Racialism—not racism—is engulfing our civilization. Racism is a special case of racialism, one that was fading slowly from our society but has been given renewed vivification by the racialism infecting our public life. Racism is not, strictly speaking, the abused term often propagated, which is so expansive in its definition that it encompasses anything a given person dislikes in a member of a different racial group. Racism is a form of racialism, and as such must be condemned like all racialist thinking. Those of us who care about the future of our nation and all those who are in the greatest need have a duty to oppose the false anthropology at the heart of the racialist ideology.
Therefore, I cannot remain silent about the issues of our day concerning race and the turmoil and havoc that false understandings of the racial question are inflicting, especially to minority neighborhoods. The countless souls trapped in communities where incivility, anger, and violence reign are not often covered by the news. Pursuit of justice does not have to be this way, but this push for racial justice has become what seems to be an inevitably destructive movement. It is especially destructive precisely because it camouflages as a fight for justice.
Racialism refers to the inordinate attention given to and the demarcation of the social construct of race by placing it at the center of human identity. I call it a social construct because the idea of separating the human species into distinct groups based on physical characteristics is not based on any scientific evidence that there are biogenetically distinct races. What we call “races” reflect specific attitudes and beliefs that were imposed on different populations beginning in the 17th century.
In our present social context, this centering of race has been informed by the anthropology of revisionist Marxism. In classic Marxist theory, the concept of social class determines identity by collectivizing it. If one is a worker, one is a proletarian, and that collective classification exhausts any meaningful content of individual identity. Once, some Communist Party members approached Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin) complaining about the killing of many Russian Kulaks—those peasants wealthy enough to own a farm and hire labor. “They are treating their employees well and are decent people!”, the party officers explained. Lenin, without missing a beat, responded, “We are not killing them for being bad people, we are killing them for being Kulaks.”
In other words, their class identity displaced any other meaningful aspect of their being; individual characteristics were irrelevant. In exterminating them, Lenin was being consistent. Their existence as a class was detrimental to the advancement of a revolution that, although bloody and even unjust for some individuals, was supposedly destined to bring about the victory of the proletariat and the eventual hoped-for classless society.
However, after the predictions of Marx concerning the coming revolution did not pan out, it was left to his intellectual supporters to revise it. A number of theorists offered varied revisions of Marxian theory: Lenin, Trotsky, Bakunin and the Anarchists, and many others. This revisionism continues unabated until the present time. Some neo-Marxists distinguish themselves by their emphasis on race.
A number of neo-Marxists posit that social class is not the element (or the only element) at the base of individual and social identity. Race is an irreducible reality that cannot be subsumed within any other concept. In other words, they use the basic dialectical analysis of Marx but employ race as the dividing line, the battleground for revolution. Other neo-Marxists see race as important only in the context of their critique of capitalism. Blacks are seen as the quintessential victims of capitalism, but the race question is still an epiphenomenon or manifestation of class. Among classic Marxists the slogan remains intact: “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”
For these classic Marxists, race is reducible to class. A good example of the link between class and race is the work of the American of Russian descent, Noel Ignatiev, a founder of the magazine Race Traitor and the one who coined the concept of “white privilege.” Ignatiev taught that the term “white” refers to anyone of any race who embraces capitalism, limited government, and American traditional values. The concept of “white privilege” was not ultimately about race but about the privileges he saw embedded in a capitalist economy. The task was to eradicate capitalism, not merely to fight racism. As Ignitiev states, “The greatest ideological barrier to the achievement of proletarian class consciousness, solidarity and political action is now, and has been historically, white chauvinism. White chauvinism is the ideological bulwark of the practice of white supremacy, the general oppression of blacks by whites.”
Racialism is also expressed through the what has been termed as Critical Race Theory (CRT). The theory started in the early 1980s at Harvard Law school out of an alternative course using Professor Derrick Bell’s book Race, Racism, and American Law. It is an offspring of a post-civil rights radical activism brought into academe to analyze the law through the lens of victimization and the theory of systemic racism. Critical Race Theory (CRT) scholars focus on the relationship between race, racism, and power by questioning the liberal order in American constitutional law, legal reasoning, and the entire social framework of American life.
In any of its multiple expressions, racialism places race at the heart of both each person’s identity and social life. At its root, it offers a Marxist analysis of race and rejects the type of incrementalist understanding of progress and reform at the heart of the vision of the early Civil Rights Movement. We are today suffering from such a devastatingly alienating movement.
