Jim Kalb on “Anti-racism” II

From Jim Kalb’s article Anti-racism:

We should start by noting the great strength of the objections to anti-racism. The enormous effort it demands has no obvious concrete justification. The condition of blacks is thought the strongest argument in its favor, but anti-racism has contributed to serious problems regarding civic culture and public order[14] without obviously helping blacks. On the whole, their economic situation was improving faster before equal opportunity and affirmative action requirements were imposed than after,[15] and the period in which those requirements were first adopted was the beginning of a catastrophic decline in non-economic aspects of black well-being — family structure, community, law-abidingness and so on.[16] In any event, blacks are now better represented in high-prestige professions than their measurable abilities would justify, so the common practical justifications for anti-racist measures seem questionable.[17]

On their face, such measures work against their own purposes. Affirmative action and other race-based transfers are supposed to undermine ethnic distinctions, but what powers them is unending resentment.[18] After a third of a century of effort on their behalf blacks, especially the educated, are more likely than ever to hate whites and white society.[19] The tendency is a natural one. Continuing failures show either a problem with blacks or the profound evil of whites, and egalitarian programs demand the latter interpretation.

Indeed, anti-racism requires anti-majority racism. An anti-racist ruling class must treat the majority as presumptively wrong. “Ingrained social stereotypes”–the culture and habits of the majority — must be discredited because their dominance puts minorities at a disadvantage. Since habits and culture are what make a people what it is, the things that make the majority a people must be attacked; the majority must be defined as racist, and therefore evil and unfit to rule or even exist.[20] “Racist” has the same function today that “nigger” once did: it makes a man less than human and so unfit for self-government.

Attempts to abolish deeply rooted human tendencies are necessarily tyrannical; “rule by the people” is absurd when a government that loses confidence in the people can dissolve it and form a new one. Such attempts inevitably fail, and succeed only in destroying traditional restraints. Attempts in Russia to abolish the profit motive ended, after unparalleled brutality and massacre, in lawless greed and mafia rule. It is not clear why attempts to abolish ethnicity should be more successful.

Rather than attempt a utopian transformation of human nature, it seems better to accept the distinctions men find important, and let them deal with them in customary ways that make sense to those involved; abuses and extreme cases can be dealt with as such. Things classified as racism — ethnic loyalty and dominance — are necessary features of social life. Something as closely related as ethnicity is to men’s habits, attitudes and loyalties is plainly relevant to participation in a common effort like carrying on a business.[21] The fact that men universally take ethnicity into account in choosing associates is the best possible evidence that it makes sense for them to do so.

Life worth living depends on culture, and culture on ethnicity. Without the common habits and understandings that constitute culture society would be a battleground of brutish asocial individuals. The seedbed for culture is the complex of prerational connections a people develops through long common history — in other words, ethnicity. While ethnicity and race are not the same, they cannot be altogether separated because both are consequences of a people’s long life in common. Since all actual cultures are tied to ethnicity, and therefore at least somewhat to race, to give culture free play is to permit race to have significance.

Ethnic culture cannot survive without preference for one’s own people and their ways, or without settings in which a particular ethnic people sets the tone. French culture could not exist if there were no setting anywhere dominated by Frenchmen. The relation between culture and power, like that between culture and race, is not simple, but it cannot be abolished altogether. Culture exists by being authoritative; men share a common culture who can rely on common values and habits and hold one another to shared standards. When reduced to private taste it is not culture at all. It requires at least local, cultural, and therefore ethnic, dominance.

Things that knit society together are therefore difficult to disentangle from implicit racial distinctions. Ethnic habits, loyalties and ideals order social life whether we like it or not. To forbid discrimination with respect to such things is to demand that things that are crucial to social life be ignored, a demand that cannot be satisfied. It is impossible to prevent the habits and loyalties of the majority from deeply affecting social life, putting some minorities at a disadvantage, without opposing to them other loyalties of equal strength backed by the power of the state — in effect, without continuous revolution from above backed by troops drawn from subordinate parts of society, rather in the manner of the Cultural Revolution in China.

Anti-racism is thus at odds with basic principles of human life. In practice, eradication of racial differentials requires destroying all cultures and thus all possibility of a tolerable way of life. Anti-racism is therefore blatantly unrealistic. Its lack of realism explains a great deal: as in other cases, refusal to face obvious features of human life leads to hysterical irrationality and the tendency to see profound evil everywhere, especially in the faces of one’s opponents

.

Jim Kalb on “Anti-Racism”

From Jim Kalb’s article Anti-racism:

“Racism is the worst of sins, the gravest of public dangers, the most repellent of spiritual disorders. Any taint of racism soils and discredits in all respects.”

Some such view is fundamental to public life today. The emphatic opposition to racism that is now obligatory gives the “race card” extraordinary potency.[1] If you are not part of the solution then simply by living your life from day to day you are participating in “institutional racism.”

The nature of anti-racism is rarely discussed analytically, so it appears to be less a matter of doctrine than feeling and general orientation. Nonetheless, as a view that dominates public policy it has definite content. As such, it holds that there is a definite thing called “racism,” backed by power and constituted by contempt and hatred for those who differ, but for which race relations would be harmonious if indeed differences were noted at all.

….

Unparalleled evil though it is thought to be, racism is seen everywhere, whether there is evidence for it or not.[8] As long as some groups are collectively unequal to others, the world is racist, and the harder it is to find an explanation that can be publicly accepted, the more fundamental and pervasive racism must be. Accusations of racism always stick, at least a little, and no matter how reckless or even cynical never hurt the accuser. Even false accusations can be valuable, because they draw attention to important issues.[9]

In current practice, anti-racism is aimed at whites. In their case, racism includes not only hatred and abuse, but any distrust of others, any special concern or preference for whites, any recognition of whites as a people. Anti-racism also imposes on whites an obligation to sacrifice their interests to those of nonwhites. If a white does something at odds with black interests or desires, for example if he fails sufficiently to favor “affirmative action,” he is racist or at best insensitive.[10] In contrast, public statements by blacks can be revoltingly bigoted without consequence.[11]

Permitting to some what is forbidden others seems to relativize racism and thus deny that it is ultimate pathological evil. It also suggests that anti-racism draws support from anti-white bigotry. The suggestion is correct.

While many think “anti-white bigotry” a paradox, elite contempt for nonelite whites is simply the contempt of an ascendant group for a group it has superseded and intends to keep subordinate. Most members of our ruling elites are white, but they identify themselves by ideology and class rather than race, and their rejection of racial identification is fundamental to their claim to power. By attacking whites as a group they identify themselves with the principle of rule now ascendant. Whites are thus not immune to racial targeting. In the case of immigration and affirmative action governing elites routinely override lopsided popular majorities that would protect whites from adverse treatment as whites.[12]