Racist Essentialism

The Tower of Babel

Editor's Note: Today's article is paywalled, as a thank you to my paid subscribers (and as an invitation to join them, of course - I love doing this but it’s an investment of both time and money). Long-time subscribers know that I'll post one or two such every month. Fret not, new subscribers, the large majority of what I publish will continue to be free.

What's behind the wall? How race essentialism produced the likes of Claudine Gay, and is itself rooted in racism against blacks.

At the heart of our present-day culture wars, as deep as the broad-brush oppressor-oppressed dualism, is the message that the only way to address racism in society is to go with it. That discriminating against people based on the color of their skin is so deeply ingrained in our culture that the only remedy is a counterweight. Like the stack of steel plates that offset the weight of the elevator you rode to your office (when going to the office was still a thing), the only way to lift blacks up from the depths of oppression is to embrace the blackness. All us YTs (that's "whiteys," FYI) need to do our part, to give preferential treatment to PoC (People of Color), in order to level out the racism that is so pervasive as to be impossible to eradicate.

This is "race essentialism."

Its advocates and hawkers have hit upon a rather ingenious angle here. By accusing society as a whole, it transcends the individual, so that none of us can claim "I am not racist therefore I don't have to be anti-racist." It subordinates the individual, nullifying Martin Luther King's "content of their character" desire. It absolves the accusers of having to prove someone is racist, by socializing racism itself. It stifles dissent - if you take issue with it, you are a racist. It relegates racism to an irrefutable subconsciousness. It demands tribal loyalty and compliance: whites must "act white" in placing themselves below PoC in all matters, and blacks must "act black" in demanding and upholding race essentialism. If blacks stray off the plantation, they are excoriated as Uncle Toms and accused of "multiracial whiteness" or some such.

You get the idea.

The worst part of all this garbage is that it's supposed to be forever. That this isn't a temporary counterweight intended to accelerate the flattening of the grievance hierarchy or the achievement of a color-blind society. No, cultural color blindness has itself been declared racist, and we are warned that anyone who claims it is dog-whistling and defending his or her own deep-seated bigotries.

Think I'm kidding? A smattering of headlines:

Colorblindness: the New Racism?
Color-Blindness Perpetuates Structural Racism
Color Blindness Is Counterproductive
Why saying “I don't see race at all” just makes racism worse

I get some of the arguments, and I do hear the complaints that there is too much Eurocentrism in the teaching of history, in medicine, and so forth. But the essentialist path is fraught with pitfalls and a recipe for cultural fracture. It is guaranteed to breed resentment and widen rather than close the gaps between the races. It is an ideology of division.

And, at its heart, it insults and diminishes PoC.

Once the fanatics got a hold of it (which was pretty much from Day 1 - essentialism was ideated by fanatics), it became a cudgel with which to beat down all but their own... and as recent events show us, a way to excuse bad behaviors and inadequacies within their ranks.

Like teachers' unions protecting abusers and kid touchers, like law enforcement's "blue wall of silence" protecting the bad cops among their ranks, like politicians circling the wagons around the true derelicts in their parties, the race essentialists insist that expecting traditional standards of conduct from PoC is racist. Thus, expecting blacks to be on time is racist. Thus, Claudine Gay's serial plagiarism must not be punished. Thus, expectations of professionalism are rooted in white supremacy.

Again, this is what happens when fanatics are given free rein. We are at a point where any expectation of behavior that has been around a while is presumptively racist. We can look back at the ebonics movement as a cultural marker. The term was coined in the early 70s, was rebranded as AAVE (African American Vernacular English) in the mid-90s, and insisted that teaching black kids textbook English grammar and diction was culturally repressive. Millions of immigrants who came to the US across the past couple centuries from non-English-speaking nations found success via learning America's primary language, but that model, being long-standing, is as I noted above presumptively racist, we are to conclude. The story of Babel serves not just as a warning against hubris (though the essentialists should heed it) but as an example of what happens when the people in a society cannot communicate with each other.

What are we to make of the idea that born-in-America black kids mustn't be taught to speak the language in the fashion that other English speakers do? They want us to believe that expecting people to speak per textbook is racist, but aren't they actually telling us that it's too big a demand to make of them? The same goes for reducing educational standards and eliminating proficiency tests in primary and secondary education. Isn't that also a message that they consider black kids incapable of meeting those standards and passing those tests? I've written endlessly here about how public education has failed poor minority kids, but when the race essentialists refuse to acknowledge the system's flaws, they are left with claiming that the tests white kids have long been expected to pass are...

Too hard? Too biased?

Must be biased, because "too hard" would imply that black kids are collectively inferior. As if mathematics can be racist.

Oh, wait... the essentialists have come up with ways to accuse math of racism.

Read all this essentialism crap with the jaundiced eye it deserves and you can easily conclude that its creators, in lowering standards and expectations for blacks, are themselves the real racists. The retort will be to accuse anyone who reached this conclusion of racism, but that's their rote copout and we can ignore it.

The only way forward if one embraces an essentialism viewpoint is separatism, a "new segregation" where PoC exclude whites, and whites are told to go sit in a corner and contemplate the sins of other whites that required their personal penance. This isn't going to fly, and it isn't going to fix anything. All it's going to do is what progressivism has been doing to blacks since the 1960s: put them in a state of permanent dependence. Reinforce the idea that they cannot succeed, because the system won't let them. Tell them that any failure is someone else's fault, which will breed resentment.

The only winners of race essentialism are those at the top of the heap. The Claudine Gays, who got where they are without having to do the work expected of others. The Ibram X. Kendis and Nikole Hannah-Joneses, who peddle racism to an adoring crowd of self-loathers. Like socialism, essentialism in practice disproportionately and unjustly benefits a few at the great expense of society as a whole. It's a ruinous idea, and its peddlers are more toxic and destructive than any white backwoods racist can be. Good people shun and marginalize the white racist, but they are expected to worship the essentialist.

Once again, I am back to the libertarian ethos. Treat every person with an equal baseline of respect - and expectation. Judge them by their individual words and deeds - by the content of their character. Do not lay upon them any historical guilt, any transgressions by someone other than themselves. Be aware of past and present racism, but assign it to individuals - and, where appropriate, to a proper interpretation of “systemic,” as in laws themselves (e.g Jim Crow) rather than some nebulous and eye-of-the-beholder cultural claims.

This is the only way to achieve a harmonious and unified culture. Everything else divides, and division leads to destruction.