. . . Whenever it’s plausible to do so, the specifics of conservative racial thinking need to be analyzed and debated on their merits, not stigmatized as racist. And even if conservative racial arguments had been completely wrong, it wouldn’t prove they would continue to be completely wrong forever.
Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine, 6 December, 2013
I regularly read Jonathan Chait's columns and blog posts at New York Magazine. Mr. Chait is one of my favorite political writers because his work is often intelligent, thoughtful and easily accessible. His writings on Obamacare, for example, have been instrumental in my own understanding of the complicated law. But last Friday Chait wrote a column, dissecting conservative thoughts on race/racism and Nelson Mandela, that was a convoluted refusal to acknowledge the white supremacist foundations of most conservative thought on racial issues.
The column began well enough with Chait highlighting white supremacist William Buckley's odious defense of the South African apartheid regime. But after that the piece dissolved into something I couldn't decipher.
Conservatives, Chait wrote, believe "that, at any given moment, the balance of actual or threatened power is arrayed against whites." Chait doesn't believe this rubbish entirely, but he went onto argue that this conservative grievance isn't wholly wrong and that sometimes affirmative action can go too far and that Nelson Mandela did indeed have violent allies that killed white people. Thus, he wrote, most conservative racial arguments should not reflexively be stigmatized as racist; we should instead debate their arguments on the merits.
My younger self, when talking with my little white acquaintances who said obvious racist things, would ignore those comments instead of calling them out. A majority of white Americans enjoy this privilege, which is why racist ideals often go unchallenged. This allows supremacist ideology to continue to affect our policy and forbid the implementation of true justice oriented solutions. But the project of transforming American society into a more equal one entails unabashedly calling things for what they are. As such, when racist views (rather they come from the mouth of a conservative or a liberal) are uttered, they deserve to be stigmatized because the merits of their arguments are rooted in classic white supremacist values. To me when a white man says the pendulum is swinging too far to black people and that black people possess more racial animus, then said white man is a racist.
So when Chait's recent sparring partner, Quin Hillyer, accuses the left wing of being "so eager to see racism in every conservative heart and utterance that it ignores overwhelming evidence that more blacks these days feel racial animus toward whites, and more act in race-antagonistic ways, than do whites toward blacks," I think Hillyer is a racist, even if he did oppose David Duke's candidacy decades ago. What evidence is there that black Americans hold more racial hatred against whites or act on this animus more than white folk? Hillyer says this because he is fearful of black liberation and honestly believes white people to be the victim even though white Americans still have more wealth and sociopolitical power. Indeed, Hillyer's patently false remark is not completely dissimilar to what white racists said during Reconstruction or the Civil Rights Movement, as Chait himself pointed out. Hillyer may not view himself as bigot (a lot of white Americans live on such fantasy islands), but he clearly is, even if he is incapable of admitting so and Chait is unwilling or unable to do so.
On Twitter Chait typed:
Of course they blew it! They are bigots.
Am I wrong? Did I completely misread or misinterpret Chait? Or is Chait incapable of calling a fig a fig because of his own privilege?