The Second Coming

 

Courtesy of the "Toronto Relationship Clinic"

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,    

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

 

Current academic articles based on “critical race theory” keep cascading across my desk. They always accuse the US of being a racist society, based on “white supremacy.”

It is not obvious what they mean by this. I think many are confused. 

It is true, of course, that the US once had race-based slavery, and did not abolish it until 1865. But then again, most of the world used to have slavery, it was abolished, and in the US it was abolished over a hundred and fifty years ago. 

It is also true that discriminatory laws based on race were revived and then persisted in the US South until 1965, a hundred years later. But that too is over fifty years ago. Most now alive would have no memory.

What makes the US “white supremacist” today? Merriam-Webster defines “White supremacy” as “the belief that the white race is inherently superior to other races and that white people should have control over people of other races.” Oxford defines it as: “The belief that white people constitute a superior race and should therefore dominate society, typically to the exclusion or detriment of other racial and ethnic groups, in particular black or Jewish people.”

According to the US Constitution, and American statute law, to act on any such belief in America today would be illegal. The US is almost uniquely a non-racial nation. To be German or Japanese or French is an ethnic, a racial, designation. To be American is not. It is the one country in the world least based on any kind of racial supremacy. In America, by its very founding document, all men are created equal.

There is no constituency to speak of in modern America for such an opinion as “white supremacy.” I doubt any reader of this piece has ever heard or read such an opinion expressed by anyone in the past forty years, in public or in private. I have not. And I read a lot.

So how can the US be said to be based, today, on “white supremacy”?

By a redefinition of the term. “White supremacy” as the term is used by the critical race theorists means any situation in which it is tolerated that people with white skin are statistically doing better on some metric than are people with darker-toned skin. This must be ended, by main force, or the system is “white supremacist.” Pale-skinned people of primarily European ancestry do better than “blacks” on measures of average income and average educational attainment. So long as this is true, apparently, the USA is and will be “white supremacist.”

Yet we have a logical problem. If you factor in all racial groups, instead of an arbitrary two, it turns out that the USA is “Asian supremacist.” Asian Americans do better than either European or African Americans on both those metrics. And, given that the Oxford definition expressly excludes Jews from the category “white,” American is probably even more “Jew supremacist.”

The essential premise of critical race theory is exactly the same premise as Nazi race theory. There and then, it was the Jews running everything; for the Jews in prewar Germany were wealthier and better educated than the average German. So they were supposedly in control of everything, and were to blame for all the sufferings of the Germans. Here and now, it is the “whites” running everything, and responsible for all bad things. Increasingly we hear calls for similar remedies as well.

No cause for panic, of course—many will say. After all, the Jews were only six percent of the German population in 1930. “Whites” in the US are the majority. They really do hold power, so long as the US is a democracy, and so have little to fear, however violent and vile the rhetoric becomes.

Except, to begin with, the rules are changing. The innovation of “intersectionality” allows things to be parsed so that the ethnicity can be expanded or contracted as seems useful. “White” can be read to exclude “Hispanics,” Jews, Arabs, Muslims, Sicilians, or whatever group might be convenient. And you can discount women, homosexuals, and so forth. The remaining core might be entirely vulnerable in a democracy, depending on how the lines are drawn. Only a bigger and better Holocaust.

But it might not go that direction. Instead, there are growing signs that the gun turrets are swinging to Asians and Jews. Street attacks on Jews and Asians seem to be growing. The logic of critical race theory points inexorably in this direction.

It is amazing how history repeats; it is amazing how people seem incapable of learning from history.