The New Wave

In The Virtue Signalers Won’t Change the World, John McWhorter critiques the culture of shaming that underpins the modern social justice movement; what he calls "third-wave antiracism." He's mostly critical of it, which I understand, as I tend to be critical of it myself. I take some exception to passages that, when taken together, make it appear as if he's attempting to have things both ways, but I do have some sympathy for the overall assessment that it's a dead end. (But just some.)

Mr. McWhorter identifies three ways in which, for him, "third-wave antiracism is a less convincing project than the first and second waves."

Second, and more important, is it even necessary to force a revolution in thought? Certainly a people cannot succeed as slaves, or under a system that condemns them to officially segregated and second-class status. However, human history hardly shows that an oppressed group needs the wholehearted love and acceptance of its overlords. Are black hands truly tied because whites are more likely to associate black faces with negative concepts in implicit-association tests, especially when evidence suggests that the results do not correlate meaningfully with behavior? Or because whites aren’t deeply informed about the injustices blacks have suffered throughout history? Precisely why must whites transform themselves to so extreme a degree for racial disparities to close?

I wasn't completely satisfied with the way that Mr. McWhorter handled this topic. He makes a big deal of the fact that "so many Caribbean and African immigrants" to the United States, do much better than Black people born in the United States. The Atlantic has dealt with this topic. Ta-Nehisi Coates addressed it nearly a decade ago and much more recently, the topic was raised on Radio Atlantic. The general gist is that White Americans can perceive the difference between Black people from the Caribbean or Africa and Black people who were born and raised after several generations in the United States. My point isn't to make excuses for American-born Black people. But the omission stood out for me.

But what I came across that struck me as the most interesting was actually in another article. In The New Authoritarians Are Waging War on Women, Peter Beinart explores how right-wing heads of state and thought leaders around the world are attacking the political and social progress that women have made. Except in Scandinavia. Mr. Beinart points out that women's political power is much more the norm there than it is in the Philippines, Brazil, Hungary, Poland or the United States.

This doesn’t mean a Nordic Orbán or Bolsonaro is impossible: Northern Europe has its own far-right parties. But it’s harder for those parties to use gender to delegitimize the existing political order, because women’s political empowerment no longer appears illegitimate.

On reading this, third-wave antiracism made a lot more sense.

If the reason "to force a revolution in thought" is to normalize the political gains and social equality of minority population in the United States, then it stands to reason that one of the benefits of this would be that revanchist elements in society lose the power that Blacks and other have gained as a proof of the illegitimacy of a government that they participate in.

I am under the impression that a lot of what drove Birtherism was simple partisanship. But there was also a subtext to all of it, namely that a Black person couldn't have attained the highest office in the nation without some form of illegitimate outside assistance. And that assistance could only have come at a cost. It's not that far off from the anti-Catholic sentiment that used to be a force in American politics.

Whether some sort of White transformation is needed to do away with anti-Black prejudice in the same way that the nation has mostly done away with anti-Catholic sentiment (at least as far as politics is concerned) is a mystery to me. And as for the current social-justice movement, I'm dubious of its tactics. But from listening to A Hidden History of America at War, it occurs to me that we you to simply watch the American Civil War unfold without the benefit of knowing how it ends, it's fairly easy to come to the conclusion that the Union was doomed to fail; until it wasn't. The activists themselves are fairly convinced that it will work, which is why they're doing it. I suspect that the best way to inspire them to change tactics is to present them with better tactics. I'm not sure that I know of any.