Some interesting material in this article; an excerpt:
Nesrine Malik, a columnist for the Guardian, calls much of the anti-racist movement “a kind of group narcissism … that promotes this notion that identity politics is about easing the passage of people of color in elite spaces. … It also promotes a view that reform is via individual guilt and correction, and distracts from the systemic ways that identity politics is being nurtured by the media and politicians.” The Columbia scholar John McWhorter, a linguist well-positioned to make sense of what is largely a rhetorical movement, calls anti-racism a “religion,” complete with the power to excommunicate those who fail to speak in canonical ways. But anti-racism is more than a religion; it has had real and dispiriting political consequences. As New York Times columnist Ross Douthat has noted, it arguably helped defeat the Bernie Sanders brand of social-democratic populism in the battle to define the left wing of the Democratic Party.
At its heart, anti-racism comes from a progressive impulse. It seeks to address the glaring inequalities in American life that are suffered by non-whites, and to identify the historical roots of these inequalities in imperial conquest, slavery and the legal codification of racial subordination. It urges the country to take seriously its long history of racial discrimination and has called for finding ways to overcome these injustices. In its illiberal form, however, anti-racism has replaced substantive political thinking with an emphasis on symbolic cultural changes like replacing school names, become dangerously intolerant of dissent and sidelined discussions of class exclusion and oppression that affect Americans of all races...
Such censorious symbolic politics put off many who might agree that America has deep and longstanding problems of racial inequality, but who increasingly feel like aliens in their own country. This includes many working-class whites who, indiscriminately lumped together with the “privileged” — even amid an epidemic of white working-class “deaths of despair” — are increasingly open to demagogic appeals by Donald Trump and other right-wing populist politicians.
At the same time, and more worryingly, more Blacks and Latinos voted for Trump in 2020 than in 2016, suggesting they thought their political concerns were better met by an outspokenly racist Republican than by a moderate-seeming Democrat. This fact reveals that the putative anti-racist BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and people of color) coalition is a lot shakier than the left believes, and that the optimism embedded in the “majority minority” demographic determinism expressed by anti-racist advocates may be naive or at least premature. Even as it assumes a privileged access to truth, anti-racism makes many questionable assumptions about the world we live in.
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