We’ve seen from history where that goes. The most likely result of such mental sorting and value assignment is a return to segregation and Jim Crow type approaches to the structuring of society. Favoring and penalizing certain people purely based on the color of their skin. Taxation and economic benefits based on the color of your skin, advancement in education and business on the basis of your skin, preferential hiring on the basis of skin color, choosing what to read and where to shop and who to oaiten to on the basis of skin color, all that stuff. Cheers and praise and moral value assigned a priori purely on the basis of skin, reduced platforms and reduced validity of opinions on the basis of skin.

All of this is miles away from the more liberal democratic approach that was favored previously in the latter half of the 20th century. The fact that this move seems justified to some people is hardly a novelty. Such things have always seemed perfectly justified to those who believed in them.

The real lesson to be learned from all this is that people are largely unable to recognize or evaluate viewpoints and ideologies outside of their context. So an idea that bothers them extremely when it comes in one context or from a certain group of people with whom they are not in sympathy register Ls not at all when it comes from a different place, in a different context, or from people with whom they have sympathy.

Most people are almost completely incapable of actually abstracting the positions from the people and the circumstances in which the ideas were advanced, which is what most people actually use as their primary basis for decision making and moral evaluation. Rather than beginning with exercising their most objective mental faculties to guide their reactions, most people primarily experience an instinctive and emotional response based on personality and essential sympathy with (or antipathy with) the object in question, then follow those reactions up with rational explication afterward.

What this means of course is that people are very capable of seeing the splinter in someone else’s eye but are completely incapable of seeing the log in their own, even when they’re composed of the same material. Context, sympathy, circumstances, impressions, proximity, and familiarity play an immense role in how we evaluate whatever ideas we encounter. It is very difficult to make the move from the expression of an idea in those contexts to the actual core idea or argument being presented, absent these properties.

And so left-wing authoritarians are quite upset about right-wing authoritarians despite subcribing to similar approaches, because it’s not the authoritarianism itself they really object to. It’s those people’s authoritarianism that’s bad. Their own they hardly even notice, because they accept the premises behind it and see it as justified. For all their arguments against it, they aren’t really against authoritarianism a priori. Their arguments against it by the other side are applied a posteriori, after they have already found that they are not in sympathy with that faction. And they are quite willing, having found sympathy within their own faction, to apply a posteriori argumentation to justify those same authoritarian approaches from within their own group.

This is why it is so easy to find a hypocriaies and conflicts and betrayal of principles in politicians, for example, or among almost anyone who is defending their position on politics. People regularly call out things in the other party that their own party is also clearly guilty of, and are completely blind and ignorant and defensive and full of excuses when their people do the same things and it makes one wonder. “I thought you were against that? That’s what you complained about from that other person, and yet you don’t complain about it when you do it.” It happens so often and so consistently, this inconsistency, that it’s almost comical.

It is all because the process of essential moral evaluation does not go: Abstract reasoning – – >Moral conviction, it goes: Moral intuition – – >Abstract reasoning and argumentation. So when anti-racism brings in what from another perspective in another context would clearly be recognized as the very essence of previous racism, they do not recognize it. And because it is in the service of a cause for which they are sympathetic or rather a group toward which they are sympathetic, their racialized thinking and morality is portrayed as justifiable and reasonable and righteous.

The actual arguments and suggestions of both the current purveyors of racialized thinking and the racialized thinkers of the early 20th century are essentially the same, they just come from a different context, a different intuitive sympathetic position that serves as the real fundamental basis for justification. So it’s not the racialization itself that makes the position wrong, it’s the fact of where it came from and who it serves that makes it wrong. If it serves the people and the cause I am for, if it’s our racialization, it’s good. And that’s how you rehabilitate racism.