The most obvious indicator of left-wing racism is the white progressive reflex to strip black Americans of their agency. Blacks are not responsible for the crimes they commit, the communities their behaviors degrade, or the idleness that perpetuates cycles of poverty and violence.
At least, that’s what the progressive catechism teaches. It’s why progressives (too often mistakenly referred to as “liberals” by conservatives) rail against law and order. It’s why they sneer at the very idea of personal responsibility. To them, blacks are permanent wards of the state—infants in need of constant excuses, incapable of individual accountability or moral choice.
The white progressive is joined in infantilizing blacks by what one might identify as, following the radical thesis of internal colonialism, colonial collaborators within the black population—collaborators whom Manning Marable, in his 1983 How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, referred to as the black “Brahmin” class (borrowing a term from the caste system of India).
The black Brahmins are a small but influential group of highly educated black cultural leaders, intellectuals, and professionals who rose to prominence during the twentieth century. These are the intellectuals who developed critical race theory, a political standpoint I have written about extensively in Freedom and Reason (see Staying Focused on the Problem with Critical Race Theory, where readers will find several embedded links to other essays on the topic).
Marable thus uses the concept of the black Brahmin to describe a segment of the black community that gained social mobility through access to education, professional advancement, and often proximity to elite white institutions. This class, while playing a crucial role in shaping black thought, cultural production, and political strategy, finds itself socially and ideologically above and remote from the working-class and poor black communities it claims to represent. And so it should, since it is allied with the capitalist class, represented today by corporate state power.
Karl Marx sums up the role of such a stratum well in The German Ideology (written around 1845):
“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class that has the means of material production at its disposal has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance.”
Applied to the present analysis, the black Brahmin is subservient to the corporate state, advancing elite interests by constructing a language that serves to perpetuate prevailing social relations—and thus secures the privilege of the black Brahmin. This is how we see a situation in which black elites decry President Donald Trump’s turn to law and order in American cities, while ordinary black Americans see the enhancement of public safety as a godsend.
Marx continues:
“The individuals composing the ruling class possess, among other things, consciousness, and therefore think. Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch.”
Marx’s truism is expounded upon by Italian communist Antonio Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks, penned while imprisoned during Mussolini’s fascist regime. I recommend Gramsci’s work to anyone trying to understand how power operates in the West (see Inverting the Inversions of the Camera Obscura).
For his part, Marable critiques this divide, arguing that the black intellectual elite struggle to reconcile their privileged positions with the structural inequities still plaguing the majority of black Americans, highlighting tensions between advocacy, assimilation, and genuine radical transformation. Indeed, the “radical” transformation the black Brahmin agitates for isn’t radical at all, but the socialization of a learned helplessness designed to keep blacks in their historic place in late capitalist society: at the bottom of the class structure, performing the role of the permanent underclass (lumpenproletariat).
When you press white progressives and their black collaborators on who is to blame for the condition of black America, they don’t hesitate. It’s not them. They are the champions of the black proletariat. No—the villains are always the same in their rhetoric: white conservatives. The farmer in Iowa, the small businessman in Texas, the electrician in Ohio—they’re somehow responsible for the decay of neighborhoods they’ve never set foot in, over which they have no political control. The white conservative is blamed for dysfunction they neither created nor desire to see perpetuated.
The reality tells a different story. The political class most responsible for the plight of black Americans is the Democratic Party—the very party that claims to be their eternal savior. It was Democrats and their allies in the then-minority party (the Chamber of Commerce Republicans) who championed policies that gutted American industry, shipping jobs overseas in the name of globalism. It was, for the most part, Democrats who opened the borders, flooding low-wage labor markets and ensuring working-class blacks would face impossible competition. It is Democrats who maintain the modern ghetto, with its public housing projects, failing schools, and welfare bureaucracies that incentivize dependency and punish upward mobility. It was progressive social policies that destroyed the black family. Today’s Democrats defend all of it.
Perhaps most insidious of all, it is progressive Democrats and the black Brahmin—those who command the administrative apparatus and party machinery—who disrespect black people so profoundly that they argue blacks shouldn’t be expected to meet the same standards of behavior as everyone else. Commit a crime? Blame “systemic racism.” (As I have asked in previous essays, if systemic racism exists, and one can make the case that it does, who created and perpetuates it?) Poor academic outcomes? Blame the “legacy of oppression.” Acquiesce to generational poverty? Excuse it by blaming everyone but the individual making choices day after day that lead to predictable outcomes—and the social policies that enable such poor decision-making. This isn’t compassion. It’s condescension dressed up in the hollow language of equity and “root causes.”
Progressives prefer such sociological jargon to reality. They mumble and mutter about structural this and historical that, as if rehearsing abstractions is a substitute for acknowledging what every sane adult knows: human beings have agency. Every person, whatever his life chances, however difficult his start, has the ability to choose. To seek work instead of sitting idle. To obey the law instead of breaking it. To form stable families instead of collapsing into chaos. To overthrow the political elite who ghettoized him, instead of accepting their command as his fate.
To be clear, none of this denies that context matters. Circumstances shape motives; subcultures emerge from environments; and environments are themselves shaped by decades of policy decisions—overwhelmingly progressive in design and implementation. And these policy decisions are ultimately shaped by prevailing class power, as Marx noted long ago.
The “root causes,” however, are not the work of white conservatives but of white progressives and their black collaborators in the service of corporate power. Yet even in that context, the individual retains agency. He is responsible for his actions. What the progressive worldview does is make the exercise of that agency far more difficult, by socializing individuals to believe they are not responsible for their behavior and that accountability itself is a form of oppression. Progressive ideology is a form of political paralysis directed at the working class.
This is the great moral chasm between progressivism and conservatism, whatever disagreements one might have with the right. Indeed, this is the chasm between progressivism and liberalism in its true meaning. Conservatism and liberalism, at their core, affirm the dignity of the individual—the belief that every person possesses agency, and with agency, responsibility. That is where human dignity lies: in the recognition that each of us is the author of our own choices, that our lives are shaped by our will, our discipline, our adherence to the norms that sustain civilized society. We are ultimately responsible for our consciousness—and our conscience.
There is nothing more degrading—nothing more poisonous to the human spirit—than to tell a group of people that they are helpless, incapable of rising, mere victims of forces beyond their control. That lie, endlessly repeated by progressives, is the most insidious form of racism. It lies at the heart of what I have called the “New Racism”—just as it lay at the heart of the old racism. In the hands of progressives, the conceit traps the very people it claims to uplift in a state of permanent dependency, robbing them of the dignity that comes only from ownership of their own lives.
C. Wright Mills, in the opening chapter of The Sociological Imagination (1959), argues that understanding the relationship between “personal troubles” and “public issues” is the essence of sociological thinking. He insists that individual experiences are always situated within larger historical, institutional, and social contexts—that our biographies are intertwined with history. But Mills never claimed that social structure erases individual agency. His point was diagnostic, not deterministic. More than diagnostic, actually: to act wisely, a person must recognize the forces shaping his circumstances while bearing responsibility for the choices he makes within those constraints—and to use that knowledge to overcome them. (See Losing Control over the Narrative; The “Lived Experience” and the Paralysis of Liberty.)
A progressive will misread Mills, turning a framework for understanding and action into an excuse for inaction, stripping individuals of responsibility and reducing complex human lives to passive outcomes of impersonal forces. Spreading fatalism is the role of the black Brahmin, who have infused their thought with the progressive sociology that misreads Mills (and Marx), while finding their tactics in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, to keep the black proletariat from a methodology that could, if acted upon, allow them to become conscious of the forces impeding their progress and organize politically around that awareness to change their circumstances.
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