Mark knocks it out of the park again with a new Reality Check on racism.
The New Racism and the Problem of Collectivized Sin
Hello, and welcome to Reality Check. Hi I’m Mark Pellegrino and today I’m going to talk about THE NEW RACISM. Words have meanings, and sometimes those meanings can change over time and with usage. ‘Bad’ is a perfect example. It means not good. Right? But in casual conversation with others it’s not uncommon to use the word ‘bad’ to describe extreme excellence, or someone or something that is a force of nature not to be trifled with. In other words, to be ‘bad’ could mean to be really, really, REALLY good.
That’s not weird; languages evolve.
Like ‘bad’, Racism is one of those words that has undergone a linguistic makeover. Unlike ‘bad’ the changes to its meaning have not gone along the normal evolutionary route languages take; Rather, its meaning has been altered by a relatively small group of people in a narrow corner of academia known as the social sciences. So what was racism before the academics re-created it? Before academic revisionism, racism was seen as a moral failing of the individual. The big fail resulted when one person judged the character of another by the color of his skin. You need not have been politically powerful, rich or even white to have been a racist. Racism was an equal opportunity form of prejudice that anyone could practice at any time, from any economic or political vantage point. Basically If skin pigment got you all judgy, you were a racist. FULL STOP Such is not the case today. Today, academics tell us that racism is not an individual failure of moral reasoning; it’s a Collective Sin. No, this does not just mean lots of people practiced it, accepted it, or codified it into law so that it became a part of the nuts and bolts of society… (pre academic revisionism, we called that Institutional Racism….) No, a Collective Sin is much deeper. A Collective Sin is an inherent moral flaw contained within a particular group BECAUSE it’s a particular group. Follow that?
That essentially boils down to ‘you’re bad because you’re you…’ If you’re experiencing a slight sensation of deja vu and you’re a Catholic, I don’t blame you. Original Sin was the first Collective Sin. To refresh those raised outside the Universal Faith…. Original Sin asserts that all men are bad because they share the flaw of humanness with a couple of people who committed a ‘crime’ in the dark ages of pre-history. The consequences of this crime (sin nature) were then passed down, like a congenital disease, from generation to generation. Similarly, The New Racism asserts that all white people are racists for sharing the flaw of whiteness with historical whites who predated and abused historical blacks. Like Original Sin, the consequences for the racialized crimes committed by historical whites supposedly stain the moral character of whites today, not because they actually participated in or even supported those historical crimes, but for the mere fact that they are the same color as the historical predators. Huh? Ok, it shouldn’t be hard to see that the whole concept of Collectivized Sin ain’t about the establishment of justice or righting historical wrongs…because Collective Sin robs the individual of the very mechanism he needs to do those things: moral agency. Remember that old thing we call choice? Yeah. You don’t have it with immutable characteristics like ‘sin nature’ or ‘whiteness’. And let’s not forget the fact that groups aren’t moral or immoral, individuals are.
So if the Collectivized Sin of New Racism is not about justice, or even morality what is it about? Well, the short answer is power through guilt. Just as Original Sin leaves you feeling guilty about something you never did but apparently couldn’t help, so The New Racism demands that you emotionally suffer for something you didn’t do and cannot fix; And as the guilt generated by Original Sin leaves you vulnerable to the prospect of whatever ‘out’ the church offers – redemption through the sacrifice of Jesus – so The New Racism demands that you accept the ‘out’ of divesting yourself of political, social, and economic power and hand it over to people you never deprived it of. Cause, muh group.
Check it out. Enough with the bullshit. Racism is real. It’s what Ayn Rand called ‘the lowest form of collectivism’, because it’s a collective based not on ideas or values, but on appearances and nothing else… It’s a form of ‘otherism’ that was so near death as to be declared mostly dead but, like a zombie during the apocalypse, has been resurrected by collectivist thinkers bent on collective revenge. But there is a way out of the Collective Sin mythology. And it’s not the baby Jesus… It’s the end of the idea that collectivized anything is good. Collectivism in ALL its iterations is demoralizing and dehumanizing and is not the path to a more just and fair society. Individualism is. Individualism is the true anti racism because its premises are that people are not their immutable characteristics, but the sum of their choices. And the sooner we get back to understanding that racism is a choice, made by individual moral simpletons who speak and act only for themselves and not their racial group, the sooner we can throw the New Racism on the trash heap of history and get on with the business of judging each other by the content of our characters…not by the color of our skins or the historical failings of our ancestors. CHECK.
