Why I — and You — Are Racists
To acknowledge that I might be a racist, no doubt, puts me in a difficult position. It is something I have always recognized, but it is difficult to admit. But then I asked myself, when even members of the Alt-Right, Neo-Nazi parties, and President Trump can claim not to be racist, is it becoming just too easy to be anti-racist? Or worse yet, when someone like a Hilary Clinton, can eulogize a former KKK leader, the late U.S. Senator R.C. Byrd, as being her “mentor”, then does any claim to being anti-racist loose its meaning? Maybe I am trying to be just too honest with myself. But what is it to actually claim to be non-racist? I mean it is always easy to recognize someone who admits they are a racist, but what is it to recognize a non-racist? Is this not a logical paradox when addressing racism that goes to the heart of any political position?
First of all, I must be racist since I am admittedly for the segregation of dead people. I would like them to stay in cemeteries or other such cordoned off areas. Most would probably admit to at least this minimal segregation. But let’s go further.
In fact, it seems to me to say ‘I am not racist and I deplore any form of racism’ is just stupid, since inevitably people end up being racist against racists in much the same way Anti-facism is against the Alt-right.
On the contrary, saying then everyone must be racist is just as stupid. No doubt, each society, each culture, has its forms of narcissism, but to say that as human beings we would be determined by this, is false. One can very well be immersed in a completely racist family or society and neither adhere to their propositions nor public announcements that promote the segregation of others, even if the Other is compared to a zombie or the dead.
But it is also false that I would not be racist, like a lot of people I not only find my neighbors from another planet, but my ex-wife and even my children! Sometimes I think I would like to lock them all in a room somewhere and throw away the key, but in the end this remains a thought — though it sometimes arrives to the level of speech between us.
This type of narcissism is all together different than an announcement of hate and violence towards others in public. When, for example, a Milos Yiannopoulos can write in the New York Observer, “I can’t wait for vigilante squads to start gunning journalists down on sight”, it is not free speech, but a political crime in the incitement to murder. Such speech does not become criminal because two days later there was a shooting at the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland where five people died. Rather, it was criminal in principle from the beginning, even if the author later claimed he was joking.
If someone is a racist, has murderous thoughts, or anti-semite views, that is their problem, but when such views are published and promoted in public, then there is a political and public responsibility to take.
The difficulty today is one is caught between a first amendment guaranteeing free speech and the recognition that speech itself can be criminal.
Today, it takes a kind of ‘strong-mindedness’ to claim one is not racist, then go about promoting racism and segregation while claiming one is ‘joking’ when faced with the contradictions and consequences of one’s statements.
Admittedly, I may be one of the last weaklings on earth to admit from the beginning that I am racist. I have all my narcissisms and am capable of being a cesspit of human crumminess, but there is a place where I am not racist since I refuse to participate in the segregations that do violence towards others. At least, my weakness avoids the continuous disavowals and jokes of the strong-minded anti-racist.
What I am proposing is that nobody is ‘naturally’ non-racist. It takes an act and a kind of practice of narcissism not to be racist. In fact, by examining my insecurities some time ago, I had to admit to myself I needed an instrument to study racism. My mind and powers of self reflection alone were never adequate to the task; in fact, they seemed to be mere alibis and part of the problem. I needed something like a microscope that would allow me to reason with the narcissism I was observing in modern politics and myself. I needed to return to something like John Henry Newman’s seminal work the Grammar of Assent so that I could begin to determine how the various statements presented in public become true or false, not merely with respect to their reason or a correspondence to the facts, but in their use and presentation. For it is not the racist texts, thoughts, or speech that are obscene or criminal, but how they are presented, i.e., assented to, used, and published. For without such a logical and grammatical instrument, I began to realize that there is no more a way to make a coherent statement about human subjectivity, racism or otherwise, than there is to see a virus with the naked eye.
