“Blacks can’t be racist because as a group that have no institutional power.” This is also known as the “myth of reserve racism.” You’ve heard these assertions before I’m sure. The first formulation often comes with a caveat: blacks who deviate from the acceptable narrative about black suffering are the racist agents of white supremacy. Many years ago I accepted the premise of these assertions and even rehearsed them in public (see Why Black People Can’t Be Racist … At Least Not Against Whites). You can find that in some of my earliest blog essays the logic of this statement underpins the arguments. This logic remains fundamental to the post civil rights rhetoric of woke progressivism.
Stokely Carmichael, later known as Kwame Ture, a major player in the Black Power movement, is believed to have coined the term “institutional racism” in the book Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America, published in 1967. The book was coauthored with Charles Hamilton, professor of political science at Columbia University. Patricia Bidol introduced the formulation racism = power + privilege in her book The Black Woman’s Manifesto, published in 1970. These works argued that racism involves both prejudice and the power to enforce prejudice through institutional means.
The conceptualization emphasizes the structural and systemic aspects of racism, which requires a specialized theory to detect, which would arrive in its mature form as critical race theory (CRT). The theory posits that racism is not only about individual attitudes or biases but also about the ability of a particular racial group to enforce those attitudes through institutional power. In this view, members of historically marginalized groups, especially black people, may hold prejudiced views, but they lack the systemic power to enforce those views on a broad scale, therefore they cannot be racist (at least against whites).
What I didn’t realize when I was younger is that Black Power propaganda was taken up by rich and poor alike to (a) justify positive discrimination against whites and those considered white-adjacent (East Asians) and (b) rationalize crime and violence against whites, a category that includes Jews (but strangely not Arabs, who are also white), as well as East Asians. The concept of “positive discrimination” is a gloss for such practices as affirmative action, designated “positive” because these practices allegedly represent a good kind of discrimination. If institutional racism has any meaning, then, it’s manifest in the practice of positive discrimination and the assumption of white privilege (which is a fallacy).
These ideas have been taken up by corporate power to assemble a loyal court of “victims” from many tribes (the soul of diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI), at the same time disorder the proletariat by dissimulating class power in the rhetoric of racism, sowing division among working people.
This is the New Racism. The New Racism works much the same way as the old racism and its function is the same with only the direction of hate and resentment reversed. It’s no surprise, then, that the party of the Slavocracy and Jim Crow would be the party of the New Racism. I’m talking about the Democratic Party, of course. The corporate and professional-managerial classes recognize the role of racism in maintaining capitalist hegemony over the working class. After the success of Civil Rights in the 1960s, racism was rejiggered and respecified.
The truth is that blacks can be and often are racist. Many of you didn’t need me to tell you that. We see this in the black-on-white violence and the looting of white-owned stores that are daily occurrences in America, their frequency sharply increasing thanks to anti-racist politics. Anti-white prejudice has been internalized by many whites who go to great lengths to make their racial self-loathing in public spaces visible and shareable on social media. Seeing video of white progressives kissing the boots of black men in public is a disturbing sight. But that ritual practice of the Woke Church is only one signal that Western Civilization is in crisis.
In the new racial conceptions, racial self-loathing extends to an embrace of an especially pernicious political ideology that despises the West and seeks its destruction, namely the sharia supremacy of the clerical fascists. Polls are finding Holocaust denial, a form of antisemitism rampant in the Muslim world, more common among Democrats than other groups, especially the young. This is the fruit of postcolonial studies and the reductive oppressor-oppressed paradigm.
In this paradigm, the successful examples young people should be modeling are decried as the colonizer. Because Jews are an exceptional ethnic group, they’re the paradigm instantiation of oppressor/colonizer. Because the left has no critique of capitalism anymore, having been trained to see the world through the lens of race (and other social constructs), it was inevitable that we would arrive at a point where the myth of systemic racism (at least in the way the left thinks it works) would include the Party of God, the main reason hundreds of millions of Arabs and other Muslims live in shit-hole countries.
freedom and reason 