I wanted to draw attention to this video, not because it’s such a detailed examination of this subject or of what it means, but because it’s such a small, limited case. And it includes several statements by Ibrim X Kendi that are very representative of his positions and asks the question, what would that mean for the NBA? It clarifies the fundamental conflict between the institution in question (the NBA) and the difficulty of integrating the ideals of anti-racism into such an institution.

As much as the term “Marxist” has been overused as an epithet, this video, including Kendi’s own arguments, really help to illustrate why anti-racism actually is a Marxist ideology. In fact I think it’s safe to say that it’s fundamentally Marxist and necessarily Marxist. Not as an indictment, but as an accurate descriptor of the ideological structure of the theory.

Anti-racism is clearly Marxist, which Kendi is very honest about. In fact it’s so Marxist that you can’t embrace it without also eliminating capitalism. And you can’t embrace capitalism without embracing racism, he argues.

That last point is one I think you could argue about, that it doesn’t obviously follow from the premises. It’s not clear that capitalism necessitates racism, in any classical sense of the term. But at the least, I do think it’s fair to say that you can’t embrace capitalism without embracing race. Why? Because capitalism is fundamentally in favor of allowing and even benefiting from the competition and cooperation between differing individuals and therefore between differing people groups.

If capitalism is going to allow for individual differences, then it must allow for racial differences also, assuming race has any validity as a category. If capitalism is going to be built on the premise that there are individual differences in nature, actions, desires, and outcomes, then by extension it is built on some acceptance of that phenomenon at an extended social level, which may include race. Capitalism is definitely committed to the first position, and that may imply the second at various levels of iteration.

Whereas anti-racism, by insisting on the fundamental equivalence of all races and all individuals, not at the level of equality of existential or moral value or freedom, but ncecessarily equivalent at the level of actual outcomes, denies you the right to be an individual and have different outcomes in life as a result of your individuality. The fundamental premise is Marxist and applies to individuals. Kendi just extends that idea to whole races. Whether black or white or any other race, you do not have a right to be different, do not have a right to your own character or qualities or strengths or weaknesses, differing desires or actions, or to the differing outcomes that diversity produces. Anti-racism is essentially anti-race. Because all invidivuals must be equal, meaning equivalent, therefore all races must be equivalent. And if all races are not in practice equivalent, then something must be distorting the outcomes. And that something is racism. Any divergence in outcomes that accrues by race must be, by definition, indicative of racism. That is Kendi’s essential argument.

And the fundamental question, as it was with Marxism, is: How much power do you think you need to grant someone for them to be able to strip away and equalize all differences that your individuality might produce? How much power do you need to grant someone, how much tyranny, how much inequality, how much license to enact potential injustices, for them to “correct” humanity for the sin of having different people?

You can’t be different from anyone else under anti-racism, because that would produce different outcomes. Your family can’t be any different. Your people, your race, can’t be any different, because that might produce differing outcomes. All must be the same, otherwise racial differences will emerge and racism will be present. And the character of that sameness shall be determined and controlled by the elite prophets, who will mould and shape humanity into what it should be.

And you have no right to refuse. Shall the clay refuse to be molded by the potter? You’re not an individual, or a family, or a people. You’re an offense. You’re meant to be generic substance in the hands of the elite, to be molded into their ideal figure. And there’s no room for individual differences in material in that sculpting.
So in a way Kendi is right. Capitalism is a system that embraces inequality, because it embraces the freedom to be different. To utilize and embrace your own uniqueness to further your own particular outcomes in competition and cooperation with others.

Capitalism embraces the freedom to be different, to have a right to your own particularness and to the results of that particularness. To test and exchange those results against and with others. People can be wildly different, with wildly different talents and strategies and goals, and produce a wildly different panoply of goods and outcomes. You have a right to your individual character, the particular character of your family, and the particular character of your people.
Anti-racism will not and cannot allow that. Neither capitalism, nor the individuality it embraces. You must be a stripped of your identity as an individual, family, and people to be freed from the particularness that accompanies them, the differences in outcomes. Then everything will be equal, because all will be the same. An equal share of whatever is left when all individuality has been stripped from humanity. That’s equity. That is his vision. The harmony of unity, when all differences have been eradicated by force and reduced to a single glorious note, guided by the grand conductors like himself. The state, in which we are all perfect, all equal, all the same.
How grateful we shall be to lay by the burden of our own individuality and the inequities of difference, for uniformity. What a load it will lift from our conscience, to not have to worry about such things any more. No more shall we have to worry for others or fret about our own responsibilities. We shall all rest easy when the great parent provides for us all and we are all gathered under her wide wings as one. What joy we shall know. Not in being ourselves, not in what we have done or left undone, but the joy in having all, because there is only one thing we can have and be, and all shall have it. What a wonderful world it shall be, to be equal kings and queens of an empire of beige.
Individuality costs us everything. It is the greatest and most terrible pain and burden we know. But you can’t lift it without stripping us of everything we are and all we have. It is what we are. It is what the world is. You can’t correct for it without being anti-race, anti-family, anti-individual, without being against humanity itself. It’s anti-human-racism. It hates us and accuses us for what we are and seeks to end it and end everything we are and have done. That isn’t compassion. It’s genocide against the whole human race.
Kendi isn’t for kindness to other races or harmony between them. He’s preaching a new kind of racism. Not against one race or another, but against race itself. Against the human race for being different. His idea is the forcible extinction of differences between people, or at least the forcible correction of all outward evidences.

That’s a whole new level of racism. Anti-human-racism. There’s an anti-human, genocidal undercurrent there that can’t be underestimated. It’s a rejection of humanity and the world for being what they are. Different, varied, diverse, particular, unequal, exceptional. A world where so much is beyond our control, and yet we carry such heavy responsibility for what we do with it.

The hunger for the kind of power you would need for any person to fix or change that is a hunger for godlike, tyrannical power. The power to challenge and rewrkte the very fabric of being. To remake the world. We have seen people with that kind of hunger before, and they aren’t known for being kind.
As with Marxism, in order to bring in the new world the old one must be committed to the flames. It must be decomposed and broken down to its most fundamental atoms so it can be rebuilt in purity of form and essence. And any price, any injustice, any trampling of individual rights or identity is justified in the pursuit of the promised utopia. It is worth crushing, butchering, robbing, and pulling apart people, families, even whole races to make way for the new man. The old world deserves its fate. It is entirely corrupt in its nature. And no part of it can remain to taint the new world, where oneness and equity are the inheritance and mandate for all. It is the end of all striving, all failure, all difference, all excess. It is the end point of history itself.
And it is glorious. It is paradise. It is a world stripped of the sin of individuality and choice and responsibility. It is nirvana. Cessation of self. Monism. Welcome it. Speak its name. Anti-racism.

PS. It’s almost impossible in the face of the thing to tell whether Anti-racism is the solution to racism or a new kind of super-racism itself. The statement, “all differences between races are racist,” isn’t so much a conclusion as it is a fubdamental moral axiom. And it seems to lie at the core of anti racism and its moral calculus. Any difference in any outcome that accrues according to race is racism, and therefore is evil. And you therefore have a moral obligation to correct it by forcibly confronting it.

Can this theory be restrained in any way? Could you constrain it qualitatively? For example, by saying that it only applies to bad differences? So positive differences get excepted. The answer seems to be, obviously, no. The simple fact that outcomes are not purely and simply binary (good or bad) but instead are complex and exist along a continuum (better to worse) makes that impossible.

Virtually every scenario you can imagine of measuring outcomes between races, even construed only as a measurement of positive outcomes, could be ordered as accruing in better or worse distributions along racial divisions. That is racial difference, that is advantage, therefore that is racism. There is no acceptable qualitative category of racial difference. So no, there is absolutely no qualitative way to constrain this theory.

What, then, about a quantitative restraint? Is there some limit to the amount of racial difference that is acceptable, or to the scale at which it can be meaningfully measured and parsed? Is there an allowable quantity of racial difference? Again, obviously no. That flies right in the face of the premise. The whole point of the theory is that difference itself is by nature racist and reprehensible. Any racial inequity is racism. That’s not a tertiary claim, that’s the primary claim of the theory.