How I am so incredibly not a racist, and why I oppose most of our "anti-racism"

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Prediction: Black Lives Matter will not succeed in reducing the number of incarcerated persons or the use of prisons and long sentences, nor the prosecutorial blackmail that causes most people accused of a crime to be convicted with no more realistic chance of a fair trial that the average worker has of freely negotiating a fair wage or the average citizen of even reading the documents we are now regularly expected to sign with an electronic pad and no opportunity to read what we are signing. Nor will the movement succeed in overturning the militarization of policing, either in its weaponry, or even more importantly, its practices, of treating citizens like enemy combatants to be occupied as if by a conquering foreign power, searching without warrants, killing and asking questions later while thinking only about their own safety, etc.

But they will succeed, as they already are doing, and massively, in transforming every workplace and educational institution or other organized social environment into a place where social justice warriors carry out witch hunts on an ongoing basis against people accused of "feeling white" or not wanting to take a "critical" attitude to the demographical identity that a pseudo-left "progressive" politics both assigns to them undeniably and then punishes them for expressing, no matter what they think or say. "Black may be beautiful," but unfortunately, this idea only seems to be possible so long as "white is ugly."

Tomorrow, there will be just as many prisoners and just as much police violence, with violence on the streets undiminished, except that there will be even more of it committed against white people -- and Jews, as the current period of triumphant "progressive" politics has seen a dramatic rise in acts of anti-semitic violence, mostly committed, unfortunately, by African-Americans. I think this is because some of their leaders have encouraged them to think in ways that quite naturally facilitate reverse racist hate crimes.

I have been the victim of both undercover police harassment leading to wrongful incarceration (on false medical pretenses) and anti-semitic and racist violent assaults by African-Americans. I refuse to consider myself racist, simply because I believe those people were outside the norm, not only in this country in terms of its prevailing ethos and laws, even now, but also in terms of the African-American community itself. Because most black people are not like that? No, I don't know that that is true or that it isn't; my experience alone would suggest the less salutary answer here, but I know that my experience is limited. The decisive point is that those criminals who attacked me and hate me, almost always without my doing anything to provoke their hatred, are abnormal for their community and not representative of it, for the simple Kantian reason that what is normal for anyone including members of any social group is not a matter of "is" but "ought," because norms state what people ought to do, and be like. Even if it were true (as I know it is not, happily) that 1% of black Americans hold the tolerant and integrationist beliefs of King, Obama, Cornel West, and others, while 99% held some views that to me some noxiously racist, I would still know that I should respect every black person I meet at least until and unless he or she does something terrible (in which case my respect is tainted by a criticism or even a reproach and some resentment -- it is not negated completely, because I believe that no person is without title to being respected, since all people are in essence good and that essence can be realized, and should be recognized), - even then, I remain undaunted, though perhaps discouraged.

I may also have some fears and retain some caution. So do you and so does everyone else, even if you are expected to be careful and politic in what you say about this.

My prediction is based on my analysis of what is wrong with the analysis of Black Lives Matter and other left-liberals. What is wrong with the police violence against black people is not that it is a performance or defense of "whiteness," at least not near so much as that it is a use of violence.

Liberals police attitudes; the left wants to change structures. The forces driving the Biden administration to carry out liberal or progressive attitudinal social justice warrior political moralizing in the name of changing institutions, but also instead of doing so, are enormous.

The surveillance state and administrative governance will not be diminished but increased on the liberal watch. The liberals will do all they can to co-opt leftist rhetoric. This is facilitated by the fact that Americans are quite aggressive in public generally, and militancy and degree of passion and refusal to compromise while one stands one's moral ground, tends to substitute in the minds of most Americans for radicalism in either the definitional and etymological sense of going to the root of a matter or the sense of being more to the end, in principle usually the left end, of the spectrum of political opinions. This alone makes relatively centrist solutions pass as radical ones. If those on the left are not only not vigilant enough about this but too invested in worrying about the "who" of the injustices they oppose rather than their substantial "what" and "how," then they will lose their struggles all the while feeling as if they are winning.

I hope I am proven wrong.

If things were different in this respect, there would be more scope for honesty. People get taken sometimes for racists who merely are able to notice that they have their own distinct values in some ways, as, for instance, Jews and blacks tend to. These cultures have developed in ways that have some distinct values that they do not entirely share, even while we on our side emphatically do not support any of the exclusions and forms of oppression that we know very well that they are subject to. For one thing, our religious values are rather different. For better and worse, the two religions that are dominant in the African-American world, evangelical Protestant Christianity and the racist Islam of the Nation of Islam, are both distinctly authoritarian, as indeed Christianity is in ways that Judaism is not. That's one value difference, and there are others. One can feel on the outs in a way that can be portentous of real danger (official punishments if the other person is a functionary in some managerial position, or indeed, violence in more open public spaces) with the impression or presumption of racism that they have concluded perhaps all too quickly of us, actually being a misconception. You can also dislike the way someone else is without hating them; at a maximum, this marks the difference between anger and hatred, which is a huge difference, as followers and readers of Martin Luther King all know all too well; and short of that maximum, it marks out the possibility of civil disagreement, but also of areas of difficulty because of different norms of civility and politeness. My experience is that most African-Americans are informal outside of work and especially with each other, and very insistent on formality and social rules in institutional settings. Definitely, Jewish and black approaches to social norms associated with civility and politeness and presumed as obligatory are very different. My experience with African-Americans in business and government contexts has been both that I have to expect to be treated with some suspicion and possibly contempt, and the only allowance possible for a non-"racist" response to this is to tolerate silently that appearance of hostility. This is how it is, and the history explains it; so it is said, and so it is. I know too the bar is low for me to be declared "disrespectful" by them, even and perhaps especially when I feel I am encountering some amount of hostility. Broadly, it seems to me that I have to conclude something similar to what the left-wing (and Palestinian-sympathizing) Israeli novelist Amos Oz says in his novel "A tale of love and sadness": his family were neighbors to an "Arab" (Palestinian) family, and what he recognized was that they particularly needed to be shown respect and politeness, in a way that with other Jews would seem unnatural. This was both because of they were a marginal and oppressed group, and because their religion is somewhat more insistent on such social formality, convention, and politeness. One tries to learn the differences between social groups, and this is necessary in American society because, unlike France, it understands itself as not unitary and having a single set of public social values that are identified with the national identity, the language, and what everyone learns in schools; American society is instead composed of sub-groups, some of which want to be recognized as distinct, so that the options may or may not still include integration, but they require distinctness and refuse assimilation. But that is difficult if any posture that one consciously assumes is called racist, as I warrant it would be for any "white" person to suppose that African-Americans in general are "essentially like us" or "different from us"; of course, part of the solution to this theoretically is to refuse essences, though in reality a defined social group does have an essence that lies in whatever property or set of properties define it; the rule is of course just that only members of a group can speak about its identity and the meaning of it. In any case, one does the best one can to navigated difficult social terrains defined very largely by the expectations of those people one encounters in it who are different from what one is oneself most accustomed to. No one can do this perfectly, and failure to manage it does not produce racism, though some ways of articulating and registering frustration or resentment about this would have to be so called.

If our society wants integration and not to merely manage a segregated social map of territories, which to me seems a nightmarish prospect that is unsustainable in the long term, it will probably be necessary to lower the bar of what is permitted to be said, such that many differences in understanding and in recognized values are treated not as the hatred we must hate so as to refuse it (or refuse it while affirming and wanting its continuation so that we can?), as possible grey areas that should be less guarded and defended like boundaries between distinct territories that may not be crossed, than explored, with the hope that eventually some of those fences will wither.

Calling people racist is really fighting words, maybe for the benefit of the militant and martial sentiments of those doing the calling more than those so called. The liberal left does not want this; they thrive on creating problems so that they can solve them with censorious administrative and policing measures. That is why the anti-racist liberal left is likely to lose the battles for what it really wants while thinking it is winning them. That's what is happening now.