The View of Race Held by Many Progressive Academics is Broken

Colorblindness is good, actually

I was recently in one of my classes, a class filled with people with quite a progressive view on race, when an interesting subject came up. Suppose a black person doesn’t want to go into a bar because it has too many white people: would that be racist? Literally everyone in the class except me agreed that that wouldn’t be racist and in fact would be perfectly okay.

It was also agreed by everyone that if a white person refused to go into a bar because there were too many black people, that would of course be racist. No one seemed troubled by this asymmetry.

One person helpfully explained that in a bar full of white people, there are probably some racists, and so a black person has a legitimate fear of going into a bar with a lot of white people. In contrast, a white person has no legitimate fear of going into a bar with black people. The idea that one should be more afraid of crimes from white people than black people, when black people commit way more crime, is a bit absurd. Furthermore, no one has any significant risk of being the victim of crime just from going into a bar.

Another person explained that black people couldn’t be racist because racism is power plus prejudice, and has to do purely with institutional dynamics. Therefore, because black people lack power as a group, they can’t be racist against white people. Lots of others nodded along in agreement.

But this claim is totally ridiculous. Suppose a black person goes up to a white person and shoots them. When asked why they did it they say “I have a strong prejudice against white people which makes me want to harm them. I judge them not based on the content of their character or even based on their history of institutional oppression. I judge them based entirely on the color of their skin. If that guy had been black, I’d have given him 100,000 dollars, but purely because of the color of his skin, I decided to kill him.”

Anyone who is speaking English rather than politically correct bullshit speak would say that this person is being racist. Yet on this definition, this person wouldn’t be racist, for black people can’t be racist. This is because terms like racist have lost their meaning and are basically terms that progressive people throw at things that deviate from their agenda. As Scott Alexander says:

And so we return to my claim from earlier:

I think there is a strain of the social justice movement which is entirely about abusing the ability to tar people with extremely dangerous labels that they are not allowed to deny, in order to further their political goals.

If racism school dot tumblr dot com and the rest of the social justice community are right, “racism” and “privilege” and all the others are innocent and totally non-insulting words that simply point out some things that many people are doing and should try to avoid.

If I am right, “racism” and “privilege” and all the others are exactly what everyone loudly insists they are not – weapons – and weapons all the more powerful for the fact that you are not allowed to describe them as such or try to defend against them. The social justice movement is the mad scientist sitting at the control panel ready to direct them at whomever she chooses. Get hit, and you are marked as a terrible person who has no right to have an opinion and who deserves the same utter ruin and universal scorn as Donald Sterling. Appease the mad scientist by doing everything she wants, and you will be passed over in favor of the poor shmuck to your right and live to see another day. Because the power of the social justice movement derives from their control over these weapons, their highest priority should be to protect them, refine them, and most of all prevent them from falling into enemy hands.

If racism school dot tumblr dot com is right, people’s response to words like “racism” and “privilege” should be accepting them as a useful part of communication that can if needed also be done with other words. No one need worry too much about their definitions except insofar as it is unclear what someone meant to say. No one need worry about whether the words are used to describe them personally, except insofar as their use reveals states of the world which are independent of the words used.

If I am right, then people’s response to these words should be a frantic game of hot potato where they attack like a cornered animal against anyone who tries to use the words on them, desperately try to throw them at somebody else instead, and dispute the definitions like their lives depend on it.

And I know that social justice people like to mock straight white men for behaving in exactly that way, but man, we’re just following your lead here.

Suppose the government puts a certain drug in the water supply, saying it makes people kinder and more aware of other people’s problems and has no detrimental effects whatsoever. A couple of conspiracy nuts say it makes your fingers fall off one by one, but the government says that’s ridiculous, it’s just about being more sensitive to other people’s problems which of course no one can object to. However, government employees are all observed drinking bottled water exclusively, and if anyone suggests that government employees might also want to take the completely innocuous drug and become kinder, they freak out and call you a terrorist and a shitlord and say they hope you die. If by chance you manage to slip a little bit of tap water into a government employee’s drink, and he finds out about it, he runs around shrieking like a banshee and occasionally yelling “AAAAAAH! MY FINGERS! MY PRECIOUS FINGERS!”

At some point you might start to wonder whether the government was being entirely honest with you.

This is the current state of my relationship with social justice.

Yet why is it that this has arisen? It doesn’t apply to other words. Progressives don’t just go around calling conservatives rapists, before clarifying that a rapist is really just someone who uses their power to void the rights of women, so really all pro-life people are rapists. They don’t say “black people can’t be rapists because they lack system power.” So why do they do this with social justice words?

I think this has a lot to do with the power of tribalism. When black people express racist but still left-wing views of race, progressives don’t want to condemn them—they’re part of the same tribe. So as a result, left-wingers go through elaborate hoops to explain why black people saying things about race that seem racist aren’t really racist.

They say racism is power plus prejudice. So you ask them: could a white person with no power, say a terminally ill man in middle America with no money who is addicted to opioids be racist to Obama who has more power? They say no because racism has to do not with the amount of power you have but with the amount of power of your racial group. So you ask them: suppose that a poor native American killed a black person because they were black. Would that be racist? They add another epicycle, you pose another challenge, and the epicycle cycle continues to cycle.

What’s wrong with the standard color-blind view of race? There’s good evidence that excessive focus on race makes people more racist (Coleman Hughes argues for this at some length in his book). If we want people to eventually see race the way we currently see, say, being left-handed, the solution is to not talk about it endlessly. And it’s certainly to avoid drawing arbitrary distinctions so that we can make race a central and important part of modern life, so that discussions about race occur frequently, and each time one happens, one must consider the race of the speaker.

If, however, progressives are going to endlessly fixate on race, they’ll have to do a better job of it. The power + privilege definition of racism is obviously absurd, as even conservative political pundits are able to easily recognize. Definitions should accord with how people use terms, rather than obviously gerrymandered definitions to meet one’s political agenda.