It's Hard to See Racism When You're a Liberal
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
A few years ago, Newsweek's glossy
cover asked "Is Your Baby Racist?" The baby looking
back at supermarket shoppers, airline passengers
waiting for their flight and patients in the dental
office had blue eyes.
The labeling of racists as white
has itself become a racial stereotype. And it's not
an accidental stereotype.
Behind the left's support for affirmative action is
the belief that white racism is the only kind of
racism that exists. Black racism they insist is
really called "reverse racism" and is a myth made up
by white people.
It's not that the left believes that affirmative
action isn't racist. It's that it believes that
there is no such thing as racism against white
people. Like the Knockout Game or white students who
qualify on merit but can't get into college because
of racial diversity quotas; it’s an invalid
category. A myth.
And if it's a myth, then there's nothing wrong with
a little racial violence or a few racial
preferences.
Our system isn't immune to bouts of niche insanity.
A sizable portion of Hollywood believes that their
souls originated on another planet and that they
will eventually gain superpowers. Much of Washington
D.C. believes that money can be printed infinitely
with infinite economic benefits. And the academic
and non-profit establishment believes that
anti-white racism doesn't exist.
The left is delusional, but it isn't completely
insane. It doesn't deny that black hate crimes can
take place. It won't even deny the occasional act of
institutional discrimination. And that is where
sanity parts ways with insanity because the left
does not recognize racism except as a collective
phenomenon.
The debate over affirmative action is about the
collective and the individual.
"It cannot be entertained as a serious proposition
that all individuals of the same race think alike,"
Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the
Schuette v. BAMN decision that permits a ban on
racial affirmative action discrimination in
Michigan. But that's the exact premise that the left
operates under. Or rather it doesn't care whether
members of a race think alike. It still chooses to
address them as a group or not at all.
Racism, to the left, exists systemically. It exists
institutionally. It exists collectively, but not
individually.
All white people are racist. All black people are
victims of racism. Any events to the contrary are
exceptions to the rule. Racism can only exist one
way between the majority and the minority.
Anything else is a mythical 'reverse racism'.
Conservatives view people as individuals. Leftists
view them as parts of a system. To a conservative,
racism is something that happens between
individuals. To a leftist, it's the attribute of a
system. Trying to convince a leftist that black
racism exists or that affirmative action is racist
is like trying to convince him that some of the
cells in his body are plotting against him.
He doesn't see individuals, he sees a system.
The debate over affirmative action is really the
debate over whether we see people as individuals or
cells, whether the white and black students who want
to be seen as individuals will prevail, or whether
the totalitarian left with its insistence on viewing
them as differently colored marbles in a single
system will continue to get its way.
Similarly in politics, conservatives reach out to
people who agree with their policies, regardless of
race, leading to less diverse, but more
intellectually robust groups, while liberals form
racial coalitions. Liberals accuse conservatives of
racism because they assume that they are not a
coalition of individuals, but a racial collective,
just like them. The lack of individual conservative
racism occasionally registers, but is not processed
because only the system matters.
And yet racial healing hasn't happened in America on
a collective level. We haven't been readjusted as a
system. We have changed individually.
That is what the left, with its obsession with
systems, cannot see and cannot cope with it. The
Great Society failed miserably because we were a
great society all along. We weren't a great society
because we were perfect, but because we were
constantly striving to better ourselves as
individuals.
And it is this trait which
affirmative action and the left's collectivist view
undermines.
Systems don't reject racism. Individuals do.
It is this fundamental truth that Newsweek's
obsession with baby racism and the indoctrination of
white privilege are meant to combat. Their
collective message is that individuals are products
of the system, puppets of their biology, forever
damned by an original sin of racism that so
thoroughly pervades every part of their being and
mental state that they can never escape it.
Not unless the system changes.
That was the left's defeatist totalitarian response
to class. The failure of its systems of economic
management and the success of capitalism destroyed
its credibility on class. The idea that the working
class can never escape poverty under private
enterprise has been buried as thoroughly as the
statues of Marx and Lenin.
But instead of rethinking its paradigm, the left
substituted race for class. The working class could
succeed under private enterprise , but only as long
as it was white.
And that's still wrong.
Race, like class, is not a systemic problem. It's
not a problem of the system, but of the individual.
There is no single collective solution, only the
solutions that individuals find for themselves. We
are not a nation divided between black and white, or
between the even more absurd formulation of the
colorless whites and the 'people of color'.
We are individuals. We always were.
Affirmative action denies that race is an individual
experience. It denies that race is not the sum of
the individual. It denies the suffering of those who
are caught between the gears of the system because
they are members of the 'wrong race.'
It denies the individual. It denies his identity,
his worth and his agency. It puts the system above
the individual and takes away the rights of
everyone, of all races, genders and assorted
identities.
The left is obsessed with the 'whiteness' of the
system. Its obsession is not only racist, but it
replaces an open system in which people can change
and are changing... with a closed system under which
they cannot. This totalitarian aspect of the system
has been hidden under a sham of empowerment and the
rituals of victimization that reward those who play
the race card over those who try to do their best.
The system doesn't reward aspiration, it rewards
only outrage. It is interested only in promoting the
collective force that keeps its wheels turning, not
the individual counter-clockwise rotation of
dissent.
The white experience of black
racism is illegitimate because it turns 'against'
the system. And so it's a conversation that has to
be shut down and an experience that has to be
delegitimized with accusations of white privilege.
White privilege is an artifact of systemic thinking
that does not recognize individuals. It's an attack
by the political immune system of an ideology that
has absolutely no room for non-conforming
experiences.
What will determine the outcome of the affirmative
action debate and the larger debates over race and
class is whether we approach them as individuals or
as parts of a system. Americans resist being treated
like interchangeable parts of a system, but the
individual narratives that the left uses so
effectively are cover for systemic approaches and
systemic solutions.
The left has responded to institutionalized racism
with institutionalized racism until it became the
very racist institution that it was once fighting
against. Institutions don't fight racism, they
create it. The most compelling argument against the
left's collective racial policies has always been
the individual.
Organizations can create hate, but only individuals
can replace it with love.