The Irrationality of Anti-Racism

It is amusingly ironic that in the taxonomy of modern thought, racism is considered to be a species belonging to the genus prejudice. The word prejudice refers to certain types of non-rational beliefs or ideas. Note that I said non rational not irrational. Something can be non-rational without being irrational. Something that is irrational is contrary to logic or reason. Something that is non rational is not derived from logic or reason but is not necessarily contrary to logic or reason. Prejudice, a word formed from components that mean “before” and “judgement”, denotes beliefs or ideas that have been formed before the process of making a reason based judgement. It has both a positive and a negative sense, although the former is all but forgotten in our day and age. Prejudice in the positive sense refers to the ideas that have been passed on to us through tradition that enable us to make decisions in the absence of the information necessary to form a fully rational judgment. Edmund Burke praised prejudice in this sense of the word at great length in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). In the other sense of the term, prejudice is a negative opinion formed against a person or group without sufficient evidence to support it. Both forms of prejudice are non-rational, neither is necessarily irrational, but the latter kind of prejudice is frowned upon because it involves unjustified injury to the reputation of a person or group. Racism is considered to fall under the category of the second kind of prejudice. This brings us back to our initial statement. The irony is due to the fact that anti-racism, in the sense of the set of beliefs that expresses itself in organized activism against racism, is not just non-rational but thoroughly irrational.

As evidence of this claim, I offer the anti-racist response to the words "All lives matter".

This expression is obviously itself a response to "Black lives matter", a phrase which began as a Twitter hashtag seven years ago when George Zuckerman was acquitted for the shooting of Trayvon Martin and which became the name of an organized activist movement. For the sake of distinguishing between the phrase qua phrase and the movement it has been attached to, quotation marks will be used when the phrase is intended and the capitalization of the initial letter of each word will indicate that the movement is intended. Note carefully the nature of the response. “All lives matter” does not contradict what is stated by “Black lives matter.” Quite the opposite, as a matter of fact, it clearly affirms it. Black lives are part of the extension of all lives, therefore if all lives matter, black lives matter. Furthermore, “All lives matter” is more inclusive than “Black lives matter.” In anti-racist theory and rhetoric “inclusivity” is ordinarily considered to be good, desirable and ideal, while its opposite “exclusivity” is treated as being bad and undesirable. Indeed, one of the principle objections to racism is that it excludes people. A stereotypically racist club, for example, is one that excludes people from membership on the basis of their skin colour.

Anti-racists, however, regard “All lives matter” as being a racist slogan, take offense whenever they hear it, and demand that people stop using it.

Let us look at a couple of examples from this past week alone.

Grant Napear, long-time play-by-play television announcer for the Sacramento Kings basketball team, as well as the host of a show on Sacramento’s KHTK Sports 1140 radio station, was fired from the latter and made to resign from the former, because of a tweet including the slogan “All lives matter.”

Here in Manitoba, our provincial premier Brian Pallister, speaking on Tuesday about the anti-racism protest that was scheduled to take place on Friday and in support of that protest said “Black lives matter, All lives matter, of course” and was immediately attacked for doing so. Someone named Elsa Kaka, who apparently hosts a podcast entitled “The Ordinary Black Girl Podcast” gave an interview to the press in which she said “'All lives matter' is a deeply offensive and problematic phrase that has been used to derail and disregard the Black Lives Matter movement.” Pallister, much to my disgust, apologized on Wednesday.

How could "All lives matter" possibly be "deeply offensive and problematic" to anyone except those who hold and cherish the belief that some lives don't matter?

The rational answer is that it cannot. The late Sir Roger Scruton frequently talked about the distinction between "giving offence" and "taking offence" and here we have a textbook example. The phrase "All lives matter" does not give offence in what it affirms, those who object to it are taking offence.

The offence they take from the slogan has nothing to do with the meaning of the words themselves. Indeed, any attempt to find fault with the assertion made by those words would immediately render them susceptible to the charge that they think some lives don't matter. Their justification for taking offence, when they deign to give such a justification rather than simply assuming that their taking offence is itself its own sufficient justification, is to either rely upon the ad hominem argument that the slogan is racist because those who say it are racist, object to the intention of the words, i.e., to counter the "Black lives matter" slogan and criticize the Black Lives Matter movement, or argue that "All lives matter" detracts from their own message which is that the institutions and structure of American, and by extension all Western, societies are embedded with a racism that treats black lives as if they don't matter.

The first of these arguments merits no response.

The problem with the objection to the intent of the words is that it requires the assumption that the Black Lives Matter movement is or ought to be beyond criticism. This assumption is both false and dangerous. No movement, let alone one the "peaceful demonstrations" of which have a tendency to become violent or degenerate into riots, ought to be beyond criticism.

The final argument rests upon a belief that is widely held even though it is demonstrably wrong.

Let us consider the specific type of alleged institutional racism which has been the primary focus of the Black Lives Matter movement. Police in the United States, especially white police, are accused of being racist towards blacks and expressing that racism by making blacks more than anyone else the objects of the violent abuse of their authority.

The facts simply do not bear this out. In 2017 American police killed 457 whites and 223 blacks, in 2018 they killed 399 whites and 209 blacks, in 2019 they killed 370 whites and 235 blacks, and in this year so far they have killed 172 whites and 88 blacks. Now, the fact that the total number of whites killed each year exceeds the total number of blacks is not sufficient to disprove the allegation. It is to be expected because there are more whites than blacks in the United States. In 2017, for example, there were 247.62 million whites in the United States and 43.5 million blacks. Now here is where the argument for police racism comes in. There were 5.69 times the number of whites than blacks in the United States in 2017. By contrast the number of whites killed by police was only twice as high. This, the anti-racists maintain, proves that police are racist. If they weren't, the number of whites killed by the police would be around 5-6 times higher than blacks so killed. However, there is another figure which must be taken into consideration. In the same year out of reported non-fatal violent crimes, 2, 230, 910 involved white perpetrators and 1, 112, 610 involved black perpetrators according to the American Bureau of Justice Statistic’s National Crime Victimization Survey. In other words, the number of whites who committed non-fatal violent crimes was only twice the number of blacks, the exact same ratio as is found among white and black victims of police killings, and equally disproportionate to the relative size of the two racial populations. Since the vast majority of cases where police kill a suspect involve violent crimes - the recent example of George Floyd being an obvious exception as it involved passing a bad bill - it is far more rational, if far less politically correct, to attribute the disproportion in the percentage of blacks among victims of police violence to their identical overrepresentation among violent crime offenders than to racial prejudice on the part of the police. Since this holds true for pretty much any year for which these statistics are available, and studies have repeatedly shown that policemen of every race are far more likely to shoot a member of their own race than of the other, just as criminals of all races are far more likely to choose victims of their own race than of another, this conclusion is quite definite. Arguments which take the form of "but look at what happened to fill-in-the-blank" are not valid as a rebuttal. Ironically, they involve an extrapolation from the specific to the general that is very similar to the sort that anti-racists would immediately recognize as invalid in the case of racial stereotypes.

Clearly, the anti-racist condemnation of "All lives matter" is utterly irrational. This is only to be expected. After all, we are talking about a belief system/movement that fifty-six years after an American Congress that was by a vast majority white passed a bill protecting blacks against the private discrimination of employers, landlords, etc., sixty-three years after a white American president used military force to racially integrate a high school in Arkansas, forcing it to comply with the ruling of an all-white Supreme Court three years earlier that all segregation laws were unconstitutional, and one-hundred fifty-five years after an all-white American Congress abolished black slavery, maintains that institutional white racism is the biggest problem in the United States. Furthermore, it is a belief system the representatives of which frequently claim that all whites are racist and only whites are racist, which very much suggests that it is itself an example of the very thing it ostensibly opposes. The assertion that there is an evil demanding extirpation, of which all whites and only whites are guilty, cannot be anything other than racism against white people - frequently on the part of white people. It is thoroughly and utterly irrational