Darwin Deez

“When you say black lives matter, that’s inherently racist,” Mr. Giuliani said in an appearance on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” – NYTimes.com

Racism is basically prejudice based on skin color. By this definition, black people in America can be racist towards white people. I think black people can sometimes be prejudiced, angry and/or unfair but I would love it if the word racist could be reserved for the institutionally and psychically ingrained disadvantages of being a person of color in this country. We fear young black men in hoodies consciously and unconsciously. Research consistently shows that lighter-skinned black people are viewed as more attractive, are more likely to be hired for jobs than their darker-skinned peers, and are more likely to receive lenient prison sentences. Racism is not just hatred. To fear a black stranger is racist. But how can a human being be blamed for feeling fear? How can he be blamed for feeling attraction?

Here’s my point: The word “racist” is a powerful word that invokes blame. No one in this country wants to be called racist. It’s a powerful word. As black people in America have struggled to rise out of poverty where they/we started just a few generations ago, the word “racist” has come to help with its righteous power to blame and shame the system and its enablers. It’s important to me not to take any of that power away from black people who are grappling with that system/culture. By logically reasoning our way to the thought that “black people can also be racist” I believe we subconsciously seek refuge from the real feelings the word threatens to bring up. By bringing ourselves back from the brink of real feelings, I believe we support the status quo more than we support black Americans in their fight against discrimination. I’m essentially saying that there is a racist way to use the word racist—that is, a way of defining the word which silently supports the discrimination that happens to black people—and there is a way of using the word that is in solidarity with our black brothers and sisters.

TL;DR: Please don’t call a black person racist. Say “prejudiced” instead.

This police brutality/killing shit is unjust. And by submitting to rhetoric that lets “racist” be a word that applies “just as much” to discrimination against white people, we are putting discrimination against blacks—a real problem—on the same level as a mostly theoretical and mostly irrelevant problem (in America), and thus subtly diminishing the importance of black issues, lessening the impact of the word, and making ourselves more comfortable caring less about it. “There was blame on both sides.” This kind of shit is setting us all back. Likewise, by conceiving of racism as a double-edged sword, we dull the only currently relevant edge of that sword, reducing its power to cut into society and make people think and feel about how our black brothers and sisters are doing. And how our black brothers are doing is important for all of us. When they do a little better, we all do a little better.

— substantially edited 5/1/2018 —

Since posting this originally on July 11, 2016, I’ve gotten really into Jordan Peterson who opposes social justice warriors and radical left on the grounds that identity politics is essentially a version of Marxism enabled by postmodern thought with the proletariat replaced by women, people of color and LGBTQs, and the bourgeoisie replaced by straight white men. Peterson sees Marxist thinking as leading inevitably toward the bloody hell of Solzhenitsyn’s account of Communist Russia—the worst possible thing that has ever happened or could happen (yes, worse than the holocaust). In response to Marxism and the social justice warriors who he sees espousing a version of it, Peterson paraphrases Orwell who said that Socialists didn’t so much love the poor as they hated the rich. (“Though seldom giving much evidence of affection for the exploited, he is perfectly capable of displaying hatred—a sort of queer, theoretical, in vacuo hatred—against the exploiters.”) SJWs sure do get angry and speak out against white privilege and the patriarchy, but is that culture of outrage adding to our lives and improving things? It’s clearly not, but then how do we improve things without the kind of hypersensitivity to words that I am myself advocating for here? Peterson’s answer is the individual. He argues that the divisibility of groups, what the left calls “intersectionality” (e.g., being both black and a woman), is basically infinite, and that for many reasons, the sovereign individual—not any group—is the place to look. So let’s all get our individual acts together (in terms of our careers and our inner lives and our families and our personal relationships) and stop mincing words. Since mincing words is useless.