On Anti-Racism Part Three: Enemy at the Gates

“It’s levels to this shit.” ~ Meek Mill

So I talked to Jodi Shaw and her supporters. I wasn’t there to attack Jodi or call her or her fans racist. I didn’t look to relitigate the July 2018 incident at Smith College. I made no assumptions about the thoughts or feelings of anyone beyond what they had posted. The reason why I wanted to talk with them was because it was clear that their beef was not just with how racial bias training was being implemented, but with the very idea of anti-racism and Critical Race Theory. They referred to critical race theory as a hurtful ideology, they claimed terms like systemic racism and white privilege were destructively divisive and a dangerous lie. Jodi’s fight wasn’t a personal matter between her and the college, it was a flashpoint in a larger war between right and wrong. Diversity trainings weren’t a clumsy attempt at building some understanding of the experience of marginalized people, they were an attempt at mind control. The beginnings of an authoritarian push to control people's thoughts and actions under threat of coordinated social exclusion. 

It’s interesting that the arguments against the concept of systemic racism and the need to address it were so grand in nature. The position I was there to advocate was that these types of trainings, seminars, and catchphrases are counterproductive, but the underlying analysis prompting them are valid. Their position was that it was all based on a lie. That there were nefarious intentions behind it all. I feel like it was preferable for them to believe the psychological damage for people like Jodi was done on purpose for bad reasons than that it was collateral damage in service to a noble goal. Because then the purpose of rejecting Critical Race Theory wasn’t just to spare them some hurt feelings, it was a moral imperative. It was right.

Another interesting aspect was that it seemed like a lot of people, Jodi included, didn’t want to defend their arguments with their own reasoning. Instead I was given extensive reading lists of books and articles written by “serious scholars” who had unquestionably proven the lie of CRT and systemic racism.

“Helen Pluckrose already debunked this.”

“You should read Thomas Sowell’s research into this.”

“Thoughtful people like James Linsay disagree with you.”

“Oh you think you know better than Glenn Loury and James McWhorter?”

“I would recommend reading Candace Owens book.”

The assumption on their part seemed to be that when I would ask about a particular piece of their argument, the same piece of opinion writing that confirmed their beliefs would disprove my own. I’m pretty sure that a few of them just assumed that I would never read the links they sent me and therefore I could be dismissed for not engaging with a logical and reasoned argument. But I did read some of them, and what I found is that the same leaps of logic and genetic fallacies that pervaded the arguments on Jodi’s social media pages, were being used by “leading academics” with large media platforms. 

This group of intellectuals attributed the racial disparities in social and economic outcomes to a complicated confluence of factors. Sure some interpersonal racism did exist but this could not and should not be described as systemic. What was more at fault was Black culture and white gatekeepers lowering the standards for minorities, thus setting them up to fail. Poverty was a better predictor of outcomes than race. While it was true that a higher percentage of Black and Brown minorities live in poverty per capita, the a priori assumption that poverty is the result of bad choices meant that disparities were due to a culture of bad choices. This group leaned in hard to the model minority argument, asserting that the relative success of African and Asian immigrant populations disproved that the marginalization of Black and Brown native born Americans had anything to do with systemic racial animus. 

Once or twice I took the time to write lengthy rebuttals to the work of these serious thinkers. I’m not so cocky that I believed my critiques were enough to convince my debate opponents, but I did find it curious that I only received either silence or accusations of being brainwashed in response. The thing was, none of these arguments were new to me. Especially the idea that Black culture was to blame for racial disparities in outcomes. I mean, Bill Cosby has been making that argument for the last 50 years. When the NBA allowed players to wear social justice messages on the backs of their jerseys in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, a few of them chose “Education Reform” as their statement. As if Black people were being murdered by police because they weren’t educated properly. It wasn’t a coincidence that most of the essays assigned to me were written by Black authors. The implication was that these Black people were able to assess the situation dispassionately and free from the victim complex instilled in the majority of the Black community by the liberal orthodoxy. I’ve heard it all before.

It’s levels to this shit.

If you have heard of the Intellectual Dark Web (IDW), you probably know it by its most famous members. They are all over the place ideologically, with religious arch conservatives like Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson, atheist or secular classical liberals like Sam Harris and Dave Rubin, and whatever Joe Rogan is. Instead of ideology, the IDW are linked through their principles. They are free speech absolutists. They believe in debate and the free market of ideas. They hate cancel culture and the perceived coddling of social justice minded students by academic institutions. They view post-modern, Marxist, and critical theory as the beginnings of authoritarianism and warn against their growing influence. Most importantly, they have all said some stupid shit publicly at some point and suffered minor consequences for it. 

To be fair, not everyone associated with the IDW is proud of the title. Just because you believe that the murder of Black people by police isn’t a widespread systemic problem or motivated by race doesn’t mean you want to be put in a group with Ben Shapiro. But I didn’t make the rules. Former NYT opinion editor and current Jodi Shaw superfan Bari Wiess made the rules when she used the term coined by venture capitalist Eric Weinstein to describe the growing cadre of politically diverse public intellectuals united in a fight against woke liberalism run amok. Bari knows all too well the damage that can be done by intolerant mobs of student activists, because during her time at Columbia she led a few of those mobs against Muslim and Arab professors over their criticisms of Israel. 

The specific IDW-associated arguments against anti-racism and CRT aren’t important here. What we need to understand are the aesthetics of the arguments. There is a premium put on objectivity and an almost violent rejection of subjectivity. They don’t reject CRT because they hate Black people, they reject it because it lacks “scientific merit” or because the term systemic racism is ill-defined. I was repeatedly told that since there is no way to falsify the hypothesis of systemic racism, it is based on bad science and must be rejected. And how can you argue with science? Well you can argue with science when you are a Marxist dedicated to destroying the foundations of western civilization.

Problem is, the idea of falsification as a determinant of scientific merit is deeply flawed. It seemed like people believed that falsification was developed as a bedrock principle of scientific inquiry during the Enlightenment and the dawn of liberalism. Actually, falsification was a scientific philosophy created by physicist Karl Popper in 1934. It was an idea that developed around Popper’s chosen field of physics and worked quite well in that discipline, but today many scientists argue that it doesn’t really work that well for others. For instance, what hypothesis are you trying to falsify when you are a chemist trying to develop novel drugs for cancer treatment?  Falsification completely fails as a measure of good science when applied to modeling. Modeling involves trying to describe and predict complex systems. When a single data point works against the model, you tweak the model. And in fact, multiple models can account for the same piece of data. An economist like Glenn Loury can see data showing the overrepresentation of Black people in prison and chalk it up to bad culture. I can see that same data and say it’s systemic racism. Not everything needs a null hypothesis. 

This is not to say that falsification is useless or bad. It’s just that you can’t treat it like the supreme judge of scientific merit across any and all disciplines. That’s how you get climate change deniers alleging conspiracies when scientists change their climate models to account for new data. But none of that is important because by invoking concepts like falsification and scientific merit, IDW arguments against critical race theory adopt the aesthetic of dispassionate reasoning. They have no ideological dog in this fight, they are just looking at the facts. If you don’t think about it too deeply, it sounds really convincing. And when the IDW is validating your negative feelings around racial bias training and CRT, thinking deeply is disincentivized. 

The dirty truth is that the IDW is not fueled by a love of reason and a search for objective truth. They run on grievance. They are a bunch of cranks who don’t like when people object to the objectionable things they sometimes say. So they spend a lot of time crafting sophistical arguments that don’t really hold up under scrutiny. Consequently, their intellectual authority comes not from the strength of their theses but from the mere fact that they’re arguing against perceived consensus opinion. Because the people who put forth these arguments land all over the traditional political spectrum, they are granted the illusion of impartiality. After all, no one wants to agree with Ben Shapiro, but facts don’t care about your feelings. But they aren’t impartial and they do have many ideological commonalities. They are all kind of obsessed with dictionaries.

Seriously, the number of times I was referred to the dictionary definition of racism was amazing. Likewise, there was one person who was gravely concerned that CRT was prompting teachers to tell students that two plus two equals five and that anyone who would insist that it was four was racist. Now this sounds silly and that’s because it is. What was actually happening was that a Black mathematician put out a tweet thread explaining how in applied math you must always understand what your terms are. In the context of using math to describe reality, you must always be mindful of what numbers represent. An IQ score assigns a number to intelligence. If my score is 180 and another person’s score is 100, then it means that I am smarter than that person because 180 is more than 100 and that’s how numbers work. But that doesn’t tell you how intelligence works, or if the IQ test is sufficient for measuring different types of intelligence. What if that other guy is just a bad test taker?  

The subjectivity of numbers when applied to reality speaks to a core concept of CRT. The idea that our systems and institutions are objectively fair (at least since they’ve been purged of de jure discrimination) is based on the assumption that objectivity can be obtained through the intellectual musings of a very small insulated group of rich white men. The IDW defends these systems because they experienced success within them, and if it is decided that they need to be radically changed then maybe their success would be invalidated. 

The IDW is capable of forming decent arguments. They have a point about the counterproductive nature of cancel culture. And yes, college students sometimes go overboard in their activism. They are freakin’ kids. Most importantly, employer-mandated racial bias training that focuses more on punishing and shaming bad behavior than it does on inspiring critical thinking and working toward material systemic change can alienate people. It can turn potential allies into enemies, and lead them straight into the comforting arms of the IDW. Those valid critiques serve as a gateway drug to more specious and disingenuous arguments.

And it doesn’t help that liberals often give them a lot of runway. Liberalism loves a technocrat. So as long as these arguments are being made by accomplished academics who wear nice clothes and speak with a level of sophistication, they will be treated as good-faith differences of opinion rather than dangerous conjecture. And yes, they are dangerous. They aren’t dangerous because they are bad arguments and I disagree with them. They are dangerous because if you watch a lot of IDW-affiliated videos, eventually YouTube’s algorithm will start suggesting alt-right content. 

It’s levels to this shit.

Most members of the IDW do not want to be associated with the alt-right. I’m pretty sure that Black intellectuals like Thomas Sowell and James McWhorter do not want to be lumped in with the likes of dapper nazi Richard Spencer. But when you start arguing that minorities are dividing the country by unfairly targeting members of the majority demographic, and that conspiracies are being formed by groups of people unwilling to assimilate to the dominant culture, there really is only one place that road leads. 

My metaphorical ears perked up when a few Jodi supporters started describing CRT as “cultural Marxism”. The term cultural Marxism is a descendant of the term cultural bolshevism, which was used by the Nazis to marginalize progressive art and culture. This was an anti-Semitic exercise, as the Nazis believed that the progressive degradation of culture in the Soviet Union was the work of Jewish agents seeking to destroy Western values. The term was rightly discarded after the fall of the Third Reich but the base idea stuck around in American conservative discourse. It was pretty common to smear social justice movements in the 50’s and 60’s as the work of Soviet agents trying to destabilize America. 

In 1990, a writer named Michael Minnicinno brought the term cultural Marxism to the lexicon. It’s defined as a conspiracy to promote ideas like critical theory and multiculturalism as a way to destabilize and destroy Western civilization. Since then it’s been adopted by conservative stalwarts like Andrew Brietbart and Pat Buchanan. It’s a defining theme in the work of lobster daddy and IDW luminary Jordan Peterson. It’s important to note that most right-wing personalities who push the concept of cultural Marxism don’t explicitly blame Jewish people for it’s supposed emergence. But white supremacists like Stephen Molyneux and Richard Spencer most certainly do. Anders Breviek cited cultural Marxism as the reason he had to murder 77 people in a terror attack in Norway. 

None of this is to say that Jodi Shaw and her supporters are nazis or white supremacists. But they are playing with the same fire used to forge the intellectual support structure of white supremacy and white nationalism. Liberals like to think of racism and fascism as irrational pursuits. Hating people based on their race or identity is stupid, and therefore racists are presented as unthinking and backwards. The image of poor white southerners donning their white robes and engaging in live action role playing comes to mind. But in reality, white supremacy is obsessed with science and reason. It’s a bastardized version of science and reason based on misappropriated concepts and disingenuous claims to objectivity, but if you squint, it appears logical. And that is how upstanding middle class and nominally liberal people become swayed by arguments that are just a few steps away from straight up race science. You start by being put off by the managerial nature of racial bias training seminars and end up believing in Jewish conspiracies to use Black people to destroy the concept of math. Say it with me:

It’s levels to this shit.

And I want to be clear: The solution to this problem is not to abandon the cause of social justice and discard CRT because these things might push people like Jodi Shaw into accepting white supremacist notions. We don’t need to excuse Jodi for so easily buying into Western chauvinism. But we must address the flaws in the popular conception of anti-racism because there is a well-funded and motivated cadre of bad-faith grievance hustlers waiting in the wings to take advantage. This can and will lead us to some places where we really do not want to go.

So how do we address these flaws? How can we devise a conception of anti-racism that is consistent with the analysis of Critical Race Theory but abandons the scolding model of liberal wokeness? Well friends, we will talk about that in part four.

Solidarity Forever.