The Quiet Death Of Antiracism
At the beginning of last year, in a piece for The Atlantic, Nellie Bowles described the mood at a four-day antiracist cult…excuse me, Zoom seminar she attended in May of 2021.
It wasn’t great.
One participant admitted that she felt ashamed to be white and hoped she’d come back as a person of colour in her next life (don’t worry, she was harshly reprimanded by the group for “exoticising black people”).
Another confessed that knowing her “very existence perpetuated whiteness” made her wonder if the world would be better off without her. “The darkest place I go is thinking it would be better if I weren’t here. It would at least be one less person perpetuating these things,” she said.
And guest speaker, Robin DiAngelo, had an extended moment of crisis as she pondered if the phrase “Black Brit,” was offensive.
But Bowles’ key insight came during a different session called, “Foundations in Somatic Abolitionism,” where, the course facilitator (a man named Resmaa Menakem), drove home the importance of keeping “white bodies” separated from “bodies of culture,” with a vocalisation exercise:
…Menakem intoned, “All white bodies cause racialized stress and wounding to bodies of culture. Everybody say it. ‘All white bodies cause racialized stress and wounding to bodies of culture.’” We said it, over and over again. I collapsed into it, thinking: I am careless; I am selfish; I do cause harm.
The more we said it, the more it started to feel like a release. It felt so sad. But it also — and this seemed like a problem — felt good.
It’s hard to believe how much things have changed since those halcyon days of racialised brainwashing and suicidal white women.
Ibram X Kendi has gone from promising to “build the world anew,” with his Center for Antiracist Research to laying off over half his staff, failing to produce a single piece of meaningful research and having to answer pointed questions about what he did with the ~$55 million he received in funding.
Robin DiAngelo went from making $10,000 an hour for telling audiences that “racism is the water they’re swimming in,” to self-imposed exile after being tricked into paying a black stranger $30 in “reparations.”
And BLM went from riding a wave of international support and over $90 million in donations to being investigated by the IRS as their founders jumped ship (several of them stole millions of dollars first).
Today, almost all signs of the racial reckoning and the “antiracist” movement that followed it have vanished. So what did we gain from those years of racial consciousness and white guilt?
Well, we gained a comprehensive list of things that might be racist if you reach hard enough. Apple pie, birdwatching, computers, dentistry, environmentalism, fishing, gardening, hard work, ice skating, Jello, knitting, on and on. I’m guessing we’ve accounted for at least 85% of the alphabet at this point.
Thanks to scholars like Kendi, we have “antiracist” children’s books like Antiracist Baby and Goodnight Racism, that racist politicians can drag out anytime they feel like harassing black political nominees with dumb questions about whether babies can be racist.
And most important of all, we made some white people feel bad about themselves.
We hounded innocent white people for harmless gestures and got white students kicked out of college for three-second Snapchat videos, we got white women fired for an assortment of transgressions and destroyed family businesses over tweets their children wrote as teenagers.
Heck, we even managed to ruin a few black professors’ and teenagers’ lives too!
Weighed against that, who cares if police brutality is exactly as bad as it has been for the past ten years and race relations are worse than they’ve been for decades?
Who cares if words like “racism” and “white supremacy” have been rendered meaningless through over and mis-use?
Who cares if a bunch of petty, attention-seeking morons squandered one of the greatest opportunities for positive change in the history of civil rights?
But just in case we ever do get an opportunity like that again, allow me to offer a few suggestions.
You do not end racism by calling people “inhuman demons” or “malignant parasites” or even just “racist” based solely on the colour of their skin.
You do not end racism by reintroducing racial segregation in schools and public spaces.
You do not end racism by allowing people who are only interested in validating their insecurities and justifying their obsession with “race,” to hijack your movement.
Racism cannot be done well or kindly or in a way that promotes healing. It doesn’t matter which direction the racism goes or who gets to dole it out. There is not, nor will there ever be, an “antiracist” way to stigmatise people based on the colour of their skin.
Because that, for everybody taking notes, is what racism is.
If you’re the kind of white person who is “unable to hide [your] surprise that a black man is the school principal,” I can see the appeal of believing that racism isn’t a character flaw or a sign of stupidity, but a benign, inevitable consequence of having white skin.
If you’re one of the black people who was anointed as a guru, I can see how the sudden, unearned rush of power (not to mention the millions of dollars), might tempt you to turn yourself into a caricature of racial oppression.
But what I can’t understand is how anybody paying attention, anybody who actually cared, failed to see that this would end in disaster.
BLM-era antiracism didn’t fail (solely) because of the explosion in performative outrage and fanatical, cult-like bullying.
It failed because of the unyielding refusal to acknowledge that class has a far greater impact in the 2020s than “race,” (a fact that would have united millions of people behind a common goal instead of pointlessly dividing them over their skin tone).
It failed because it turned universal issues like police brutality and wealth inequality into divisive, racially-charged niches.
It failed because it was a lightly rebranded, pseudo-virtuous form of racism and a betrayal of everything “antiracism” is supposed to be.
But, of course, for many of these so-called antiracists, this was never about ending racism, it wasn’t about finishing the work Martin Luther King started, it certainly wasn’t about making progress or doing good.
It was about feeling good. And yes, it turns out that was a problem.
A therapist once told me that self-loathing and self-harm are both forms of a kind of narcissism. That really changed how i understood the world.
So it turns out that wallowing like a drunk in a pool of self loathing has a statute of limitations.