‘Anti-Racism’, or the re-Mainstreaming of Racism

In her essay The Age of Envy, Philosopher Ayn Rand observed an insidious premise taking hold in the culture. She observed:

 

Today, racism is regarded as a crime if practiced by a majority—but as an inalienable right if practiced by a minority.

 

“Today” for Ayn Rand was July 1971.* That double standard has today, in 2020, reached a fever pitch in the form of the so-called "Anti-Racist" movement. But the premise actually dates back to the 1960s New Left uprising. 

 

Given the prominence Rand accorded the role of ideas in shaping human events, she would not have been surprised that there is a theory that only white people can be racist because whites are the majority and a minority can’t possibly oppress a majority. Just google “Only White People can be Racist” and you’ll get some exposure to this theory. If you disagree with the above statement, then how do you explain Affirmative Action and racial “diversity” programs, which specifically use skin color as a criterion of judgement, but only to favor “minority” individuals (people of color) at the expense of majority (white) individuals. Yet this blatantly racist practice is called “racial justice” while the opposite is called racism.

 

Articles like the one-sided ‘Being anti-racist is a verb, so it requires action’: Don’t stop demanding racial equality — how to become a lifelong ally by Meera Jagannathan are suddenly everywhere. The article views every perceived slight of a black person as ipso facto evidence of “racial injustice” perpetrated by whites (a textbook racist assumption that no genuine anti-racist would make). The author, with a straight face, goes on to give several instances where race should be a criterion of judgement as long as it favors some black person. Everywhere around us, we see evidence of the double standard. 

 

Or you can consider sociologist Dr. Robin DiAngelo’s theories on “White Fragility”, in which she “teaches” white people that they are racist whether they know it or not or regardless of the fact that they don’t engage in racist speech or actions. I’ve listened to clips from her talk on 'White Fragility', though I haven’t gotten up the stomach to listen to the whole thing straight through. If you’ve thought things through and decided that racism is evil; if you’ve re-evaluated past conscious or subconscious racist attitudes, and corrected them; if you’ve rationally adopted individualism as your guiding philosophy; If you’ve adopted a political philosophy of color-blind law: None of that matters. According to Dr. DiAngelo, you are still racist, as determined by your experiences living as a white person. 

 

You are racist due not to your character, but to your skin color. DiAngelo basically denies the two attributes that separate us from the rest of the animal world, reason and free will. So anything you say, believe, and do mean nothing. Your racism is genetically programmed into your white skin. It’s a prescription for unearned guilt, and a direct attack on the Enlightenment  premise that every individual has the power to shape his own character and soul.

 

DiAngelo herself, of course, doesn’t identify her own blatantly biased theory as racist. But like all forms of determinism, DiAngelo’s theory is self-refuting. If I as a white person can’t believe my own rational anti-racist individualism because my “true” character is predetermined by prior causes beyond my control, then on what basis should I take a word of DiAngelo’s ideas seriously, since hers are no more the result of her rational faculty than mine?

 

I submit that Dr. Robin DiAngelo and the whole Anti-Racism movement is designed to re-mainstream racism for the purpose of “evening the score” based on color tribalism. The white race subjugated the colored race, so now it’s time for the colored race to subjugate the white race, regardless of the guilt or victimhood of any individual member of either skin color. This, to correct historical injustice perpetrated by long-dead perps. It is a regression to something that the Enlightenment and the birth of America were designed to consign to the dustbin of history, tribal revenge. It is collectivism at its worst. Where does it end? It ends with a socialist America: The whole “Anti-Racist” movement to re-mainstream racism is really to lay the collectivist groundwork for socialism.

 

Racism is the idea that a person’s character is shaped not by his conscious choices but by his body chemistry (blood, skin color, genetic make-up), and should be judged accordingly. There’s no question that blacks have been the prime victims of racism and legal subjugation through most of American history. But law, not private behavior, has always been the driver of systemic racism. Those laws are gone. While effects of those laws linger, racism has been dying away since the 1960s and America today is the least racist it has ever been--and I know this from my own experience. Reigniting racism will never be anti-racist. Collectivizing racism as white only just perpetuates racism, because fundamentally racism is collectivism (group identity) and the only antipode to collectivism, and thus racism, is individualism.

 

* [Originally published in the July 1971 edition of The Objectivist, The Age of Envy appeared in the book The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, as well as the expanded version Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution.]

 

Related Reading:

 

Individualism vs. Collectivism: Our Future, Our Choice—Craig Biddle

 

The 'New American Socialists' Dilemma: The Declaration is as much anti-Socialist as anti-Slavery

 

The ‘1619 Project’ Fraud Begins its Poisonous Infiltration into American Politics

 

The Collectivist Left Appropriates an Inhumane Christian Doctrine to Obliterate Americanism

 

AMERICA: A RACIST NATION? BY ANDREW BERNSTEIN

 

Related Viewing:

John McWhorter: America Has Never Been Less Racist -- ReasonTV