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Home » And in classic Orwellian fashion, these racists call themselves “anti-racists”

And in classic Orwellian fashion, these racists call themselves “anti-racists”

The New Neo Posted on by

Leftists love to give themselves titles that are the opposite of their essence. Orwell knew this, and it was a prominent part of his masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four.

We see it today in the names of several organizations. For example, “Antifa” (whose members actually lean toward the leftist wing of anarchism), which supposedly stands for “anti-Fascist,” is the closest thing this country has to brownshirts right now. And “Black Lives Matter” – founded by avowed Marxists and admirers of Venezuela – could more accurately be called “The Only Black Lives That Matter Are Those Snuffed Out By White Cops, and We Don’t Care If the Policies We Advocate Lead to the Deaths of Countless More Innocent Black People Than Are Ever Killed By Police.”

That name would be a bit unwieldy on a poster, though.

The “anti-racism” advocates sound as though they’re promoting a good thing, too. “Anti-racism”? Sign me up for the course! Except that, unfortunately for all of us (except the anti-racism trainers themselves, who are smiling all the way to the bank), they are advocates of a racism that’s remarkably pernicious and cleverly – well, the word “diabolical” comes to mind (here’s an article from The Federalist that will get you up to speed on the details, if you aren’t already).

How does flagrant racism, and the promotion of a program that will lead to more racism rather than less, come to be defined as anti-racism? Well, never underestimate the creativity of the left, but in this case it pretty much boils down to the fact that the left defines everything in terms of the power hierarchy (as they order that hierarchy, of course). So racism can only be exercised by the group or groups the left sees as being on top.

In other words, to the left, racism against white people is some sort of oxymoron – it literally does not exist and cannot exist. So we get things such as this, which harms just about everyone:

I repeat: this harms everyone. Except, of course, the purveyors of anti-racism. It may even harm black children the most.

Comments

And in classic Orwellian fashion, these racists call themselves “anti-racists” — 27 Comments

  1. In signaling one of the many Pacific NW virtues, the Seattle School Board years ago defined racism as something done only by whites. The black population of Seattle is only 5-6%, and it is segregated, with 3 ZIP codes each containing 25% blacks out of 36 total ZIP codes.

  2. This is the old Leninist formula (who whom?), followed by Trotsky and then by Stalin, which reduces all human relations and interactions to a binary of oppressor and oppressed; the New Left replaced the class struggle of the Old Left with identity politics and “intersectionality” (often described as “Cultural Marxism”) and such mindless dogmas as “punching up” and “punching down”. The ideas of Foucault about power and transgression and Marcuse’s theory of “repressive tolerance” have also contributed to our current cultural insanity, which shows no sign of abating.

  3. The leftists always lie. For example, Planned Parenthood is an abortion mill and has nothing to do with becoming a parent. They prevent parenthood.

  5. The racism of the colonialists was that blacks were lazy and feckless. I find it unbelievable that we are now meant to agree with them. This isn’t just racist, it’s appallingly racist.

    If hard work is a white only virtue, how will any other societies rise?

    Except, of course, those traits are also the traits of China, Korea and Japan etc too (except way more respect for authority, and less nuclear family).

  6. ” … the closest thing this country has to brownshirts right now.”

    Not to go all Godwin on you, but how exactly is Antifa different from Hitler’s brownshirts? Antifa’s “Beer Hall Putsch” this summer has been much more successful than the Nazi’s were in Autumn of ’28. And, how exactly do their demands differ from the Nazi’s? Seize industry. Demean and scapegoat a race of people because of “power/wealth inequities.” Antifa’s brownshirts have gotten at least 3 Congresswomen elected, and the Mayors, Attorney Generals and Governors of most of our most populous cities and states. Looks like they also have supporters in the top echelons of the military, CIA and FBI.

  8. Ray:

    When Planned Parenthood was named, it was about dispensing birth control. Abortion was illegal, and it wasn’t providing abortions.

    The name has become ironic.

  9. I’m thinking of having this quote from Theodore Dalrymple printed on business cards, and leaving them around like Chick Tracts.

    “The purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.”

    tldr: Shut up and think what you’re told, prole.

  10. I think this article has been referenced on another thread, but it’s certainly applicable here.
    https://taibbi.substack.com/p/on-white-fragility

    Matt links to these useful posts on being part of the Real Resistance.

    https://newdiscourses.com/2020/06/template-resisting-white-fragility-workplace/

    The message that worked is provided below. Feel free to use it, combined with the other resources here on New Discourses, as a template to create your own materials and get this stuff out of your companies. Knowing what I do about these critical theories, I can assure you that, despite the risk in standing up against them, your company assumes a lot of risk by importing them. As you will see, a very common problem is that people think Critical Race Theory is one thing when it is really another, and good-intentioned people tend to adopt it without realizing what it is (and reject it when they do know what it is).
    …
    [from the letter to HR]
    The major issue with the current conversation around race is that the goalposts have been moved, but we continue to use the same language to describe very different things. The most foundational example is the new definition of racism.
    …
    Maybe it’s my white fragility, but I don’t think you need to call people names in order to recognize and correct systemic injustice.

    https://newdiscourses.com/2020/06/how-we-fought-woke-thought-police-won/
    [I omitted the prefacing story, which involved making Canadian lawyers sign a loyalty oath to equality, diversity, and inclusion – the Statement of Principles SOP — which was opposed by a group who campaigned for and won all the seats on the governing board of the legal association.]

    In order to get lawyers on board with this “accelerated culture shift,” as they called it, it was necessary to moderate their thinking. To that end, a mandatory Statement of Principles was part of the package to which each lawyer and paralegal needed to sign on. …if you didn’t indicate on your annual report that you had complied, there would be “progressive discipline,” presumably through to the suspension of your license to practice law. You could either sign the requisite statement without believing it and be a hypocrite, or you could refuse to sign it and risk your career.
    …
    Requiring people to swear, in effect, a loyalty pledge to a particular political view is unsettling at best, and totalitarian at worst. But that’s not how the activists see it. And for most people who aren’t spending their time watching the culture war unfold, spotting patterns, witnessing people being canceled for wrongspeak, they hear those nice words “equality,” diversity, inclusion and wonder how anyone could be opposed. When in doubt, or until the consequences hit them personally, people tend to side with “Social Justice” because it just sounds nice.

    But those nice-sounding words demand more of us than it appears at first blush.
    …
    As Milton Friedman is quoted as saying, “A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.”
    …
    But the important question isn’t what the values are. Most people do think that diversity—of all kinds—is a good thing, myself included. The important question is whether an arm of the state should be able to decide your values at all. It was remarkable how few lawyers saw this as a concern.
    …
    As the recently deceased conservative philosopher, Sir Roger Scruton, wrote not long ago: “We are entering a dangerous social condition in which the direct expression of opinions that conflict—or merely seem to conflict—with a narrow set of orthodoxies is instantly punished by a band of self-appointed vigilantes.”
    …
    Someone drew cartoons portraying opponents of the SOP as pointy-eared goblins, much as Jews were portrayed in 1930’s German propaganda to vilify them. There was a steady stream of disparaging comments about our slate being filled with “old white men,” while those on our team who were women, young, or from minority backgrounds were dismissed as tokens. Very rarely, if at all, did our opponents engage on the merits of our arguments—they just expressed vitriol and anger that anyone would dare oppose them. But this was right out of the playbook. In Saul Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals, he instructs activists never to debate the topic, but rather to attack the person.

    Despite all the bullying and name-calling, there was really nothing of substance on the other side. They didn’t have the facts—we did. They didn’t have the arguments—we did. They didn’t have any way to convince people of the merits of their position except through pressure to conform. And when we didn’t conform, they were completely taken aback by our commitment and organization. Yes, we were called some names, but we took the high road and didn’t engage in the mudslinging, making them look like fools. What happens when you stand up to them? Nothing. The world didn’t end.
    …
    They say the center doesn’t hold—all this activism and conflict hollows out the middle as people tire of being involved, especially when they are personally under attack. That’s part of the activist playbook too—but the center has to hold. If you know what you’re dealing with, you can prepare yourself. Ordinary citizens, and especially thinkers and leaders like yourselves, need to step up before this country becomes toxic and unlivable, with people speaking their opinions only in hushed whispers around their kitchen tables and everyone forced to conform with the prevailing orthodoxy.

    I believe 2020 will be the year that the balance begins to shift, when we stop merely tweeting about all the craziness, and when sensible men and women who value our free and liberal society roll up their sleeves and get to work. They can’t cancel all of us.

    That last sentence is the point that Solzhenitsyn tried to impress on the West.
    The key to doing it is what the lawyers did: organize, enlarge the group, and convince the cowardly that there was a viable option to the despots.

    Somebody had to be the first, not to stop applauding Stalin, but to never begin.
    It helps if the Stalinists don’t yet have guns.

  11. Another significant non-fan of White Fragility, who has figured in Neo’s posts several times recently.

    https://hotair.com/archives/john-s-2/2020/07/15/john-mcwhorter-white-fragility-racist-tract/

    Today the Atlantic published a new piece by McWhorter in which he goes to the heart of this new faith by reading Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility. While he says he believes DiAngelo is well meaning, he finds the book itself to be a “racist tract.”
    …
    [John McWhorter speaking]

    DiAngelo’s outlook rests upon a depiction of Black people as endlessly delicate poster children within this self-gratifying fantasy about how white America needs to think—or, better, stop thinking. Her answer to white fragility, in other words, entails an elaborate and pitilessly dehumanizing condescension toward Black people. The sad truth is that anyone falling under the sway of this blinkered, self-satisfied, punitive stunt of a primer has been taught, by a well-intentioned but tragically misguided pastor, how to be racist in a whole new way.

  12. AesopFan:
    Thanks for that link. An important read, that “courage is contagious”.
    Plus importantly “Once the lawyers were subsumed into the equality and diversity totalitarian enterprise, the rest of us were doomed.”
    Which is as true here as in Ontario.

  13. Another person cancelled (gee, isn’t it a good thing that cancel culture doesn’t exist??) because of being insufficiently woke. Most of you have probably read about the SFMOMA debacle, but Jazz makes an important point at the end of his post.
    https://hotair.com/archives/jazz-shaw/2020/07/15/art-museum-curator-forced-resign-world-garbage-now/

    If you make a habit of applying labels like Nazis and racists to everyone with whom you have a difference of opinion, you’re going to be completely unprepared and out of your depth when the actual Nazis and racists arrive.

    The hard Left is undoubtedly inviting the advent of open war, but the soft left is really going to be surprised at the consequences to them when some of the white people they accuse of racism, and of being unable to become otherwise, finally decide: “What the heck, we might as well join up with the real racists, because we’re tired of getting dissed for something we haven’t done.”

  14. Those posters/signs couldn’t be a better illustration of how legitimately nuts the “anti-racist” Left has become. I mean, there’s some things on them like “No tolerance for deviation from single god concept” and even “Your job is who you are” that you can imagine coming from a non-insane person.

    But defining “Cause and effect relationships” and “Hard work is the key to success” as elements of “whiteness” is like something out of the Nuremberg Laws.

    Mike

  15. The main point about the poster (which looks like a take on the old joke line “You might be a White Supremacist if you…”) is that the Left has been pushing this sort of “don’t do anything to improve your life and prosperity because that just be actin’ white” for a long, long time.

    My mother taught in an integrated school for 25 years (we only had one campus for seventh grade; no pretend “racial balancing” there!) and she witnessed it many times when a capable black or Hispanic student suddenly stopped making good grades because of family and peer pressure.

    The goal was and is to keep their constituency poor and depressed because of being oppressed — without having anyone look behind the curtain to see that they were the source of the worst oppressions.

  16. Funny thing. I’m old enough to remember that splitting up black families by selling one parent was considered one of the major sins of slavery.

    It also gets me that they call families particularly “white” practices. Really? The pre-Mao Chinese, for instance? The only way you can make that work is if you really push the “nuclear” to mean exclusively mom, dad, and the kids, with no extension. No grandparents.

    That is not what family life was life when I grew up as a Boomer. And in fact, to the extent that has happened, it would explain many problems. My wife often says the problem with younger girls is they don’t get “granny wisdom”. But of course, that could just be part of being older. Still, there is no question that for me, and all the kids I grew up with, grandparents were huge. That is the only sense I can make of the above, and I don’t think it’s what they meant.

  17. The “White Culture” poster looks pretty good to me. And it says we’ve all internalized it to some degree- great!

    It seems that many are trying to provoke racial conflict, but hopefully a plurality of Americans don’t want that.

  18. It’s about treading the path to power, nothing else, nothing less.

    That path has reached the point where it consists of using fanatically indoctrinated, useful idiots to attack America’s foundational values.

    In a second term, Trump can do much to rein in the insanity but that will almost certainly be a temporary reprieve.

    After Trump, the insanity will resume and will quickly reach the trigger wire; ‘cancelation’ of our unalienable rights.

    The choice will then be a binary one; kneel down and lick the hand that allows you the “tranquility of servitude” or refuse to kneel knowing that armed resistance is the only path that remains.

    “Our contest is not only whether we ourselves shall be free, but whether there shall be left to mankind an asylum on earth for civil and religious liberty.” Samuel Adams

    George Orwell famously spoke of the Left’s utopia; ‘If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.’

  19. Eeyore,

    I was fortunate to have young parents and young grandparents. One set of grandparents lived 1 mile away, the other 2. My parents both worked, often different shifts, so I spent a lot of time with both sets of grandparents. I consider myself immensely fortunate to have them so prominently in my life.

    And Uncles and Aunts and family friends all lived in the same neighborhood. It was not uncommon for an Uncle to pop in on a weekday night after working the late shift (or, maybe, stopping at a “gin mill”). My mom would make sandwiches and the adults would stay up and talk or play cards. Often I spent the nights with one set of grandparents on weekends, as my parents went out on the town. Sunday afternoon the grandmas would cook and various contingents of Cousins, Aunts and Uncles would come by. It was a great way to grow up.

    My children have 1 Uncle, 2 Aunts and 1 cousin.

  20. Geoffrey Britain,

    Just heard an interview of pollster Henry Olsen. He thinks Trump’s goose is veritably cooked. No one since Truman has come back from a deficit like Trump has at this point, and Trump doesn’t seem to have a strong strategy to win undecideds; who, if they haven’t broke by now, typically vote against the incumbent.

  21. This racist garbage has been floating around for a long time. The poster is copyrighted to Judith H. Katz in 1990. If you look up her picture with her books on Amazon you see a smiling white lady with granny glasses who is probably out of touch with most white people let alone black and brown people.

    The idea that Christianity is a white religion is one of the most ignorant things imaginable. In Africa black people join Islam to avoid death by jihad while the same people become Christians of their own free will and often sacrifice their lives for their beliefs.

  22. Here is another antidote to the White Privilege Myth.
    https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-7-15-a-potential-successor-to-thomas-sowell

    After going through his personal background, [Rav] Arora then proceeds to start citing various government statistics that sharply undermine the “white privilege” narrative.

    … [ most of the examples should be familiar to Neo’s readers: Japanese-Americans and various not-European immigrant groups, including black people from the West Indies and Sub-Saharan Africa]…

    …don’t look for the purveyors of the “white privilege” narrative to deal any time soon with data such as the higher median incomes of Nigerian and Ghanaian Americans over white Americans. They think that they can just get away with ignoring such facts. And maybe, for now, they can.

    After looking at Arora’s list of minority groups with median household income greater than white people (predominant European ancestry, and Hispanics when it suits the Left or the government to classify them as white), I can’t believe that any of them reached that affluence level by eschewing the Aspects and Assumptions of Whiteness and White Culture.

    I guess the Ghanaians are White now, and the Nigerians all made their money in email scams.

  23. “The idea that Christianity is a white religion is one of the most ignorant things imaginable.” – Dennis

    Now I’m confused.
    Somebody told us just last month that Jesus was a Black man.
    And a sinner, according to Don Lemon.

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8473935/St-Albans-Cathedral-places-painting-Supper-black-Jesus-altar.html

    https://hotair.com/archives/ed-morrissey/2020/07/09/lemon-lets-face-jesus-christ-admittedly-not-perfect-earth/

  24. Someone in the comment thread asked the obvious question, “If these traits are signs of whiteness, then what are the signs of blackness?”

  25. Rav Arora’s essay is worth reading in full.
    I expect him to get cancelled for something by the end of the week.

    https://nypost.com/2020/07/11/the-fallacy-of-white-privilege-and-how-its-corroding-society/

    Also, Power Line links to the original Katz 1990 graphic, which isn’t nearly as fancy as the one being passed around now. I wonder who gussied it up for the reruns.

    https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/07/the-smithsonian-has-lost-its-mind.php

    http://www.cascadia.edu/discover/about/diversity/documents/Some%20Aspects%20and%20Assumptions%20of%20White%20Culture%20in%20the%20United%20States.pdf

  26. America, conservative Americans are not, in principle, or practice, diversitists. Liberals are divergent. Progressives are monotonic. Libertarians follow their own path.

  27. And the latest from the “Babylon Bee”:
    https://www.newsweek.com/petition-fire-nyc-professor-accused-sleeping-during-anti-racist-meeting-gathers-2000-signatures-1518056

    Um, hold on just a sec.

    Well, uh…it looks like a retraction is in order here, as the “Bee” has denied all connection with the above article, calling it “beyond absurd”. “To confuse us with ‘Newsweek’ is most objectionable, said the publication’s spokesperson who continued that legal measures were being considered.

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