Alas, I too wish you hadn’t jumped in to muddy what had been clearing waters and the beginning of finding common ground.

The waters were already muddied by your dishonest use of language; I’m just here to point it out. Let me try to explain exactly where I see this dishonesty creeping in.


I did say that [Needforname] threw out some racist BS, and I certainly stand by that. What you seem to misunderstand is that racism isn’t just about hate. It’s also about failure to grasp the reality faced by other communities.

You also write:

In the conversation I was having with needforname, I articulated a definition of racism that includes not only ill will or hatred, but a failure to recognize institutional or structural impediments to racial equality and justice.

Everyone fails to grasp realities faced by other communities. And the extent of the “institutional or structural impediments to racial equality” is not well understood. After all, we have many official policies which are actually favorable to disadvantaged racial groups — affirmative action, welfare, and so forth. The “impediments” meanwhile are supposedly purely informal — racist white people in HR departments, “micro-aggressions”, lack of representation in media (#OscarsSoWhite), and so forth.

By this definition of “racist”, you permit yourself or your co-ideologues to tar anyone who wants to discuss this necessarily difficult topic with the “racist” brush. Which would be fine if “racist” just meant someone who was skeptical of the official narrative. But it carries the David Duke meaning too, and this is precisely the motte-and-bailey tactic I alluded to earlier. It is a rhetorical dance that goes like this:

  1. you call someone a “racist”;
  2. they challenge you with the fact that they said nothing indicating hatred or bigotry;
  3. you explain that, no, “racist” just means someone who doesn’t recognize “institutional or structural impediments to racial equality and justice”**;
  4. after the challenge is over, they have been labeled a “racist”, which reverts to its original meaning — and you continue to use it in the original meaning as well.

What you describe as “clearing waters” is merely one step of this dishonest process, which is made possible by the complete failure of the usual English vocabulary to properly distinguish one kind of “racism” from another.

** And who defines what these impediments are? You? Are we not allowed to question whether “micro-aggressions” — which never stopped e.g. my own Chinese immigrant family in the 1970s — can really keep a people down for generations? By granting yourself and your faction this power to label, you are in fact creating a situation where everyone is necessarily racist (except for the most extreme radicals — who ironically tend to be actual racists, just in the opposite direction). I’m sure there are those to your left who consider you a racist.

)

Progressive Reformation

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A Right-Opposition for the New Left.

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