Wednesday, July 1, 2020

The Problem of 'Anti-Racism'

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, recently declared from the well of the Senate: "Being race-conscious is not enough. It never was. We must be anti-racists." What, pray tell, is the difference between being against racism and being anti-racist? Ibram X. Kendi, author of "How to Be An Antiracist," provides an answer: Racism is no longer to be defined as the belief that someone is inferior based on race.

Instead, racism is to be defined as the belief that any group differences can be attributed to anything other than racism.

The classical liberal says that rights fall equally on the just and the unjust alike; the anti-racist suggests that rights are merely tools of power.

The self-proclaimed "Anti-racist" left - a left that sees all of human relations reduced to a rudimentary correlation of skin color and inequality, an analysis we used to call racist - has decided that the culture must be cleansed of all of those who will not be drafted into its woke army.

The hard left has targeted them as the weakest link in the chain of free speech: If corporations can be bullied into pulling their money from social media networks, those social media networks can be bullied into restricting their free-speech cultures.

Such a campaign is now front and center in the culture wars: Major corporations from Coca-Cola to Target have stopped advertising on social media networks, citing the need for more "Hate speech" regulation on those platforms.

That's because the woke crusade is not truly about reducing racism; it is about attacking fundamental institutions, American history and our very culture of rights.

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