Is the exclusion of racist whites liberal hypocrisy?

We welcome and accommodate Islamo-supremacists who hate us and intend our subservience and destruction. We wax rhapsodic about “La Raza,” the bronze race that claims the entire North American continent as its own. Isn’t it about time, then, asks Julia Gorin, that we also reach out to

the other supremacists in our midst, whom society has shunted aside—the white supremacists, skinheads, neo-Nazis, KKK and other affiliates? Why do we discriminate against them? Why the double standard? It’s long past time to bring them into the political fold and establish dialogue. After all, wouldn’t the same logic apply to them that applies to immigrants and Muslims: when people are marginalized, it fuels their sense of otherness, and their anger festers. Besides, talk about traditionally disadvantaged products-of-their-environment who need a self-esteem boost!

It’s a worthwhile and amusing column, but by attributing the negative treatment given to white racists to a “double standard,” Gorin fails to get at the core of the liberal logos. Pace Gorin, it’s not a double standard for liberals to refuse to embrace white racists, because, very simply, they are not the Other.

We need to understand that liberal society, founded on the belief in non-discrimination, is an organic arrangement consisting of three parts, each of which is indispensable to the working of the whole. First there are the liberals themselves, who represent and conscicuously practice the society’s ideal of non-discrimination, though they tend to do this symbolically more than in their real lives. Then there are the unassimilable Others, the non-Westerners and minorities upon whom the liberals practice the virtue of non-discrimination. Then there is a third group, consisting of whites who are insufficiently non-discriminatory toward the Others, and so are the foil against whom the virtue of the liberal elites shines more strongly. While the earlier, non-liberal society defined itself by discriminating against unassimilable Others, today’s liberal society defines itself by discriminating against its own native members who have not yet “gotten with” the liberal program and still discriminate against the Other, or at least fail to display the correct non-discriminatory attitudes. There is also a fourth group, which could be considered an adjunct of the third, consisting of the expendable whites who are needed as sacrificial lambs for the non-discriminatory project, people like Barbara Grutter, whose exclusion from elite institutions allows for the admission of unqualified minorities, which in turn allows the white liberals who have been admitted into those institutions to experience multiracial diversity and thus practice the virtue of non-discrimination.

Thus the contempt for racist or insufficiently non-discriminatory whites is not liberal hypocrisy. It is an organic expression of liberalism, and an intrinsic component in the functioning of the liberal order.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 22, 2006 01:15 PM | Send