The language of race has become very strange indeed.
Take the following statements.
Black Lives Matter Is
not racist but praiseworthy
White Lives Matter Is racist, far right and gets you
sacked
All Lives matter Is likewise racist
White Lives Don’t matter Is not racist and gets you promoted
This is to put language through the looking glass.
Words mean what we want them to mean and the use of language becomes inconsistent
and illogical. But how did this happen?
Take the statement. “White lives don’t matter. As
white lives.” The qualification “as white lives” is supposed to change the
meaning of the previous statement. But if someone said “Black lives don’t
matter. As black lives” there would be immediate fury. It could be that these
statements are trying to say it is not the characteristic of being white or
black that makes a life matter. But this is the equivalent of saying “All lives
matter”.
The problem with a statement like “White lives don’t matter.
As white lives” is that it is unclear. So too is the statement “Abolish whiteness”.
How am I supposed to do this? If I set out to abolish yellowness I might for
instance try to find all the bananas in the world and paint them red, but even
if I succeeded, I would still find that part of a rainbow was yellow. So how
would I abolish whiteness. I clearly can’t abolish a colour that occurs in
nature, e.g. snow, not unless I tried to turn snow yellow. But what about trying
to abolish whiteness as a race?
How could I abolish white people? I could do this in
two ways. I could set out like Herod to slaughter all the innocents. The problem
with this is that I would have to go to somewhere like Poland where nearly 100%
of the population is white and try to repeat what was tried there between 1939
and 1945. This might abolish whiteness in Poland, but there is a word for such
an endeavour.
How else could I abolish whiteness. I could strive to
achieve a situation where every white person gave birth to a non-white child. If
enough people from all over the world ignored race completely in their choice
of partner, then eventually there would be no racial distinctions at all nor
indeed would there be national distinctions. There would simply be the human
race. There are some attractions to this idea. It would make wars less likely.
There might develop a universal language, but the trouble is that everything
about human nature that we actually know suggests that it isn’t what human
beings want. Why else did we historically develop countries that were mostly
monocultural? It suggests people choose to live with those who are
linguistically and culturally similar. If there were not the case, there would
be no countries today.
So how are we to abolish whiteness and if we did so,
would we be allowed to abolish blackness too?
Earlier in the week I read about a cartoon character
that was mixed race which was played by a white actor. This is now forbidden.
Only a black person can play a mixed-race character. What this means is that a
person with a white father and a black mother is considered to be black. From
this it follows that while whiteness can be abolished by white and black people
having black children, blackness cannot.
Abolishing whiteness therefore is not about achieving
equality. It is about encouraging white societies to be ever more mixed race in
order that eventually they cease to exist. But this abolitionism must require
the cooperation of these societies otherwise how could it happen without force?
Does it happen by making the concept that “white lives don’t matter. As white
lives” intellectually acceptable and indeed praiseworthy while if the words
black or brown were substituted, we would all be fired?
The problem we have is that the study of race in
modern universities is not about equality. This is because the foundation of
modern studies of race is the idea that only white people can be racist.
This idea has never been proved and is in fact counterintuitive.
But much of modern academia consists in statements that cannot be proved. Subjects
like Postcolonialism are full of statements that can neither be proved by logic
nor by experience. But if a statement can neither be proved by reason or experience,
it must have been made up. Eventually these statements that are made up are
treated as being the truth. We thus end up with a variety of counterintuitive
statements that we must believe such as “Men can become women”, “Men can marry
men”, “Black people cannot be racist” and “Black lives matter, but white lives
don’t”.
These statements do not result from clear thinking. Rather
they result from unclear thinking, unreadable books and subjects where there is
only ever one correct answer one goody (e.g. women, black people, transgender
people) and one baddy (men, white people, non-transgender people).
It means that there is always a fundamental
inconsistency in the thinking. A white
actor must never play Othello, but a black actor may play Hamlet.
This would not matter much if this inconsistency were
limited to acting, but it extends to everything.
The unforgivable sin of racism gets a white person
fired, but gets a black person promoted. Black people have no fear of being
called a racist because of either their actions or their words, because they
have been told that no matter what they say, or do it is impossible for them to
be racist.
This of course is a racist ideology, but it is the
foundation of modern thinking on race. This is why a Cambridge academic feels
she can say anything. It is also one of the reasons why some black people feel
they can do anything. You can kill three white gay people, but no one will call
you either homophobic or racist. But if a white person killed three black gay
people that would be the first thing that was said.
You cannot achieve equality from inequality.
