Ibram X. Kendi: Our New Postracial Myth

2013 meta-analysis of US black-white IQ gap among 3 year olds.

Complete stability since 1960s.

This kind of thing rules out a lot of possible non-genetic causes, anything directly school related, for instance.https://t.co/ki2tO6GZLs pic.twitter.com/EqFEEmMwCZ

— Emil O W Kirkegaard (@KirkegaardEmil) May 13, 2020

Ibram X. Kendi is a simple man.

He has a very simple doctrine. It has also always been the core of antiracism stretching back to the 18th century. This is true of both the liberal version of antiracism and the woke version.

The simple idea is a distortion of this idea: all men are created equal. The original idea, which is Christian in origin, is that human beings are created in the image of God and have immortal souls, which is the basis of human dignity. Egalitarianism was also fueled by the republican concept of equal citizenship. In the most extreme version of post-Enlightenment racial egalitarianism, these ideas are distorted into antiracism and taken to mean that there are NO INHERENT DIFFERENCES between human beings.

It is extremely important to point out that this novel idea isn’t found in either Christianity or republicanism. The republics of Antiquity or the Renaissance weren’t egalitarian by any stretch of the imagination. Similarly, Christendom wasn’t egalitarian by any stretch of the imagination for over a millennium. Instead, this phenomenon is best understood in the context of the breakdown of the Medieval social order in the wake of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. In the Early Modern Era, Western Europeans enslaved Africans and conquered and settled the New World because those generations were blissfully ignorant of “antiracism” which was still in the future.

The rise of antiracism can’t even really be pinned on the Enlightenment. It was Enlightenment thinkers guided by reason and observation who came up with what is now denounced as “scientific racism.” Most prominent Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire or Montesquieu or David Hume were racialists and would be denounced in our times as “white supremacists.” In the United States, President Thomas Jefferson was the most prominent racialist of his time. He also advocated the removal of free blacks to Africa and went to his grave believing in racial differences and that it was impossible to assimilate them.

No, the rise of antiracism has always been deeply connected to an underlying religious impulse. Specifically, it was the Quakers who were famous for debasing themselves who first started to elevate and ennoble blacks. Later, it was the gushing sentimentality of a peculiarly 19th century flavor of evangelical Christianity, which arose in reaction to the Enlightenment cult of reason, that latched onto the cause of the African. It was evangelical Christians who abolished slavery in Britain and America and who forced its abolition elsewhere. The Christians of the 19th century were profoundly different from the Christians of the 17th and 18th centuries. In the wake of evangelicalism and Romanticism, crude sentimentality and irrationality came to be exalted over doctrinal disputes which had dominated the previous era. In the Lutheran Church, we call this the Age of Orthodoxy which was followed by Pietism.

As the 19th century gave way to the 20th century, Christianity rapidly retreated from its previous position of dominance in American culture. The secular liberal intelligentsia whose misrule we live under today can be traced back to the 1920s. It rose in power and influence with the professional managerial class (PMC) in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. The liberal version of antiracism can be traced back to the 1920s. It went mainstream in the late 1930s and early 1940s in the context of the rise of Hitler’s Germany when fascism was seen as a major threat to liberalism. After World War II, “antiracism” became key pillar of the postwar consensus and was institutionalized in the United States and other Western countries.

Racial science was suppressed after World War II along with eugenics and nationalism as part of the general repudiation of fascism. This is when the taboo on “racism” emerged. It had nothing to do with “science.” It was entirely due to the political climate of the mid-20th century West.

The Atlantic:

“The signposts of racism are staring back at us in big, bold racial inequities. But some Americans are ignoring the signposts, walking on by racial inequity, riding on by the evidence, and proclaiming their belief with religious fervor. “America is not a racist country,” Senator Tim Scott said in April.

Black babies die at twice the rate of white babies. Roughly a fifth of Native Americans and Latino Americans are medically uninsured, almost triple the rate of white Americans and Asian Americans (7.8 and 7.2 percent, respectively). Native people (24.2 percent) are nearly three times as likely as white people (9 percent) to be impoverished. The life expectancy of Black Americans (74.5 years) is much lower than that of white Americans (78.6 years). White Americans account for 77 percent of the voting members of the 117th Congress, even though they represent 60 percent of the U.S. population.

Just as you can recognize an impoverished country by its widespread poverty, you can recognize a racist country by its widespread racial inequity. In the United States, Black college graduates owe an average of $25,000 more in student loans than white college graduates. Native Americans die from police violence at three times the rate of white people; Black people die at 2.6 times the rate; and Latino people die at 1.3 times the rate. In the United States, racial inequity is widespread by any measure.

And yet, some don’t want the American people to stop and see. They don’t want our kids to learn about the racism causing racial inequity. They are trying to ban teaching it in schools; Florida passed the latest such ban last Thursday.

They can’t acknowledge racial inequity because to acknowledge it is to discuss why it exists and persists. To discuss why racial inequity exists and persists is to point to the libraries of nonpartisan studies documenting widespread racism in the United States.

To say that there is widespread racial inequity caused by widespread racism, which makes the United States racist, isn’t an opinion, isn’t a partisan position, isn’t a doctrine, isn’t a left-wing construct, isn’t anti-white, and isn’t anti-American. It is a fact. …”

Fastforward from 1945 to 2021.

We’re now 75 years removed from World War II. The Greatest Generation is now mostly dead. The Silent Generation is dying off. The system that was created by those generations in the context of World War II is breaking down. This is what always happens in historical cycles.

The liberal version of antiracism, which was articulated by Gunnar Myrdal and other social scientists of that era, assumed that White prejudice and discrimination was the cause of racial inequality. Thus, as White prejudice and discrimination faded and racial tolerance grew and the barriers to black advancement were torn down (see the destruction of Jim Crow) the confident prediction was that racial equality would be triumphantly achieved. Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish author of An American Dilemma, confidently predicted that total racial equality between blacks and Whites would be reached by the 1990s.

The following excerpt comes from Jared Taylor’s book White Identity:

“The theoretical basis for integration was set out in An American Dilemma written in 1944 by the Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal. With the possible exception of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, no other book has had a greater influence on American thinking about race. An American Dilemma went through 25 printings – an astonishing record for a dense, thousand-page work of sociology – before it went into a second, “twentieth anniversary” edition in 1962. It set contours for the debate about race that have lasted virtually unchanged until our own day.

Here is one of the book’s key passages:

“White prejudice and discrimination keep the Negro low in standards of living, health, education, manners and morals. This, in its turn, gives support to white prejudice. White prejudice and Negro standards thus mutually ’cause’ each other.”

This was the fundamental problem. Whites kept blacks in an inferior position. Whites then pointed to this apparent inferiority as justification for their own prejudices, which gave rise to the very acts of oppression that degraded blacks.

Myrdal believed that if white attitudes could be reformed, oppression would ease, the status of blacks would rise, white attitudes would improve further, and blacks would find yet more opportunities for success. Myrdal was convinced that if the vicious cycle could be turned into a virtuous cycle it would be “America’s incomparably great opportunity for the future.”

Myrdal’s supporters thought change would come quickly. His assistant, Arnold Rose, added a postscript to the 1962 edition, in which he triumphantly described the progress that had been made since the book’s appearance in 1944. He predicted that all legal discrimination would be abolished within ten years (it actually took only three) and that in 30 years – by 1992 – residual private friction between blacks and whites would be “on the minor order of Catholic-Protestant prejudice.”

Alas, none of this happened.

Jim Crow was successfully dismantled.

Blacks were granted voting rights and exercised that right to elect Barack Obama.

White racism and prejudice has faded just as Gunnar Myrdal had hoped.

Trillions of dollars have been transferred from Whites to blacks through Great Society social programs. Every single institution in our country is now run as a kind of racial uplift charity for the benefit of blacks at the expense of everyone else who lives here. Several generations of Whites have put up with explicit racial discrimination which was implemented to uplift blacks and give them a leg up.

In spite of all this, “racial inequity” has persisted. It is not because of systematic racism. Foreigners have since come here like the Chinese and Indians and now have achieved a higher per capita income than Whites. Blacks now govern many of our large cities like Chicago and Atlanta. In our “white supremacist” society, our elites do nothing but shit on the White working class from their perches in all of our institutions. Racial inequity is not due to racism because there is significantly less of it than in the past. It is due to the stubborn persistence of racial differences. Reality itself is the problem.

We already know from 50 years of experience that integration, affirmative action, trillions of dollars in wealth transfers, a vast reservoir of White guilt and goodwill, indoctrinating Whites in antiracism and the diminution of White racial prejudice is woefully insufficient to bring about “racial equality.” Splitting the atom was easier. Landing on the moon was easier. It would be easier to put a human being on Mars than to achieve racial equality because the underlying premise is false.

That’s the truth. Reality doesn’t care about your feelings. Reality itself is racist.