By his arguments there really isn’t such a thing as anti-racism. It’s just the opposing racism. It’s just labeling to justify a particular type of racism. Which, if you believe in a very relativistic worldview that’s only defined by power dynamics, what other alternatives are there?
I’ll give him this, his position follows from his beliefs. It’s just that calling it thst anti-racism is really just clever marketing. Anti-racism is just another kind of racism, with approved targets. It’s a mental framework for making racism great again.
I don’t know, maybe people really need to believe in racism. They can’t believe in perfect relativism. Not in practice. You have to act as if there was a value hierarchy, in order to act. And they don’t believe in objectivism. So you need some justification for acting under relativism as if it had objective force (which is the base idea underlying racism; you are different, therefore bad, I am different, therefore good).
I really don’t think you can overcome his arguments without addressing their underpinning philosophy. Or perhaps in practice you can simply expose the fact that it really just is a framework for justifying racism, and people will see that you’re not actually offering a real alternative, and so will seek a different framework.
That’s the real problem with anti-racism. It’s a false alternative. You don’t actually escape racism, you just choose a different racism to believe in. But if it’s all racism, why not just stick with the racism you’ve already got? I don’t think there’s actually a good argument for why you should.
Under a relativistic framework, what’s wrong with my racism vs yours? In what objective way is your racism actually better, and what (if relativism is true) could possibly be inducing me to switch loyalties, other than manipulation and clever power manuvering? Of course, under his own theories there’s really nothing wrong with that, it’s all justified. Why not fight for your side against others? That’s all anyone does. So it’s consistent enough in its mercenary quality.
Really the cleverness of his arguments is his ability to spin the relative value of identical alternatives and to convince people to fight and argue against their own interests, without actually appealing to any objective reality. That’s why you can say “believe all women”. Because the point isn’t to honor some objective truth or universal justice, but to advance the cause and advantage of that faction, period. Simple enough.
All he’s really saying is, pick a side, and mine is better. Not better or different in reference to some objective standard. Just better because it’s my side. And because it feels compelling. And because I want to advance it and you suck and deserve to lose because you’re you. It really is that simple. Dress is up as much as you want. But if you wonder why anti-racism looks, in practice, do much like racism, it’s because that’s all it is. It’s just an intellectual marketing campaign to make a certain kind of racism seem intellectually and emotionally palatable and reasonable to act on.
We’ve been without racism for too long, maybe. We couldn’t live without it. We want it back. We need it back. So we need some framework to support it. The idea of being judged by the content on our character is an outdated theory based on a naive religious conception, where all humans existed relative to some universal objective standard against which all could be judged, and to which people like MLK appealed, arguing that racism was itself inconsistent with the stated values of the larger society.
That trick won’t work now, because that conceptual framework is dead. So with both religion and modernism properly buried, it’s time to get on with the inevitable result, where you take away the common ground and common judge between all peoples. The battle for survival. In which survival and advantage itself is the only argument needed, and success is the only judge.
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