Candidly Speaking - 07/05/22

On Racism and Race

Norman Podhoretz

Thomas Chatterton Williams

For the record: I am an unrepentant lover of America. It produces half of the movies I like, virtually all of the music I listen to, and one cannot help but be inspired by its culture of freedom and excellence. For that reason, I cringe every time someone living within its borders starts mouthing off some sub-Chomskyite talking point about how American hegemony is endangering the world or how American capitalism makes life miserable for the so-called “99%.” If you can’t find satisfaction living in the most prosperous nation in history, you wouldn’t stand a chance living in countries like Vietnam, or much of the Third World, for that matter.

Nevertheless, I don’t love all of its features. If I ever get a chance to live there, two major aspects of its society will always remain alien to me. One, its permissive culture of firearms. In the US Bill of Rights, the amendment following the right to free speech guarantees the right to bear arms. Thus, America remains the only Western democracy in which restricting the use of guns is a heated topic of debate.

The second aspect is its endless fixation on race. I can recall vividly how, during the 2020 protests and riots following the police killing of George Floyd, I thought to myself: “I want no part of this.” This is not because I do not have sympathy for the deceased, whose killing was an unjustifiable act of police brutality. Rather, it is because of the flame of racial division has never been fully extinguished in the US of A. It only takes a spark - and the George Floyd videotape serves more than its intended purpose - to ignite ancient hatreds and vitriol.

I was 7 when I first learned about racism. It was in a short textbook reading about Nelson Mandela and his fight against the institutionalized racism of South Africa, known to the world as Apartheid. For most American children, the same experience would be found in a history textbook reading on either slavery in the South or Martin Luther King Jr. Whatever the case, the reading made sure we know that racism is an evil which creates a malicious and unfree society.

For most people, racism means the opposite of that famous Dr. King truism - you judge a man by the color of his skin, instead of the content of his character. You construct prejudices and biases in your head regarding a stranger of a different skin color, then make hasty generalizations about everyone who shares his pigmentation. In other words, racism is literally skin deep.

In the age of #BlackLivesMatter, a new phrase has entered public discourse. It goes by “systemic racism”, but you can spot its other disguises such as “historical racism”, “institutional racism”, “foundational racism”, etc. To its proponents, it means that society itself, particularly in the West, is so plagued with implicit racism and hostility towards “people-of-color” that any manifestation of disparity between the races in a given profession or field can be simply explained: the field itself is racist. Jesus is depicted to have European facial features in Western churches? That means Christianity is racist (upon hearing his Earth-shattering revelation, Dr. King must have been kicking himself when he became a revered Baptist minister). The canon of Classical music does not feature black, Indian or Asian composer? It must be racist, period. And of course, who can forget the 1619 Project, a magazine article by the New York Times which misconstrues the American Founding as fundamentally based on the preservation of African slaves.

All these examples, and more, tries to redefine what it means to be racist in a way that makes genuine non-racists question their own way of thinking. Psychologists have a term for this - gaslighting. In his Commentary article, the political scientist Wilfred Reilly notes that “In foisting upon us a new understanding of such a consequential term, this campaign leaps from the semantic into the substantive and seeks to reevaluate our thoughts and actions as individuals and as a nation.” There’s only one reason behind this concerted effort to contort our discourse surrounding race matters - the desire for radical social change. Already, the West is losing its faith in Christianity, “white people” or “whiteness” has become a term of derision, American slavery is discussed ceaselessly as if it is something that happened yesterday, or is continually perpetuated on American soil (neither is true). It is not difficult to presume that the society which the “systemic racism” crowd hopes to achieve is an explicitly color-based one. This new society designates your position in the pecking order based on your race: white = oppressor, black = oppressed. As for Asians (AAPIs under the new anti-racist regime) and Jews, they are accorded the label not unlike the “Honorary White” designation under South African apartheid: they are not “white”, but they benefit greatly from “whiteness”. Anti-racism, behind its colorful facade (pun not intended), is merely racism in new clothes.

It is worth noticing that those who firmly believes the genuinely anti-racist idea of color-blindness tends to be devout Christians. Christ does not say much about race, but love and mercy is fundamental to His teachings. Certainly, one can find Christians of all races and ethnicities, which necessitates the famous Korean Jesus gag in the film version of 21 Jump Street. Color-blindness, crudely misunderstood by the “anti-racist” crowd as the literal statement of “I don’t see skin color,” is the principle that grounds Martin Luther King’s dream and our current reality (if we choose it).

I cannot help but think, as I commit these words into digital paper, of Norman Podhoretz’s famous essay My Negro Problem - And Ours, published in 1963 on Commentary. This is a must-read piece of prose, particularly for the author’s gut-wrenching erudition:

Special feelings about color are a contagion to which white Americans seem susceptible even when there is nothing in their background to account for the susceptibility. Thus everywhere we look today in the North, we find the curious phenomenon of white middle-class liberals with no previous personal experience of Negroes—people to whom Negroes have always been faceless in virtue rather than faceless in vice—discovering that their abstract commitment to the cause of Negro rights will not stand the test of a direct confrontation. We find such people fleeing in droves to the suburbs as the Negro population in the inner city grows; and when they stay in the city we find them sending their children to private school rather than to the “integrated” public school in the neighborhood.

Elsewhere in the piece, he pays tribute to the great observer of the American racial dilemma, James Baldwin:

Baldwin’s message is and always has been simple. It is this: “Color is not a human or personal reality; it is a political reality.” And Baldwin’s demand is correspondingly simple: color must be forgotten, lest we all be smited with a vengeance “that does not really depend on, and cannot really be executed by, any person or organization, and that cannot be prevented by any police force or army: historical vengeance, a cosmic vengeance based on the law that we recognize when we say, ‘Whatever goes up must come down.’” (my emphasis)

Fast forward to today’s world, where using the word “Negro” in a sentence will get you instantly canceled, we find that Baldwin’s prophecy may have come true. Thomas Chatterton Williams, a student of both Baldwin and Podhoretz, writes of the eerie similarity between the “anti-racist” author Ta-Nehisi Coates, and the notorious white supremacist Richard Spencer:

This summer, I spent an hour on the phone with Richard Spencer. It was an exchange that left me feeling physically sickened. Toward the end of the interview, he said one thing that I still think about often. He referred to the all-encompassing sense of white power so many liberals now also attribute to whiteness as a profound opportunity. “This is the photographic negative of a white supremacist,” he told me gleefully. “This is why I’m actually very confident, because maybe those leftists will be the easiest ones to flip.” (my emphasis)

However far-fetched that may sound, what identitarians like Mr. Spencer have grasped, and what ostensibly anti-racist thinkers like Mr. Coates have lost sight of, is the fact that so long as we fetishize race, we ensure that we will never be rid of the hierarchies it imposes. We will all be doomed to stalk our separate paths.

What may have left Mr. Chatterton Williams’s stomach churning is that the white supremacist is not altogether wrong. And I would loathe to live in a world where the white supremacists are right.