Racists Against Racism

What is better? A racist fighting against racism, or a complete non-racist doing nothing?

A large portion of abolitionists who ended both slave trade and slavery were racists by today’s standards. Often very racist. Yet their actions still mattered in the grand fight against racism. They made a very bad situation less bad. And so it has been for every generation fighting racism. They have never been what people call “color blind.”

The same applies to feminism. Many men agreed to let women vote even if they did not really think of women as equals. We cannot sideline the push for progress by a desire to meet arbitrary purity tests.

The racism debate — in particular as I see it in the US — has turned into what I would call bike-shedding. It is an expression from a fictional example about discussions around building a nuclear power plant where all the effort went into discussing the bike shed for employees. Often it is referred to as the law of triviality.

The modern racism debate often turns into something similar. Emphasis is put on the trivial rather than the substantial. Thus instead of issues such as Republicans taking away voting rights from minorities through voter suppression laws, you see social media more focused on various personal anecdotes about how a person of…