The Poverty of Antiracism

“Contact the administration and the Board of Trustees and demand an end to the destructive and anti-intellectual claptrap known as antiracism” — Andrew Gutmann, withdrawing his daughter from Brearley School, New York.

This is a critique of the collection of ideas known as “antiracism”, after Ibram X Kendi’s How to be an Antiracist, and of its practical consequences. It appears to have originated in American academia, which, its advocates claim, is marred by racism.

Consider a college campus boiling with racial and gender sensitivity, with courses in victimization, organizations for victims, a constant barrage of victimization propaganda — but no immediate and palpable victims. “Anti-racist” vigilantes with no racists (or misogynists and homophobes) to hang had better get busy and make some, and as we see, they often do. — Laird Wilcox, Crying Wolf, 1994.

At Duke University, Durham NC, in March 2006, the district attorney prosecuted three white students, following the claim of a black woman that they’d raped her, ignoring clear evidence that it was false. The college president said it was an example of “racism”, and eighty-eight professors signed a “Listening Statement”, defending the woman’s allegation. One of them is Eduardo Bonilla-Silva. After the students were acquitted, and the DA jailed, he didn’t apologise; he doubled down. His Racism Without Racists claims

“Shielded by color blindness whites can express resentment toward minorities; criticize their morality, values and work ethic; and even claim to be the victims of ‘reverse racism’”.

At San Diego State, Maryland, Oberlin, North Park, Drake, Evergreen, and dozens of other higher education institutions, over the last three decades, the authorities accepted the claims of minority activists. Even after discovering that most of these claims are false, they usually failed to rein in their credulity. In July 2018, at Smith College, Northampton MA, a black student falsely accused white employees of racial profiling. Even after the hoax was exposed, the college president, Kathleen McCartney, subjected some of her white subordinates to actual racial profiling, driving one of them, Jodi Shaw, to resign and go public — “Lone Whistleblower Takes On the Woke Racists at Smith College”, National Review, February 24th 2021.

“Woke racism” has also infected primary and secondary education. In one Manhattan school, the headmaster had to resign over its race-based curriculum. At a second, a parent withdrew his daughter because “I cannot tolerate a school that not only judges my daughter by the color of her skin, but encourages and instructs her to prejudge others by theirs”. A teacher at a third school objected to racial segregation, claiming this objection risks his career. A teacher at a New Jersey school has resigned for the same reason. Two Los Angeles schools have been accused of the same thing. Antiracism activists in the Virginia public school system conspired against parents who disagree.

Antiracism crossed the Atlantic at least thirty years ago. It influenced the 1993 Macpherson inquiry into the police investigation of the murder of a black London teenager, Stephen Lawrence, and the 2000 Race Relations (Amendment) Act. Macpherson’s definition of a racist incident was “any incident perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person”. This phrase, which shifts the burden of proof from the shoulders of the accuser to those of the accused, originates in “Standpoint Theory” and “Critical Race Theory”. “Listen first to the voice of the victims” urged American academic Mari Matsuda, in Words That Wound, 1993. As we shall see, some victims’ voices are more equal than others.

The book Cynical Theories, by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, 2020, critically examines these theories. Detailed critiques of Sir William Macpherson’s methods and conclusions can be found in the Civitas publications Racist Murder and Pressure Group Politics, by Norman Dennis, George Erdos, and Ahmed Al-Shahi, September 2000, and That’s Racist!: How the Regulation of Speech and Thought Divides Us All, by Adrian Hart, November 2014.

Following the publication of Macpherson’s report, antiracism became de rigeur in the police and other institutions. One of the consequences was the grooming gang scandal. It was not the only problem; it’s not why some coppers believe minors can be prostitutes; but it contributed to the authorities’ failure to keep sexual offenders away from vulnerable girls. Some of them prioritised combatting white racism over protecting white girls from Pakistani gangs.

Jayne Senior, the Rotherham scandal whistleblower, describes a white man telling the police a gang was “grooming” his 14-year-old daughter. They ignored him, until he shouted a racist word at the men’s house. Then the police quickly appeared, and found the girl getting out of bed with a man, but they did not arrest him — instead, they charged father and daughter with disorderly behaviour.

“Jessica subsequently told me that when she was driving around with her abuser in his flashy car, he’d often play the ‘race card’ if stopped by the police.” — Broken and Betrayed, March 2016, pages 91–92.

In his book The Tribe: The Liberal-Left and the System of Diversity, July 2018, Ben Cobley explains how several British institutions denied the nature of the gangs in Rotherham, and at least seventeen other towns and cities. In January 2011, eight years after Andrew Norfolk’s first report in the Times, three years after Julie Bindel’s exposé, and three years before the Alexis Jay report on the scandal, Libby Brooks argued in the Guardian that “Dubious claims about Muslim men grooming white girls hide legitimate worries about a system that fails victims of abuse.” Even after the truth came out, in the form of the convictions of hundreds of men, most of whom have Muslim names, some left-wing and Muslim organisations tried, in effect, to continue the cover-up, by subjecting the whistleblowers to allegations of racism.

The 2020 antiracist upsurge

The launchpad for the worldwide upsurge of 2020 was the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis on May 25th. Protests and riots started that night, and soon spread around America and overseas. On April 20th 2021, officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of second-degree unintentional murder.

My point is not to criticise hostility to the police. Rather, I take aim at the movement’s political framework. This framework assumes that, because Floyd was African-American, and the man who killed him is white, it was a racist murder, so what is needed is “racial justice”.

I sympathised with protests about the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others, but outside my window in Portland, I saw some protestors were carrying signs saying “White Silence Is Violence”. This doesn’t just mean that people of a particular race should not disagree with the antiracist movement; it means they must proactively agree with it. It could even imply that they can be forced to agree, since their silence is a violent act.

Signs like this indicate that defenders of antiracism are sure of their beliefs; I don’t think their confidence is justified.

Take, for example, Robin DiAngelo’s bestselling February 2019 book White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard For White People to Talk About Racism. DiAngelo’s title gives a clue to the logic she develops in the book: if you’re white, and you don’t want to talk about racism, or at least, not in the way approved of by DiAngelo, you have something wrong with you which needs fixing. Because any refusal to accept it can be explained away by the theory itself, it is therefore unfalsifiable; anything which attempts to show it is flawed, including this sentence, is an example of the problem it pretends to identify.

After the Smith College racism hoax was exposed, president McCartney said “it is impossible to rule out the potential role of implicit racial bias”. Indeed: that’s the point of it.

What is the evidence of police racism in the USA?

On April 27th 2021, a week after the conviction of Derek Chauvin, I became aware of a document entitled “Report of the International Commission of Inquiry on Systemic Racist Police Violence Against People of African Descent in the United States”. The PDF of the report on the commission’s website simply gives “March 2021” as its date, and its references to the Chauvin case show it was completed before his conviction.

The title tells us it was written by lawyers, and its Executive Summary makes their methodology clear.

“All cases selected for the hearings involved the egregious and unjustified killing or maiming of individuals of African descent in the U.S.” (page 13)

The authors try to justify this selection of data by contrasting the rate of police shootings of black people with those of white people.

“Today one out of every 1,000 Black men can expect to be killed by police violence over the course of his life, which is approximately 2.5 times the likelihood of white men being killed by police.” (page 20)

The claim that black people are overrepresented in the victims of police brutality is clearly demonstrated. What is not so clear is how this is evidence of racial discrimination.

1,021 people were killed by the American police in 2020. 25 per cent were black, almost double their percentage in the population. But, as Wilfred Reilly demonstrated, adjusting for the black rate of crime, 2.4 times the white rate, eliminates this gap, and debunks the claim of racial discrimination (Spiked Online, May 5th 2021).

In spite of the poverty of the theoretical basis of the antiracism movement, many suffer from a weakness which makes it difficult to defy it. At the Macpherson inquiry, lawyers tried to pressure London police commissioner Paul Condon, and he explained how it would be easier to give in than to resist:

‘You have told us 10 times you are not in denial’, said Macpherson’s adviser: ‘I say to you now, just say, “Yes, I acknowledge institutional racism in the police …”.’ Condon was clearly reluctant to say his force was institutionally racist. So Macpherson’s adviser pushed Condon harder: ‘I say to you now, just say, “Yes, I acknowledge institutional racism in the police” and then in a way the whole thing is over… Could you do that today?’ Condon responded: ‘It would be very easy to please the panel, to please the audience… it would be dishonest….’ — Sir William Macpherson: a divisive legacy, Adrian Hart, Spiked Online, March 6th 2021.

Many people find it harder to resist the pressure. Reasons for capitulating to mobs include

– Cowardice

– The urge to please

– Fear of losing one’s job

– The urge to appear moral

– Fear of social media storms

– Ignorance of the scientific method

– Thinking that apologising will appease the mob

– Shame at raising logical objections to the claims of angry people

“Most human beings would temper their ideas, because normally, people like to fit in” — Brexit architect Nigel Farage, Triggernometry, Youtube, March 10th 2021.

Standing up to woke racism

Antiracists sometimes define racism as “power plus prejudice”, and add that only white people have this power. But Chris Rufo pointed out that “Ibram Kendi could cancel you, but you can’t cancel Ibram Kendi” — Spiked Online, YouTube, February 25th 2021. James Lindsay put it like this, on Facebook, on March 13th:

An important difference between you and the Woke is that if they see the opening, they’ll demand your resignation or firing in a heartbeat and won’t stop until they get it. You, meanwhile, will argue against removing from their positions even when they abuse them, and you.

On March 31st he added:

I believe Woke people and even the Woke ideology has a place in society (as with other types of racism), but in that I am fundamentally classically liberal, it must be totally removed from access to power in society.

The problem is not that antiracists have freedom of speech, it’s that some of them have power. Removing advocates of racial discrimination from positions where they are able to implement it should be easy, but in the current political climate, it is an uphill struggle.