The new religion of anti racism

[ExtraPlinky]

John McWhorter: the new anti-racism is a danger to us all

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/efdb9288-8b54-11ec-8038-0bd5b9e2c469?shareToken=65b635613cfd1d9d73a3ecea92fea2e0

I'm BAME - I agree with this especially given what I'm seeing in anti racism groups that have been hounding people on the internet.
It also has a direct parallel in the Rainbow Religion.

He is really good. Anyone who questions, in the forthright way John McWhorter does, this current idiocy, is likely to be GC. Wonderful, major intellect and should have lots of people who haven't paid much attention, on their toes questioning what is going on

Secure middle class black guy doesn't personally suffer too much under racism so doesn't give a shit about the people who do and thinks we should all just get over it. It's like Chris Rock all over again.

Interesting, OP. Thank you.

There's a conversation said to be had here, for sure. I think he's right about CRT being a religion but more importantly, how is it actually helping in making meaningful policy changes or in more practical ways, concrete ways? It's important to have voices like McWhorter, Thomas Chatterton Williams etc

I've seen him interviewed a couple of times, he came across very well. It's interesting when anti racists claim they want to amplify black voices and then when people like McWhorter speak they tell him to be quiet. I must buy his book Woke Racism.

Secure middle class black guy doesn't personally suffer too much under racism so doesn't give a shit about the people who do and thinks we should all just get over it.

As opposed to a bunch of secure middle class people who don't give a shit about people and make a career for themselves escalating racial tensions?

You think Kendi and DiAngelo have a better message than McWhorter and are improving anyone's lives, apart from "DEI" consultants?

This sounds like the equivalent of -
First-wave feminists fought for the right to vote.
Second-wave feminists fought for equal pay.
Feminists now are busy with cancel culture, microaggressions and hysteria over toilets.

It is simply someone else who does not see racism unless it is the BNP beating black people up.

And as an aside, listening to black people never meant listen to all black people and agree with all of them. It meant giving black people as much space and time to talk about their opinions and issues as white people. But individual black people, just like individual white people, can still say some bloody stupid things.

Do you genuinely think that not being racist is bad? Thanks.
Yours sincerely,
notmewithoutmycoffee123

And as an aside, listening to black people never meant listen to all black people and agree with all of them.

We should only listen to some black people then?

When did listening to someone's point of view automatically mean agreeing with them?

Interesting OP

I am also BAME and it feels like we are going backwards with CRT

Also see parallels with other movements

I do think we talk about a lot of US stuff here that shouldn't be relevant here but sadly people are sort of making it relevant.

@FOJN everyone should have a voice. But you can disagree with them. It is pretty obvious.

When I first saw the headline criticising anti-racism I thought here we go... But actually reading the article, he isn't saying racism isn't a problem - just that the way its being looked at/dealt with now causes more problems than it solves. In the same way if someone was criticising "feminism" I'd roll my eyes, but if someone was criticising aspects of 3rd wave/liberal feminism/ feminism that JUST centres on micro-aggressions, I would think they have a point. I mean feminism did lose its way a lot and I think we are all paying the price for it now. Maybe there is a wider point to make about the corporatisation of civil rights generally.

First-wave anti-racism fought slavery and segregation. Second-wave anti-racism, in the 1970s and 1980s, taught America that being racist is a moral flaw. The third wave teaches that racism is baked into the structure of society, making all whites who aren’t actively fighting it complicit in its persistence.
But.. you could say the same for feminism! Look, feminism AND racism can be seen as a theoretical idea by people who are nicely sorted and protected with good jobs and lots of validation, but you can’t tell me that racism ( and misogyny) are not “ baked into the structure of society”
Also, all these posters describing themselves as BAME..what do you mean? Never known a black person describe themselves as BAME, just haven’t.

Tammy "Also, all these posters describing themselves as BAME..what do you mean? Never known a black person describe themselves as BAME, just haven’t."

In my experience this falls into two categories

1. describing myself in that way in some god awful work meeting because I'm supposed to

2. describing myself that way to preserve online anonymity but make it clear what context I'm approaching the debate from.

@TammyOne I don't want to detract too much from the conversation but personally I DO say the same thing about third wave feminism. I am not saying it was all bad, but a lot of it has led directly to where we are now. In retrospect empowering ourselves by taking all out clothes off and looking at how the patriarchy hurt men (which ironically men hated) and pretending there was no physical difference between men and women didn't work out so well

@EmmaH2022

Tammy "Also, all these posters describing themselves as BAME..what do you mean? Never known a black person describe themselves as BAME, just haven’t."

In my experience this falls into two categories

1. describing myself in that way in some god awful work meeting because I'm supposed to

2. describing myself that way to preserve online anonymity but make it clear what context I'm approaching the debate from.

Yes exactly.

I like McWhorter and the stuff he talks about is part and parcel with gender ideology - it's all part of the same intellectual framework. As is a lot of feminist theory. It all needs to be taken apart. It's all so counter-productive.

One of the things he talks about pretty often s that this ideology is basically a kind of race essentialism, that looks at non-whites in a patronizing and ultimately degrading way. And will have long term negative effects for the groups concerned if it prevails. To claim he's just trying to be controversial is very unfair, I get the sense he finds it really upsetting, not at all the performative crap from people like DiAngelo.

personally I DO say the same thing about third wave feminism. I am not saying it was all bad, but a lot of it has led directly to where we are now. In retrospect empowering ourselves by taking all out clothes off and looking at how the patriarchy hurt men
To be honest I’m not well read about 3rd wave feminism - I remember the whole laddette thing if that’s what you mean- but I am really making a parallel between the idea of racism and sexism both being “ baked in”. I think that’s true, and I also think some white people love to latch on to a black man saying, essentially, that racism isn’t really that bad anymore and that white people aren’t collectively to blame. Much like when a women gets up and says she’s not a feminist, or feminism harms women and a load of men hail her as a heroine, when really she is one woman with her own agenda.

I can see the parallels that’s all.

Are “ non- whites” like “ non-men”?

@TammyOne

Are “ non- whites” like “ non-men”?

Goodness knows. But under the new anti-racism, that is the dividing line - whiteness vs everything that is not white. Hence the desire for acronyms that try and team up everyone else together. I suppose in a way they are similar to the ever expanding LGB acronym, and perhaps that's part of the purpose, a kind of forced teaming.

McWhorter's argument against the current anti-racist movement is in part that it is itself racist, so I don't know that it's fair to say that he doesn't care about racism. Though you're right, he doesn't think it's a good or true thing to implicate every white person as a racist or supporter of racism as people like DiAngelo do.

I see the anti crt/woke movement as being of the same cloth as anti gender critical/anti feminist. Both want to cancel ideas/books that privileged people find uncomfortable. Both conflate being impacted by structural oppression as being the same as being fundamentally weaker. Both think that the way to remove discrimination is to pretend it doesn't exist.

I do think we talk about a lot of US stuff here that shouldn't be relevant here but sadly people are sort of making it relevant.

Emma, I think one of the issues is that what's going on in the US travels over here and CRT has travelled and captured our institutions, even though it shouldn't. Often academics looking for a new buzz because that old Marx stuff is just so yesterday.

@highame

I do think we talk about a lot of US stuff here that shouldn't be relevant here but sadly people are sort of making it relevant.

Emma, I think one of the issues is that what's going on in the US travels over here and CRT has travelled and captured our institutions, even though it shouldn't. Often academics looking for a new buzz because that old Marx stuff is just so yesterday.

I agree with Emma that a fair amount of stuff travels but not well because it's from a very different context and it's an uneasy transplant.

The US assumes that the UK has a fair amount of the discriminatory practices they do for a number of groups: the UK doesn't. We have functional employment law and the EHRC as well as the NHS and other substantial differences.

I agree with Tammy that racism and sexism are baked into a number of systems. and structures that affect people's every day lives and opportunities. We need UK-based and influenced conversations about addressing expressions of these problems in the UK—not US frameworks for addressing US problems.

My DH recently left his former employer. He found another excuse to do it, but in essence he'd identified his former employer as a racist organisation. He thought it best not to tell them he was leaving for that reason, as it makes getting a reference a bit awkward!

He's implacably opposed to racial segregation, and yet that was what his former employer was instigating, using what seems to be the modern term for old, established racism; "affinity groups". What that basically meant was that black people (not those of asian or even South American descent, who are judged as being 'white adjacent') were-to-be-placed together in their own office space, on the grounds that they were better off working amongst their own racial group. That meant physically moving them from desks if they were working in the office, separating them from the teams they were embedded-in. As-it-is most are still WFH, and the impact hadn't fully hit home.

It did with a few though, and every single one objected and one has resigned and is due to leave at the end-of-the-month (and likely with a financial settlement to keep them quiet). My DH left the month before.

Who is driving this? Well, it isn't the black employees and contractors, that's for sure. Rather it's the enthusiastic 'anti-racists' in the firm, particularly in its diversity team, who seem to have collectively decided (and are being advised by an external consultant) that Alabama Governor George Wallace was on to the right thing, and black people have to be segregated from everyone else, apparently for their own good, it having been determined that working with white and 'white-adjacent' fellow employees is harmful for them. CRT has been adopted wholesale, together with pronouns in email signatures.

The firm tries to be seen as an anti-racist institution but it has inadvertently become racist to a toxic degree.

I think the problem is racism, but the fix definitely isn't CRT. If anything that's making things worse, and it's allowing racist structures - like racial segregation - to be re-enabled, just with different terms (like "affinity groups").

CRT seems more focused on creating racial division and distress, whilst trying to infantilize black people in a fashion they invariably don't or won't, accept. I'm sure that CRT proponents genuinely believe that they are pursuing a worthy cause, but it isn't clear yet how reintroducing racial segregation gets us to a good place.

There's some truth to the idea that transplanting things from the US doesn't work because of a different history, but to some extent that accepts the idea that this stuff is really ok in the US or does reflect the situation there.

A lot of what McWhorter and others who take the same view are saying is that no, it isn't ok there, and it doesn't really reflect their history. A significant part of the argument is that this movement is not only overtly anti-historical, for example the 1619 project, but that it is naive or dishonest about current circumstances as well.

He mentioned in one of his talks with Glen Lowery a few weeks ago something written by Andrew Sullivan about the way that this movement now wants to try and stitch together quite disparate groups, under titles like "black and brown" or BIPOC. What Sullivan was saying is that due to immigration in recent decades in the US, there is no longer a fairly simple cultural landscape of disadvantaged blacks and hispanics and advantaged whites. This has already begun to change because of an increasing black and hispanic middle class, but there have also been huge influxes of immigrant groups who are certainly not white, but also do not have the same kinds of demographic profiles of older minorities - their children are often high achievers in school for example. Some are very successful in business. Etc.

But this doesn't fit well with more simplistic anti-racism narratives in the US any more than it does in the UK.