Is America’s 150-Year Obsession with Race Mythology Finally Flaming Out?
Article by Clint Fargeau in "RedState"
Is today’s racial inflammation in the United States the crisis before the fever breaks?
My Magic 8-Ball says, “Signs point to yes.” One can only hope. What a blessing if, after 150 years, America’s bankrupt race mythology finally collapsed under its own weight and contradictions.
Progressives have depended on factitious racial categories since the Civil War. In the late 1800s, the newly minted progressive Democrats used pseudo-Darwinian racial theories to justify second-class status for Americans of African descent–especially freed slaves–whom they painted as evolutionarily unfit to shoulder the responsibilities of citizenship in a liberal democracy.
Fast forward 80 years or so, and the Nazis had saddled progressive racial theorizing with a bad odor. In spite of this setback, progressives were unready to give up on their “modern” racial sorting system. Rather than dump the whole mess and embrace the Lincolnian precept that all men are created equal–full stop–progressives pivoted to a new plan. To wit, the federal government should embrace socio-racial legal categories to *fix* local circumstances for Americans of African descent. Racial separation and privileges were maintained in law, but with a righteous odor restored.
This grand pivot culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a dog’s breakfast that supercharged the administrative state; put the federal courts in the lawmaking business; hobbled local autonomy not just in the Southern U.S. but everywhere; turned countless Americans into impoverished wards of the federal government; and effectively seeded a new constitution that overgrew the first Constitution like ivy on a brick wall.
And now here we are.
Activists obsessed with race have transformed into the enemy they purportedly despise. They are demanding widespread unequal treatment of Americans, including re-segregation, more affirmative discrimination, “reparations”–a welfare payment only for Americans of African descent–and race-specific speech restrictions.
A YouTube comedian captured the towering absurdity in all this with a fictional conversation between a woke “anti-racist” and a white supremacist, who discover they hold virtually the same opinions about socio-racial engineering. If you haven’t had your laugh today, don’t miss this
It’s
funny because it’s true. Woke race hustlers are recylcing the
storylines of early-20th-century racial theorists. Only now, white
people are genetically inferior. White people are incapable of
participating fully in liberal democracy. White people are by nature a
violent race who will murder and destroy if not suppressed and
reeducated. Present-day race hustlers have merely dusted off and
repurposed old racial canards.
For their part, conservatives have adopted progressives’ fictive racial categories without realizing their mistake. Simplistic categories like “white,” “black,” and “Asian” lack all precision and objectivity, scientific or otherwise. The groundless and overbroad racial terms conservatives reference on a daily basis–even when expressed in the latest installment of politically correct language–only serve to derail intelligent, productive conversation.
As soon as expansive racial terms make an entrance, discussion crumbles into misunderstanding and perilous bickering over definitions. This perennial breakdown of communication is not a bug but a feature of factitious racial categories.
The problem was brought home to me in an overheard conversation between an American and a visiting Nigerian. The American referred to the Nigerian as “black,” and the Nigerian lost no time correcting him:
“I am not ‘black.’ I am NIGERIAN.”
The Nigerian explained that he held nothing in common with Americans of African descent except approximate skin tone–no language, no culture, no tastes, no habits, no history, no mores, no worldview. He pointed out that lumping a Nigerian together with “black” Americans made about as much sense as associating pale-pink Americans with Russians living in Moscow.
Of course the Nigerian was correct. His American interlocutor had developed the habit of relying on racial generalizations to prop up “enlightened” but dubious political beliefs. In the process, the American fell into speaking nonsense–nonsense that was obvious to a foreigner not indoctrinated in American mythology of race.
Such exchanges occur more and more frequently these days. Events are forcing Americans to confront the lack of objectivity and substance in their inherited racial mythology. The reductive groupings bequeathed to us by progressives fail miserably as descriptors of reality. They lead to circular reasoning and cascading ambiguity. The more charged and racialized the public debate becomes, the less grounded it is in the world. Thus we get headlines like:
Associated Press Refuses to Capitalize ‘White’ while Still Capitalizing ‘Black’
The silliness of both the AP’s style choice and the ensuing criticism of that choice becomes apparent when unfamiliar but equivalent terms are substituted:
Associated Press Refuses to Capitalize ‘Elf’ While Still Capitalizing ‘Hobbit’
As odd as it may strike Americans accustomed to racialized thinking, “whites” and “blacks” are hardly more meaningful categories than “elves” and “hobbits.” To be sure, some folks identify themselves as “black” or “white”; but recall that some Comic-Con attendees choose to identify themselves as elves and hobbits, too.
The racial sorting project is spinning from ‘distasteful’ into ‘preposterous’. Progressive racialists have sapped race categories of even the pittance they used to communicate–relative lightness or darkness of skin tone. Light-skinned attention seekers in the mold of Rachel Dolezal and Shaun King style themselves “black,” while others of African decent are pronounced “not really black” because they happen to embrace traditional American culture or conservative politics.
Meanwhile, intellectuals in social science have fabricated pseudo-platonic forms from imaginary racial categories–barren mega-abstractions like “whiteness” and “Blackness” (to abide by the AP guidelines).
Such naked idiocy cannot endure forever. Progressive racial theorists have developed into parodies of themselves. Even the man on the street grasps that something doesn’t add up. He senses that–like debates about the inhabitants of Middle Earth–racial mythology amounts to exhausting and fruitless word games.
A loss of faith in racial sorting signals catastrophe for progressive leaders and organizations who depend on manufactured racial conflict to amass attention, power, and funding. As Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi observes:
The people who run this country have run out of workable myths with which to distract the public, and in a moment of extreme crisis have chosen to stoke civil war and defame the rest of us – black and white – rather than admit to a generation of corruption, betrayal, and mismanagement.
Racial categories and hierarchies are articles of progressive faith and thought control. Questioning their existence tears a hole in woke reality and threatens the entire grievance-industrial complex–the burgeoning pyramid schemes of campus diversity czars, white-privilege instructors, witch-smellers of “implicit racism,” and politicians riding the wave of racial demagoguery.
Those who wish to champion the old Lincolnian ideal of universal equality for all Americans might begin by eschewing progressive racial categories entirely. Engaging with silly assertions like “America is infected with systemic anti-black racism ” validates the underlying psychosis that “white” and “black” describe something meaningful about individuals.
To pierce the trance, one might ask instead: “What makes you think that categories like ‘white’ and ‘black’ exist or have any utility outside your overheated imagination?”
https://www.redstate.com/diary/clint-fargeau/2020/07/26/972801/
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