Category: Uncategorized

Kenan Malik, in the foreword to his 2008 book Strange Fruit: Why Both Sides are Wrong in the Race Debate, writes “that, for all the vitriol directed at [James] Watson [the co-discoverer of DNA’s double helix structure punished for suggesting in an interview with the Sunday Times that blacks were cognitively inferior], racial talk today is as likely to come out of the mouths of liberal antiracists as of reactionary racial scientists.” “The affirmation of difference, which once was at the heart of racial science,” he continues, “has become a key plank of the antiracist outlook.” (For a lengthy discussion of Malik’s work see my “Kenan Malik: Assimilation, Multiculturalism, and Immigration.”)

In the battle against racism in the twentieth century, liberals either denied racial differences altogether or at least rejected the doctrine of racial hierarchy. Humans are, they argued, all the same beneath the skin, their outer appearance no indication of patterns of behavioral tendencies, cognitive ability, or cultural and societal potential. It followed that organizing society along racial lines enjoyed no rational justification. More than this, it was wrong and harmful. But in the post-civil rights era there emerged on the left a movement that sought to commandeer the language of racial difference and use it as a cudgel with which to attack the liberal and secular values of Western society. “The paradoxical result,” Malik writes, “has been to transform racial thinking into a liberal dogma. Out of the withered seeds of racial science have flower the politics of identity. Strange fruit, indeed.”  

How did this happen? “Where radicals once championed scientific rationalism and Enlightenment universalism, now they are more likely to decry both as part of a ‘Eurocentric’ project,” a move facilitated by the corruption of philosophy and science by postmodern ideas that had found purchase in the academy. “Over the past three decades,” Malik, writes, “postmodern theory has made the link between the physical subjugation of the Third World through colonialism and the intellectual subordination of non-Western ideas, history and values.” This has led to the development of “cultural racism” As French philosopher Étienne Balibar announces in his essay “Racists and Anti-racists,” “we have passed from biological racism to cultural racism.” (See the last section of my essay “Smearing Amy Wax and the Fallacy of Cultural Racism” for a detailed analysis.)

“All knowledge systems, including those of modern science,” writes philosopher Sandra Harding, one of the most influential postmodern thinkers of our time, “are local ones.” The dominance of Western science across the planet is “not because of the greater purported rationality of Westerns or the purported commitment of their sciences to the pursuit of disinterested truth,” she contends, but “because of the military, economic and political power of European cultures.” (One might ask how the West came by this power.) Harding casts science as “politics by other means.” For thinkers of her ilk, the content of Western civilization—liberalism, rationalism, secularism—is an imposition on the rest of the world; its ideas have not won because they are better but because those who espouse them—white Christian men—are imperialist.

The postmodern epistemology expounded by scholars such as Balibar and Harding have produced regressive effects on developing countries and various communities in developed ones. As historian Meera Nanda observes: “postmodernism in modernizing societies like India serves to kill the promise of modernity even before it has struck roots.” The influence of postmodern ideas “has totally discredited the necessity of, and even the possibility of, questioning the inherited metaphysical systems, which for centuries have shackled human imagination and social freedoms in those parts of the world that has not yet had their modern-day enlightenments.” (Perhaps an irony in all this is that postmodernism, like modernism, is a Western idea.)

Antiracism is pitched as the policy or practice of opposing racism and promoting racial tolerance. That’s the standard dictionary definition, anyway. However, in conception and practice, this is not how antiracism operates. Antiracism is a manifestation of racial thinking and is not only inadequate for combating racism but is one a major form racism takes today—racism defined as a system that essentializes cultural differences in human populations in racial terms. I no longer describe myself as an antiracist because I reject the racial thinking that inheres in the practice. It is wrong to say that every member of race of people possesses something for what should be two obvious reasons: (1) there is no such thing as race and (2) because collective and intergenerational guilt are theological constructs. The contemporary practice of antiracism is therefore irrational. This blog entry explains that position.

* * *

Antiracism finds its origin in the progressive political-ideological strategy of combating racism by replacing the concept of race with the concept of culture in explaining human behavioral and cognitive variation and establishing cultural relativism as a political and scientific worldview.

The first part of this is welcome. The claim that race explains differences in human populations is the essence of racism. The scientific consensus is that race is not a meaningful biological construct. What the evidence shows is that differences in human populations (and this includes the distribution of phenotypic features used to identify racial types) is the product of migration, cultural forces, and social organization. Moreover, cultural relativism is a sound methodological stance for studying cultural differences and similarities. The careful researcher should make efforts to ensure his own cultural standpoint does not interfere with practice rooted in objective epistemology (I reject the postmodern claim that there can be no such thing).

However, cultural relativism makes for awful for moral and political standpoint, as it rationalizes actions and attitudes that are exploitative, false, oppressive, and unhealthy as appropriate to the culture under consideration. This error is, to some extent, the consequence of functionalist thinking in anthropology. But it also expresses postcolonialist desire and anti-West loathing, the character of which is postmodernist (and post-Marxist). In effect, cultural relativism obviates individualism and human rights. All those things that define modernity—democracy and universal suffrage, diversity of opinion, freedom to produce and access knowledge, gender equality, individual liberty, sexual emancipation—are treated as a particular point of view, a perspective that hails from an imperialist civilization. There is nothing in these things enjoying universal appeal, the argument goes.  

The ethic of cultural relativism stands in place of what one might on the face of it consider an authentic antiracist standpoint, namely an anti-ideological practice opposing the tradition of racializing populations, by which is meant the system of beliefs positing that Homo sapiens is meaningfully organized as biological types called “races.” In conception and in practice, what is called “antiracism” is the policy or practice of opposing criticism of non-European cultures and promoting tolerance and even acceptance of nonwestern norms and values. But race and culture are different things, with the former conceived as a constellation of traits obtained via biological heredity, the latter describing an observable system of assumptions, beliefs, norms, and values learned via socialization that inhere in an institution or a society. By confusing the concepts, antiracism confuses its audience. It becomes ideological.

If the premise of racism is accepted, then individuals are born as members of a given race. In this way, race is caste; one is eternally tagged by what Erving Goffman called “tribal stigma.” For racists, the reality of race explains cultural variation. For many of those who reject racism, even if they recognize race as a social construct (which clearly it is), they understand that no person is born with culture or a religion. Culture is acquired after one is born. An American whose great-grandparents immigrated from Japan and whose ancestors only married others of Japanese ancestry, would carry around with him American culture. He would not, unless he were a Nipponophile (and even then, whether his sensibilities could be said to reflect the emic is doubtful), carry around Japanese culture. Japanese culture is not encoded on one’s genes. At the very least, if humans are born with some innate cultural sensibilities, as the evolutionary psychologist might suppose, those sensibilities are not racially differentiated. There’s no evidence for this.  

Race and culture are plainly different because, granting for the sake of argument an objective reality of biological race, or at least admitting to the common-sense recognition of racial types, a culture may be—and cultures often are—multiracial in character. However, things tend to end badly for those civilization without a unifying culture. Historian Victor Davis Hanson writes, “Ancient Greece’s numerous enemies eventually overran the 1,500 city-states because the Greeks were never able to sublimate their parochial, tribal, and ethnic differences to unify under a common Hellenism.” He cites numerous other examples. His point is not that multiracialism presents a problem for stable and prosperous societies, but rather that multiculturalism does. At the heart of multiculturalism lurks a repudiation of the necessity of a common culture for unifying a people around a common social purpose. In contrast to ancient Greece, Rome “managed to weld together millions of quite different Mediterranean, European, and African tribes and peoples through the shared ideas of Roman citizenship (civis Romanus sum) and equality under the law. That reality endured for some 500 years.”

Of course, what has always been true is that culture is produced everywhere by individuals of the same species. A society can only be described as multiracial when races are presupposed. One would think that the idea that cultural differences are racial differences, that races are entitled to separate cultural systems because of phenotypic affinity, is what antiracism was devised to counter. Instead, assuming notions advanced by Horace Kallen in the early twentieth century, antiracism promotes the Balkanization of society—that is a society splintered into hostile and uncooperative groups along lines of ethnicity and religion, to use a common definition—and recast the notion that an overarching nationalist consciousness as racist.

Étienne Balibar is a useful example of a proponent of the view that nationalist consciousness is racist. Why is it racist? Because, he argues, it is exclusionary. He denies that one can speak of an absolute universalism; universalism is always inscribed in a civilization, of which there are plainly several. He claims that “modern racism is [the] dark face of the republican nation, and one which incessantly returns, thanks to the conflicts over globalization.” He cites France and the principle of laïcité, or state secularism, noting that, in France, a “nation increasingly uncertain as to what its values and its objectives are, laïcité less and less appears as a guarantee of freedom and equality between citizens, and has instead set to work as an exclusionary discourse.”

But this misses the point of the work of civic nationalism. It is not exclusionary of individuals but of norms and values that undermine modernity, that deny the universalism of human rights. “A diverse America requires constant reminders of e pluribus unum and the need for assimilation and integration,” writes Hanson. “The idea of Americanism is an undeniably brutal bargain in which we all give up primary allegiance to our tribes in order to become fellow Americans redefined by shared ideas rather than mere appearance.”

This is what antiracism rejects, namely the emancipation of the individuals from the imposition of racial, ethnic, and religious identities. Instead, the antiracist, in defining the Muslim as a race, expects she will wear the hijab as a skin color in order to mark racial difference (see Muslims are Not a Race). It only seems confusing to read Balibar defining universalism in its basic form as “a value that designates the possibility of being equal without necessarily being the same, and thus of being citizens without having to be culturally identical” until one understands that race and culture are conflated in his thinking. At the same time, he claims the following: “The universal does not bring people together, it divides them. Violence is a constant possibility.” Not only Balibar want to find universalism in multiculturalism, he blames violence on opposition to such a formulation. (Read Verso’s full interview with Balibar here.)

Modern-day accusations of racism leveled by antiracists therefore include in their scope not only those persons who believe they are biologically or genetically superior to others or they are some way essentially or intrinsically racially better than members of other races (one cannot rule out idealist claims of racial difference), but also cover those who believe that certain ways of life are superior or better than other ways of life. This is why Balibar wonders, “How could [Immanuel] Kant be both the theorist of unconditional respect for the human person, and the theorist of cultural inequality among races?” “This,” he claims, “is where the deepest contradiction—the enigma, even—lies.” When one criticizes Islam, and therefore Muslims, since Muslims are those culture-bearers bringing Islam, one risks being accused of racism. But what does religion have to do with race? How does it contradict unconditional respect for the human person to note cultural inequality? What is race stuck in there? I am not here defending Kant, but noting the problem of the point on its face. Balibar assumes at every step of his case that race and culture are intrinsically linked.

In his Racism Without Racists: Color-blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America, first published in 2003, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva identifies what he refers to as “central frames of color-blind racism.” Two of these frames bear directly on the present discussion.

The first is the frame of “abstract liberalism,” involving ideas associated with political and economic liberalism, that is the values of equal treatment under the law and personal or individual liberty. Bonilla-Silva cites as an example of the “new racism” the objection to preferential treatment as a violation of the principle of opportunity. He argues that opposition to preferential treatment ignores the fact that people of color are severely underrepresented in good jobs, schools, and universities. Rather than explain the causes of minority underrepresentation, which may or may not have something to do with racism, Bonilla-Silva assumes racial inequality is the consequence of racism, and, to remedy this situation, people of color should be given preference in admission and hiring, and those who object to positive discrimination are racists even if they no make racists arguments. I expect that the reader will see that Bonilla-Silva has made no argument here. He has merely told us that he wants to call people who are critical of preferential treatment “racists” because he supports preferential treatment. He tells us why at the end of the interview below.

The second frame is “cultural racism,” which “relies on culturally based arguments such as ‘Mexicans do not put much emphasis on education’ or ‘blacks have too many babies’ to explain the standing of minorities in society.” One might therefore think that these stereotypes are not examples of racism. Bonilla-Silva concedes that only white supremacists root such prejudices in biology. However, according to Bonilla-Silva, “biological views have been replaced by cultural ones.” To illustrate, he quotes a male subject named George interviewed in Katherine Newman’s Declining Fortunes (1994). George says that he believes in morality, ethics, hard work—“all the old values.” What George doesn’t believe in are handouts. He criticizes the welfare system for creating dependency on the government. Newman observes that “George does not see himself as racist. Publicly he would subscribe to the principle everyone in society deserves a fair shake,” an observation which Bonilla-Silva uses to punctuate the title of his book: “Color-blind racism is racism without racists!” But, since culture is not race, why would criticizing welfare be racist? Neither Newman nor Bonilla-Silva present evidence that George is racist. Rather they are making criticism of welfare an act of racism. But most welfare recipients are white.

Bonilla-Silva says in the interview I shared above that, as a social scientist, his role is not to “provide the path to the promised land.” At the same time, as a person of color, he “has a stake in improving our position.” Yet there are people of color, for example Glenn Loury of the Watson Institute at Brown University, who cites research that shows that black and Hispanic youth who aspire to scholastic excellence are accused by their peers of “acting white” and that this social pressure reinforces a culture of underachievement, reproducing the conditions with which blacks are more likely to be associated. Anthropologists Signithia Fordham and John Ogbu identified this phenomenon in the Urban Journal in 1986. They documented an “oppositional culture” in which black youth dismissed academically oriented behavior as “white.” In the late 1990s, Harvard economist, Ron Ferguson, found a similar anti-intellectual culture in another setting. Columbia’s John McWhorter contrasts African American youth culture with that of immigrants (including blacks from the Caribbean and Africa), and notes that the latter “haven’t sabotaged themselves through victimology.” These are all persons of color. From Bonilla-Silva’s standpoint, what do they have a stake in?

Harvard’s Ronald Fryer, in his 2006 article “Acting White,” while finding fault with the previous explanations nevertheless concludes that “the prevalence of acting white in schools with racially mixed student bodies suggests that social pressures could go a long way toward explaining the large racial and ethnic gaps in SAT scores, the underperformance of minorities in suburban schools, and the lack of adequate representation of blacks and Hispanics in elite colleges and universities.” He argues that there is a need for new identities in communities of color. “As long as distressed communities provide minorities with their identities, the social costs of breaking free will remain high” he writes. “To increase the likelihood that more can do so, society must find ways for these high achievers to thrive in settings where adverse social pressures are less intense. The integrated school, by itself, apparently cannot achieve that end.”

These claims are racist in Bonilla-Silva’s formula (or are they only racist when white scholars make them?). The problem is not merely that Bonilla-Silva is wrong. His arguments perpetuates the situation of inequality. If policymakers don’t recognize the problem and address it properly for fear of being smeared as racist, then society fates a proportion of minority youth to habits that, at least in part, perpetuate racial inequality in America—which Bonilla-Silva is right to complain about. Wouldn’t failure to honestly confront a problem in communities of color be a better example of racism than the one Bonilla-Silva puts forward?

There is no objective truth to claims that race has a biological reality. These claims result from ideology. Ideologies are cultural products. All ideologies, indeed all cultural products, are subject to vigorous interrogation—if humanist principle is observed. In a society where cultural criticism is permitted, thinkers will criticize those aspects of Western culture that produced and reproduce modes of racial thinking, as well as modes of sexist and heterosexist thinking. Or they will interrogate subcultures that systematically disadvantage minorities, independent of what the majority thinks or does. Thinkers should also be able to criticize those aspects of Islamic culture that, for instance, produce and continue to reproduce patriarchal attitudes. And so on. (See Racisms: Terminological Inflation for Ideological Ends.)

If one is convinced that the criticism of nonwestern culture or minority subcultures is racist, then those feminists who endeavor to root out patriarchal attitudes wherever they’re detected risk being labeled as racist and marginalized. This marginalization comes at cost for women and girls who live under the structure of patriarchy in the Islam world, a structure that denies them equal rights, personal freedom, and other rights and liberties associated with modernity. The same is true for black youth when criticisms of “acting white” are suppressed by accusations of racism. These are not exercises in exclusion, but the work of emancipation.

Since culture cannot be a result of race (rather racism is the result of culture), it makes no sense to describe cultural criticism as racist when there is not racism moving it. To be sure, there are people who criticize culture with the assumption that racial difference explains it. But, as we have established, those people are racists. That is what the term racism meant to capture. Absent that it is just cultural criticism. Bonilla-Silva’s argument is vacuous even if consequential.

If by “white” we mean something other than race, then criticizing white culture—or celebrating white culture, for that matter—would not be racist. But why would anyone describe the culture of the West as “white” if there is no such thing as a white race? Racism is the belief that the human population is meaningfully organized into racial groups and, moreover, that these groupings explain behavioral tendencies, cognitive ability, cultural accomplishment, and moral aptitude. If criticism of culture does not contain this belief it is by definition something other than racism. The idea of “white” and “black” cultures, if it is to mean anything racial, assumes as reality what science has proven false.

* * *

Antiracism in practice tacitly accepts a core premise of racism: it associates culture with a race and places these in an explanatory framework. It claims that western culture is the culture of white people and that, for this reason, there is something wrong with it.

Antiracists could say that racism as an element in a culture is a bad practice and should be eliminated without condemning the culture in which it is found. Racism is, after all, an aberration in a culture committed to the value of individualism. The more Westerners realize the ideals of the Enlightenment, the more peripheral the irrationalisms of race (and religion) become. One could declare an entire culture is racist or in some way harmful to people. But the antiracist wishes to say a great deal more than this. He wishes to say that all white people are racist because they are white and that the culture they produce is inherently racist for this reason. (What would be the solution to this problem if true?) Rightwing racism has a version of this logic: all white people belong to a tribe (whether they know it or not) and white culture is the product of the white race and it’s good for this reason.

This is the consequence of essentializing culture and religion in identitarian movements left and right: both standpoints root in racial thinking. The difference one would as least hope for is that, for the left, racial thinking would be seen as a bad thing. It used to be. But for today’s left, race identitarianism enthusiastically commits the crime it condemns: it hypostatizes race and places it at the center of its politics.

Consider the rhetoric of race privilege. When antiracists accuse people of possessing “white privilege,” the standard formula holding that “all white people” are privileged in some way that disadvantages members of nonwhite races, they are essentializing race. The assumption is that there is such a thing as the white race, and that intrinsic to it is race privilege. We know race privilege is intrinsic to the white race because every white person possesses it. It comes with their skin color. It is a feature of having been born white. If I, as a white person, deny being privileged in this way, then I am guilty of denying something I possess by virtue of my race. I am doubling down on my racism. I cannot get better if I do not admit that I am sick.

It’s all very circular and very racist. I am criticized and often condemned for my skin color. For many, hatred towards me on the grounds of my whiteness is at least understandable. But it’s not. It irrational. It’s exactly like supposing a black man is inferior to those who are not black because he is black. We have no evidence for this claim beyond racial identity. Privilege is assumed to be an actual and universal thing without requiring any evidence presented beyond the mere fact that I am “white,” which proves I am privileged. It’s as if there is still a rule in effect that directs blacks through a side door and up the stairs to the balcony of the movie theater so that whites do not have to mingle with them. But the United States abolished privileges on the basis of race in the 1960s. We’re taught to overlook the significance of the fact that, today, it is illegal—or should be illegal, anyway—to discriminate against persons on the basis of their perceived race.

But this last part is not exactly correct. Race is still considered in admissions to educational institutions, as well as in hiring in the public sector and at many business firms. You may not find many people who still believe in the old racism, but you will find plenty of persons who believe in this new idea of racism that makes it appropriate to decide matters based on racial classifications that work in a “progressive” direction. Members of the “white race” are, like members of the “black race,” human beings, each proven members of the same species. Yet race must necessarily be imagined as real in order to make the claim that one is privileged (or otherwise) by virtue of it.

The natural scientist tells us that race is not a thing (unless he is a racist). The social scientist says, “Not so fast.” Today, he accepts demands for racially segregated spaces, programs, and benefits, as if the United States did not more than half a century ago declare that the doctrine “separate but equal” is anything but equal. Progressives talk about the need of some people—white people—to pay reparations for a crime they did not commit (see my essay “For the Good of Your Soul”). These demands require coding people on the basis of selected and superficial phenotypic characteristics in order to discriminate against them on that basis. One may decry, “Isn’t this racism?” But one will be told that it is in fact racist to say, depending on the race in question, that recognition of racial types and differential treatment on the basis of race is racism. That’s the straitjacket into which Bonilla-Silva wishes to put critics of discrimination.

The antiracist sends conflicting messages. He promotes racial consciousness, and then insist that only some races have a right to organize their politics around it. He tells people they suffer from implicit race bias because they recognize race, but then criticizes them if they behave as if they don’t see race. He tells people to treat people as individuals but then accuses them of racism if they say they don’t see race. The critical race theorist, such as Bonilla-Silva, calls this “colorblind racism.” The antiracist claims that racism is an invisible structure that works its evil subtly and only by recognizing race and making decisions on that basis, with a certain selective logic, can we counter its effects.

In an act of extraordinary reification, the antiracist treats individuals as concrete representations of abstract groups, which are defined into empirical existence with statistical measures, aggregated data selectively touted when beneficial while rejected when not according to whom it benefits. Data showing that whites-as-a-group are better off than blacks-as-a-group is proof of the justification for positive discrimination. Data showing blacks-as-a-group commit more violent crime than whites-as-a-group cannot be accepted as grounds for policy formation because only individuals should be judged for their actions. (See Demographics and People.) Are we supposed to treat people as individuals or as racial types? It depends on abstract notions of power and direction in the cosmology of intergenerational guilt. And, of course, racial typing is also desired when organizations need to act as if persons with particular constellations of phenotypic features can stand in for abstract racial or ethnic group and thus should be admitted, displayed, or hired for this reason.

Antiracism does the work of racism. It determines worth based on race and other abstractions. It is rightwing racism’s leftwing mirror image, which is why we’re taught at a young age that there is no such thing as “reverse racism.” Which is in a way true. There is only racism.

This is how religion works. You are not supposed to examine its assumptions or true aims. Faith is a reflex. Angels, demons, heaven, hell, sin, salvation—these things are assumed as given. Naturally you will want to organize society around them if they are real. When you actually examine them, religion falls apart. They are not real things, but myths designed to control you. It is an absurd exercise to debate the reality of different sorts of demons when there is no such thing as one. Yet this is what happens. A rational person asks himself, why am I believing in unreal things? But people believe that race is real, so you have to operate on that basis, we are told. You may not see it, but others do. Should I suffer anything on account that people still believe in sin? How is that a remotely reasonable demand? One hundred years ago people believed that race was real. Some people believed it was a repugnant way to organize society, but they grew up in a culture that told them it was real. But then they examined the construct and found that it is not an actual thing. It only persists because people insist on keeping it alive. Why should that be my problem?

The ideas that we accept fictions or organize our lives around untruths because some people still believe them makes no rational sense. Why are those of us who have moved on pulled into such orbits? I’m an atheist. It’s not my religion. I’m not a congregant in the church of racial identity. Why should I be taxed for this or expected to seek salvation from the sin its moral entrepreneurs say I possess by virtue of my existence? There should be in a free society no gravitational force in such abstractions.

This much the postmodernist gets right: it is because of power that individuals are compelled to submit to the tyranny of fictions. Even though we now know race is not real, those who control our institutions, who organize our society—who make our law and form our politics—force us to submit to the fiction of race. We could move on from it. But those who demand we keep the damn thing going put their power where their desire is. We are compelled to participate in a delusion because there are real punishments for refusing to do so. It’s like challenging a witchfynder during an Inquisition. That makes you a witch.  

My father is not an American Christian because of his race. He is an American Christian because he was born in a particular country in a particular culture. That is what makes him white, too. Had he been born somewhere else or in a different we would be describing him differently. He would be committed to different things. But whatever time and place he may exist in, he will always be Homo sapiens. That is the enduring truth. That is what makes humanism universal. Racism is wrong because it considers individuals on the basis of an abstract condition they were born into; it treats a cultural category as a natural one. There are no good or bad races apart from racist ideology. But cultures and religions are objectively not good for people. Some cultures and religions cut off body parts, subordinate women and girls, and persecute homosexuals.

If you are a postmodern type and chalk up these sorts of things to cultural and moral relativism, then this talk of human freedom and rights is lost on you. But if you recognize that each person is a member of a single species that comes with needs like every other animal species, then cultures are on the basis of their functioning and results either in whole or in part praiseworthy or blameworthy. But if culture is essentialized, treated as if it were race or gender, then the observer who reports what he sees can appear bigoted. But on what grounds is it rational to assume that all cultures are equal?

* * *

I have written numerous entries on this subject from various starting points. In this entry, I lay out the main argument for why criticism of culture and religion absent an appeal to biology (explicitly or implicitly) is not racism, exposing the agendas of “cultural racism” and “new racism” as resting on a false premise. These agendas, projects of leftwing identitarianism, interfere with the necessary liberal and secular practice of cultural and irreligious critique, as well as function to undermine the defense of human rights and western civilization.

Applied to categories of living things, the term “race” first appears in the late sixteenth century referring to breeding stocks of animals and plants. Human selection of desired traits created races of dogs (and other animals). People cultivated races of corn, some sweet, others bitter. By the seventeenth century the term had become a basic concept in the developing science of evolutionary biology. During this time it came to be applied also to people. Why not? They’re animals, after all. In time, talk of races of dogs and of corn died out. Today we hear instead about breed and varieties. But language referring the races of people carries on.

The terms “racism” and “racialism” appear in the first decade of the twentieth century to refer to the ideology that applies the concept of race to people. Thus, to be a “racist” or a “racialist” is to believe that the human species can be meaningful organized into races—sometimes three, sometimes five, sometimes even more—and that race explains variation in the behavioral proclivity, cognitive ability, cultural production, and moral aptitude of different groups of people grouped by selected phenotypic characteristics (skin color, hair texture, and so on). The core idea is that people of a given race think and behave in expected ways because they are evolved (or God made them) to think and behave in those ways.

The doctrine of the hierarchy of races lost its position in mainstream science following the revelation of Nazi atrocities at the end of WWII. However, my 1969 The World Book Encyclopedia still included a section on “The Three Great Stocks of Man” (see above). The entry maintains that modern science “does not support the claim that some races are biologically superior or inferior to others” and, moreover, “civilizations of any race may be advanced or retarded, and the people within them may have greater or smaller opportunities for contact and personal development [but that] there is no scientific evidence to prove this has anything to do with inborn abilities or aptitudes.” Nonetheless, the biology of race stands out in the entry, the rejection of the doctrine of “separate but equal” notwithstanding.

The practice of presupposing race as a biological entity faded over the next several decades. Physical anthropology mortally wounded racism in the 1960s. Modern genetics research nearly finished it off in the 1990s. It is now a marginal belief. (See “Race, Ethnicity, Religion, and the Problem of Conceptual Conflation and Inflation.”) Racism’s destruction was not a disinterested affair, the concept having long been a repugnant notion for many, transparently an ideological attempt to make something grand or disreputable out of ancestry. Unfortunately, racism has not completely died out. Charles Murray, Sam Harris, and Jordan Peterson are examples of notable contemporary racists. But such people are thankfully rare.

However, interest in racism on the left is anything but rare. Because racism is such a heinous doctrine, affixing that label to an institution, an opinion, or a person can effectively delegitimize that institution, opinion, or person. Noting this usefulness, the left has repurposed the term to smear those with whom they disagree as “racist” even when the target of abuse is not. How is this possible? Because racism, we are told, now extends to culture, not the racist notion that culture is a projection of genetics (that is already part of racism), but to Enlightenment criticism of nonwestern culture and minority subculture. (See “Smearing Amy Wax and the Fallacy of Cultural Racism.”) Students are taught this in elementary school as soon as they’ve reached the age where they can be effectively programmed with rudimentary abstractions. And, since religion is part of culture, why not take the next step and claim that irreligious criticism is racist? And so the charge of racism is now leveled at the critics of Islam, even though Muslims are not a race (see “Muslims are Not a Race. So why are Academics and Journalists Treating Them as if They Were?”). The left calls this practice “antiracism.”

So absurd is the application of racism to cultural and irreligious criticism that does not appeal to biology that it is reasonable to suppose there must be an agenda in back of the practice. Suppressing the work of liberal and secular activists is more than a side effect of misguided thinking (although the thinking here is certainly misguided). The progressive left and the culture industry is consciously taking a term indicating an heinous ideology—that there are biological distinct races and that this fact explains culturally variable attitudes, behaviors, and culture—and enlarging it to encompass cultural and irreligious criticism in order to undermine defense of western culture. The new definition even includes criticism of the new definition; denying that criticizing culture and religion is racist is an element in the “new racism.”

An authoritarian feature of leftwing identitarianism is the desire to subject the Enlightenment demand to pursue a ruthless criticism of ideology to restrictions enforced by severe social sanction, including disciplinary action, mob action, and reputational damage. Attacking the humanist in this way is designed to produce a chilling effect that suppresses rational critique in the greater society. Any attempt by the antiracist to appeal to the same humanist tradition to justify his work is rationalization because he is not pursuing ruthless criticism for sake of freedom and reason but endeavoring to stifle criticism by delegitimizing the critic. The expansion of the term “racism” to cover things not germane to it is plainly ideological work, the point of which is to confuse meaning in order to deceive audiences. Exposing this tactic does not intend to deceive but to enlighten.

A crude but useful example of this is Ben Affleck’s meltdown on the Bill Maher show in the presence of Sam Harris (who is a racist but not for the argument he is making here) illustrates the problem quite well. Although Affleck is not a scholar or even an intellectual, his objection to rational criticism of Islam is no less sophisticated than what passes for scholarly discourse in today’s universities.

We don’t have a name for people who criticize culture because there is nothing wrong with criticizing culture. Knowing that, and not wanting to lose a good smear, the antiracist expands the term racism to include culture. But selectively. You can criticize western culture without being called a racist because the antiracist defines racism in such a way that it does not include western culture. The antiracist throws in religion, as well. Except, of course, Christianity. It is not racist to criticize Christianity because that is the prevailing religion in western culture. But it is racist is to criticize Islam.

Defining racism in this arbitrary way allows the antiracist to smear a person as racist without appearing as if he has betrayed the humanist and liberal value of openness he claims to possess. Ben Affleck gives us the perfect illustration of this mindset. “Of course, we do,” he say when Sam Harris says, “Ben, we have to be able to criticize bad ideas.” “No liberal doesn’t want to criticize bad ideas,” Affleck agrees. But he says this while characterizing criticism of Islam as “gross and racist.” Thus the ideology of antiracism produces what George Orwell calls in Nineteen Eighty-Four “doublethink,” the ability to accept contradictory beliefs simultaneously, which Orwell sees as a result of political indoctrination. Believing criticism of Islam is racist selectively negates the belief that bad ideas need criticizing.

There is little doubt that Affleck hears racism in Harris’ words. That he is operating on an emotional level is betrayed by his flushing. He is angered by criticisms of Islam. But to characterize Harris’ argument as racist is self-evidently fallacious since Muslims are not a race. Muslims are devotees to a political-religion ideology. Describing Muslims as a race is analogous to describing Christians or Nazis as a race. But irrational thinking is not concerning to the Antiracists who is working from the following principle: “I will define racism in a way that will make your nonracist arguments racist.” Even denying that he is right to do this becomes evidence of your racism. More than this, the antiracist defines racism in a way that makes his racist argument nonracist. Any open letter that begins with “Dear black people,” written by a white person with critical content to follow, will be deemed racist. But an open letter that begins with “Dear white people” will not be racist because white people cannot be the targets of racism. White people are, by definition, racist. That they take issue with that fact proves it.

Under cover of the interview format, Isaac Chotiner’s The New Yorker piece, “A Penn Law Professor Wants to Make America White Again,” attempts to assassinate the reputation of Penn law professor Amy Wax by portraying her as a white nationalist. (His is not the only media attempt to wreck Wax’s career using the smear of racism. Google it.) Wax easily handles him, but I fear confusion and willful ignorance over what racism is and what it is not will make it difficult for an interested public to grasp her points.

The subject of the Chotiner’s piece is Wax’s recent National Conservatism Conference talk in which she discussed the idea of “cultural-distance nationalism,” which is, in Wax’s words, the belief that “we are better off if our country is dominated numerically, demographically, politically, at least in fact if not formally, by people from the first world, from the West, than by people from countries that had failed to advance.” She is unapologetically making an argument in favor of preserving western culture, which she believes is at least preferable to other cultures.

In her talk, she laments that the ubiquity of leftwing political correctness probably means that conservatives will not advocate restricting immigration from non-Western countries because whites are still the majority in the West and, therefore, advocacy of immigration restrictions will appear to favor white people, which would lead to accusations of racism. Wax’s disclaimer is uncharitably omitted in most media accounts. The dean of Penn Law School, Theodore Ruger, is likewise uncharitable, declaring Wax’s views “repugnant to the core values and institutional practices” of the institution.

Shorn of its disclaimer, Wax’s words do look bad. “Let us be candid,” she said in her talk, “Europe and the first world, to which the United States belongs, remain mostly white, for now; and the third world, although mixed, contains a lot of non-white people. Embracing cultural distance, cultural-distance nationalism, means, in effect, taking the position that our country will be better off with more whites and fewer non-whites.” Those in attendance report that the audience did not hear her words in the way it is portrayed in the media. Why should that matter? Wretched from its context, the quote is useful for smearing as racist not just Wax, but all those who oppose mass immigration from nonwestern countries. 

There is nothing subtle about Chotiner’s approach. In the introduction to the interview, he describes Wax as “the academic who perhaps best represents the ideology of the Trump Administration’s immigration restrictionists.” Since Trump is widely assumed to be a racist for his immigration policy, Wax becomes the essence of Trump’s racist regime. Chotiner writes that Wax “promotes” the idea of cultural-distance nationalism. “Promotes.”

When given a chance to respond, Wax clarifies: “I think there is something to be said for it, and I think that we should at least be talking about it. And, if you read the rest of my talk, from start to finish, and you read it carefully, then you will see me saying that. I am saying this is a neglected dimension that gets no attention, no discussion.” Noting she was speaking with fellow conservatives, she makes the disclaimer explicit: “I was saying, ‘Well, if you do discuss it or you even advocate for it, people are going to say, “Oh, you are saying we are better off with more whites than non-whites.” That is the equivalent of the position you are taking, and that is going to spook conservatives.’” She suggests she should have been more careful since “the media and people on the left are going to interpret your neutral criterion as a racial one, or at least they will be upset that it has racial effects, and you will be tarred with that.” This is indeed the attitude of the culture industry and the progressive establishment. The smear of racism is applied liberally in order to reduce the immigration debate to a popular reflex for open borders. (I have written extensively on this subject here on Freedom and Reason. Browse the table of contents.)

The rest of The New Yorker Q&A returns again and again to racism, with Chotiner’s agenda explicit: he wants Wax to admit her argument is racist, or at least that it properly viewed as such, and to extract from her some form of apology which, if you are at all familiar with Amy Wax, is highly unlikely.

On the smear, Wax ties Chotiner into knots and provides substance for the dialogue. Here’s an example: “You have to understand that I come to this whole question of immigration with an unanswered question in my mind, something I got interested in years ago, and I have tried to get people to answer it: Why are successful, peaceful, orderly, prosperous, technologically advanced, democratically sound countries so rare and so few, and why do they clump up in one tiny corner of the globe, namely Europe, the Anglosphere?” She notes Japan and Taiwan as exceptions outside of the West and continues: —And why is the rest of the world essentially consisting of, in various degrees, failed states? Why do we have a post-Enlightenment portion of the world and a pre-Enlightenment portion of the world?” Never reluctant to state what she knows the audience is thinking, Wax puts the matter bluntly: “I guess, to be really crude about it, you would use Trump’s succinct phrase: Why are there so many shithole countries? Of course, the moment you say that, people just get outraged: Oh, my God, you are a racist for saying that. And that, of course, lets them off the hook; they don’t have to answer the question, which is convenient.”

She laments the reluctance to explore the question. “I have asked many sophisticated, knowledgeable people that question, and I have never gotten anything close to a plausible answer, because of course any answer has to be subject to the strictures of political correctness. I have had a couple of really smart people, people on the left, say, to me, Hey, you have a point: we don’t have an answer, and we are not allowed to think about it rigorously and realistically because there is a code of things you do say and things you don’t say.”

As a member of the academy, I can tell you from my own experience Wax hits the nail on the head here. We are taught in the social sciences to practice cultural relativism and avoid ethnocentrism—judging other cultures by western standards. Cultures are not bad or good, better or worse, superior or inferior, just different. Morality, since it is the product of a cultural worldview, is also relative. In the functionalist tradition, which lies at the core of anthropology and much of sociology, cultural traditions are theorized to have evolved to suit the “needs” of the people.

There is a double standard here. While social science students are encouraged to consider power in western culture, for example, in the patriarchal diminishment of women, they are discouraged from considering the problem of power in nonwestern cultures. That would be ethnocentric. Indeed, given the ethic of diversity, the nonwestern patriarchal diminishment of women is perversely celebrated in academic circles. For example, the hijab is touted as a progressive expression of cultural and political identity, a form of resistance to the assimilationist pressures of the Islamophobic West. Events are held on university campuses showing American college students how to wear the hijab.

Seeking racism, Chotiner asks Wax if she thinks culture is something innate or the result of history and experience. Chotiner wants self-reported confirmation for what he and his media colleagues have asserted. Wax responds, “I think the word ‘innate’ is terribly mischievous.” When asked why, she notes that “‘innate’ is a term that looks to heritable, or genetic factors.” She adds that she “not saying anything about biology.” She stresses that her question “is not a race-realist question or point of view.” Instead, she is asking: “What is it about cultures that hold people back?”

I have made the point that explaining cultural differences by reference to race is an element of racism. It has always struck me as a curious thing that left identitarians reflexively pair culture and race in their charge of “cultural appropriation,” such as a white man wearing dreadlocks, or a white woman wearing a kimono. From this standpoint, only blacks can wear dreadlocks and only Asian women can wear kimonos. That Chotiner wants Wax to admit to an innate or biological cause telegraphs the assumption that this is what racism is really about. Chotiner is not up to rehearsing the logic of cultural racism, which is the assumption lying behind this controversy. Perhaps he knows there will be no consensus here.

Chotiner tries to find a contrast by noting leftwing explanations about culture as a function of experience and history with colonialism. She argues that colonialism is a nonstarter, since it came late on the scene. This is a powerful and provocative observation. By the period of colonization, the West had already developed the foundational norms and values that made it a powerful cultural and historical agent. Indeed, to use Wax’s words, colonialism took “advantage of these discrepancies in sophistication and modernity, in advancement in technology, in science.” This is Max Weber’s observation. It was the unique character of the West that produced and caused capitalism to spread across the planet. And to suppose that what we call the Third World would look like the West without colonization is an odd suggestion. Wax hears this and wonders rhetorically, “if it weren’t for colonialism, Malaysia would be Denmark?” If anything, in light of the corruption of indigenous cultures around the world wrought by western colonialism, history should be a warning to those eager to open their countries to foreign cultural elements.

Wax also dismissed the role of geography in societal development, giving examples of nations with disadvantageous geography that have achieved high level of development because of their western cultural orientation. (Crediting western cultural orientation to one side, a leftwing social geographer once made the same point to me about the false assumption of geographical advantage in explaining more advanced societies.) It’s cultural. To be sure, it is other things. But it’s cultural. But, again, as with power, there is a double standard about who can appeal to cultural factors in their explanations. 

At one point, Chotiner attempts to hang Enoch Powell like an albatross around Wax’s neck. But if one takes the time to look at Powell’s position, despite his rather incautious use of the word “white” (one can make the same criticism of Douglas Murray and other cultural conservatives who use white as a description of the Anglosphere), whether he is racist or, to use the term questioners usually used in putting this question to him, “racialist,” depends on, to use Powell’s own words, whether one defines racialist as “being conscious of the differences between men and nations, and from that, races” or “a man who despises a human being because he belongs to another race, or a man who believes that one race is inherently superior to another.” If the term meant the latter, then Powell’s answer was always “emphatically no.”

When discussing these matters with colleagues and students, I note people are culture bearers. This is rarely remarked upon in the social sciences. By culture bearer I mean that an individual brings with him his socialization and his worldview. My children speak my language, share many of the same values, and perpetuate in action norms learned in childhood. Their mother is Swedish. Had my children grown up in Sweden, they would speak Swedish, know the national traditions, reflect the national attitude. But they grew up here in America. They bring their American culture with them when they travel to Sweden. Wax asks, “How do little Swiss people become big Swiss people? Because we do associate a certain profile, a certain type, a certain set of priorities and orientations and behaviors and beliefs to Swiss people. Swiss people are radically different from, let’s say, Somali people or Indonesian people.” Despite it not being discussed in the immigration debate, this is a basic anthropological and sociological point of immense importance. Only some cultural differences are trivial.

Wax asks, “I’m Jewish. Why are Jews so Jewy? How did that happen? Why do French women, at least until recently, look so French? I mean, what is going on? I have a friend who’s Dutch, a Dutch artist, and he’s very well off, and, every morning, he gets up and cleans the front window of his house. It sparkles. I said, ‘Why are you doing that?’ He said, ‘Because I’m Dutch.’ So people do differ, there are these differences, and we just take them for granted. We don’t really interrogate them and examine them, we don’t look closely at their origins, once again, because a lot of it isn’t big-think stuff; it’s the little stuff that goes on in the family or civil society. How is the persona of each nationality preserved? That’s the question that has fascinated me for a very long time.”

Swedes have a particular persona. When I visit Sweden, I am always struck by how different the Swedish persona is from the persona I acquired growing up in the American South (my persona is different from the persona of the Midwest where I now live and work). Swedes are likewise struck by the difference. The last time I was in Sweden (summer 2018), the recent and very large influx of immigrants from Muslim-majority countries made for a stark cultural contrast. Sweden is having a lot of problems because of this situation (homelessness, vagrancy, crime, violence). Cultural personas matter.

Why is it controversial to admit to the difficulty large influxes of immigrants from very different cultures present to a particular way of life? Assimilation (which is not racist) is a slow process. If immigration occurs in large numbers and too quickly, then cultures clash, ethnic enclaves emerge, split labor markets form, and these forces make assimilation almost impossible. That’s not good. Over time, the culture of the host country shifts, in part through accommodation, and the native born see their traditional way of life diminished. And if that way of life was better for individuals, better for securing liberty and for achieving self-actualization, then a great tragedy occurred, both for the native born and for the newcomers who could have otherwise benefitted from emancipation from the personally-limiting norms and values of the culture they brought with them. If immigration is needed because there are jobs for which the native population do not possess skills (and if this is a systemic problem then it indicates that the educational system needs investment and reform), then it is prudent for a government that represents its citizens to consider the culture immigrants bring with them. It is not racist to ask, “How compatible are their norms and values with our society?” Citizens are not xenophobic to worry about this.

Not only are such concerns not racist or xenophobic, but the suggestion that they are deserves to be met with suspicion. The smear indicates an agenda. The accusation is meant to shame into silence those who would ask voice such concerns. It is this agenda that is putting Amy Wax through the ringer. Wax’s situation is representative of a greater problem. Wax is a cultural conservative. Is cultural conservatism therefore racist? Many leftwing identitarians would say “Yes.” This is why so many Americans are alienated by today’s left; the progressive worldview is a Manichean one, a black and white world organized by racism and antiracism. You are either on board with mass immigration or your are a nativist, racist, or xenophobe. (The agenda helps explain mission creep over at the Southern Poverty Law Center.)

Wax is an intellectual. She knows where Chotiner is getting his agenda. She flips the conversation and puts Chotiner on the spot. “Whether or not something is ‘racist’—I put it in heavy quotes, because I think it is a protean term, it is a promiscuous term, it is a term that’s trotted out as a mindless bludgeon, whatever. The question is, is it true? And, in fact, it’s emblematic of sliding toward Third Worldism that we now have this dominant idea that to notice a reality that might be quote-unquote ‘racist’ is impermissible. It can’t be true.”

Third Worldism runs throughout the identitarian left. The argument is that the West is responsible for the social problems of the rest of the world (poverty, sickness, crime, even terrorism) and therefore open borders is reparations the West owes the rest of the world (see “Reparations and Open Borders”). Because colonialism. The argument codes the West as “white” and the nonwestern world as “brown.” “Whiteness” is the bane of world existence and must be dismantled (while other cultures are encouraged to defend their cultural integrity). The structure of the global economy, without access to the nations of the West, is portrayed as a system of global apartheid (see the work of Harsha Walia and her notion of “border imperialism”). The goal is to disempower the West and expropriate its wealth, said to come not from the ingenuity of its culture, but from its ruthlessness. Third Worldism is why it is so easy for progressives to portray border control efforts as “racist” and “xenophobic,” immigration detention and processing centers as “concentration camps,” and a government that enforces the law as “fascist” and the agents of enforcement as “brown shirts.”

Chotiner raises the specter of anti-Semitism by noting the claim that Jews control much of Hollywood. Maybe, because Wax is Jewish, she can relate. Or at least be made to look like a hypocrite. Wax responds that “there are a tremendous number of Jews, out of proportion to their numbers in the population within the universities, within the media, in the professions. We can ask all of these questions, and you know what? They admit of an answer. But essentially what the left is saying is: We can’t even answer the question. We can’t. Once we’ve labelled something racist, the conversation stops. It comes to a halt, and we are the arbiters of what can be discussed and what can’t be discussed. We are the arbiters of the words that can be used, of the things that can be said.” 

When Neil DeGrasse Tyson made the observation that there are only about fifteen million Jews in the world, yet they have received 25 percent of science Nobel prizes, while Islamic scientists have won just three of the 609 science Nobel prizes so far issued, even though they account for about 1.6 billion of the global population, he wasn’t criticized by Jews (that I know of). He did, however, face the wrath of Muslims and progressives. Was he saying that the difference is biological? Of course not. First, Jews and Muslims aren’t races. Second, race is not a biological reality. Clearly, their respective outlooks on science are the product of cultural differences. It is a relevant sociological question to ask: What is it about Jewish culture that produces individuals who excel in certain avenues of economic and social life?

Chotiner retreats: “I’m just trying to make a point about how something could be true but still racist or used in a racist manner.” This is so obvious it makes one wonder why Chotiner himself did not incorporate this understanding in the first place. It is his agenda. Relentless, Wax analogizes: there are differences between men and women. Is it “sexist” to say so? Chotiner asks, “What about saying, ‘I don’t like the way black people look, and so I don’t want this black person marrying my daughter?’ Is that racist?” Wax responds, “I guess it’s racist, but I think people are entitled to have preferences about who they marry. It’s on a basis of race, and it’s a broad generalization on the basis of race.”

Chotiner tries to get Wax to say Trump is racist because the president suggested Obama wasn’t born in the US and questioned whether a judge of Mexican heritage could make a fair judicial decision. Wax points out that Mexican is a national identity, not a race. Frustrated, Chotiner says, “We’re both smart people, Amy, or at least I’m somewhat smart. You know what he was saying. Come on.” To which she responds: “O.K., but you’re patronizing me because you’re trying to use the word ‘racist’ where race is not the operant category. You see, you’re saying, ‘Oh, you have to expect that, when you say something about a Mexican, it’s something about race.’”

Wax is brilliantly using the interview to show how the racism smear works in today’s political-ideological environment. The word is overapplied. She says, “I think we’re now having a discussion about the content of what he said, and we can’t have that discussion if you just go off on this ridiculous heresy hunt: ‘Is he a racist? Isn’t he a racist? Is that racist? Is this racist?’ That’s really, as far as I can tell, eighty-five per cent of what the discussion now is about on the progressive left. It is so pointless, and it’s so shallow. O.K.?” Chotiner attempts again to make her view appear as racist, suggesting that she sees culture as “hardwired.” He attempts this even though Wax earlier told him, in no uncertain terms, that she was not making a race-realist argument. Wax gets Chotiner to admit that “hardwired” is his word, not hers. And so the interview concludes, providing us with an excellent illustration of the problem with the contemporary discourse about immigration and race.

I noted earlier that what lies in back of the overapplication of the racism charge is construct of cultural racism. Cultural racism (the new racism or neo-racism) is a recent invention used to characterize judgments based on perceived or imagined differences in norms and values between nationalities, ethnicities, and races. For example, if one argues that western culture is superior to nonwestern cultures because the norms and values of the West uniquely emphasize critical thought and open inquiry, democracy, equality (for women, homosexuals, etc.), personal freedoms, such as freedom of association, opinion, and speech, scientific reasoning (rationalism, empiricism), and secularism (separation of church and state), and especially if one believes that native inhabitants of the West ought to be skeptical and wary of foreign norms and values that may threaten the integrity of their culture, one may be accused of cultural racism. Cultural racism is a weaponized version of the charge of ethnocentrism in a worldview where everything—ethnicity, nationalism, even religion—is reduced to race. It’s an example of terminological creep, the practice of repurposing a term to cover phenomena that exists beyond its parameters, phenomena that are qualitatively different from the phenomena initially covered by the meaning of the term. Cultural racism bears little resemblance to the term it seeks to qualify. (This is also true of symbolic racism, the other “new racism.”)

What is racism? I have defined the term many times on this blog (see, e.g., “Race, Ethnicity, Religion, and the Problem of Conceptual Conflation and Inflation” and “Prejudice and Discrimination: There are Many Sorts and We Mustn’t Confuse or Conflate them”). Racism is the belief that individuals can be differentiated into groups based on innate abilities and dispositions and that these groups can be rank ordered into superior and inferior types of humans. The term itself appears in the earlier twentieth century (interchangeable with the term “racialism” appearing around the same time). The ideology of racism emerges with the enlightenment, tangled with the development of science. Because of the latter’s self-correcting method, the core tenets of racism—chief among them that there actually is such a thing as biological race—have been debunked. But not before justifying some of the worst deeds in history, the ideology reaching its zenith in Nazi Germany, whose ideologues couched ethnicity and nationality in the language of natural history.

Heavily influenced by the postmodern turn in the social sciences in the 1980s and 1990s, the concept of cultural racism emerges in the aftermath of the collapse of scientific racism, the dismantling of de jure segregation in the United States, and the resumption of mass immigration to the West by nonwestern people. Thus, it was when the force of racism—law and policy, thought and practice, justified by widespread belief in innate racial differences—had been either eliminated or marginalized that the term was given a new lease on life by the political left for their own political purposes. Exploiting the differences and amplifying slight ambiguities in the concept of race between European cultures (which are, in his eyes, manufactured by state power), French philosopher Étienne Balibar argues that racism is always evolving and therefore is always “neo-racism.” This is a clever trick. In this way of thinking, racism becomes an eternally useful accusation by merely changing its meaning. And the left is doing this.

In “Racists and Anti-racists,” Balibar writes that “we have passed from biological racism to cultural racism.” That is not what has happened. What has happened is that we have marginalized the racists and produced a more just society in the West, an accomplishment that itself speaks to the power of the western cultural orientation. And, with the ethic of human rights, which is of western origin, people around the world have a chance to raise their moral standards and live better lives, to emancipate themselves from the oppression and poverty their culture generates and perpetuates. However, there are traditional powers that seek to prevent this (which is why there is such a thing as the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam) and it is not racist to identify those forces and condemn them.

I have been criticized for mocking the burqa and niqab. I commented on a widely circulated image of a women in a niqab taking a selfie (the image is shared below). I asked, “What’s the point?” Some expressed surprise that a man of the left would post such a thing. I’m not a good social justice warrior.

I am always a little surprised that anybody who knows me even a little—or who cares about women, frankly—would be surprised or dismayed by my criticism of Islam. To be clear, I understand why progressives think this way. Defending the Islamic way of life is how leftwing identitarians establish their progressive bona fides. It’s still always a little surprising. Disheartening is probably a better word to use here.

I am a vocal antitheist. Have been for most of my life. An antitheist is not merely an apostate or an atheist, but someone who has become convinced by reason and evidence that religion is a malevolent force in history and society. An antitheist openly advocates disbelief in supernatural things in order to save human beings from the oppression and violence that follows from such beliefs. Religious ideologies—in particular Catholicism and Islam in our time—are analogous to fascism and racism. They run on similar social logics and are responsible for widespread pain and misery.

One commentator asked me how, as an academic, that I could engage in such a crude act as mocking the niqab. But the conclusion I draw about modesty dress is the product of critical historical social science reflection. I wouldn’t be using my sociological training to proper ends if I allowed myself to participate in an ideological project to mainstream irrational belief systems by denying the reality of the structure and function of religion. Moreover, I have a responsibility as an moral person to criticize oppressive ideas and practices.

As a humanist, I don’t just reject religious belief for myself; I want to see religion marginalized to the point where it does not affect any significant number of people (ideally, the point at which it affects no one). Irreligious criticism and ridicule is central to the secular humanist project. And, as a feminist, I abhor the erasure of women. I would be a hypocrite if I remained silent in the face of such blatant oppression of my sisters. What do progressives say about the effect of failing to stand against oppression? Well, I know what a liberal said about it: “There are times when silence becomes an accomplice to injustice,” said apostate Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Or, as Leonardo Da Vinci put it, “He who does not oppose evil, commands it to be done.” It is not always true that silence is consent, but in the case of Islam’s treatment of women it is.

And it’s not just straight women who suffer under Islam. Watch the video below by Ex-Muslims of North America concerning the predicament of gay ex-Muslims. The video focuses on Omar (not his real name) and his story of growing up in a country where both homosexuality and apostasy are met by death (this is true of many Muslim-majority countries).

It has always troubled me that progressives selectively condemn religious systems that subordinate girls and women and persecute homosexuals. When it comes to Christian oppression of these groups, progressives are eager to criticize, mock, and ridicule. But when Muslims engage in oppression of these groups, they not only fall silent on the injustice, but attack those who speak out. Why do so many on the left resist extending to others the blessings of liberty and protections of rights they enjoy for themselves? We do they attempt to marginalize and suppress the voices of atheists, feminists, and homosexual activists who criticize Islam? It is a bizarre expression of racism that I analyze in my essay “What’s Racist About Islamophobia? Not What You Think.”

Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin starts off sounding like he is going to make a compelling point, then drives his train off the rails by blaming gun violence on things that have absolutely nothing to do with gun violence: pornography, video games, movies, song lyrics (see video below). Really? Song lyrics?

The increase of hard-core pornography and violence-themed video games, movies, music, and lyrics are actually associated with historic decreases in interpersonal violence across Western societies. This claim is among the most robust findings in all of social science.

Sorry governor, mass shooters are not motivated by movies or video games or pornography. If anything, these materials substitute for aggression and violence. There is scientific evidence showing that these materials demotivate those who consume them. Isn’t this the complaint? That we can’t get our kids to go outside? And when they’re playing violent-themed video games for hours on end, they’re not perpetrating acts of violence. 

Whether pornography motivates masturbation and sexual intercourse or merely aids these activities is unclear. Maybe it’s both. But who cares? Why is photographing, filming, or video recording anal play, coitus, cunnilingus, fellatio, etc., degrading? People enjoy doing those things. Some even get paid doing something they enjoy. There’s nothing wrong with any of these things. Why is the governor talking about them? It’s silly.

As for this claim about abortion, if we agree that the frequency of abortion increased after Roe v Wade, we have to agree that this increase is associated with a historic decrease in interpersonal violence. What would be the causal link anyway? Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people on the Virginia Tech campus in 2007 because women gained more control over their reproductive capacity in 1973?

You know what else is associated with a substantial decrease in violence in Western society? Growing secularism. That’s right, declining religiosity is associated with a safer (and more moral) society. As people have moved away from organized religion and the Judeo-Christian god, violence has declined. The progressive disappearance of corporal punishment, the practice of physically punishing children, is also associated with a decrease in violence. So is increasing sexual equality and female empowerment. So is the institution of civil rights laws and policies—those changes that recognizes the dignity and worth of all human beings regardless of the color of their skin. And greater tolerance of gay and lesbian rights. 

All of these things—many of them things conservatives (publicly) don’t like—are associated with not more but less killing and violence. That these developments are associated with less violence is not merely empirical fact; it’s common sense. We are civilizing ourselves. What do you expect? This is good news. Share this gospel with everybody you meet. More people need to know about it, so they don’t fall for the nonsense folks like Governor Bevin peddle.

But, alas, we do have this problem of mass shootings, which is really a problem of large casualty counts associated with mass shootings. What’s behind this? Easy availability of high-powered military grade weaponry and an industry that fosters and enables gun fetishism are among the greatest sources of the problem. 

The governor talked about the widespread ownership of guns in our society in his childhood. Guns were in my childhood, too. I have been around guns my whole life. But we didn’t have the types of weapons used in mass shootings when I was growing up. We had rifles and shotguns. Maybe a pistol in the family. It’s hard to pull off Virginia Tech with the stuff we carried around with us. Not that there weren’t murders. There were actually more murders back then! But we did not see mass shooting events routinely taking the lives of dozens of people. Not in the United States.

The governor said there are fewer households with guns. True. He’s been reading. But he forgot to tell his audience that there are more guns than ever, which means that many of the households have become, in effect, armories. Isn’t this what police and the FBI find when they search the homes of these mass shooters? Many of them have a lot of military-grade weaponry and lots—and I mean lots—of ammo. And they have all sorts of gun paraphernalia. It’s a fascination. Cult-like. Typically, a cult of one. A person has lots of guns designed for one purpose—killing human beings—for what reason? I’m always suspicious. We hope the purpose of this technology is never realized. So why allow it?

There are other things associated with mass killing. The glorification of military culture and the pathology of violent masculinity. After all, look at how so many of these killers are dressed. They’re obsessed with military and paramilitary fashion. They’re literally dressed to kill. (Of course clothes aren’t a source of violence. In this case, they are an outward manifestation of personal disposition.) The rise of violent religious fundamentalism, both Christianist and Islamist ideologies, that is, theistic tribalism, motivates a lot of these events. You see the source of violence in their rhetoric and in their targets. It’s not movies and video games that inspire violence but ideology. In our central cities, mass violence, for example gang-related shootings, is driven by structural inequality, hopelessness, tribalism, and, again, easy access to high-powered military-grade weaponry. These are cultures of violence.

Given all the facts, how do we combat mass killing in an optimistic era of declining crime and violence? Many of these sources will take a while to diminish or remove. But one of the sources we could ameliorate almost immediately and achieve the greatest effect: remove the means to perpetrate mass death. Comprehensive gun control and bans on most types of weapons and ammo.

The woman who asked the question that got the governor going was accused of eye-rolling and smugness. The governor thought she was being disrespectful. No, Governor, she just wasn’t buying the nonsense falling from your mouth. Bevin’s attempt to take the moral high road was in reality an exercise in rehearsing a failed doctrine masquerading as morality. He is merely feigning an ethical stance. In actuality, he’s a tool of the gun lobby.

Ideal types don’t exist in reality. They are heuristics developed via abstraction from actual evidence and discernment of the structural logic explaining relationships in the data that are then used to explore the empirical world. There is only “actually-existing” or historical feudalism, capitalism, or socialism. There is no “pure this” or “pure that.” Purity is always an abstraction. 

Moreover, an ideal type must never be applied to the data in a superficial manner, such as the way people talk about this or that thing or person being “fascist” on the basis of an appearance of a handful of (often highly selective and stretched) analogical points of contact. There is “actually-existing,” i.e., historical fascism, and there are sociopolitical systems that are fascistic in character but are not fascism actually-existing. 

Conceptual systems are never exactly the things they conceptualize (in part because things are always changing), but they come very close when they enjoy validity (such as in their predictive power) and their application is empirically sound (that is, supported by the facts). Still, we have to avoid reifying concepts such that they stand in place of the reality we are striving to grasp. 

To suppose that the ideal type of capitalism exists anywhere in the world is absurd. To suppose one may use this absurdity to defend or rationalize capitalism marks ideology. Capitalism is an actual concrete historical system that comes in many varieties. There are characteristics of capitalism that distinguish it from other social forms, and central to these are its social relations and mode of exploitation.

My critique of “white privilege” rhetoric (for example, here: “Debunking a Sacred Text in the Church of Identitarianism”) concerns the practice of using the term to describe prevailing racial inequality. It is not a denial of the problems of race prejudice, race discrimination, or racial inequality. These are very real problems to be addressed. But the vast majority of Americans are not racists nor do Americans live in a nation that runs on racism.

I reject the white privilege discourse not because of “white fragility” but because the discourse misuses language and meaning. Race privilege has been abolished in the United States. Continuing to speak as if a problem the nation overcame decades ago is still a problem is more that unhelpful. It divides the working class (which is likely the reason so many bourgeois institutions push the rhetoric in rules and training). Instead of founding a proletarian movement on the basis of common material interests, the rhetoric of race privilege fragments class consciousness and worker solidarity. It leaves the impression that the nation has accomplished very little with respect to the problem of racism and white people are the reason. By mischaracterizing the contemporary situation, the rhetoric denies progress while recycling grievances long ago addressed.

It is, moreover, fallacious—and racially discriminatory if it informs treatment—to attribute to individuals group averages based on skin color. Individuals are not statistical averages. Persons are concrete entities with biographies. One cannot explain a person’s successes (or failures) on the grounds that he allegedly possesses a group advantage “revealed” by aggregated statistical differences. This is the problem of making claims about racial differences in aptitude and intelligence tests based on aggregated data, “findings” that are at best correlative even generously granting the validity of such instruments. The chart presented below from Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s notorious The Bell Curve (1994), is not explanatory. It is illogical to infer causality from statistical averages drawn from passive demographic categories (unlike aggregate analysis based on shared belief systems, for example religious groups). It’s stereotyping. It turns people into cartoon abstractions: villains, victims, allies, and heroes. It is the reification of demographic categories that allows for the production of mythology, of monolithic standpoints labeled “oppressor perspective” and “victim perspective.”

When I discuss this matter with people, they often raise the problem of redlining, the practice of selectively granting loans or selling homes to buyers on the basis of their race. Doesn’t redlining prove white privilege? Depends on the historical context. The fact that corporations and banks engage in discriminatory and illegal practices today does not substantiate a claim that we live in a society that operates on the basis of race privilege.

There were several landmark changes made in the United States that ended race privilege in the form of de jure housing discrimination. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 made it “unlawful to discriminate in the terms, conditions, or privileges of sale of a dwelling because of race or national origin.” FHA also made it “unlawful for any person or other entity whose business includes residential real estate-related transactions to discriminate against any person in making available such a transaction, or in the terms or conditions of such a transaction, because of race.” Congress strengthened the law in 1977 with the Community Reinvestment Act.

While financial institution do engage in these practices, they do not do so with impunity. Just in the last five years, enforcement actions have been brought against, to identify but a few examples, Associated, Community State, Evans Bank, First United Security, and Hudson Bank (banks in the northeast, midwest, and deep south). Far from establishing privilege for whites who get loans, banks are punished for discriminating against non-whites. A society operating on the basis of white privilege does not make it illegal to discriminate against non-whites. Whites do not enjoy special rights or immunities—the meaning of privilege—on the basis of discriminatory action by financial institutions.

To draw a contrast, we live in a capitalist society where economic exploitation is legal. There is a very real class privilege reinforced by law. Under socialism, exploitation would be illegal; class privilege would be abolished. It may very well be that under socialism labor will be exploited here and there. But such instances would—or at least should—be addressed through government action. These instances of exploitation under socialism could not be said to establish class privilege, as they are deviations from the law that makes exploitation illegal. The failure to enforce the law is also not an instance of privilege. By analogy, a person who gets away with murder is not privileged. The law failed to hold him accountable. Nor is an innocent man privileged because the system failed to convict him of a murder he did not commit.

I recently wrote about racial disparities in criminal offending (see “Mapping the Junctures of Social Class and Racial Caste: An Analytical Model for Theorizing Crime and Punishment in US History”). The rhetoric of white privilege is often attached to these disparities, as well. The sources of violent crime in the black community are chiefly structural inequality, culture, and easy availability of guns. As I have explained, these problem emerge in part from de facto patterns of occupational and residential segregation shaped by legal and economic history. Furthermore, the problem with white privilege rhetoric, as well as the claim that the problems of black people are the result of an ongoing web of structural oppression, is the denial of human agency and dignity. It treats black people like puppets on a string. It makes a black man killing a black man the fault of white people. Whites get all the agency; they’re responsible for their actions and more. Blacks are infantilized; they’re victims. It’s more than an error to blame the social problems associated with black neighborhoods on “white privilege.” It undermines human dignity.

What about inherited and cumulative advantages and disadvantages? These are certainly explanatory. The explanation moves the call for reparations. Whatever one thinks about reparations (and I believe they are a bad idea “For the Good of Your Soul: Tribal Stigma and the God of Reparations”), reparations have already occurred. As the call for more reparations ramps up, we’re again hearing the slogan “forty acres and a mule.” Forty acres and a mule was a feature of Special Field Orders 15, a declaration by Union General Sherman in 1865 in the context of a civil war. Because this never happened, the story goes, nothing was ever done about the material foundation of post-slavery racial inequality. But in the Civil Rights period, reparations did indeed take place, they just took a different form: public investments, expansion of the social welfare system, public housing, affirmative action, and other policies and programs. Forty acres and mule no longer made sense in an advanced industrial society.

Today, Americans live in one of the freest and most open societies in world history. The United States is a multiracial and multiethnic democratic-republic with legally protected access to educational, occupational, and residential institutions. We no longer live in a nation that operates on white supremacy and race privilege. Of course, as I said at the outset, race prejudice, race discrimination, and racial inequality persist. But we must emphasize that these problems do not establish the presence of white privilege. Legal structures granting privileges on the basis of race that function to systematically advantage whites are required to indicate white privilege. Moreover, white privilege is unnecessary for race discrimination and racial inequality. It is wrong to claim, as we hear people say all the time, that every black person experiences discrimination or that every white person benefits from discrimination or that every white person is racist or that white people cannot suffer discrimination. This is the rhetoric of a grievance industry that denies the progress this nation has made in righting the wrongs of history and power.

Yesterday, The Los Angeles Times (“Getting shot by police is a leading cause of death for black men in America”) reported that about 1 in 1,000 black men and boys in America can expect to die at the hands of police. Black men and boys are 2.5 times more likely than white men and boys to die during a police encounter. It is important for readers to know that more white men and boys will die at the hands of police in the United States than will black men and boys. Black men and boys, while representing a minority of those killed in police encounters, are overrepresented among those killed in an encounter with a police officer. The question for scientists and policymakers is what explains this disparity.

Through the prism of left identitarian politics, racial disproportionality in police shootings indicates racism. It’s a sign of a civilization built upon white supremacy. A social movement—Black Lives Matters—has emerged to address the problem of racist police shootings. However, those pushing this line neglect one crucial fact: independent of ethnic and racial bias, the overrepresentation of blacks in serious crime increases the likelihood that police will encounter black men and boys under circumstances that represent a threat to the themselves and to others, circumstances that make it more likely that police will discharge their firearm or take some other action that increases the likelihood that a fatality or serious injury will occur. 

As I document in “Mapping the Junctures of Social Class and Racial Caste”: “In 2017, according to the Uniform Crime Report (FBI), blacks were responsible for 33 percent of aggravated assaults, 30 percent of burglaries, 53 percent of homicides, and 54 percent of robberies.” Most of these offenders were men and black men account for less than six percent of the United States population. Thus, black males are significantly overrepresented in serious crime. One finds ethnic and racial disproportionality in police shootings with respect to other demographic groups, as well. Black women and girls, as well as Latino men and boys (about 1.4 times more likely to die at the hands of a police that non-Hispanic white men and boys) are also killed by police at higher rates than their white peers. These groups are also overrepresented in those types of crime that are more likely to bring them into serious encounters with the police.

A headline framing police shootings as “a leading cause of death” for black men and boys, inspired by Frank Edwards, the Rutgers sociologist who produced the study informing the LA Times story, in this case conceals the leading source of death of black men and boys: black men and boys. According to the website Mapping Police Violence, police killed 1,147 people in 2017. Blacks were 25 percent of that total, or around 286 persons. That same year, according to the FBI, there were 15,129 homicides. Black victims accounted for 52 percent of them, or 7,851 persons. More than 86 percent of those victims were male. In approximately 90 percent of black homicide deaths, the perpetrator is also black. In other words, a black person is more than 27 times more likely to be killed by a black civilian than by a police officer (black or white). Edwards compares the odds of getting shot and killed by a cop to winning “a lot of scratch-off lottery games.” Of course, the lottery is random. But applying this metaphor to peer-to-peer shootings, the odds of a black person being shot and killed by another black person are much higher than a black man being shot and killed by a police officer.

I know many of you will object to this comparison. You question its relevance. Is it not changing the subject to bring in black-on-black killing? Isn’t there an agenda at work? I am guilty of making this very complaint. On July 20, 2016, I published a piece in Truthout titled, “Changing the Subject From the Realities of Death by Cop,” in which I criticized Heather Mac Donald of committing this very offense. I then appeared on the Project Censored show on KPFA Berkeley 94.1 to talk to Mickey Huff and Peter Phillips about it (you can listen to the program here: Black Lives Matter) and tied my argument to an appreciation of the BLM movement, which I felt at the time was making an important contribution to the problem of death by cop. Since that time, I have taken another look at the problem and come to a different conclusion (you can read my argument here “The Problematic Premise of Black Lives Matter”). In fact, police shootings and violence in America’s central cities are rooted in the same context and are directly associated.

The media systematically downplays the crisis of life in poor inner city neighborhoods, disproportionately black and brown, where the experience of murder and serious crime has become routine. Mass shootings perpetrated by white men serves as spectacle (the “real problem”), while shootings perpetrated by black and brown men in Baltimore, St. Louis, New Orleans, and other major cities, if reported at all, do not enter the media echo chamber where they might be amplified. As a consequence, one of the most serious social problem in the United States is little more than background noise. When one ventures to note it, he risks being accused of racism. The keepers of the narratives either portray the crisis of crime and violence in inner city black and brown communities as something akin to a natural phenomenon, inevitable and automatic, or treat black and brown people as if they are victims with no agency, as if they’re marionettes whose wires dangle from the fingertips of an invisible white marionettist.

I no longer see the phenomenon of shootings during police encounters as a problem of police officers operating on implicit racial bias (although bias needs to be confronted and eliminated where it is found) as much as the general problem of the function of law and order in a capitalist society. The United States is a business-run society with a pathological ethos of rugged individualism. As such, economic security for the majority is precarious and social supports are sorely lacking. The alienating conditions produced by a system that relegates a large proportion of its population to lives of economic uncertainty and material deprivation is associated with several serious problems: neighborhood disorganization and social disorder, high levels of crime and violence, and a large segment of the proletariat living beyond the routine means of control and discipline attached to the industrial system.

The capitalist state and interested private forces developed the criminal justice system to manage those persons who experience and to a significant degree cause these problems. The police and the system of jails and prisons are functions of industrial capitalism and are stamped with the character of British and Northeastern United States rational Protestant culture with its emphasis on efficiency, calculability, predictability, and uniformity. It was inevitable that a crime control system in the context of a society at this stage of development and with this ethos would clash with the due process spirit of the U.S. Bill of Rights when crime and disorder, along with the enlargement of the industrial reserve, became widespread problems. Contemporary society, with most of the population now living in urban areas, experiences more crime than the framers of the Constitution could have possibility anticipated.

The need for a comprehensive crime control apparatus is real. Citizens of a democratic-republic rightly expect public safety. Living in safe communities is a human right. The crime control emphasis emerging from the 1960s addressing the drastic increase in crime and disorder throughout the United States during that decade played a major role in promoting general lawfulness forty years down the pike. We live in a much safer society today than previous generations. Despite this progress, high levels of crime and violence persist in our central cities. And the ills disproportionately impact black and brown people. Not addressing crime and violence in these communities is to abandon them to chaos. Studies find high levels of mental health problems, such as depression and emotional issues, in the black population of states where urban conditions make police shootings more likely. As The LA Times points out, living in a state of constant fear can lead to chronic stress. Far more fear inducing than the presence of law enforcement is the presence of armed civilians assaulting, killing, and robbing members of their own community (the article spins this reality in a way that pins chronic stress on the actions of the police).

The most effective way of reducing potentially lethal or harmful police encounters is to reduce the frequency of those encounters. Ending the drug war would help reduce the number of police-civilian encounters. We’re making some progress in this area. More broadly, ameliorating the conditions that give rise to crime and violence in the first place would drastically reduce these types of encounters and transform the experience of policing. Thus a state-organized industrial system of employment, along with social democratic reforms in education, housing, and policing, is needed to ameliorate the conditions that give rise to crime, disorder, and violence. These approaches will also help reduce the frequency of police-civilian encounters among white populations, whose members comprise the largest number of those shot or injured during police encounters. Blacks are overrepresented in the circumstances that put them disproportionately at risk because of historic patterns of occupational and residential segregation shaped by legal and economic history. The potential for criminality inheres in blacks no more than it inheres in whites. More than reducing lethal encounters with the police, combating criminogenic conditions will reduce the risk of aggravated assault, homicide, and robbery.

These are political questions, and unless those representing the general interests eschew the divisive practice of racal politics and organize instead around common class interests, no broad-based social movement will emerge with the power to put leaders into positions from where they may address this problem in ways that don’t pit working people against each other. Left identitarianism is a morass of competing interests based largely on demographic constructions. If one were to imagine what a bourgeoisie strategy to fragment working class consciousness on the left, it would look just like leftwing identity politics. Movements like Black Lives Matter are too narrow, too exclusive, too dismissive of whites. And they are too extreme, calling for the abolition of the police and prisons, blaming police shootings on such rhetorical constructions as “white privilege.” As such, these politics are alienating to the majority of working class people. And they are based upon a false premise: that the main cause of racial disparities is white supremacy.

I have written about the problem of “white privilege” rhetoric before. I want to review two errors committed by Peggy McIntosh’s “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” which has become something of a sacred text in Church of Identiarianism. I have covered both in some fashion on this blog, but I want to go a little deeper into them here.

I am inspired to do this by the almost unquestioned assumption across higher education and the Democratic Party that this rhetoric is valid and useful. It is neither. Indeed, the rhetoric of white privilege and the framework in which it operates is harmful to liberty and democracy. (For my past writings on this see “The Rhetoric of White Privilege: Progressivism’s Play for Political Paralysis,” “You are Broken. We Will Fix You,” “Race and Democracy,” and “Demographics and People.”)

The first error is McIntosh’s neglect of demographic information and ignorance of facts to make claims about the underrepresentation of minority wants and needs in capitalist markets. For example, accepting the premise of the following item for a moment, if I, as a white person “can easily buy posters, postcards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys and children’s magazines featuring people of my race,” how much does this have to do with the simple fact that 80 percent of the U.S. population was white when McIntosh penned her essay (three-quarters of the population today)? White people prefer to purchase culturally familiar items. There are more white people in American than nonwhites (who we will assume do not want or need the products white people use). It makes sense that the items would be readily available in a society where the vast majority of people are white. One can consider this apart from race. Halal foods are not readily available in the United States. Is this “Christian privilege”? (What does the abundance of Kosher products tell us?) My musical tastes are not well represented at Walmart. What sort of privilege is this? A great deal of her essay depends upon this faulty logic.

But it’s worse than that. The premise of McIntosh’s example isn’t really even true. For decades, capitalists have been keen on tapping the African-American market. Capitalist firms have an army of designers and marketers to develop, engineering, and push products for black Americans. They cultivate consumers and advertise specifically to them. It’s a vast industry. When I was a kid (a long time ago) there was a television show called Soul Train that was a vehicle for products that my family would never use (I watched it for the “black music,” which was, and still is, oddly, ubiquitous in American culture). Remember Afro Sheen products? They were available at the department stores in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Some of my white friends in high school in the 1970s wore afros. They bought these products. They carried black power hair picks in their back pockets. They were cool. Blacks represent more than a tenth of the United States population. And blacks are not evenly distributed throughout the country. Half of all blacks live in the South. Capitalists aren’t stupid. So maybe McIntosh is not very culturally savvy. That’s the kindest thing I can say about this aspect of her essay.

The second error is McIntosh’s systematic misuse of language and meaning, specifically the deployment of linguistic tricks that work to manufacture the perception of a reality with a different set of rules (these tricks are central to the reality manufactured by critical race theorists). McIntosh writes that “not all of the privileges on my list are inevitably damaging.” For example, “the expectation…that your race will not count against you in court should be the norm in a just society.” She describes the “privilege” of being treated in a racially-neutral fashion in court as an “unearned entitlement” that, because “only a few have it” (presumably she wrote that in error, since whites are a majority and all whites are privileged), “is an unearned advantage.”

But the expectation that one’s race will not be used against them in police stops or court rooms (or college admissions) is not a privilege. That’s the wrong word. As I have explained before on my blog, a privilege is a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group of persons. It is illegal to grant or make available on a racial basis special rights, advantages or immunities in the United States of America. What she is talking about is not privilege but right. It is an individual right in the form of equal treatment before the law to not have one’s race uses against him in a court of law. When that expectation is not met, then discrimination is suspected. 

My son is white. He is not regularly stopped by the police when he is out in the neighborhood doing nothing wrong. That’s not a privilege. Cops are not instructed to avoid stopping him because he is white. Think about how absurd this notion is. Then think about how an entire nation is in the thrall of such an absurd notion. (Stop laughing at the 43 percent of Americans who believe in demons. Or the 64 percent who believe in angels.) My son enjoys a right to go about his daily affairs unmolested by the state. Read the U.S. Bill of Rights to understand this right. If my son were stopped by the police because he is white, then his rights would be violated. 

I will give you a real-world example disproving McIntosh’s claim: “If a traffic cop pulls me over…, I can be sure I haven’t been singled out because of my race.” My cousin and I were driving through a black-majority neighborhood in Miami because it was the shortest route to our destination. When the cops stopped us, I asked them why. They said, “Because you’re white boys driving through a black neighborhood.” So? I asked. “White people don’t ordinarily drive through this neighborhood unless they’re buying drugs.” I asserted my rights. They laughed at me and proceeded to take my car apart. Literally. Parts were strewn all over the sidewalk and the road. Finding nothing, they left us to put my car back together. We were late for our appointment. My rights were violated on the basis of race. That was the only reason they stopped us. We were racially profiled. Had this not happened it would not have indicated white privilege. It would merely would have meant that our right to travel unmolested by the state would have been observed.

McIntosh’s argument simply doesn’t work. It’s nonsense. Absent a system of segregation where institutions are legally permitted to exclude black people, the entire white privilege fleet crashes on these shores. In his essay “Critical Reflections on Three Popular Tropes in the Study of Whiteness” (from George Yancy’s What White Looks Like), Lewis Gordon writes, “A privilege is something that not everyone needs, but a right is the opposite. Given this distinction, an insidious dimension of the white-privilege argument emerges. It requires condemning whites for possessing, in the concrete, features of contemporary life that should be available to all, and if this is correct, how can whites be expected to give up such things?” We hear all the time that if we are going to have racial equality whites need to “check their privilege.” But they’re talking about our rights. And we aren’t going to check them. We are going to keep and assert them. 

Despite the absurdity of her argument, McIntosh’s essay is used in universities across the country to accuse white students of enjoying “white skin privilege,” a term developed in the 1960s by labor activist Theodore Allen (Allen writes that for justice to occur white Americans must “begin by first repudiating their white skin privileges”) and embraced by the New Left, many of whom went into academia and became teachers. When white students resist the accusation, they’re accused of a second offense, something resembling a psychiatric disorder, something called “white fragility.” So, either they confess to having something they cannot possibly have that makes them inherently racist—an original sin that birthed them broken—or they are in denial about being a racist—and can never be a proper “ally.” Of course, an ally is the best whites can ever be because there is no escaping the privilege they are born with by virtue of their skin color. They are, therefore, permanently morally inferior. (At least they have access to a psychological wage by virtue signaling.)

Aufstehen, which translates to “Stand up,” is a left collective movement founded in the summer of 2018 by, among others, Sahra Wagenknecht, a leader in the political party die Linke (“the Left”). Die Linke is left populist in character, the result of a merger of the Partei des Demokratischen Sozialismus (“Party of Democratic Socialism,” or PDS) and Arbeit und soziale Gerechtigkeit—Die Wahlalternative (“Electoral Alternative for Labor and Social Justice,” or WASG). PDS emerged from a Marxist-Leninist orientation but was retooled for current historical conditions. WASG emerged in 2005 in opposition to neoliberalism, criticizing both center-left and center-right politics. Within two years WASG had merged with PDS to form die Linke. Aufstehenlinks die Linke with two other left-oriented parties Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (“Social Democratic Party of Germany,” or SPD) and Die Grünenor Grüne (“Greens”). 

Aufstehen is a collective in the spirit of Momentum, founded to support the Jeremy Corbyn tack of the British Labor Party, as well as the Jean-Luc Mélenchon movement, represented by the ecosocialist party La France Insoumise (“Unsubdued France”), founded in 2016. Aufstehen is a response to right populism, represented in Germany, for example, by Alternative für Deutschland (“Alternative for Germany” or AfD). Prominent voices in Aufstehen are Wolgang Streeck, an economic sociologist who argues that late capitalism is marked by several problems portending its demise (such as austerity, declining growth, and oligarchy), Bernd Stegemann, a dramatuge, Andrea Nahles, who served as leader of the SPD, as well as Wagenknecht and her husband, Oskar Lafontaine, who served as fiancé minister under Social Democratic chancellor Gerhard Schröder. Aufstehen’s left populism prioritizes Germany’s working class, opposing corporate strategies that undermine labor’s power, for example, the exploitation of immigrant labor as a strategy to drive down wages in order to raise the profit rate. Aufstehen opposes or at least seeks to modify transnational capitalists relations. The attitude is similar to Brexit in that regional and global economic linkages are theorized to disadvantage the proletariat of the advanced state economies of Europe (and North America) and undermine national sovereignty. Readers of my blog will know that these are politics I associate very much with my own. 

The summer edition of Dissent magazine has published an article, “Pop-Up Populism: The Failure of Left-Wing Nationalism in Germany,” announcing Aufstehen’s death (as everything is tensed in the past, the entire essay is in the form of an obituary). “Aufstehen’s leaders insisted that their movement was not defined by its opposition to migrants,” write Quinn Slobadian (a historian of modern Germany) and William Callison (a PhD student of political science at Berkeley). “But they consistently cast migrants as either pawns in the game of finance capital or as the phony poster children of misguided urban idealists.” The mood of the piece immediately apparent, the authors blow several opening paragraphs describing key players as if this were the first chapter of a snarky novel. Bernd Stegemann was “a large man in wire-framed glasses with the slumped mien of an eternal graduate student.” Streeck was “a partisan of earth-tone sweaters with a paintbrush mustache.” And so on.

The upshot of the article is that populism is good politics no more and that Aufstehen is an anti-immigrant tendency in the trans-Atlantic community that has infected the right and the left. Hardly unexpected. This is a general take by multiculturalist intellectuals who find concern for native-born workers, ecological overshoot, overpopulation, religious fanaticism, and cultural disorganization to be contemptible no matter from what point along the political spectrum they hail. Slobadian and Callison quote Wagenknecht: “Cosmopolitanism, anti-racism, and protection of minorities are feel-good labels to conceal crude upward redistribution and to preserve a good conscience for the beneficiaries.” The authors lament that “Streeck went further, calling the use of taxpayer euros for migrant resettlement ‘morally obligatory expropriation’ and casting doubt on the motives of the refugees coming to Germany.” The doubt expressed was over whether refugees entering Germany were actually refugees or economic migrants traveling under cover of humanitarian crises and taking advantage of the lax borders of the European Union. Anybody who took even a cursory look at the composition of those pouring into Europe during the migrant crisis had no difficulty doubting the official narrative. Anybody familiar with the work of Streeck knows that the looks he takes are more than cursory.

Stegemann, to use the authors’ words, “casts ‘neoliberalism’ and ‘postmodernism’ as the dramatis personae of our time. It was this twin menace, he argues, that decimated the welfare state, exterminated class consciousness, and transformed race, gender, and class into matters of mere ‘social construction.’” Those who read my writings on this blog know that I am largely in accord with Stegemann’s opinion on this matter. Slobadian and Callison continue (cleverly): “To reclaim power, left populists need to Make Class Hegemonic Again, thereby blurring established lines between right and left.” The way they frame the argument, it would seem that the authors do not agree that neoliberalism and postmodernism are a twin menace. And while I would disagree that the effect of postmodernism has been merely to transform the structures of social reality into constituents of discourse (the effect has rather been the essentializing of such social construction as gender and race), I do agree that moving the focus to social class is how those who speak for the working class regain an authentic left politics and, moreover, that left populism, class solidarity, cultural unity, and civic nationalism are the necessary ingredients for such a politics. 

The authors write, “The first step, it would seem, is casting opponents of immigration as the designated representatives of ‘the people.’” Here, the reader is supposed to scoff along with the authors. But, given that the proponents of immigration scheme in opposition to working class interests, this formulation makes qualified sense—qualified in that one should consider the political sentiments of the opponent in question. Indeed, the authors worry that the approach “cater[s] to AfD voters, who studies have shown tend to be of average or above-average income, disproportionately male, over thirty, of average education, and skeptical of not only immigration but also gender equality and the human provenance of climate change.” But the authors invert the causal order. Aufstehen does not reflect the AfD tendency, but rather AfD attempts to fill its ranks with those abandoned by the left on this very issue. Indeed, this is the point of Aufstehen: to pull disaffected workers back into the sphere of leftwing politics; not only to build solidarity, but to weaken the rightwing tendencies that oppose gender equality, homosexual rights, and environmentalism. Does the left really want to give up on these folks?

As for Slobadian and Callison’s concern about marginalizing Muslims, stifling the Islamization of European societies is key to keeping secular society, the political, legal, and cultural basis for progress for women, gays and lesbians, and other historically marginalized groups. Islam is an ideology, like Christianity and Nazism. I am doubtful the authors of this piece would worry about marginalizing those ideologies. (People give quite a lot away with their concern over the minimization of Islam in Europe.)

The authors note that observers compare “Stegemann’s polemics against the German left to Mark Lilla’s denunciations of American liberals.” In 2017, Lilla, a political scientist at Columbia University, published The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics, in which he argues for a politics that emphasizes what citizens have in common rather than a politics that emphasizes the differences of identity. (A man after my own heart.) “Both trace the breakdown of the center and the rise of the right to the evils of identity politics,” the authors write, “and both envision center-left coalitions reforming around concepts like border security, national citizenship, the traditional family, and the homeland.” I seriously doubt either Stegemann or Lilla would accept the authors’ wording here, phrasing apparently designed to call to mind the rhetoric of white nationalism (if not national socialism). Stegemann and Lilla would almost certainly put the matter differently, namely that national integrity and integrated communities, organized around shared economic and environmental concerns, and a politics operating in the liberal secular framework of democratic-republicanism, would represent an authentic working-class politics. At least that’s the way I would put it. 

I do agree with the authors when they write: “Giving up on the young and urban, the educated but underemployed, the paperless and the stateless means falling back to the same problems that sank the old left: seeking salvation only from the factory floor when the material base for that kind of politics no longer exists.” However, giving up on the young and urban does not explain the failures of socialism in the West. The Old Left did not just merely give up on the youth. The Old Left abandoned the youth to the corruption of postmodernism and identity politics of the New Left. As co-editor of Dissent, Michael Kazin, once noted, persons usually do not become aware of historical pivots until decades after history has already pivoted. Perhaps it is unfair to lay the failure to combat the anti-proletarian anti-Enlightenment notions of the postmodern turn in culture and politics at the Old Left’s doorstep. But what it did not see then, surely we can see now.