“Contact the administration and the Board of Trustees and demand an end to the destructive and anti-intellectual claptrap known as antiracism” — Andrew Gutmann, withdrawing his daughter from Brearley School, New York.
This is a critique of the collection of ideas known as “antiracism”, after Ibram X Kendi’s How to be an Antiracist, and of its practical consequences. It appears to have originated in American academia, which, its advocates claim, is marred by racism.
Consider a college campus boiling with racial and gender sensitivity, with courses in victimization, organizations for victims, a constant barrage of victimization propaganda — but no immediate and palpable victims. “Anti-racist” vigilantes with no racists (or misogynists and homophobes) to hang had better get busy and make some, and as we see, they often do. — Laird Wilcox, Crying Wolf, 1994.
At Duke University, Durham NC, in March 2006, the district attorney prosecuted three white students, following the claim of a black woman that they’d raped her, ignoring clear evidence that it was false. The college president said it was an example of “racism”, and eighty-eight professors signed a “Listening Statement”, defending the woman’s allegation. One of them is Eduardo Bonilla-Silva. After the students were acquitted, and the DA jailed, he didn’t apologise; he doubled down. His Racism Without Racistsclaims
“Shielded by color blindness whites can express resentment toward minorities; criticize their morality, values and work ethic; and even claim to be the victims of ‘reverse racism’”.
At San Diego State, Maryland, Oberlin, North Park, Drake, Evergreen, and dozens of other higher education institutions, over the last three decades, the authorities accepted the claims of minority activists. Even after discovering that most of these claims are false, they usually failed to rein in their credulity. In July 2018, at Smith College, Northampton MA, a black student falsely accused white employees of racial profiling. Even after the hoax was exposed, the college president, Kathleen McCartney, subjected some of her white subordinates to actual racial profiling, driving one of them, Jodi Shaw, to resign and go public — “Lone Whistleblower Takes On the Woke Racists at Smith College”, National Review, February 24th 2021.
Antiracism crossed the Atlantic at least thirty years ago. It influenced the 1993 Macpherson inquiry into the police investigation of the murder of a black London teenager, Stephen Lawrence, and the 2000 Race Relations (Amendment) Act. Macpherson’s definition of a racist incident was “any incident perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person”. This phrase, which shifts the burden of proof from the shoulders of the accuser to those of the accused, originates in “Standpoint Theory” and “Critical Race Theory”. “Listen first to the voice of the victims” urged American academic Mari Matsuda, in Words That Wound, 1993. As we shall see, some victims’ voices are more equal than others.
Following the publication of Macpherson’s report, antiracism became de rigeur in the police and other institutions. One of the consequences was the grooming gang scandal. It was not the only problem; it’s not why some coppers believe minors can be prostitutes; but it contributed to the authorities’ failure to keep sexual offenders away from vulnerable girls. Some of them prioritised combatting white racism over protecting white girls from Pakistani gangs.
Jayne Senior, the Rotherham scandal whistleblower, describes a white man telling the police a gang was “grooming” his 14-year-old daughter. They ignored him, until he shouted a racist word at the men’s house. Then the police quickly appeared, and found the girl getting out of bed with a man, but they did not arrest him — instead, they charged father and daughter with disorderly behaviour.
“Jessica subsequently told me that when she was driving around with her abuser in his flashy car, he’d often play the ‘race card’ if stopped by the police.” — Broken and Betrayed, March 2016, pages 91–92.
The launchpad for the worldwide upsurge of 2020 was the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis on May 25th. Protests and riots started that night, and soon spread around America and overseas. On April 20th 2021, officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of second-degree unintentional murder.
My point is not to criticise hostility to the police. Rather, I take aim at the movement’s political framework. This framework assumes that, because Floyd was African-American, and the man who killed him is white, it was a racist murder, so what is needed is “racial justice”.
I sympathised with protests about the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others, but outside my window in Portland, I saw some protestors were carrying signs saying “White Silence Is Violence”. This doesn’t just mean that people of a particular race should not disagree with the antiracist movement; it means they must proactively agree with it. It could even imply that they can be forced to agree, since their silence is a violent act.
Signs like this indicate that defenders of antiracism are sure of their beliefs; I don’t think their confidence is justified.
Take, for example, Robin DiAngelo’s bestselling February 2019 book White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard For White People to Talk About Racism. DiAngelo’s title gives a clue to the logic she develops in the book: if you’re white, and you don’t want to talk about racism, or at least, not in the way approved of by DiAngelo, you have something wrong with you which needs fixing. Because any refusal to accept it can be explained away by the theory itself, it is therefore unfalsifiable; anything which attempts to show it is flawed, including this sentence, is an example of the problem it pretends to identify.
On April 27th 2021, a week after the conviction of Derek Chauvin, I became aware of a document entitled “Report of the International Commission of Inquiry on Systemic Racist Police Violence Against People of African Descent in the United States”. The PDF of the report on the commission’s website simply gives “March 2021” as its date, and its references to the Chauvin case show it was completed before his conviction.
The title tells us it was written by lawyers, and its Executive Summary makes their methodology clear.
“All cases selected for the hearings involved the egregious and unjustified killing or maiming of individuals of African descent in the U.S.” (page 13)
The authors try to justify this selection of data by contrasting the rate of police shootings of black people with those of white people.
“Today one out of every 1,000 Black men can expect to be killed by police violence over the course of his life, which is approximately 2.5 times the likelihood of white men being killed by police.” (page 20)
The claim that black people are overrepresented in the victims of police brutality is clearly demonstrated. What is not so clear is how this is evidence of racial discrimination.
In spite of the poverty of the theoretical basis of the antiracism movement, many suffer from a weakness which makes it difficult to defy it. At the Macpherson inquiry, lawyers tried to pressure London police commissioner Paul Condon, and he explained how it would be easier to give in than to resist:
‘You have told us 10 times you are not in denial’, said Macpherson’s adviser: ‘I say to you now, just say, “Yes, I acknowledge institutional racism in the police …”.’ Condon was clearly reluctant to say his force was institutionally racist. So Macpherson’s adviser pushed Condon harder: ‘I say to you now, just say, “Yes, I acknowledge institutional racism in the police” and then in a way the whole thing is over… Could you do that today?’ Condon responded: ‘It would be very easy to please the panel, to please the audience… it would be dishonest….’ — Sir William Macpherson: a divisive legacy, Adrian Hart, Spiked Online, March 6th 2021.
Many people find it harder to resist the pressure. Reasons for capitulating to mobs include
– Cowardice
– The urge to please
– Fear of losing one’s job
– The urge to appear moral
– Fear of social media storms
– Ignorance of the scientific method
– Thinking that apologising will appease the mob
– Shame at raising logical objections to the claims of angry people
“Most human beings would temper their ideas, because normally, people like to fit in” — Brexit architect Nigel Farage, Triggernometry, Youtube, March 10th 2021.
Standing up to woke racism
Antiracists sometimes define racism as “power plus prejudice”, and add that only white people have this power. But Chris Rufo pointed out that “Ibram Kendi could cancel you, but you can’t cancel Ibram Kendi” — Spiked Online, YouTube, February 25th 2021. James Lindsay put it like this, on Facebook, on March 13th:
An important difference between you and the Woke is that if they see the opening, they’ll demand your resignation or firing in a heartbeat and won’t stop until they get it. You, meanwhile, will argue against removing from their positions even when they abuse them, and you.
On March 31st he added:
I believe Woke people and even the Woke ideology has a place in society (as with other types of racism), but in that I am fundamentally classically liberal, it must be totally removed from access to power in society.
The problem is not that antiracists have freedom of speech, it’s that some of them have power. Removing advocates of racial discrimination from positions where they are able to implement it should be easy, but in the current political climate, it is an uphill struggle.
The woke elite, in academia, the media, government, and the personnel departments of various companies tell us, in effect, that Western people and societies are uniquely, ubiquitously, and pathologically ethnocentric. It is my contention that nothing could be further from the truth.
Introduction — Antiracism in Higher Education — Antiracism’s Claims are the Opposite of the Truth — Why So Much Credulity Toward Antiracism? — Negative Consequences of Antiracism in Britain — Conservative Uses of Antiracism — Definitions — Acknowledgements — References
Introduction
Some of the concepts discussed below have contested labels. For example, defenders of Critical Race Theory claim that its critics don’t know what it means.
I put my definitions, what I mean when I use particular words, under a subheading near the end of the essay.
Briefly, I use the terms “Wokeness,” and “Critical Social Justice,” to mean the broad range of left-wing views and practices which have spread into the commanding heights of many institutions of the Western world in the last few years. “Antiracism” and “Critical Race Theory” are more specific terms, covering the idea that white Western people need educating to overcome their ethnocentrism. Examples of these claims can be found in the bestselling books of Ibram X Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, and in the New York Times’ 1619 Project. I also call this idea “Woke Racism,” after an article in the National Review by Frederick M Hess, Lone Whistleblower Takes On the Woke Racists at Smith College.
The origins of these ideas can be found in US and Canadian higher education.
Antiracism in Higher Education
Consider a college campus boiling with racial and gender sensitivity, with courses in victimization, organizations for victims, a constant barrage of victimization propaganda — but no immediate and palpable victims. ‘Anti-racist’ vigilantes with no racists (or misogynists and homophobes) to hang had better get busy and make some, and as we see, they often do.
In March 2006, in, Durham, North Carolina, the district attorney prosecuted three white students, following the claim of a black woman that they had raped her, ignoring clear evidence that it was false. Their college president said the alleged rape was an example of “racism”, and eighty-eight professors signed a “Listening Statement”, defending the woman’s allegation. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva is one of them. After the students were acquitted, and the DA imprisoned, he doubled down. His book Racism Without Racists, currently in its 5th edition, claims
Shielded by color blindness whites can express resentment toward minorities; criticize their morality, values and work ethic; and even claim to be the victims of ‘reverse racism’.
Jodi Shaw doesn’t claim to be a victim of reverse racism. She says “it’s not, it’s very simply racism”. In July 2018, at Smith College, Northampton Massachusetts, a black student falsely accused white employees of racial profiling. Even after the hoax was exposed, the college president continued to act as if white racism was a problem, and her solution was to subject her white subordinates to actual racial profiling, driving one of them, Jodi Shaw, to resign and go public — Lone Whistleblower Takes On the Woke Racists at Smith College (ibid.). President Kathleen McCartney’s explanation of her policy was “it is impossible to rule out the potential role of implicit racial bias”.
Indeed: the claims of antiracism cannot be falsified. Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility argues that if you’re white, and you don’t acknowledge your racism, you have something wrong with you which needs fixing. Her theory is unfalsifiable; it implies that anything which attempts to show it is flawed, including this sentence, is an example of the problem it pretends to identify.
Critical Race Theory (CRT), a variant of antiracism, originated at Harvard. Invented by professor Derrick Bell and developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw, and others, it is a subset of Critical Social Justice, an idea originating in the Frankfurt School. There is not enough room in this essay to give these schools the treatment they deserve — those interested could start by consulting Cynical Theories, by James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose.
Approximately ten years ago, I began to become aware of the exaggeration of racially-motivated crimes in America. I created the website fakehatecrimes.org, which new users can join, and add alleged hate crimes which are likely, or proven, to be fake. It extends the 1990s research of Laird Wilcox (ibid.). Some of this data was used by professor Wilfred Reilly, in his February 2019 book Hate Crime Hoax. The site currently contains hundreds of cases, most of them in US colleges and universities, in which activists invented, or perpetrated against themselves, crimes allegedly motivated by bigotry.
Antiracism’s Claims are the Opposite of the Truth
The woke elite, in academia, the media, government, and the personnel departments of various companies tell us, in effect, that Western people and societies are uniquely, ubiquitously, and pathologically ethnocentric. It is my contention that nothing could be further from the truth. First, I will give a list of examples which show Western societies are not particularly racist, then, give examples of credulity toward the allegations of antiracists, then try to explain it. Consider
– The two most effective forces fighting to abolish slavery during the 19th century: the Royal Navy and the US Army – Protests against racism from the 1930s onward – The defeat of Nazi Germany – Subsequent support for national and international institutions committed to opposing racism – The Civil Rights movement – Civil rights legislation – Affirmative action to give black students an advantage in applying for places at US universities
Contrasting modern Western societies with others gives the lie to the claim that the West is particularly racist.
In May 2013, the Washington Post published a map of “racial tolerance,”based on research by two Swedish economists, classifying areas of the world according to percentage of inhabitants who would not want to live next to people of a different race. Blue is the most tolerant; red, the least. The tolerant, dark blue areas are the Anglo-Saxon countries, and most of South America. India is bright red. It appears that, on average, Indians are remarkably intolerant of people they consider members of a different race.
A recent paper from Cambridge University Press, Genetics, Anthropology, and the Politics of Racial Nationalism in China, describes the corruption of human origins research in the interests of Chinese racial mythology. Frank Dikötter’s 2015 book The Discourse of Race in Modern China shows that the People’s Republic of China is more racist than the West, although he follows Richard Lewontin and Stephen Gould in denying that races exist. If this were true, the Chinese government claim that Mongols, Uyghurs and Tibetans are part of the same race as the Han, would be neither true nor false. But in fact, it is false. Uyghurs are more closely related to other Turkic-speaking peoples than to the Han Chinese people. This is important, because Chinese claims have consequences — they underpin the destruction of minority cultures.
Eastern Europe is the only area where the football authorities are still punishing clubs for racist chanting from their fans. English players wear “No Room For Racism” armbands, and various other subtle hints are directed at fans, implying that they need educating. As Brendan O’Neill shows, this is unjustified.
Westerners are remarkably open to the claim that they are racist. Note
– The spread of antiracism training in Western institutions – Widespread acceptance of the “unmarked graves” hoax, which claims hundreds of native children in Canadian residential homes were murdered and secretly buried – The leading science journal Nature has adopted a policy where scientific conclusions can be dropped if they clash with the demands of antiracism — The Fall of Nature, Bo Winegard – The term “white supremacy” is often used in the media, and by politicians, without evidence, to describe people they disagree with — When, in January 2019, in Washington DC, a group of black adults subjected a group of white schoolboys to racist abuse, the media, for the most part, claimed it was the boys who are racist — President Biden called Kyle Rittenhouse a white supremacist, after he shot three white men who were attacking him in Kenosha Wisconsin, during – The protests and riots of 2020
The 2020 protests for “racial justice” were sparked by the murder, on May 25, of African-American George Floyd, by white policeman Derek Chauvin. Although no evidence of a racial motive for that crime has been produced, large numbers of white people acted as if there was, and some of them acted as if they believe they are responsible for it. I was about to join one of the protests, when I saw signs saying “white silence is violence,” which means, if you’re white, and you don’t proactively agree with antiracism, you are committing violence, so violence can justifiably be used against you.
It is true that black people are disproportionately targeted by the police in America. But adjusting for the black rate of crime debunks the claim of racial discrimination. 0.8% of whites commit violent crimes, but for blacks, the ratio is more than twice as high (Criminal Victimization, 2018, US Department of Justice, Table 12).
Given the evidence that Western societies, particularly the English-speaking ones, are institutionally less racist than most others, we can conclude that antiracists are deluded, or dishonest. There is no need to examine their motives any further. But we need to try to understand the weakness in these societies which enables the remarkable success of woke racism.
Why So Much Credulity Toward Antiracism?
A complex theory, constructed by Kevin MacDonald, an evolutionary psychologist, claims that the specific material conditions of ancient northwestern Europe selected for certain genetic psychological traits, which, today, are maladaptive — “pathological altruism,” or white guilt.
Another theory, in a work by Benedict Beckeld, locates Western self-contempt — oikophobia — in the inevitable trajectory of civilisations rising and falling, with emphasis on the particular examples of ancient Greece and Rome, and modern Britain, France and the USA. On pages 57–58, Beckeld more or less admits that oikophobia is almost exclusively Western.
I am unable to decide how much truth there is in either theory. I don’t know the cause of Western weakness in the face of wokeness. Currently, I can only ask readers to patiently and politely point out what’s wrong with it, and support the brave people refusing to accept the racism of antiracism. For instance, one can donate to Jodi Shaw’s legal costs in her case against Smith College. Her GoFundMe page is help-jodi-stand-up-to-smith-college.
Oikophobia, or whatever it is, is deep-rooted. Even some of the people most effective at exposing the harmful consequences of antiracism resist drawing logical conclusions from their findings.
Jayne Senior is the whistleblower who exposed the Pakistani-origin child-rape gangs of Rotherham, and the role of the Labour party in helping them avoid prosecution. In her book Broken and Betrayed, she writes
Of course there was a grooming problem in Rotherham involving Asian men and white girls — you’d have to be blind not to see that — but there was no way I was going to contribute to any political point-scoring on behalf of the BNP or the EDL.
(Broken and Betrayed, page 230). Instead, in chapter 21, from page 321 onwards, she describes her integration into the South Yorkshire Labour machine.
The word “Islam” occurs twice in Broken and Betrayed, “Muslim” six times, and “Asian” sixty-seven. In the UK, “Asians” usually means people from the Indian subcontinent and their descendants. “Asian grooming gangs” is a phrase used to broaden the scope and fudge the issue. Over 80% of convicted gang members have Muslim names, and hardly any have non-Muslim Indian names.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali has written extensively on the negative consequences of Islam for women and girls. She herself was a victim as a child in her native Somalia, and her subsequent campaigns in the Netherlands and the USA have necessitated 24-hour security to protect her from Muslims who want to murder her. Her 2021 book Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights explains how, after decades of advances, areas of European countries are becoming less comfortable for women, because of the presence of growing numbers of men from Muslim cultures. But, like Jayne Senior, she has a fear of supporting what she calls “right-wing populism.”
Only by clarifying what has gone wrong in Europe in recent years can one make a truly credible case for effective integration of immigrants. For that — not the exclusion and repatriation favored by the populists of the Right — is the only feasible way forward.
(Prey, page xiv). Both of the above quotations make something sound worse, by juxtaposing it with something which really is worse. Senior lists the British National Party and the English Defence League together, although they are quite different. The BNP was racist, whereas the EDL aimed at an ideology — Islam. Ali puts “exclusion” and “repatriation” together. “Repatriation” of non-white citizens, as advocated by the BNP, would be a crime against humanity. “Exclusion” is another matter. Nation states, by definition, include some people and exclude others. It would be “feasible” for some of them to exclude potential immigrants from a specific culture. Her book is full of examples of immigrants who don’t want to be “effectively integrated,” but she doesn’t explain how to deal with this problem.
Negative Consequences of Antiracism in Britain
Antiracist ideology landed in the United Kingdom at least thirty years ago. It influenced the 1993 Macpherson inquiry into the police investigation of the murder of a black London teenager, Stephen Lawrence, and the 2000 Race Relations (Amendment) Act. (See Sir William Macpherson: a divisive legacy, Adrian Hart, Spiked Online, March 8, 2021). Macpherson’s definition of a racist incident was “any incident perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person.” This phrase, which shifts the burden of proof from the shoulders of the accuser to those of the accused, originates in Critical Race Theory. “Listen first to the voice of the victims” urged American academic Mari Matsuda, in the collection of essays Words That Wound.
Her phrase is triply misleading. Firstly, anyone investigating an allegation inevitably “listens first” to the accuser, but then they must listen to the accused, assuming his innocence unless and until he is proven guilty. In CRT, “listen” means “believe,” because, secondly, the phrase “the victims” assumes the guilt of the accused — in should be “the alleged victims.” Thirdly, antiracism does not encourage listening to all victims’ voices. Witness the “grooming gang” scandal.
Following the publication of Macpherson’s report, antiracism spread around the country. It was not the only cause of the grooming gang scandal, but it contributed to the authorities’ failure to keep sexual offenders away from vulnerable minors. Some of them prioritised combatting white racism over protecting underage white girls from Pakistani gangs.
To cite just one example, Jayne Senior, the Rotherham whistleblower, describes a white man telling the police a gang was “grooming” his 14-year-old daughter. They ignored him, until he shouted a racist word at the men’s house. Then the police quickly appeared, and found the girl getting out of bed with a man, but they did not arrest him — instead, they charged father and daughter with disorderly behaviour.
Jessica subsequently told me that when she was driving around with her abuser in his flashy car, he’d often play the ‘race card’ if stopped by the police.
After the story broke, the government appointed professor Alexis Jay to control the damage. Her report was completed in August 2014.
Several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so.
In his 2018 book The Tribe: The Liberal-Left and the System of Diversity, Ben Cobley explains how the Labour party’s embrace of “identity politics” enabled the “race card” described by Jayne Senior above. Each sector was expected to stay in its lane. Muslim “community leaders” were trusted to look after their own. Feminists concentrated on getting all-female shortlists for election candidates, and kept quiet about the grooming gangs.
Antiracist activists and journalists sometimes help the grooming gangs, by labelling whistleblowers “racist.” An article by Libby Brooks in the Guardian, January 6, 2011 says “claims about Muslim men grooming white girls” is an example of “racialising crime.” This is doubly false; firstly, the claims are true, and secondly, Islam is not a race. Nevertheless, fear of being accused of racism helped delay the exposure and prosecution of the gang members, as Jayne Senior and Alexis Jay make clear.
Conservative Uses of Antiracism
One of the techniques used by antiracists is to persuade listeners to accept the substitution of feelings for facts, so that an argument can be dismissed by claiming that it offends, or “harms,” somebody. Another is to pretend disagreement with an ideology is prejudice against a section of the population. For example, liberal lawyer Maud Maron refused to pretend to agree with aspects of antiracism, and was driven out of her job by left-wing activists who wrote that she “is racist, and openly so” — The Courage of Maud Maron, The American Conservative, July 27, 2021.
Conservatives can also use these techniques. In 2019, an event entitled “Not Backing Down: Israel, Free Speech and the Battle for Palestinian Human Rights” took place at the University of Massachusetts. The College Fix, a conservative student-produced online magazine, published an articlequoting Jewish students claiming they “will suffer immediate and irreparable harm” from this conference.
In March 2019, representative Ilhan Omar claimed, on Twitter, that the Israel Lobby is wealthy: “It’s all about the Benjamins baby”. The response of her critics was to say that this is a “trope.” Little effort was made to show that her claim was factually incorrect, but she apologised, using the woke language customary in the Democratic party, and deleted the tweet. However, there is some truth in her original claim — the American Israel Public Affairs Committee spends millions trying to get the most pro-Israel candidates selected for elections. Here is one example — Summer Lee Faces AIPAC Spending Onslaught In Final Days Of Pennsylvania Primary, The Intercept, May 2022. Another article, in the Guardian, August 2022, claims “Aipac has poured more than $24m into defeating Democratic primary candidates critical of Israel”.
The Anti-Defamation League uses these antiracist techniques, both to exaggerate the danger from right-wing extremists, for example, The Proud Boys, and to smear left-wing critics of Israel as racist.
Wokeness — the traditional left emphasises economic class as the most important division in humanity. Its leading theorist was Karl Marx. The woke left theorises that other divisions — race, gender, sexual orientation, and so on — matter more. “Critical Social Justice” is a term preferred by the defenders of wokeness, as it conveys an impression of intellectual rigour and moral virtue.
Critical Race Theory — a theory formulated by Harvard Law School professor Derrick Bell in the late 1970s and further developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw. Bell and Crenshaw argued that the Civil Rights Movement had failed to reform American society in any fundamental way and that all American institutions are systemically racist.
Race — DNA sampling reveals humanity is divided into large clusters of related people, with sparsely populated gaps between them (Charles Murray, Human Diversity). How large a cluster has to be, and how great and sparse the gaps between it and other clusters, for it to be called a “race,” is debatable. This does not mean that race is a meaningless concept; the clusters exist.
Racism — inaccurate and negative beliefs about the members of a race, discrimination or violence against the members of a race, or belief in the superiority of one race over others. Although race is real, racism can also attribute imaginary characteristics to imaginary races. The National Socialists’ beliefs about Aryan, Slavic and Jewish races were racist, regardless of whether or not these races exist.
Antiracism — antiracism, without a hyphen, is a term adopted from the work of Ibram X Kendi. It includes the works of Critical Race Theory and The 1619 Project, begun on August 14th 2019 by the New York Times Magazine, currently being taught to thousands of schoolchildren. Antiracism implicitly makes the racist claim that white Europeans are uniquely racist. It uses Kafkaesque circular reasoning to claim that the denial of racism, by white people, is evidence of racism.
Acknowledgements
Of the individuals and organisations which provided me with the evidence which led to this essay, I would like to mention first the Freethinkers of Portland State University, who are taking a brave stand in the lions’ den. The National Association of Scholars has produced a series of papers which informed some of the arguments within. Christopher Rufo has accumulated the most convincing evidence of the spread of Critical Social Justice in American government, corporations, universities, colleges and schools. The website Spiked Online, podcasts including Katie Herzog’s, Bari Weiss’s, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s, and several college-based online magazines, such as Minding the Campus, have all helped. Finally, and perhaps surprisingly, the World Socialist Website has produced the most comprehensive demolition of the New York Times’ 1619 Project. None of these sources are responsible for anything I argue herein.
Stephen Lawrence was a black London teenager. He was murdered in 1993 by a gang of white criminals, shouting racial insults. It took twenty years for the legal system to convict his murderers.
The law’s delay led to the widespread belief that it was because of “institutional racism”. In contrast, this brave investigation, “Racist Murder and Pressure Group Politics”, questions the consensus view, and argues that the initial failure to prosecute was simply the result of lack of evidence: http://www.civitas.org.uk/pdf/cs05.pdf (PDF).
Lawrence’s murder led the government to set up the Macpherson enquiry, which defined a racial incident as “any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person“. This gives complete freedom to anyone to define anyone else as a racist: http://spiked-online.com/newsite/article/13127.
The Mcpherson report used the familiar circular reasoning of Zionists and the p.c. left: “To question whether the murder of Stephen Lawrence was a purely racist crime was, in itself, adduced as evidence of racism.” – Racist Murder and Pressure Group Politics, page xix.
This is the same logic used to attempt to censor any discusssion of the Holocaust, or less extreme examples of violence against minorities. It’s the same logic that made it hard to question whether Tawana Brawley, Crystal Magnum, and various other minority pseudo-victims were telling the truth. It’s the logic that led to the prosecution of George Zimmerman. It’s the false idea that white societies like Britain and America are uniquely prone to racial supremacy, and have to spend the rest of eternity apologizing for it. It leads to the idea that the plaintiff, not the defendant, should be given the benefit of the doubt when the plaintiff is black. This would mean abandoning one of the basic principles of Anglo-Saxon law.
