Is BLM Racist?

Recently, I said of pandemic news, "[I]t can be helpful to follow the odd contrarian." For similar reasons, it can be helpful to listen to a foreign voice with regard to American affairs.

Enter Australian writer Xin Du, whose 1500-ish words in Spiked! take a look at the "systemic racism" claim of an organization whose name I can't agree with more, and whose ideas and methods I can't agree with less.

I highly recommend its whole essay as a look at the real progress America has made in racial equality and a reality check on its current state of affairs. But I particularly liked the following part of Du's conclusion:

Is there any to end? (Image by Clay Banks, via Unsplash, license.)

In a debate on reparations, the late, great Christopher Hitchens defined racists not as those who discriminate, but precisely those who are unable to discriminate between individuals. Instead, the racist prefers to see individuals as groups, based on arbitrary markers like skin pigmentation.

This is exactly what the so-called anti-racists are doing. They clump together all black people, and all white people. They then paint all black people as mendicant, and unable to forge their own way without the white people getting out of the way. Theirs is the soft bigotry of low expectations. [bold added]

Du continues, although I think this applies more to the rank-and file than the leaders of this odious movement:

The latest anti-racist [sic] lynching of America shows how much damage can be done by well-meaning people who follow narratives rather than facts, and who treasure feelings over truths. The road to hell is indeed paved with good intentions.

But back to the previous quote: This reminds me both of Ayn Rand's seminal essay on racism and Tyler Cowen's recent call for the piece to be "resuscitate[d]." Rand's money quote is quite similar to that, although it elaborates on important points:

Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man's genetic lineage -- the notion that a man's intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.

Racism claims that the content of a man's mind (not his cognitive apparatus, but its content) is inherited; that a man's convictions, values and character are determined before he is born, by physical factors beyond his control. This is the caveman's version of the doctrine of innate ideas -- or of inherited knowledge -- which has been thoroughly refuted by philosophy and science. Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes. It is a barnyard or stock-farm version of collectivism, appropriate to a mentality that differentiates between various breeds of animals, but not between animals and men.

Like every form of determinism, racism invalidates the specific attribute which distinguishes man from all other living species: his rational faculty. Racism negates two aspects of man's life: reason and choice, or mind and morality, replacing them with chemical predestination. [bold added]

It can be difficult, within America over the past few weeks, to maintain a sense of optimism about our country in general and racial equality in particular. I thank Xin Du for offering us the perspective of someone for whom there is psychological distance, and for reminding us of who we are at a time when tempers can cause us to forget.

-- CAV