How to Eliminate “Racism”

2,244 words

Fighting racism requires knowing what it is — not an easy task . . . [R]acism is a Schimpfwort: a term with pejorative connotations, whose very use inevitably tends to be more instrumental than descriptive. To call someone a racist, even if the charge is intellectually dishonest, can be a useful tactic, either in successfully paralyzing or in casting enough suspicion as to curtail credibility. — Alain de Benoist, “What is Racism?”

In light of Alain de Benoist’s observation, a radical proposal: Make the accusation of “racism” an automatic slanderous/libelous offense if made by a private citizen; if made by a public official, job termination and loss of government pension. Punishment falls on the accuser unless the accusation can be substantiated and confirmed by empirically verifiable evidence based on a single, legally promulgated definition of “racism” with clear, unambiguous, operational terms.

Source of the definition? A second proposal: It would be drafted by a prominent individual whose career has been destroyed by the Schimpfwort smear artists. The Nobel prize-winning geneticist, James Watson, comes to mind, purged from his laboratory and professionally shunned by intellectual pygmies, the Lysenkoists now in charge of the “science” establishment.

With the implementation of these proposals, “racism,” stripped of its instrumental mutational powers, would quickly disappear as a social pathology because a genuinely workable definition would make the “proof” of it dangerously difficult — essentially high risk and not worth the effort.

What about free speech, you counter? Well, what about it? Free speech has done a disappearing act in Canada where among the many vicious “hate crimes” you might commit is — are you ready? — to refer to a transgendered person who has become a “he” as a “she,” and vice versa.

According to two “legal experts,” Brenda Cossman, Law Professor at the University of Toronto and Director of the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, and Jared Brown, commercial litigator at Brown Litigation, who often works with corporate clients on employment law and human rights disputes:

If someone refused to use a preferred pronoun — and it was determined to constitute discrimination or harassment — could that potentially result in jail time? It is possible, Brown says, through a process that would start with a complaint and progress to a proceeding before a human rights tribunal. If the tribunal rules that harassment or discrimination took place, there would typically be an order for monetary and non-monetary remedies. A non-monetary remedy may include sensitivity training, issuing an apology, or even a publication ban, he says.

The wrong pronoun preference can get you hauled before a “human rights tribunal.” So much for the Canadian national anthem, “O Canada”: “O Canada, we stand on guard for thee. God keep our land glorious and free!”

“Transphobia” joins its morally defective cousins, homophobia and Islamophobia — phobias that will put the possessor in the crosshairs of the local prosecutor once the stooges from the tribunal are done with you.

Free speech in Western Europe has given way to government-regulated speech where any criticism of a member of a designated protected class is prosecutable, again, as hate speech.

Here in the United States? Try going to any university and college campus and see how far free speech takes you before some social justice warrior heaves a plastic bag of feces at you because you are deemed a “hateful” person, or some self-designated “anti-fascist” starts punching you because disagreeing with him makes you a fascist. Free speech on social media platforms has been abolished in service to “our democracy.”

Essentially, the governments in the Western world have dramatically shifted away from the long-held high priority of liberal, democratic polities for freedom of expression to the suppression of “hatred,” selectively and arbitrarily interpreted and enforced by highly-placed ideologues who get to determine whose hatred gets punished and whose is justified. This turns the business of legislating, of making readily understandable rules that everyone is expected to follow, into a contorted hermeneutics of hatred where the subjectivity of moralizing displaces the objectivity of law and the intended universality and fairness of its application.

The ideologues who operate the abstruse moral machinery that is designed to suppress hatred have theorized individuals into distinct groups, the oppressed and the oppressors, the latter who exploit and, of course, hate the former. The social world conjured up by the ideologues is a deeply morally fractured one populated by helpless, blameless victims who need protection from the malevolent, menacing bigots (“racists”) who fail to recognize the humanity of those they oppress. The moral and legal order of such a world then must be structured to protect the oppressed and punish the oppressors, and so the moral and legal standards and expectations necessarily differ depending on whether you are an oppressor or one of the oppressed. The mad scramble then commences. You join, if you can, the community of the oppressed, articulate your grievances, agitate for revenge, and demand the assistance and protection of the State. Failing that, retreat, submit, be quiet, and hope the political police will leave you in peace. A third option is limited to opportunists and vocabulists of self-flagellation from the oppressor class like Robin DiAngelo, who practices groveling white-abasement for profit, and for forgiveness for her skin color.

Whatever one might wish to call this kind of sociopolitical order, a “democracy” is not what firsts jumps to mind.

Nevertheless, a swift and resolute implementation of the above proposals would have many immediate and enormously salubrious effects. Below are just a few.

To begin with, they would liberate public discourse from the fetters imposed by the moralist-scolds in so many places who wait to pounce on any and every deviation from the script of political correctness and then demonize normal people. Some of the scolds are even highly paid to do so.

In the workplace, at cocktail parties, in schools, churches, labor unions, political assemblies, and — even as unimaginable as it might now seem — university classrooms, people could speak their minds and express their concerns without the threatening, censorious race commissars launching protests and coercing apologies, Chinese Cultural Revolution style. Fewer lobotomized college students would be assaulting campus speakers who might hurt their feelings. No more time would be wasted on deciphering “racist dog whistles.” No longer would we have to endure the hypocritical, disingenuous calls from the corrupt politicians, Hollywood virtue-signalers, and fake journalists galore for a “national conversation about race” because it would actually be possible to have a real one — or rather, many — without a threat to your career, reputation, or even your physical safety.

You can buy Stephen Paul Foster’s new novel When Harry Met Sally here.

With the enacted proposals, redemption would be possible for 60 or 70 million Americans pronounced by Hillary Clinton to be “racist,” and hence “irredeemable” and “not part of America.” No more reincarnated Hilters, Mussolinis, and Bull Connors to fear, agonize over, and scare small children with. The Ku Klux Klan would be recognized for what it is: a small collection of people who are mostly government-sponsored agent-provocateurs. The Southern Poverty Law Center, unable to smear any conservative individual or organization it took aim at, would have to close up shop.

This would also mute the multitudes of charlatans and extortionists who populate the “diversity” industry. Unable to affix “racist” to every conceivable thought, gesture, word, and institution that strikes their fancy, the vast “victim” community under their care — one which they now relentlessly endeavor to expand — would begin to shrink. The elaborate taxonomy of “racism,” now in a growth mode – “overt racism,” “covert racism,” economic “racism,” “institutional racism,” “environmental racism,” “legacy racism,” and the ne plus ultra of “systemic racism” — would be duly recognized as the mysterious and incomprehensible mumbo jumbo it is, and thus sink happily into oblivion, a subject matter for cultural anthropologists sometime in the far future to ponder as a lingo used in the practice of post-modern superstition or witchcraft.

With many fewer individuals and institutions certified as “racist,” there would be a substantial decline in micro-aggressions which, like a reduction in crime, would make everyone happier. University presidents could relax a bit and not worry about whether they must grovel and apologize every time they hear of one on campus, and whether they will be fired for being too lenient with the micro-aggressors.

Many “professors” of English and sundry area studies programs would in turn have to seek actual, useful employment. There would be little demand for professors of Post-Colonial Studies, and even less for literature courses about the “racism” in Shakespeare, Milton, Faulkner, and every other dead white male in the literary canon. African-American Studies programs would wither as well, since they are premised on discovering “racism” as the core of the American experience, and no one in his right mind would employ any of its degree holders.

Calling or labelling a person a “racist” today is a cost-free way to accomplish several things that enhance your self-esteem and your status as a superior person. First, it shows how deeply you care about the disadvantaged, the magnanimous dimensions of your personality, and your sensitivity to the suffering of others. It also immediately separates you from that “racist” you have identified, who of course is your complete opposite. Thus, the contrast dramatically demonstrates your vast moral superiority and justifies your self-righteous disdain. It also bolsters your standing among your friends and colleagues as a truth-to-power speaker, even if that “racist” you have called out is an unemployed mechanic from down the street whose house is in foreclosure. Best of all, you don’t have to do anything else to bolster your virtue credentials, like send your kid to that run-down inner-city school full of — well, you get the picture. Sometimes it is even fun, especially when that “racist” gets really angry and flustered after you have “outed” him and you get to relish his discomfort as he stumbles through all of those futile protests to convince you otherwise.

If these proposals were enacted, however, they would constitute a bold step toward making people more accountable and responsible for the language they use to assert their superior virtue, and it would impose a price for what is now cost-free moral preening. Taking “racism” out of the compendium of popularly permissible slurs would mean that “racist,” as an accusation with all of its invidious connotations, would have to give way to an honest “I don’t like you,” or maybe even “I hate you” — which is fine. Sometimes, the people who hate you are reasons for pride. I like the way Mussolini put it: “Molti nemici, molto onore” — “Many enemies, much honor.”

Heretical as it sounds, no one should be required to like anyone. Much of the time, “love is not the answer,” since a fair number of people are not, well, particularly lovable. Not liking someone only means just that, with no implications for your moral stature and no put-downs that testify to the maker’s own goodness.

Most importantly, this would also greatly advance the possibility that there would be an honest evaluation of what the implications are for those mass migrations from the Third World that are currently assaulting the countries of the West. In Europe and America, those of European heritage who question the inundation of refugees from Africa, the Middle East, and Asia are kept in check and shamed by the politicians — in collusion with the media moguls — as bigots and xenophobes; in a word, as “racists.”

Mass immigration from the Third World is a time bomb that threatens incalculable cultural, political, and economic damage. The coming millions — many of them destitute, low-skilled, and entitlement-focused — carry an enormous financial burden that falls mainly on the middle- and working-class natives.

Even worse is that these new arrivals are coached by our “compassionate” elites to be resentful of their hosts, using all the tested tools of moral blackmail against the targeted benefactors.

This means that political-cultural conflict is inevitable, and that the sheer number of needy, resource-devouring immigrants threatens the stability that has long been enjoyed by their host countries. All of these concerns are real, pressing, and legitimate, but the elites who have opened the gates appear to welcome the coming catastrophe. Its horrors, they seem to be calculating, will fall upon the bad whites: those practitioners of “systemic racism.” Those of European descent who doubt the wisdom of this inundation and fear for the destruction of their own culture get the reductio ad racista treatment that now has a long record of successfully beating down legitimate dissent.

First, the oligarchs de-moralize dissent and turn it into bigotry; then they criminalize those citizens they have turned into bigots (“racists”), leaving them unable to participate in any way in the decisions that affect their lives and those of their children. The fact that the likes of Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron, Stefan Löfven, and Joe Biden continue to call their tyrannies — run by unelected bureaucrats who punish their citizens for speaking the truth — “democracies” is but one more expression of their treachery and dishonesty.

With 400,000 “refugees” on their way to America’s southern border, “racism” will be the ticket used to keep the turnstiles wide open. The intellectual dishonesty of accusations of “racism” noted by de Benoist is now turning into a catastrophe of world-historic proportions. Life does imitate art, and Jean Raspail’s Camp of the Saints may turn out to be the most prophetic novel ever written.

If the above proposals were enacted, the social and political elites would have to begin to argue their case and relinquish the smear that has served them so well for so long.

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