Reverse Racism

Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X Kendi are having their fifteen minutes of fame. The sooner it’s over, the better we will all be.

DiAngelo is a race hustler, a guilt tripper, who wrote a best selling book and who offers group therapy to corporations who want their staff to get in touch with their racist feelings. And then to do penance.

Commenting on the two racism hustlers, Anthony Daniels writes in The New Criterion that the DiAngelo approach resembles nothing, if not psychoanalysis. This merits inclusion on this blog:

After thirty years of constant work of supposedly anti-racist training, she confesses—like the tearful Jimmy Swaggart—to being still guilty of racism herself, promising to reform, although reform is ex hypothesi impossible because racism is in her society’s dna, as it were. One is reminded of the type of psychoanalysis which after thirty years of hourly sessions four times a week fails to get to the root of the analysand’s problem, let alone solve it, because it doesn’t even know what the problem is. But failure is also an opportunity, because, like psychoanalysis, the more anti-racist training fails, the more it is needed. DiAngelo, all credit to her, has found an economic niche for herself for the rest of her life. One has a sneaking admiration for such entrepreneurs. They are the asset-strippers of the soul.

For his part Kendi teaches at Boston University. He has written a best selling book and has received a generous gift from Jack Dorsey, of Twitter fame.

I have not read his book. Daniels has. From his description we would have to conclude that Kendi’s career, such as it is, derives from what used to be called reverse racism. In a world where people were judged on their merits he would probably not be a tenured professor at Boston University. If that persuades him that we are all racists, we must conclude that he feels like an imposter and does not want anyone to find out the truth.

Being incapable of serious thought Kendi believes that once we eliminate the last vestiges of bigotry all of society’s benefits will be distributed proportionally. This is an absurd notion, but one must admit that most of the anti-racist crowd really believes that racism is the cause of underperformance and overperformance of certain ethnic groups.

Proportionality has never happened in the history of the human species, but it does allow Kendi, the beneficiary of reverse racism, to believe that white people are at fault for every ill that has ever happened to every non-white in the history of the world.

Anyway, Daniels makes this telling observation:

He is, however, consistent in one great error throughout his book: he does not distinguish inequity from inequality. He never uses the latter word. He does not appear to understand there could be no greater inequity than equality in a world of effort or lack of it. He believes that all differences in outcome between groups can be the result only of prejudice and discrimination, and that if the latter were removed the former would disappear. Nor does he recognize, even faintly, that to bring about the equality between groups that he believes is the only equitable arrangement for society would require a totalitarian regime that would make North Korea seem like a libertarian’s dream.

As for serious thinking, has anyone noticed that, while it is commonplace to classify blacks as people of color, strictly speaking, black is not a color. It is the absence of color. It’s lucky that we do not want to speak strictly about such matters.