What liberals—what the whole modern Western world—say racism is
Style columnist Carolyn Hax of the
Washington Post got this
letter:
Dear Carolyn:
Some friends of mine had been talking up this guy they thought would be perfect for me, so I finally went on a blind date with him. It turns out he’s black, and while I am NOT racist and have no problem with interracial dating in general, it’s not for me. I just prefer to date white guys.
I told my friends why I wouldn’t be seeing him again, and they were, shockingly, horrified. Did I miss something here? I know interracial dating is more prevalent now than it used to be, but I didn’t realize it was SO common that you get in trouble if you don’t want to do it. I figured if I’m the one who needs a kick in the pants, you’re the perfect person to give it to me. But I’m hoping you’ll tell me I’m right, that no one should have to date anyone they don’t want to.
Sacramento
Hax replied:
You’re right—no one should have to date anyone s/he doesn’t want to.
And your friends are right, too—they shouldn’t have to pretend they’re not horrified by something they find morally repugnant.
And you’re right, interracial dating is more prevalent now, but its prevalence here is the cart; the issue here is the horse.
More people date interracially because more people realize that the only alternative to being racist is to judge each person as a person.
Your decision not to date this man wasn’t about his character or lack thereof, it wasn’t about his sex appeal or lack thereof, it wasn’t about his intellect or lack thereof, it wasn’t about his sense of humor or lack thereof, it wasn’t about his work ethic or lack thereof, it wasn’t about shared history or lack thereof, it wasn’t about his goals or lack thereof, it wasn’t about his compatibility or lack thereof.
To your credit, you’re owning your opinion; all you had to say was that you didn’t find him attractive, and this conversation doesn’t happen.
However: We’re having this conversation because you didn’t find his race attractive. That’s what racism is.
- end of initial entry -
Gintas writes:
“I just prefer to date white guys.
“I don’t know why, um, I just, you know, do. But I am NOT racist! No no no!”
At some point, someone is going to look at the big red button on each liberal labeled “Manipulate With Racism!”, and he’s going to start pushing that button from the right. And he’s going to sweep all before him, because every liberal has that button planted in him at birth, and it’s carefully nurtured all his life, and he’s very sensitive to it.
Am I suggesting you push that button? Yes. I know you have, in the past, tried to maintain “racism” as a legitimate moral problem, carefully defining it, and refusing to abuse it. However, we may be better off finding a different word, a new word, to describe the true racism, and use the word “racism” aggressively against the left. A little dose of Cultural Marxism for the left. After all, they are all conditioned to crumble helplessly before the word racism. It’s almost like…the Ring of Power. Almost.
Talk me out of this, but I am feeling radicalized.
LA replies:
I have never said that conservatives should not use liberals’ own beliefs against them. To the contrary, I have said that we should force liberals to be consistent with their own principles, so that they can’t escape from the consequences—and thus the real meaning—of their principles. As it is now, the unprincipled exception allows them to keep escaping the consequences—and we stupid conservatives keep enabling them to do so! Conservatives (understandably) feel gratified and relieved when a liberal says something sane and non-liberal. The conservative feels he’s found common ground with the liberal as a fellow human being and wants to embrace him. The conservative must not give in to this generous feeling. Instead, the conservative should say something like this: “This non-liberal thing that you just said completely contradicts what you ordinarily say. You have repeatedly called conservatives racists for saying the kind of thing that you are now saying. What gives you the right to say it yourself?” Every time they move away from liberalism on some particular issue, we, instead of celebrating, should tell them that they are contradicting their principles and that according to their own beliefs they are doing something morally bad, racist, or whatever.
Ingemar writes:
Drivel! Absolute drivel!
I am beginning to agree more and more with you that liberalism is a soft tyranny (that hopefully will not become a hard tyranny). In bygone era it used to be that racism was the oppression of one race by another. Now, thanks to postmodernism and professional race grievance mongering, the distinction between racism and taste has been blurred to incomprehension. What right does one person have to call another racist for preferring her own race? I do not think a white woman or a black woman racist for not finding me attractive because of my race, because I realize everyone’s tastes are different.
Perhaps Hax would prefer that the writer be like that mudshark English actress (who ended up getting killed by her black boyfriend).
LA replies:
You write:
“Now, thanks to postmodernism and professional race grievance mongering, the distinction between racism and taste has been blurred to incomprehension.”
I don’t agree. The columnist’s position is not incomprehensible or incoherent, it is perfectly sensible, rational, and consistent. If race does not matter, if we’re supposed to see people only as individuals without any reference to their race, if it’s immoral to care about race, then it’s racist—it’s immoral—not to want to marry a person of another race, if his or her race is a factor in the decision.
Conservatives will never be able to oppose liberalism effectively until they recognize that liberalism is not just some self-interested hypocritical game (which is not to say that lots of liberals are not self-interested and hypocritical), but is based on a principle, which is non-discrimination. If we are to oppose liberalism, we must stand for the opposite principle, which is that certain kinds of discrimination are normal, morally ok, and indeed necessary for the good of individuals and society. (And proper moral thinking involves figuring out which kinds of discrimination are good ,which are neutral, and which are bad.) But conservatives don’t believe that certain kinds of discrimination are normal and morally ok, They don’t oppose the non-discriminatory principle of liberalism. So they keep acting as though the problem with liberalism is not liberalism itself , but some excess or nuttiness or hypocrisy of liberalism. This leaves liberalism unchallenged and in the saddle.
Just as people who are unwilling to recognize that Islam is the problem are stuck in forever spinning out non-Islam theories of Islamic extremism, conservatives who don’t want to oppose liberalism as such are stuck in forever spinning out non-liberalism theories of liberal extremism.
Terry Morris writes:
“That’s what racism is.”
Does this definition of racism apply to all races, or only to the white race?
LA replies:
Only to the white race. But that’s not because of hypocrisy. That’s because liberalism is a white thing, and under the liberal script, only whites are either moral or immoral actors, depending on whether they have the correct or incorrect attitude toward nonwhites. In the liberal script, nonwhites are not moral or immoral actors, they are the objects of the whites’ moral or immoral behavior.
I understand that liberalism is active and dominant in certain non-Western societies, such as India. That doesn’t change my point about whites and the white liberal script, which is solely about whites. Whites don’t know about Indian liberalism, it’s not an issue for them.
Rose H. writes:
As a child, I was taught that racism was (1) believing that one race (e.g. whites) was inherently superior to another (e.g. blacks); and (2) interacting with the other race on that basis. Merely preferring the members of one’s own race was not considered racism—it was normal. My parents treated everyone with basic courtesy and it usually was returned in kind.
Now, of course, the “enlightened ones” tell us that we’re racist if we don’t prefer to spend time with other races in at least equal portion to our own—but only if we’re white! This is nonsense.
LA replies:
I disagree. The fact that racism 40 years ago was defined as a belief in racial superiority does not mean that that is the only legitimate definition of racism. The extension of the definition of racism from a belief in superiority to a preference for one’s own race is a perfectly logical development of the liberal idea. Racism means making any racial discrimination. To prefer your own race is to make a discrimination, and that is racism.
There is no escape from recognizing what liberalism actually is and opposing it.
Paul K. writes:
That’s an amazing response to that letter.
Upon reflection, I realize that I have never found a black woman physically attractive. That does not only encompass the black women I’ve met over the years, but whatever black female celebrity was considered a great beauty at any given time, from Dihann Carroll to Beyonce. I am not saying that they are not good looking—in an objective sense they are very much so—it’s just that they don’t appeal to me personally. I can’t explain this, as I find many dark-skinned sub-continent Indian women attractive.
Fortunately, the issue is moot, as I’m married, but were I not married, how would Carolyn Hax suggest I go about correcting my innate preferences?
September 30
Morgan, a BNP member from Wigan, England, writes:
In response to Paul K.:
I was married 24 years to a South Asian woman. My daughter is, despite her white skin, rosy cheeks, fair hair and blue eyes—mixed race. My wife was a Sri Lankan Burgher (whose deceased father is listed by Wiki as the most famous Sri Lankan there has ever been). so I suppose a few old-time Dutch and modern-day Celtic recessive genes met in there somewhere. I can just imagine now my daughter or a granddaughter marrying a white man, then getting a beating or divorce for possibly having an Asian looking baby.
The only other woman in my life (57 years) that I’ve been seriously involved with is Malaysian Chinese.
And no, I don’t find black women attractive either. I do genuinely concede that some are extremely beautiful, but I just don’t ‘fancy’ them.
Does this make me racist?
James G. writes:
Another point you might make is that if “homophobia” is just like racism (as liberals are constantly reminding us), and if not finding a person’s race to be sexually attractive is “what racism is,” then not finding people of one’s own sex to be sexually attractive must be “what homophobia is,” and must be deserve the same moral opprobrium that racism does. I’d like to know if Carolyn Hax agrees, and if not, how she can evade the logic of her position.
Leonard D. writes:
First let me affirm your reply to Rose H. There is indeed logic to the progressive position. If one accepts their moral axiom of equality, then all discrimination between people based on any innate attribute must logically fall.
There is one interesting angle to this letter nobody has mentioned yet, so I will. The friends of the letter-writer “talked up” their black acquaintance for some time (“I finally went”). But obviously they never mentioned his race! There are two possible explanations: both are rather horrific if you think about them. One is, that the friends authentically don’t believe and cannot imagine that race matters in human sexual attraction and/or mate choice, at least for anyone whom they are friends with. Yikes. Or the alternative: at least some of the friends do understand that race can matter for people’s attraction, but that they nevertheless did not mention it. That is, they are so PC-whipped that they would prefer to embarrass a friend, raise her hopes and dash them, and waste her time, rather than even casually mention to her an obvious and salient attribute of the guy. Amazing! [LA replies: I’m glad you pointed that out. I had noticed it in passing, but hadn’t zeroed in on it. It’s impossible to read her as saying other than that her friends did not tell her that the man they were setting her up with for a blind date was black. As you said, that truly is taking PC to a new level. But, as I always say, “PC” is just liberalism applied consistently.]
Incidentally, the answer to Paul K.’s question is more-or-less given by Carolyn. First, you’re not really expected to correct your barbaric preferences: if you can, great, maybe you can be a good white progressive. If you can’t, it just demonstrates why progressives are better than you and should have power. What you are supposed to do, though, is clear enough. Never, ever, for any reason whatsoever, mention anyone’s race, or act like it matters to you. That is, don’t ask, don’t tell. And if asked, lie. Specifically: “all you had to say was that you didn’t find him attractive, and this conversation doesn’t happen.”
P.S. For your amusement, a natural parody is here subbing sex for race. The future beckons us:
Dear Carolyn:
I’m a guy. Some friends of mine had been talking up this person they thought would be perfect for me, so I finally went on a blind date with him. It turns out he’s male, and while I am NOT homophobic (no really! I have many gay friends!) and have no problem with same-sex relations in general, it’s not for me. I just prefer to date women.
I told my friends why I wouldn’t be seeing him again, and they were, shockingly, horrified. Did I miss something here? I know homosexual dating is more prevalent now than it used to be, but I didn’t realize it was SO common that you get in trouble if you don’t want to do it. I’m hoping you’ll tell me I’m right, that no one should have to date anyone they don’t want to.
(The reply is left as an exercise to the reader.)
LA replies:
I hope Leonard will send his letter to Carolyn Hax.
Mencius Moldbug writes:
One thing most people don’t know: neither “racism” nor any declension thereof appears in the 1926 OED.
Significant use of the word appears to be entirely post-1945. Thus, the primary political heresy of our generation was entirely unknown in the era of our grandfathers. Of course, this is just because our grandfathers were such racists that they had no idea anyone could be anything but a racist. So they needed no word for it—just as fish need no word for water. Now, of course, we know better.
Using Google Books, however, I beat the OED and found a use of “racism” in 1902. Amazingly (or not), it appears in the phrase “racism and classism”:
“Segregating any class or race of people apart from the rest of the people kills the progress of the segregated people or makes their growth very slow. Association of races and classes is necessary in order to destroy racism and classism.”
Unsurprisingly, the source is the proceedings of a conference of “friends of the American Indian.” Progressive Christians, in other words.
Mencius continues:
You can try the Google search yourself:
This queries for all uses of “racism” between 1900 and 1922. You will see instantly that almost all the results are errors—eg, incorrect dates on the book, bad scans of “ostracism,” etc, etc, etc. The 1902 Proceedings—rather appropriately labeled as “Juvenile Fiction”—is the only exception on the first page.
Steve K. writes:
I would have to agree with the gist of Paul K.’s comment. Though I have periodically found an occasional black women attractive, (going back a bit, I thought Marilyn McCoo of the Fifth Dimension quite lovely!) most who I have found desirable have had at least a fair amount of white admixture. And the overwhelming majority of black men also find such women to be more attractive as well.
LA replies:
I hadn’t actually intended this entry to become an invitation to commenters to discuss which physical/racial types of the opposite sex they find desirable, but the reality is that such comments become inevitable when a columnist declares that people are morally wicked if they are not equally attracted to all racial types.
October 1
Ron K. writes:
I’ve read more than my share of Carolyn Hax columns, as our local paper prints them next to the late-in-the-week NYT Crosswords, the tougher clues of which give the eye plenty of opportunity to drift.
It finally clicked after reading this piece why her style and tone is so familiar—it’s the same used by Christopher Caldwell in the Financial Times. Neither columnist seems all that prone to telling the reader what to do, preferring to dig for the heart of an issue and then limn the consequences of various actions or directions of thought.
If one reads it closely (i.e. not “between the lines” but the lines themselves) this column is refreshingly neutral. She never comes out and says that using race as a criterion is wrong—which itself is amazing these days—so if one doesn’t believe that it is, just what is there to object to here? (Except that she didn’t give her reader the requested “kick in the pants.”)
She does mention “judg[ing] … as a person” and “shared history.” If race isn’t part of one’s person and shared history, what is?
Since “racism” itself is a bogus word used primarily by bogus people for bogus purposes, I think we can ignore this column and go on enjoying Miss Hax for what she’s good at. Which isn’t quite liberal.
LA replies:
You wrote:
“If one reads it closely (i.e. not “between the lines” but the lines themselves) this column is refreshingly neutral. She never comes out and says that using race as a criterion is wrong—which itself is amazing these days—”
I can’t imagine on what basis you say this. Hax clearly states that using race as a criterion is wrong. She declares that the correspondent is racist because she didn’t want to date a black man: “We’re having this conversation because you didn’t find his race attractive. That’s what racism is.”
Not only that, but she says that race is a matter of complete indifference, and that the reason there is more and more interracial dating is that more and more people recognize that truth: “More people date interracially because more people realize that the only alternative to being racist is to judge each person as a person.”
So, Hax is promoting the liberal orthodoxy that anything other than total race blindness is racism. yet somehow you see her as neutral and as not taking a position. I can’t understand how you could reach such a conclusion, unless you think that liberalism is itself neutral, which of course is what liberals themselves always claim about liberalism.
James P. writes:
Ron K. says,
Since “racism” itself is a bogus word used primarily by bogus people for bogus purposes, I think we can ignore this column and go on enjoying Miss Hax for what she’s good at. Which isn’t quite liberal.
Liberals use the bogus word “racism” for bogus purposes, and Hax uses this bogus word for bogus purposes. Yet we should not consider her a liberal, we should ignore the plain meaning of her words and consider her neutral?
Ken Hechtman writes:
You know what gets me about this story? If the letter-writer had told the agony aunt “I only date members of one particular race and it’s not my own” it wouldn’t have provoked a moral lecture. It would have been treated as a perfectly common and legitimate preference. I’d guess every liberal has at least a few personal friends who fit that description. The slang terms for people like that are none too complimentary (“yellow fever”, “jungle fever”, “potato queen”, “salsa dipper”, etc.) but there’s no real moral outrage about it.
October 2
Ken Hechtman writes:
You wrote:
I hadn’t actually intended this entry to become an invitation to commenters to discuss which physical/racial types of the opposite sex they find desirable, but the reality is that such comments become inevitable when a columnist declares that people are morally wicked if they are not equally attracted to all racial types.
Have we switched positions here? Your conservative commenters are falling over themselves to get their own touches of jungle fever into the public record and I’m the one saying it’s OK if you don’t happen to have one.
October 3
Ken Hechtman writes:
OK, that was mugging for a cheap laugh—this isn’t: The advice columnist is taking the exact mirror image of the conservative position of 100 years ago (50 years ago in the South). She’s dictating how people ought to experience the most personal and private feeling there is, she reserves the right to shame those who don’t obey and in general she thinks people ought to live their private lives in the service of other people’s values. If all that sounds familiar, it ought to. But you find her version of it so mindless and inhuman (and rightly so) that you’d settle for the liberal position of 50 years ago and you’d call it a win.
More than that, even your regulars don’t want to go back to the bad old days when they couldn’t ask out a woman they were attracted to or even just turn their heads as she walked down the street simply because she was the wrong race. They *like* the freedom they have now and they’re not about to give it up.
LA replies:
You’re making the same argument as Steve Sailer: people want to mate with the people with whom they want to mate, and no force on earth can or should stand against that.
Of course I disagree. If all the historical peoples of mankind are not to vanish, if the world is not to dissolve into a borderless, nationless, culture-less, socialist hell, then distinctions must be maintained, and that means saying that it’s better for people to marry people who are ethnoculturally similar to themselves.
An issue like this is where the rubber meets the road in the opposition to liberalism. Liberalism says humanity consists of a bunch of individuals with rights, and that the individual’s rights and self-autonomy represents the highest value and must be the ultimate determinant of all issues. Traditionalism says that while individuality is central to what we are, it is not the totality of what we are. We are part of, and are formed by, larger wholes of nation, culture, religion, civilization, race. Traditionalism means upholding these larger wholes against liberalism which seeks their utter destruction—at least when it comes to the larger wholes of Western man.
According to you, Carolyn Hax’s PC requirement that people must not prefer to date and marry people of their own race, is the moral equivalent of the pre-Civil Rights social order in America, in which people were strongly socially discouraged or legally barred from marrying people of other races. But the two positions are not morally equivalent. The intent and inevitable consequence of Hax’s liberal PC view is to destroy our historic culture and peoplehood. The intent of the traditionalist view (and by saying this I don’t mean to embrace everything about pre-Civil Rights America) is to preserve our historic culture and peoplehood, and, along with them, our true freedoms. You want to resolve the conflict between political correctness and conservatism by opting for pure individualist liberalism: let individuals do what they want, without traditionaal or PC restrictions. But your supposed middle position of unqualified individual freedom—a freedom that will be liberated by the dissolution of national borders which you also favor—is not a middle position at all, since, like all-out PC, it still leads inevitably to the destruction of Western peoples, nations, and cultures.
Terry Morris writes:
You wrote:
Traditionalism says that while individuality is central to what we are, it is not the totality of what we are.
What a salient point to make! The centality of individualism to the traditionalist way of thinking is in no way the totality of trad-con thinking. I like it—the acknowledgment that central to our way of thinking is individualism, but then we also keep in mind the whole of the subject, which is to say that ungoverned individualism (libertarianism) is altogether self-destructive. So that there is a balance incorporated into trad-con thinking.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 29, 2009 08:59 PM | Send