Race Unrealism

I’ve often argued that anti-racism has become a religion, maybe something of a cargo cult. The adherents keep replaying the events of the Civil Rights Movement hoping something magical happens. The obvious stuff is the weird obsession with Hitler and the KKK. Every public figure they don’t like is Hitler and every group they don’t like is the KKK.

Then you have the hilariously insane stuff like calling the NBA diverse while baseball is lacking diversity. The word “racist” simply means “bad” for gentry liberals. This Jeff Jacoby column is worth reading for this sort of loony race mongering.

Do gender quotas pose that problem? No. But racial quotas certainly do.

American society is awash with race-based quotas, check-offs, preferences, and diversity policies. In countless settings — from college admissions to workplace hiring, from government contracts to legislative redistricting — opportunities and benefits are tied to racial percentages.

Twelve decades after Plessy v. Ferguson, the notorious Supreme Court decision in which eight justices upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation, Americans are labeled and sorted by race more obsessively than ever. It was in Plessy that Justice John Harlan delivered his ringing dissent: “Our Constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. . . . The law regards man as man and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color.”
Harlan’s fierce insistence that Americans are not to be treated differently on the basis of race became the great objective of the Civil Rights movement in the 20th century. “Racial criteria are irrational, irrelevant, [and] odious to our way of life,” argued Thurgood Marshall on behalf of the NAACP in 1950. “There is no understandable factual basis for classification by race.”

Marshall’s statement was even truer than he could have imagined. Today we know for a fact what scientists in the 1950s could only have surmised: Race is not biological. It is a social construct, not a genetic reality. The DNA of blacks cannot be distinguished from the DNA of Asians or the DNA of whites. Unlike our sex, which is stamped in our chromosomes, our racial and ethnic identities are purely subjective.

“I am an African-American, but in parts of Africa, I am white,” says Stanford professor Duana Fullwiley, an anthropologist of science and medicine. When research in West Africa requires her to fly from California to France to Senegal, she told Harvard Magazine in a 2008 interview, “My race changes as I cross the Atlantic.” In the United States she is black; in France she is considered métisse, or mixed-race; in Senegal, everyone regards her as white.

Of course human beings vary widely in their appearance. Populations from different parts of the world differ notably in their skin color, facial features, and hair texture. But those distinctions are superficial, not racial. They have no immutable significance. They contribute no more to “diversity” than right- and left-handedness do. To rely on such criteria when hiring employees or drawing electoral maps or assessing a corporate board is about as sensible as consulting a Magic 8 Ball.

Exactly no one in the quantitative fields thinks race is not genetic. There’s a debate whether race is the right word as there is great diversity within races. East Africans, for example, are very different from West Africans. East Africans dominate distance running, for example, while West Africans dominate sprint races. This is just one group difference that is well known in quantitative science.

Jacoby may have lost his marbles, but my recollection is he is the token normal at the Boston Globe. To balance his hate speech, they have a thousand hooting maniacs from the Cult of Modern Liberalism. That’s diversity! So, Jacoby may have gone native, but my sense is he is having some fun mocking the the Cult for their anti-racist irrationality.

This is why anti-racism is a religion and not a tactic. From the perspective of the political Left, racism is highly useful. I’m not just talking as a shaming tool. I mean as a political wedge. Demanding proportional representation in legislatures, for example, benefits the Left politically. Demanding head counts by race would help bust up natural rights and replace it with the authoritarianism of positive liberty. But, they can’t do it.

That’s the thing with the religious impulse. It’s largely a theatrical concept. The faithful would rather face the lions than renounce their faith because just before the jaws clamp on their throat, they see the adoration of their coreligionists. Anti-racists would rather damage their own cause than compromise on the faith. It’s what defines them.

8 thoughts on “Race Unrealism

  1. A short film; Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron was made as “2081”.
    a dystopian future in which, thanks to the 212th Amendment to the Constitution and the unceasing vigilance of the United States Handicapper General, everyone is “finally equal….” The strong wear weights, the beautiful wear masks and the intelligent wear earpieces that fire off loud noises to keep them from taking unfair advantage of their brains

    As I remember a PG rated film, so no word on how they dealt with the ‘overly endowed’. Ouch!

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  3. They are the ones obsessed with racial categories, yet we are the Nazionalistes.
    They are the ones marching and lynching, yet we are the Klan.
    Yup. Makes perfect sense from the good people who tell you that women are really men, and men should be women.

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  5. The impact on peoples live aside, “diversity” is good from some real shits and giggles in the corporate world. A real life example. A few years ago I get a panicked call the from the Chief Diversity Officer. Basically, I’ve shown up on the EEOC tally reported to the Board as a Native American. Told him I had absolutely no idea why. Then it dawned. A couple years before I took a 23 and Me genetic test that confirmed the family history of my ggg grandfather marrying a full blood Shawnee woman. (not well known that the midwest frontier was the embodiment of George Carlins’s adage, “if you can’t fuck it you kill it”–intermarriage was common, so was killing) Made the mistake of discussing this with the HR rep for my division, and she missing the part about my grandmother being the last one eligible for tribal membership, went downstairs and changed my status. Apparently there was a bonus for SVP Native Americans. That brought the revelation from the CDO, that since many people don’t self ID for race and the EEOC and Board demand stats, they engage in a modern day version of phrenology, where last name, appearance etc is used to fill in the best guess as to race. Apparently, an Injun was hiding in their midst. Since it was December, we left it that he would make the change after the first of the year, so the “scorecard” for that year would not shift for the negative.

    This is what we’ve become.

  6. “Anti-Racism” (which of course really means Anti-White) strikes me more as some sort of luddite cult. It denies modern genetic science and technology and replaces it with superstitious ideas that they make fancy names for, like “social construct” and “white privilege”. If it was a cargo cult, wouldn’t they worship the white man as the bringer of all good things?

  7. I always like to think if there was true (and therefore total) diversity then everything would be done on a completely random basis. Elections for heads of government would be chosen from all the population — and no arguing about percentages as everyone is in the random selection process so everyone has an equal chance, irrespective of colour or creed or whatever — and so could easily be between a 13 year old child and an 89 year old granny. It’s just how the diversity draw works, so cast your votes now. Even the length of office could be diverse. You know, 47 years or ten minutes… hmmm.

    Naturally this would extend to everything. Lead actors in films would be equally diversely chosen and — this will please the anti-oscar lot — the prizes for best actor would be equally diversely random. A walk on part in a crowd scene could well get best actor, so that’s great.

    More, diversity would be fabulous in sports. At age 69 I could be a striker for my favourite football team or, better still, chosen to play in goal for my fave team’s cross-town rivals. I do understand that under a true diversity based system there is a chance that the NBA would still have the odd, very tall black person and yes, they would breeze past the seven year old but hey, that’s what we all want. Go diversity!

    There is however small nagging doubt in my mind about this wonderful future. Do you think people would be happy about it? Or would we still get, despite all the fairness and diversity, some people who would say ‘I don’t like it’?

    But as we can’t make anything more diverse than all diversity, surely a random and diverse decision of whether it is good or not is all that matters.

    • Socially, the tool becomes more valuable than the professed goal.
      The tool grants authority, authority grants status.

      Bah. Eliminate gerrymandering, in use since 1820, when Van Buren turned the Democrats into a criminal syndicate. Whomever lives in whatever county, you gotta work with them. It’ll be plenty diverse.

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