Kevin Williamson is not an honest person. At least he is not an honest writer, which does not make him extraordinary. Honestly in professional writing is a sure way to become an amateur writer. Publications like National Review are hoping to persuade people to a particular position. They are most concerned with rich people, who give them money for writing the things rich people like reading. As a result, the writers there are forced to make up nonsense like this.

A lefty friend once asked me whether I thought I held any subconsciously racist opinions. One should always be on the lookout for one’s own intellectual and moral defects, so I’ve been thinking about it, and I have a possible candidate: As I suggest in my NRO piece today, “Asian-American” seems to me to be an obviously nonsensical category, because it includes people of origins ranging from Pakistani to Japanese. But “African-American” has never seemed immediately nonsensical to me in the same way. This may be because I know a little bit more about Asia than I do about Africa, or it may be because Indians and Koreans strike my white American eye as obviously and visibly different in a way that is not true of members of many African groups. It should go without saying that I detest racism, and it is also the case that racial and ethnic feeling, even of the benign, St. Patrick’s Day variety, seems to me atavistic and primitive. My self-analysis here is not meant to be taken as normative, but rather an examination of the semi-subconscious impressions of what I believe to be a fairly typical middle-class white guy from Texas.

The new religion has made race awareness into mortal moral sin. if you notice anything about racial or ethnic differences, even the most innocuous things, you will be marked as a racist, and no one wants that. The ridiculous bit of squid ink in the first paragraph is a good example. It is absurd to think that Kevin Williamson is losing any sleep over his “subconscious racism.” In fact, even people who are dedicated anti-racists are not worrying about their subconscious racism. It’s just an act.

While I don’t buy the race-as-a-social-construct position entirely, there is a great deal of cultural specificity to racial perception. Surely I am not the only white American guy in the history of the world to meet a Somali or an Ethiopian and have his brain simultaneously register “black” and “not black.” And I believe that that is the real psychological fault line for white Americans: not white vs. not-white but black vs. not-black. Ethiopia, Wikipedia informs me, recognizes more than 80 different ethnic groups on its census and, for whatever reason, members of some of those groups only push some of the buttons of perception associated in my particular brain with “black.” I think it probably says something about the culture that at some level my mind really wants to make that distinction in absolute terms. We all know that Barack Obama has one black parent and one white parent, but my impression is that people generally look at him and see black, rather than biracial.

This is akin to saying “I don’t buy this gravity-as-a-social-construct position entirely” while tossing a ball into the air. In fact, the concept of the “social construct” is really just hand waving. The term was invented by people who no longer wanted to deal with facts and reason. Regardless, race is real.There is a reason we can use a mouth swab and tell the origin of your ancestors. In some cases, their origin can be plotted on a map with great accuracy. This says race and ethnicity are in your DNA.

The fundamental fact, I think, is that when a white American sees a black American, he sees history, and that history looms far more significantly over black Americans than it does over Hispanics or Asian immigrants or other minority groups. Conservatives see that history and generally don’t want to think about it; progressives see that history and want to use it for their own political ends. And I don’t have the imaginative capacity to guess what the view looks like from the black perspective. In that sense, it’s hard for me to believe that black-white relations in the United States will ever be normalized, as much as I wish it were otherwise. The fact that “black” exists in my internal taxonomy as a unitary and exclusive category — even though at some rational level I know better — suggests to me that while “Asian” maybe be only a geographic term in the American political mind, “African” is a very different kind of term, one that has more to do with realities on this continent than realities in Africa.

This is the least ridiculous portion of the post. He is right that people with a long history with one another tend to remember that long history with one another. This is true in the same way that people who have evolved here on earth tend to look like us. Armenians and Turks will forever have opinions about one another that outsiders will never fully appreciate, because of their long history together. The same is true of Jews and Europeans, but not true of Jews and Samoans.

Of course, the whole post is made up nonsense. It is an effort to inoculate himself against future changes of bad think. He’s not the smartest guy in the world, but he is a not a dullard, so he sure knows the truth about race and biology. Instead of writing that, he makes up this stuff that no doubt makes the donors happy and lets his masters on the Left know he is not having unapproved thoughts. The fact that this stuff never works is not what’s important. he thinks it works and that’s what counts.