Ugly "Benevolent Racism" From The "Woke"
"Benevolent racism" is my term for the ugly, infantilizing, and ultimately highly racist directives from "Woke"-ville to treat people who are black as if they are incompetent and fragile children.
Glenn Loury has an absolutely stellar piece on this at Free Black Thought. An excerpt:
If we can't find some way of countering the underlying problematic ideological commitment to race as an essentialist category, we're in trouble. Martin Luther King had the right idea with colorblindness, yet today it's regarded as a microaggression to say one doesn't see color. Of course, it's impossible literally not to see color, but despite pressure from cultural elites, we needn't give it the overarching significance we now do. In fact, if we're going to make our experiment in democracy work, we mustn't give it such significance.What we must do instead is find the courage to rethink some of our basic conceptual social commitments. First--how's this for controversial?--I'm against Black Lives Matter as a political movement because it's a racially essentialist movement. This is not to cast aspersions--I just mean, literally, it essentializes blackness. We can't say "all lives matter" because those words now, in our current context, signify the speaker is anti-anti-racist. However, it's simply true: All lives do matter. Second, the notion that race is the central thing driving the disparities in outcomes that rightly concern us is wrong. Monocausal explanations of racial gaps don't hold up to scrutiny, and we should disabuse ourselves of the mistaken notion that they do. Third, our political institutions ought not to be so organized that people who are actors in them think of themselves fundamentally as representing races. That's racist; that's South Africa circa 1960. We should divest ourselves of such practices. So, what's the solution? Make the social contract better--for all Americans, because the lives of all our fellow citizens and countrymen matter. What we should be advocating for is support for families, truly good schools, and meaningful jobs. Secure these things and you'll solve the only part of the racial disparity problem that warrants government involvement.
There's another problem with our current, racially essentialist disparity fixation: You can't fetishize group disparity without implicitly indicting groups that were successful. If you insist on viewing social outcomes in terms of essentialist groups, in terms of racial differences in success, then you've got some losers, some "victims" of the system, who are on the bottom, and you've also got some winners, who are on the top. But what about, say, the Jews? How can you avoid antisemitism, given this way of construing group differences? If you think that blacks and Latinos are underrepresented, how do you avoid the conclusion that Jews are overrepresented? Similarly, how do you address black and Latino underrepresentation in STEM disciplines without seeking to reduce the number of qualified Asians in STEM? Those fractions have to add up to one. You can't have an under-representation without having an over-representation. Are the people who come out on top guilty of "privilege"? Did they "steal" their success? Do they owe their success to the denial of opportunity to someone else? Even if so here or there, is it universally true in every case? Is that a dictum that we have to adhere to? I would submit that this is the wrong way to think about social outcomes. You can see that it's the wrong way from the places this sort of thinking leads you.
Now, just because I've said that we need to get past the ideology of race, this shouldn't be construed as a denial that racism exists and can have an impact. There's value in asking people to put themselves in another person's shoes. So, if you're a white man in an organization that's mostly white and male, it's not unreasonable to ask you to imagine what it's like to be a nonwhite or nonmale member--the only black person in the department, or the only woman on the team. How do you think it feels to be judged by the fact of how you look, to have a bundle of stereotypical attributes imputed to you simply because of your skin color, gender, etc.? This is surely what people have in mind when they talk about "privilege." So, it's reasonable to encourage white people (and others in majority categories) to be aware of the fact that "whiteness" actually matters in certain circumstances and that nonwhite people in those circumstances may have to bear certain burdens or meet certain unique challenges.
Be this as it may, we often find a troubling emphasis on such notions as "white silence equals violence" or "check your privilege"--ideas that presume a certain black fragility, and which are predicated upon the idea that black people have to be treated with kid gloves in all situations, otherwise offense is given to them, discomfort is imposed upon them, and they are made to feel unwelcome. The new term of art is "inclusion and belonging," which implies we must ensure people feel that they belong. This infantilization of black people on the supposition that the slightest "off" word, the smallest gesture, might somehow threaten their very sense of wellbeing, is at the root of a lot of current emphasis on white privilege. But why should white people get to be the ones who are presumed resilient and impervious while black people are presumed fragile and vulnerable?
I absolutely love how he cites Havel's greengrocer:
In The Power of the Powerless, the Czech politician and playwright Vaclav Havel invites us to empathize with those "living within the lie" during the time of Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe. Envision the dilemma of a simple man, a grocer who every morning puts a sign in the window next to his tomatoes and his lettuce that says "Workers of the World Unite." Havel asks, why does this grocer do this when everyone knows it's a fraud? "Workers unite?" The party lies constantly. Everyone knows that the official ideology of the state is completely bankrupt, and yet this goes on for decades: people reproducing and reinforcing this idea, this lie, out of a desire merely to be left alone. So, we should ask ourselves, how many "Black Lives Matter" signs in shop windows reflect the same instinct as Havel's grocer? That's not anti-racism, genuine human empathy, or authentic concern for your fellow citizen, for your brother or sister. That's living within the lie. Just as there's a great tradition of black (and other nonwhite) literature that's sure to generate empathy in any attentive white reader, so black (and other nonwhite, not to mention white) readers may come to see the plight of not only their white fellow citizens but also themselves through the lens of Havel's Czech grocer. Empathy does and should work both ways, or better yet, every which way.
I have been the only white person at a black dentist's birthday party, at a black teacher's retirement party, the only white person at iranian gatherings. Was I oppressed or unsafe? please. The idea that minorities feel "unsafe" around whites is leading to the resegregation of colleges with even separate graduation ceremonies.
If whites only got their nice jobs by their whiteness, nothing would run, nothing would work. The few cases where the idiot boss' son is working somewhere and screws up everything shows what happens if this were how the world worked. When unions do force favoritism of their members who are allowed to slack off, prices double and it takes 20 years to dig a new NYC subway tunnel. Most whites studied hard to get where they are and work hard to stay there. They get their work done on time. They show up. They may work a second job. They do not have time to hang out with their peeps and go clubbing. On top of this, even whites can be poor or struggle.
cc at August 4, 2021 1:06 PM
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