Modern Anti-Racism Is a Historical Overcorrection

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.—James Baldwin, Notes Of A Native Son (1955)

Our collective past, Baldwin argues, is carried over into the present through each moment of our lives and attempts to escape it only show its enduring weight.

This echoes a major theme of contemporary racial discourse: that our unwillingness to grapple with the brutal history of white racism and black subjugation in America is inextricably linked to racial inequality today. When commentators point to the steady decline in racist attitudes since the 1960s or the successes of a two-term black president, they often meet the rejoinder that the ongoing impacts of historical racism manifest as persistent racial disparities in group outcomes. History, according to the anti-racist narrative, is very much alive.

This was the thrust of a recent long essay in the New York Times magazine by 1619 Project founder, Nikole Hannah-Jones. Written in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests following the police killing of George Floyd, the piece—entitled “What Is Owed”—argues that now is the time to consider reimbursing black Americans for the harms wrought by historical white supremacy.

The essay reiterates the idea that the past is never really past when it comes to race in America and argues for the moral necessity of reparations to close the yawning racial wealth gap. Hannah-Jones guides us through the history of black oppression and white advantage—from the dawn of slavery to the failures of Reconstruction; from the birth of Jim Crow laws to the rise of ritualistic lynchings; from the exclusion of blacks from vital New Deal policies to the advent of discriminatory housing loans in the aftermath of the Great Migration—and shows that the compounding effects of all these phenomena effectively prevented blacks from accruing generational wealth, as their white counterparts were able to.


https://areomagazine.com/2020/07/22/modern-anti-racism-is-a-historical-overcorrection/


More to read on the link

Areo wrote:We can accept the reality of historical racism without creating an identity out of it that keeps us eternally suspicious of each other.

I disagree that modern anti-racism is an overcorrection.  While this article picks apart anti-racism, it really offers no substitute.  Without anti-racism, what is there to stop things like the murder of George Floyd?  This is the abyss of nothingness in which all RW fixes leave the (whatever) issue.  It’s the I don’t care, but I wanna appear to be working on it factor.

It seems that the main bone-to-pick with modern racism (in this article) lies in the “white guilt” that arises.  Some of us are waaaay beyond that sort of motive, and working very hard with the mechanics of the problem.

Nor do I think reparations is the answer.  How do you even appraise the compensation for a life lost, let alone the lives of a whole population?

The answer, as I say, lies in repairing the mechanics that lead to a racist society.  White guilt is simply navel watching (a newspaper term, when a reporter writes a piece on news gathering itself, he is watching his own navel).  White guilt is not productive, and must be bypassed where it occurs.   It is in the mechanics of reverse racism, not in cash reparations, that the remedy lies.  Give a man a fish, and he will feed his family for one day; teach a man to fish, and he will feed his family forever.

On “White Fragility”

A few thoughts on America’s smash-hit #1 guide to egghead racialism

A core principle of the academic movement that shot through elite schools in America since the early nineties was the view that individual rights, humanism, and the democratic process are all just stalking-horses for white supremacy. The concept, as articulated in books like former corporate consultant Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility (Amazon’s #1 seller!) reduces everything, even the smallest and most innocent human interactions, to racial power contests.

It’s been mind-boggling to watch White Fragility celebrated in recent weeks. When it surged past a Hunger Games book on bestseller lists, USA Today cheered, “American readers are more interested in combatting racism than in literary escapism.” When DiAngelo appeared on The Tonight Show, Jimmy Fallon gushed, “I know… everyone wants to talk to you right now!” White Fragility has been pitched as an uncontroversial road-map for fighting racism, at a time when after the murder of George Floyd Americans are suddenly (and appropriately) interested in doing just that. Except this isn’t a straightforward book about examining one’s own prejudices. Have the people hyping this impressively crazy book actually read it?

DiAngelo isn’t the first person to make a buck pushing tricked-up pseudo-intellectual horseshit as corporate wisdom, but she might be the first to do it selling Hitlerian race theory. White Fragility has a simple message: there is no such thing as a universal human experience, and we are defined not by our individual personalities or moral choices, but only by our racial category.

If your category is “white,” bad news: you have no identity apart from your participation in white supremacy (“Anti-blackness is foundational to our very identities… Whiteness has always been predicated on blackness”), which naturally means “a positive white identity is an impossible goal.”

DiAngelo instructs us there is nothing to be done here, except “strive to be less white.” To deny this theory, or to have the effrontery to sneak away from the tedium of DiAngelo’s lecturing – what she describes as “leaving the stress-inducing situation” – is to affirm her conception of white supremacy. This intellectual equivalent of the “ordeal by water” (if you float, you’re a witch) is orthodoxy across much of academia.

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/on-white-fragility

USA Today cheered, “American readers are more interested in combatting racism than in literary escapism.”

America is tired of it's racism, and the racists who move silently among us. It keeps popping up, and Americans are saying, enough already, fcs! Hence, the outrage we are seeing throughout America.