From Commentary:
Not so the revolutionary movement, which uses postmodern epistemology to analyze American social conflict not in terms of individuals capable of choosing virtue or vice, but in terms of an oppressive system constructed to maintain white supremacy—a system in which every individual, without choice or exception, participates. For incrementalists, racism is a form of vice. For revolutionaries, racism is essentially a property of the environment, like electromagnetism or gravity.
The recent popularity of this analytical framework tracks the rise of Antiracist1 activist writers such as Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi. For several weeks after the gruesome killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in late May, DiAngelo’s White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Race topped nearly every bestseller list in the country, headlining “Antiracist education” curricula, with its peculiar toolkit of social analysis angling to replace incrementalist assumptions. Kendi’s 2019 bestseller How to Be an Antiracist, which shares DiAngelo’s understanding of what racism means and what “disrupting” it entails, has become nearly ubiquitous as well.
What these works (and a host of related projects such as the New York Times’ 1619 Project) have in common include fundamentally eccentric assumptions about knowledge, responsibility, and the possibility of progress and racial harmony in America. First, and perhaps most obvious, the revolutionary framework treats individuals not as entities accountable for their own actions but as mere participants in already-existing “systems” that undergird every action and interaction. In DiAngelo’s telling, “no one who is born into and raised in Western culture can escape being socialized to participate in racist relations.” You may think that because you harbor no bigotry in your heart you are immune from being so tarnished, but you would be wrong. “We must challenge the dominant conceptualization of racism as individual acts that only some bad individuals do, rather than as a system in which we are all implicated.” As White Fragility contends, there is no escaping racism in America, and any attempt to claim innocence is simply proof that you are too “fragile” to reckon with your predetermined role as a participant in a racist system.
Kendi, for his part, has made waves by arguing that everyone is racist—from Douglass himself to President Barack Obama and everyone in between. In a perverse twist on the Talmudic teaching that every generation that fails to rebuild the Temple is implicated in its destruction, Kendi leads the revolutionary charge that anyone not zealously dedicated to tearing down our system—constructed on white supremacy and concerned primarily with upholding it—is complicit in racism. The charge of racism becomes simultaneously mundane and vicious; to be a racist is unremarkable and inescapable yet still synonymous with complicity in horrific crimes. (Read more.)
1 comment:
People in general naturally tend to harbor animosity toward others who are different even if they are of the same race. I am white and there are whites I would rather not be with and Black people whom I highly respect.
Post a Comment