It’s a strange debate we’re having in the United States today about race. It’s as if our sense-making institutions have lost all historical memory about what it means to be black in America. That is exactly what has happened. But it is weird only because the weird ones have assumed power and taken control of the narrative. Have you seen this?
Growing up in the 1960s-1970s to parents who were civil rights activists, and then later becoming an expert in race and ethnic relations (my dissertation was on the subject of the political economy of race and many of my articles and courses concern the racial problematic), I learned that to be a black American meant that you were descended from Africans long ago brought to the United States (a very long time ago: the United States abolished the slave trade in 1800, the law taking effect in 1808) to serve as chattel—that “peculiar institution” Republicans abolished in the 1860s at the costs of hundreds of thousands of lives. The descendants of those Africans slaves would later by terrorized by lynch mobs (see Agency and Motive in Lynching and Genocide), and suffer under de jure segregation, abolished in the 1960s despite Democrats filibustering the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in the Senate (the longest filibuster in US Senate history).
Black Americans were the focus the Civil Rights movement. Affirmative action concerned black Americans in this sense, as well. It was widely understood that an African who immigrated to the United States should not count as an affirmative action hire because the program didn’t fetishize the racial concept but the historical one. After all, race is a social construct. Indeed, Africans who legally immigrate to America typically come from affluent families. They do not descend from those who suffered at the hands of plantation owners, lynch mobs, and Jim Crow—the badges of slavery. They therefore do not need equitable adjustment.
The same is true of Jamaicans, a remarkably successful immigrant group (in the UK, as well). If one is from Africa or the Caribbean, he is not black in the sense that MLK, Jr., was black. Moreover, many Africans are white, either Arab or European (Elon Musk is African, for example). Being African or African American (naturalized citizens) does not necessarily mean one is black in any sense.
The question of Harris’ racial identity is not an offensive question—at least not the way older observers understand it. (Donald Trump, for example; see The Perils of Racecraft.) It is treated as such because elites don’t want you asking questions about it, and the rank-and-file are ignorant enough of history to be bamboozled. When progressives and the media say that Harris’ racial background is off limits, what they are doing is trying to prevent young people from learning about the history of blackness in America. This is how younger generations are controlled—through the socialization of thought-stopping devices (Orwell warned us about it). The older folks are intimidated by the younger folks very much like they were during Mao’s cultural revolution in the 1960s.
We witnesses the same thing with Obama. Obama’s mother was white. Obama was raised by his white grandparents. He had an African father with whom he had limited interaction. Obama was not black in the historic sense of the term. He moved himself to Chicago and joined the black church to manufacture racial authenticity because he had political aspirations and these were advanced by sporting a black identity (which is why black critics in the day referred to Obama as a “Magical Negro”). Blacks and whites were told they were bigots for suggesting Obama was “not black enough,” even those this was mostly coming from black commentators—white guilt couldn’t wait vote for the man. Elites presented Obama as black because it was politically useful. (See Progressive Hypocrisy and scroll down the paragraph about Alan Keyes.)
Harris does the same thing. When it’s useful to push her Asian ancestry, she does so (San Francisco, for example, where black-Asian relations are notoriously antagonistic). When she needs to be black, however, Harris goes to a record store and buys albums to bolster her racial bona fides (does she even have a record player?). She puts on a stereotypical black accent, which the progressives dutifully rationalize as “code switching,” which is something white people wouldn’t understand.
Who gets to define race in America? The answer to that question is obvious: progressives. They get to define everything. They’ve captured the sense making institutions. They’re the gatekeepers of identity. They and their minions (the army of college students they’ve trained up Saul Alinsky style) get to decide whether you’re a racist. They get to decide what words you can use. What jokes you can tell. They’re the brain police.
This is why a white ABC talking head, George Stephanopoulos, who was a top strategist for the 1992 Clinton campaign (in charge of “bimbo eruptions,” i.e., Clinton’s many rape victims), can scold Byron Donalds, who is for sure a black man, for questioning Harris’ racial identity. You’d think that the rule is that only a black man can ask such a question, but you’d be wrong. Only a progressive can, since a progressive, even a white one (especially a white one), has been given the power to define people as such. Remember when Biden said that if you were a black man who didn’t know whether you were voting for him or Trump then aren’t really black? He was saying the quiet part out loud. Trump is excoriated for simply noting Kamala’s pandering. Biden says black people who don’t vote him aren’t really black. Crickets.
You’re supposed to believe that questioning a person’s racial identity is racist—but only if you’re not progressive. The media shredded Rachel Dolezal for identifying as black because they will tell you who is who is not black. Dolezal is not black. Khelif is not a man. The pattern is obvious. It’s why young progressives come my Facebook profile and show their ass. They believe they alone enjoy the privilege to define things for everybody else because of their political identification. They’re smarter than everybody else not because they know anything (as you can see, they don’t) but because they are progressive. They’re like Islamists: their religion is a formula for truth. Identity = correctness and virtue. This is why you will never hear an actual argument. They don’t know the rules of reasoning because they don’t need to. Universities don’t teach these anymore anyway (I do, but who cares?).
My problem with Dolezal is not that she presents herself as a black woman despite being born to white parents, but that she didn’t descend from black slaves. Had that been the case, even if she appeared white, she could claim to be black. Not an insignificant number of blacks appear white. My students will always wonder aloud in Race and Ethnicity who those white children are in the photographs of freed slaves. It’s possible that Dolezal lived in South Africa as a child, and we know for a fact that from 2002 to 2006 her parents and siblings lived in South Africa as Christian missionaries. So she might claim to be African American in some sense (which is not the same as black). But if it’s wrong to question somebody’s racial identity, then why was Dolezal so viciously attacked? Because it’s only wrong if you’re the wrong person. It depends on who is doing the questioning and whether that person is the right person. The right person is the progressive person. (See The Strange Essentialisms of Identity Politics.)
Remember when the Marxist political scientist Adolph Reed, Jr. (a black man) was attacked for asking why Dolezal couldn’t be black and was destroyed over it but Bruce Jenner could be a woman and given awards? (See “From Jenner to Dolezal: One Trans Good, the Other Not So Much” to learn about this case.) I asked the same question and people got really mad. Richard Dawkins (a white man) asked the same thing and his humanist award was revoked (see Racecraft and Witch Hunts). “It’s not the same thing,” progressives said. Yeah? Why not? “If you don’t understand why these cases are not analogous, you’re transphobe.” Really? Why? “It’s just not.” “Bigot.” These aren’t answers. Sometimes, like a case of Tourettes, the Cluster B comes out and “Go fuck yourself.”
The question of Harris’ racial identity is relevant. Identity is not what people say about themselves but what they are. Most things in the world have no capacity to identify themselves. It’s up to objective observers to identify what the thing is according to valid criteria. The question “what is a woman?” has an answer (this is why Matt Walsh’s documentary “What is a Woman?” is so powerful). A woman is an adult female human. What does female mean? In mammals it means XX karyotypic and large gametes with corresponding reproductive anatomy. There’s a Y present? Then this is not a woman. But the person identifies as a woman. Right, and that person identifies as a lizard. That’s subjective. People think all kinds of things about themselves. Dolezal believes she is black (to this day). But, if we’re rational, we work from objective criteria. What is a black American? There is valid criteria to consult (I showed it to you earlier in this post).
A historical note: the party of the slavocracy, of the Ku Klux Klan, of the people who lynched blacks, the authorities who instituted Jim Crow—that’s the Democratic Party. The progressive movement grew out of this, as did the corporate state progressive administer. This is same party of the modern-day ghetto that engineered the destruction of the black family (over 80 percent of black children in the inner city are born in one-parent households). This is the party who underprotects black neighborhoods, and are therefore responsible for the fact, while black men make up only 6-7 percent of the US population, more than half of all murder victims are black men. Half of all murderers are black men, as well.
As for the Republicans we’re instructed to loathe? They had nothing to do with that. They don’t run blue cities. But they did do these things: they abolished slavery; they organized and administered reconstruction; they voted in overwhelming numbers of end Jim Crow (80 percent of Republican in the House and the Senate). Republicans are the choice of the vast majority of US counties. In those counties, children have fathers and grow up in safe neighborhoods.
If you hear these truths and think “racist,” then you’re a progressive—which means you’re the racist (weird, right?). What you think and say about the world is corporate state programming, which socializes racial thinking to disorganized the working class. It is successful because progressive control the sense making institutions.
freedom and reason 