Trickle-Down Racist AntiracismThis reactionary and neo-Confederate return to racial stigmatization and hatred is not going to end well.
By Victor Davis Hanson
April 17, 2022
Elected governments were rare in the past. They did not appear until over four millennia after civilization first emerged in the Near East. Constitutional systems were fragile at birth. And they are on the wane today. Nation after nation seems to be devolving into autocracy. Multiethnic, multiracial consensual governments have been even more brittle and sporadic in history.
The Roman, Ottoman, and Soviet empires were multiracial. But they were not consensual. Instead, they required a degree of force to ensure calm among rival tribes and warring peoples—violence that we would find incompatible with our notions of modern democracy.
Today, India and Brazil are large multicultural and multiethnic democracies. But neither, so far, has guaranteed their citizens either prosperity or security.
So present-day multiracial America is a great experiment in the unknown. Can its various tribes, and races unite around the Constitution? Or will they inevitably revert to form and give their first loyalties to those of shared superficial racial or ethnic affinities?
Regressing to the Color of Our SkinUntil about 2008, it was generally believed America had made great strides in rendering race incidental rather than essential to our characters. We were moving away from the racial collective of our past to the individual. That was the dream of Martin Luther King, Jr., who emphasized content of character over color of skin.
Barack Obama’s presidency, however, resurrected tribal identity politics. He rebooted the banal word “diversity” and made it synonymous with anyone and anything “nonwhite.” Thereby, he instantly diminished class as the true barometer in postmodern America of who was oppressed and who the oppressor.
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Equity Fatalities?In this new American Lalaland, grandees could be the purported victims of the white privilege supposedly enjoyed by an Uber driver or a part-time grocery clerk in Provo. Both could have come of age 40 years after the inauguration of affirmative action and the Great Society, but no matter.
These absurd contradictions of the woke antiracist movement remind us that such toxic racial fixations are not sustainable. Racialism of any sort remains an accelerant of hatred and violence. In a multiracial, intermarried, and assimilated society, who is to be defined as a “marginalized person”? Who declares someone a beneficiary of “white privilege”?
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Source:
https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/17/trickle-down-racist-antiracism/
