The Problem of 'Anti-Racism'

Today, the nostrum goes, it is not enough for Americans to be not racist. They must be "anti-racist." This woke terminology has infused our lexicon. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., recently declared from the well of the Senate: "Being race-conscious is not enough. It never was. We must be anti-racists." What, pray tell, is the difference between being against racism and being anti-racist? Ibram X. Kendi, author of "How to Be An Antiracist," provides an answer: Racism is no longer to be defined as the belief that someone is inferior based on race. Instead, racism is to be defined as the belief that any group differences can be attributed to anything other than racism . Thus, any system that ends with different outcomes must be racist. Indeed, Kendi contends, "Racism itself is institutional, structural, and systemic."

To be anti-racist means to tear down these systems. Any obstacle in the pursuit of equality of outcome must be torn down, assumed to be a product of discrimination. Basic decency, then, means that we must oppose even institutions that have been considered hallmarks of freedom. Those institutions, after all, have exacerbated inequalities, or at least failed to rectify those inequalities.

This means that America's culture of rights — a culture that suggests an obligation on the part of individuals to respect the rights of others, even if they disagree — must come under fire. That culture reinforces hierarchies and inequalities, after all. The classical liberal says that rights fall equally on the just and the unjust alike; the anti-racist suggests that rights are merely tools of power. Anti-racism, in its essence, is merely reworked neo-Marxism from the 1960s: Herbert Marcuse would have been ecstatic to see his concept of "repressive tolerance" — "intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left" — revived under the banner of race rather than class.