The Unbearable Lightness of Wokeism
Confronting the illogical bullying and Neo-racism of our times ...
In our current climate, as a white person in the United States, it is not possible to avoid the charge of being a racist. In fact, in a weird Orwellian twist, denial of your own racism is viewed as proof of your racism. Quite a pickle.
Worse that that, it is asserted that the United States is systemically racist. That our institutions are rotten to the core. That, from the view point of Ibrahim Kendi, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Michael Eric Dyson, Nikole Hannah-Jones and the other proponents of wokeism (aka. the elect), the evidence of systemic racism has been here from the beginning, is pervasive through our history, and remains stifling in our modern era.
In our nation’s collective horror at the brutal murder of George Floyd in 2020 (which might have been taken as a sign that racism is not quite as pervasive as the elect make it out, but I digress) something strange has happened. The success of the 1950s-60s civil rights movement (which made most Americans see that to be called a racist in public is akin to being called a pedophile) was being leveraged by the elect to engage in the public defenestration of anyone they deemed as deviating from their script. This national bullying led to people simply agreeing (without evidence) to a new form of racism. Millions of our fellow citizens on the lighter side of the human skin color spectrum started to “do the work” and this is where we find ourselves today.
Thus, with apologies to Eliezer Yudkowsky and Coleman Hughes, I offer my take on a hypothetical exchange between a space alien visitor and, in this case, a woke white person ...
Visitor: Greetings, I’ve come to your planet to do some research racism. From the limited research I have done so far, I am told that I should find someone who looks like you.
WWP: Holy sh*t! I knew it. We aren’t alone. Wait, what? Racism? Someone who looks like me? Why?
Visitor: Well, a copy of Robin DeAngelo’s book White Fragility fell through a wormhole in space and it said that here on Planet Earth, people in the United States who are white are all racist.
WWP: Oh, yes, right. I was a little confused as to why you would pick me to talk about racism, but now it makes perfect sense.
Visitor: So, based on your understanding, how did this racism thing get started with you white people?
WWP: To be perfectly honest, I’m not quite sure, but I do know that my privilege keeps me from understanding it completely. The best I can tell you is that way back in 1619 an English privateer ship reached Point Comfort on the Virginia peninsula. On that ship were some people of African descent who were traded to the locals for food. These were the first Slaves in America and the start of our nation’s “original sin.” Everything beneficial for white people that comes after, is ill gotten good born of this mistake.
Visitor: Oh? Hmmm. It seems we got it wrong then.
WWP: How so?
Visitor: Well, in 1565, as an example, the Spanish brought enslaved Africans to present-day St. Augustine, Fla., the first European settlement in what’s now the continental U.S. In 1526, a Spanish expedition to present-day South Carolina was thwarted when the enslaved Africans aboard resisted. Add to that the chattel slavery practiced by Africans who held other Africans as slaves for hundreds of years before 1619. So, our historians didn’t immediately associate slavery with “white people” and this thing you earthlings call “racism.”
WWP: Ah, yes, well. You are missing a crucial point, racism is really a function of prejudice plus power.
Visitor: Prejudice plus power?
WWP: Yes. You see racism is actually the combination of racial prejudice, and the social power to codify and enforce this prejudice into an entire society.
Visitor: Oh, I see. But, help me out here. After the end of Slavery and the passage of the Civil Rights act of 1964, the power of the law no longer favored people based on skin color, yes?
WWP: True. However, that period in between known as Jim Crow included this thing called “redlining.”
Visitor: “Red” lining? You earthlings are obsessed with color, aren’t you. We know all about redlining, but are you sure it was all about racism?
WWP: Oh, yes. It is a great example of the “Systemic Racism” here in our country. It segregated black people into areas where those residents were denied access to real estate, loans, and insurance. Basically they were deprived an opportunity to build wealth which has made it impossible for them to get ahead in this country unlike us white people.
Visitor: Oh dear. Something else we got wrong.
WWP: Wait. What did you think it was?
Visitor: Well, we were aware that there are many aspects of discrimination during that period, and before, which manifest in keeping black people impoverished. Redlining didn’t seem to be a clear cut case to us. Certainly not as you say one that was “Systemic.”
WWP: Now hold on a minute here. I read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “The Case for Reparations” and he clearly showed that redlining created real harm. Why I also just read that one town outside of Chicago, just approved a plan to pay out $25,000 grants to black people who suffered housing discrimination or whose family lived in the city during the years of active redlining. Why would they do that if redlining wasn’t systemically racist?
Visitor: I think you misunderstand. It’s not that redlining didn’t hurt people who happened to be black. And it’s not that the policy might have been implemented by some who wanted to hurt black people. It’s that it was a policy mostly designed around poor people.
We talked to some economists over at your National Bureau of Economic Research and they told us about their recent study of housing maps of 10 major Northern cities white people accounted for 82 percent of individuals living in the lowest-rated areas. White people also owned 92 percent of the homes in these areas. In addition another study of The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation showed they made a higher and proportionally correct share of its loans to black people than the other lenders at the time.
Now, we’re not saying there wasn’t active discrimination here. We think there was. We cannot really find any other reason why more than 97 percent of black people rented or owned homes in these redlined neighborhoods. That seems like they were being kept out of other markets. We are saying that redlining might just be a bit more complicated and less, what did you call it? Oh yes, “systemic” than you might have been led to believe.
WWP: I wonder why this information isn’t discussed in the podcasts I listen to.
Visitor: No idea. Perhaps you have some other, stronger, evidence of systemic racism being perpetuated in your country?
WWP: Yes. Easy. The cops are hunting people of color and visiting brutality on their bodies.
Visitor: That’s the best you’ve got?
WWP: Dude! Have you not heard their names? You know Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, Stephon Clark, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Jonathan Price, and so many more.
Visitor: clearly you are suffering from what your earthling psychologists call availability bias.
WWP: No way. Cops are out of control.
Visitor: well, if by out of control you mean they are killing people unnecessarily, I think you could say there is some evidence that there are some cops who are out of control. But surely you must know, in any given year, the cops kill way more white than black people.
In 2020, a plurality of the more than 1,000 people shot and killed by the police, according to data compiled by The Washington Post,were white (459); black people were about a quarter. This has been typical year after year.
WWP: Ha! You just proved my point. Blacks only make up 13% of the population and you just said that double that same proportion are killed by cops. How do you explain that?
Visitor: Poverty.
WWP: Huh? What does Poverty have to do with it?
Visitor: Well, those same black folks who are more than twice as likely as white folks to be killed by cops are also more than twice as likely to be poor. Also crucially, as this report on policing, poverty and racial inequity in a town called Tulsa in your country’s territory known as Oklahoma makes very clear: policing is concentrated in poorer neighborhoods. As we discussed earlier, these neighborhoods are more frequently communities of color. Now, basic mathematics tells us more frequent calls for service will result in more encounters. More encounters will results in more deaths. All of this in complete proportion with what the poverty numbers tell us might be the case.
WWP: I assume you looked at racial bias in terms of how the black folks are treated by the police? Even if the body count doesn’t provide evidence of police racism, it sure seems like the black people I know frequently get a raw deal.
Visitor: In this case, your intuition is correct. Racial bias is clearly evident within policing. We see racial bias in who gets pulled over (black people are less likely to be pulled over after dark, when the driver’s race is harder for officers to discern), searched (the bar for searching black drivers appears to be way lower than that for searching white drivers) and verbally abused. However, when it comes to killing black people specifically, I think you are going to need to open up to the possibility that police hold back on resorting to firing their weapons. And, they do so just as much as they do with white people.
There might indeed be this thing you call systemic racism, but it seems unlikely that redlining and police killings will be your primary evidence for it.
WWP: I’m tired.
Visitor: Having to think and discuss issues beyond the platitudes can be exhausting. I think we have what we need.
WWP: But what about me? Am I a racist or not?
Visitor: How would we know? You can’t really judge a book by it’s cover.
Footnote: I think the books below are some important books to consider adding to your reading list. This is especially true if you care to advance a society that doesn’t care about outward appearances, gender, sexuality, and other arbitrary human characteristics. Doubling down on racism, as the current woke movement seems to be doing, seems to me to be intuitively wrong.
For me, it will always be about ensuring freedom and equality for all under the law …
(click on the pictures to access the book on Amazon)