How Radicals Undermine the Fight Against Racism

Marley K., one of the top writers on racism on Medium wrote this article on Medium recently on how “All White People are Racist”.

These story is not really about Marley K. but about what she represents. She is part of what may best be described as navel gazing leftist anti-racism. People with a lot of fire and passion fighting for a just cause, but which are really spending all their energy attacking white liberals and others which are their natural allies.

It reminds me of the AKP-ml movement in my native Norway. They where politically very active in the 70s. Their anger and vitriol tended to be directed towards social democrats rather than conservatives, liberals or other ideologies more strongly associated with capitalist inspired ideology.

Focus on Your Enemy not Your Potential Allies

Why is that? The problem with these people is that they have no clue about how to argue with and fight their actual enemies. I have seen that with many feminists as well. They attack men who are actually most sympathetic to their cause, because they have long learned that their rants don’t go down well with people who actually strongly oppose feminism.

Why should we care? Unlike a lot of other white males often at the receiving end of these rants, I don’t care personally about the accusations of racism. Let us get real. Whites getting accused of being racist is a much smaller problem than racism itself.

No, the reason why this matters, is because such articles derail the whole discussion about racism. Rather than discussing how to tackle the problem of racism, we get dragged into a rather pointless discussion about whether all, most or some white people are racist.

The Dangers of the “Race Realists”

Today we face the problem that a large number of people believe e.g. that blacks have lower IQ than whites for genetic reasons. These people work hard to end things like affirmative action in America. Their beliefs are that the great inequality that exists between whites and blacks, especially in the US but also in other western nations is simply due to lower IQ related to a genetic predisposition for low IQ. In their view helping minorities is just a waste because there is a genetic determinism that they are going to be worse off.