native-born.”
Then this: “While Black Americans (who are overwhelmingly Democratic) often have more liberal views on immigration reform, there is also existing research that indicates that Black people may feel economic competition with new immigrant communities that can manifest as broad anti-immigrant sentiment and racism.” Note the use of the word “feel.” It’s not that immigrants actually put black people at a competitive disadvantage in their own country. It’s that blacks made feel that there is economic competition and that can manifest itself as racism.
Finally, this historical note: “In 1965, the United States ended the quota-based system of immigration and began to push for high-skilled labor to enter the country. One group that was able to enter the country were Korean Americans who were hyper-selected—that is, they had much higher socioeconomic and educational attainment relative not only to their country of origin but also to the native-born US population.” In 1965, the unemployment rate was four percent. Perhaps there was a need for high-skilled labor. But what happened as a result of the change in immigration law was a massive influx of immigrants, high-skilled and low-skilled, with the result the chronic displacement of black labor with consequences for the black community, including high crime and violence and family disintegration.
Something else about the time line. What was happening in the United States in the 1960s? Driven by rising expectations amid civil rights and guided by a radical ideology, rioting and urban violence was commonplace. The violence drove white businesses and residents from the cities. Affluent Asians, in particular Koreans, entered the country and bought the properties abandoned by whites. They became the business owners and slum lords. Radical ideology told blacks their woes were attributable to oppression not to the dysfunctional culture associated with disorganized neighborhoods. Without whites around, “honorary whites” became the substitute targets of envy and resentment. Rising displacement from mass immigration fueled animosities that, the language of class struggle denied the masses, translated into racial terms.
To say all this is due to white supremacy is to suggest that whites are sufficiently organized to develop a strategy to protect their racial privilege. This is a conspiracy theory that should be seen as obviously wrong because most white people are not racially privileged. The reality is that capitalists are organized and, moreover, operate on the profit imperative, a confluence of interests, and this is what lies behind the policies that created the circumstances that brought Asian immigrants and their descendants into conflict with native-born black Americans. By making this about race, the organic intellectuals of the bourgeois class (critical race theorists and all the rest of it) disorganize the proletariat by defining the problem in racial terms. This is the new racism. Same as the old racism.
Update #2 (03.11.21):
The spree killer Robert Aaron Long was a devout Christian, hyper-religious it appears and he frequented spas aka massage parlors and he was deeply conflicted. Long’s age suggests his conflict may have occurred in the context of an emerging psychiatric condition.
Long’s parents contacted the Cherokee sheriff’s office to identify their son. They informed deputies that a tracking device could lead authorities to his vehicle. His parents were apparently worried about Long (why a GPS tracking device?). Long was captured in Crisp County, about 150 miles south of Atlanta, en route to Florida. Sheriff’s spokesman Jay Baker said Long viewed Florida as a hub for the porn industry. Long told him the Atlanta area “spas” were “temptations to him he wanted to eliminate.” This was a disturbed young man. He was delusional and hyper-religious. It isn’t hard to figure out what is going on here.
But the media, which has obscured the identity of the perpetrators of violence against Asian Americans, latched on to this story because it to fit the narrative they are trying to construct: that it Trump, MAGA, and rhetoric about the “Chinese virus” that is behind the violence.
I have watched the ever obnoxious Shaun King flipping out on Facebook over this story. Why didn’t the police drag Long out of his truth and suffocate him? Another white man taken alive! Etcetera. Race hucksters are so consumed with attention-getting and pushing the (false) narrative of a ubiquitous white supremacy they never wait to see what is actually going on. And the media is obsessed with suppressing the populist-nationalist movement. The establishment thinks it’s at war with the American people. And, in war, as we all know, truth is the first casualty. Even when they have to walk something back, they know how first impressions stick with a lot of people, especially those who want to believe the shit they’re shoveling.
Joe Conason (with whom I have dined), essentially a Democratic Party operative, has entered the fray over Dr. Seuss in an essay at The National Memo. He admits what happened: “The Seuss estate, which oversees the 60 books and other properties he left to posterity, decided to pull a half-dozen of them because their content includes dated and offensive stereotypes.”
A cartoon from Dr. Seuss’ 1937 book And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street now $250 on Amazon (five star rating)
A lot of folks in my newsfeed deny anything happened. They characterize what Conason speaks about as merely books going out of print. Hey, it happens. Nobody wants to buy those books anyway. No, the book were pulled because images in them were presumed by left woke standards of political correctness to be dangerous to groups of people the establishment has defined en mass as fragile people.
Infantilizing minorities is rampant practice on the woke left. I swear to you, an example of transforming entire racial and ethnic groups into the collective victims of trauma just popped up on my email server. “The mission of BIPOC R.I.S.E. (Reaching Intersectional Strengths through Engagement) is to provide BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, and multicultural students) with academic, emotional, psychosocial, relational and professional support. This is achieved through engagement with academic, peer, community and professional mentors who desire to be in long-term, ongoing relationships with BIPOC students.”
This language transforms BIPOC into trauma victims in need of counseling and mentoring. I presume it’s the professionals in the “white establishment” who are to be their counselors and mentors. But isn’t the “white establishment” also the perpetrator according to Critical Race Theory? Focus on the language here: “emotional,” “psychosocial,” “professional support.” Every person in the BIPOC categories is presumed to suffer from emotional and psychological trauma. The term “relational” conveys that there are relations, presumed to be broken, in need repair. The victims of those broken relations must certainly be protected from the careless unprophetic cartooning of a well-meaning but unreflecting Dr. Seuss. They’re too fragile. They’re too delicate.
Describing Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss was his pen name) as a “liberal humanist,” Conason, like his woke progressive brethren, seems unaware of what liberal and humanist mean with respect to freedom of ideas and the significance of history. At best, the feign it. “When you remember that his first book was published more than 80 years ago, that dissonance seems almost inevitable,” writes Conason. Like Mark Twain’s work? There’s dissonance there. Kids read Twain. “The estate’s decision, a sensible response to changing standards, was plainly designed to protect both the Seuss brand and the memory of Theodor Seuss Geisel as a liberal humanist.” Not to mention all the patients woke progresses are in charge of counseling, many of whom are actually doctors (of education and philosophy).
Conason predictably flips things Orwellingly: cancelling Dr. Seuss “is the opposite of ‘canceling’ Dr. Seuss,” adding, “anyone who wants to read the old titles can still find them.” Try finding a high-quality copy of Disney’s Song of the South (grab Dumbo and Peter Pan uncensored while you will still can).
What Conason and the “sensible response to changing standards” crowd are up to is biographical and historical revisionism. Conason finds Winston acting in the best interests of the proles of Airstrip One. The Ministry of Truth, having deemed they know such things, needs to send wrong thoughts down the memory hole for their own good. Seuss cannot be seen as a man of history really. There is no history except that which advances the power of the present for the sake of its future. Geisel’s work is scheduled for cleansing in light of contemporary standards proclaimed by those in power to be universal.
Marx and Engels suggested to their audience that when they hear the word “morality” they ought to think “bourgeois morality.” Woke leftism means to redefine standards according to the terms of current-day political correctness pitched as organically emergent but actually constructed by a particular point of view that holds liberalism humanism is low regard. Political correctness is in fact the work of the “radical left” that Conason means to deny, albeit I would hardly describe this left as “radical” (more like reactionary).
Conason can’t resist loving on Democrats: “The irony is that Dr. Seuss was himself a lifelong Democrat whose advocacy of liberal causes dated back to the New Deal, when he drew scores of blistering cartoons for the left-leaning daily New York newspaper PM, usually on the subject of Republican perfidy.” I can see irony, but I don’t think it is the irony Conason intends.
Or hating on Trump. Conason implies that Trump and his movement—“Trumpism,” he and his ilk fancy it—represent fascism and racism. Hence the reason to get “ism” and “ist” into the discourse. Geisel “despised Hitler, Mussolini, Charles Lindbergh, and the original ‘America First’ movement; he deplored racism and anti-Semitism; and he served patriotically in the war against fascism. He would have low regard for the Trumpists who are now misusing his good name.”
There may be racist and anti-Semites among those who voted for Trump, just as there are racists and anti-Semites among Democrats and progressives. But so-called Trumpism is neither racist nor anti-Semitic. It’s a patriotic populist-nationalist movement against the corporatism and globalism that is laying down the Newspeak and undermining the livelihoods of working class Americans.
Unlike Conason, I won’t presume to speak for Geisel, but if he would have had low regard for Trumpists for the reasons Conason suggests, then it would only mean that Geisel, like a lot of people, didn’t understand politics as well as he could or should have. I do, however, wonder whether Geisel would have been troubled by the insinuation that at least six of his works were racist and harmful to the fragile victims of woke progressivism.
freedom and reason 