This is what is pissing me off at this point: the obscenity of the right-wing attempt to equate racism with the efforts to combat it. It is so perverse that I instinctively want to walk away from the discussion altogether. Of course, to do so is to cede the ground to those who are attempting this subversion. I feel I must respond.
Let this be clear: the movement against anti-racism is utterly reactionary. Racism is the original wrong, and anti-racism (as opposed to what MLK termed a “negative peace” of letting racist culture exist passively) is the active unpacking and tackling of the system of racism and racist thought. Racism is an ideology. Its basis is the foundational belief in the superiority of one race over another as the apparent endpoint of nature. In Western culture, that has been the belief of White people over other races in general but especially Black people in particular. This regressive belief unfortunately finds its origins in the era of the Enlightenment, with its underlying thrust supplied by one of that era’s philosophical giants, Immanuel Kant himself.
The virulent form of this worldview manifests in our culture as White supremacy. This term is probably deceptively attractive to the believer of the ideology, as the term itself appears on the surface to reinforce its central thrust. The idea that the White race is eternally and forevermore above all other races but especially Black people goes back to a pseudoscientific understanding of how the human race came to display such “obvious” diversity. Kant’s system, published in 1777, was pre-Mendelian and thus was based only on syllogisms and his own internal biases. He superimposed his own untested theories upon the framework of nature itself in an attempt to come up with a logical heuristic of natural law. Skin color in this system was an expression of this natural law, and skin color thus indicated essential, intrinsic and immutable characteristics, both of the physical and moral types. In fact, for Kant it appears that skin color is a priori evidence for the racing of humankind.
The parallels of the underpinnings of German fascism are so robust that that fact bears but mere mention.
Anti-racism means to bring this invisible but everpresent hegemony into view and into focus. When the nuts and bolts of how racism operates both legally and extra-legally (that is, culturally) are brought into the open, we gain the possibility of changing those mechanisms. So when someone states plainly that they are “anti-anti-racism”, understand that 1) their movement is entirely reactionary, and 2) by defining their stance as being against this unpacking and dismantling of this system, they have outed themselves as being actively for maintaining and entrenching the prevailing ideology.
Kant believed Black people had too much iron in their skin, which accounted for the pigmentation. This erroneous belief he took one step further, speculating that the excess iron produced a noxious gas:
The profusion of iron particles, which are otherwise found in the blood of every human being, and, in this case, are precipitated in the net-shaped substance through the evaporation of the phosphoric acid (which explains why all Negroes stink), is the cause of the blackness that shines through the epidermis.
This is so laughably non-scientific it’s nearly criminal, yet many of those espousing White supremacist thought still cling to this belief. Advocates of White supremacy transform this idea and others (especially those evoking contamination) into racial insult, which they then use as a method of social control.
Kant believed that cold, humid regions produced humans instilled with industriousness while hot, humid regions yielded humans who were “lazy, indolent and dawdling” by nature. This belief finds its root in Kant’s interpretation of natural law, which saw physical traits of organisms in nature as an expression of nature’s intent upon coming to an end in itself. It was through this law that Kant derived the valuable concept that man, then, also was an end in himself and thus was a subject in his relations, never to be used as mere means to an end. The idea of skin color being representative, nay, determinative, of essential and immutable moral traits is not and never was of value--except to those who would exploit such a fundamental misunderstanding.
These are just some examples of how wrong Kant was. Yet Kant, due to his enormous influence over Western philosophy, has by his own force of persuasion set these error-laden ideas as a fundament. Moreover, the White majoritarians of Western culture take this view not only of themselves in total (as being the first “original” race and thus the highest ideal) but also in relation to all other groups. If White is normal, all others are abnormal. If White is regular, all others are irregular. And if this line of thought, that truth is concretized by nature, were indeed the fundamental truth, then to upset this order of things would be to go against nature itself. Racism to these believers is a positive good. For them, anti-racism must be stamped out.
To be sure, Kant would probably have renounced this nexus of ideas in full once it became known (as is widely believed to be true in our time) that all human origins can be traced back to Africa. This undermines his entire classification system of humanity and deals a deathblow to the backbone of White supremacist thought.
Let’s be clear. No one (or so few that the actual percentage of the whole would be insignificant) who identifies as anti-racist is advocating for White people to suffer the kind of domination that Black people historically withstood in American history. The ideas held by anti-racists are not the same as those held by the KKK, because anti-racists don’t believe in a racial hierarchy. White supremacy as a system is a tool of extracting and maintaining social power through methods of physical exclusion and psychological abuse. Anti-anti-racists want to maintain these methods.
So the pushback from me regarding this frontal assault on CRT, vile and cynical assault that it is, will be to defend anti-racism as a whole. CRT is being conflated with all manner, aspects and facets of anti-racism anyway, so that will be the battlefield, not just CRT as a part. It is morally and ethically right to combat this pernicious ideology whose bases have been disproven ages, epochs ago. Anti-anti-racists are pursuing an active social harm.
Anti-anti-racism is reactionary, much like the conservative groundswell against the phrase “Black Lives Matter”. The reactionary rejoinder to that phrase is “all lives matter”, yet if you try to parallel that sentiment to the original, it loses meaning. “Black lives matter” has an implied “too” or “as well” appended, whereas if that were applied to “all lives matter”, that phrase begins to fall apart. (“Black lives matter because Blacks have been excluded for so long” does not map onto “all lives matter because all people have been excluded.” It’s nonsensical.) As it is entirely reactionary, anti-anti-racism has no inherent meaning.
I hesitate to even post this, because there is a deep part of me that suspects that all of this talk of being against racism is exactly what the reactionaries want. That suspicion comes from the same place of wondering if racists have somehow tricked the rest of us into showing all manners of police brutality against Black people on all media platforms, thereby passively ingraining those images into inherent biases. Did this culminate with the George Floyd trial, where we were all subject to imbibing a Black murder snuff film? If I were a White supremacist, I’d probably get a good laugh at that video of Floyd’s life leaving his eyes being replayed over and over, proliferating. So, I vacillate.
But ultimately I see the overall project of the current rightwing endgame as utilizing race hatred to garner and drive grassroot support, and the best way to clear the path for them doing so is by never confronting them with the flaws inherent at the very heart of their social system.