(personal underlines) - ...here we go singing and laughing (in Portuguese: "Cá vamos, cantando e rindo")
The game’s up for ‘anti-racist’ racism
There are only a few rules to column-writing. One of the strictest is never to waste time bouncing off the effluent of morons. So, for instance, it is a rule among British columnists not to use the term ‘Owen Jones’ in an article. It is too easy. Every couple of hours there will be another gaseous eruption. For example, this past week Jones, a YouTuber, has been engaged in campaigning to persuade a ‘queer’ British entrant in the Eurovision Song Contest to withdraw from the competition because of Gaza. It is by no means clear how much the citizens of Gaza care for the ‘solidarity’ of a couple of gay blokes in the UK. It is even less clear how anyone withdrawing from Eurovision would convince the Israeli war cabinet to halt the war against Hamas and persuade Hamas to return the hostages. But this is why the ‘Owen Jones’ rule exists. As it’s so easy, opposing him is fundamentally lazy.
For columns about America a similar rule applies: under no circumstances should you ever bounce off anything said on The View. This is a television programme that goes out most lunchtimes on a left-wing US channel and features four semi-lobotomised leftist women and a generally useless, token, vaguely conservative one. Anybody unclear on the format should ask an unemployed person or a student to explain the British show Loose Women and then imagine a less high-brow version.
Even so, rules are occasionally made to be broken, and this one is worth breaking here because last week something actually interesting happened on The View. The programme invited on the brilliant young writer Coleman Hughes to talk about his excellent new book The End of Race Politics. Hughes happens to be black, and is a member of a new generation that have seen through the race-hustle of some of their elders and have the intelligence to notice that if you view people through the prism of colour, it leads to hell – whether your obsession is with promoting white or black folks. Hughes’s argument, which is absolutely at one with Dr Martin Luther King’s message, is that we should try to judge people as people (remember ‘content of their character’?) rather than by the amount of melanin in their skin.
That isn’t to say that Hughes thinks race doesn’t exist or isn’t noticed by people. From the moment that he started getting questioned by Whoopi Goldberg he stressed that obviously people see race – but that a truly ‘colour-blind’ policy would mean that ‘We should try our very best to treat people without regard to race, both in our personal lives and in our public policy’. This got a smattering of applause from the studio audience and an ‘of course’ from Whoopi.
But it isn’t an ‘of course’, of course. Because in recent years young Americans have been indoctrinated into what is known as ‘anti-racism’. This is the theory – if you can call it that – pushed by pseudo-scholars such as Ibram X Kendi which claims that the most important thing about anybody is their race and that everything in the world is so racist that even the idea of being ‘colour-blind’ is racist. Put plainly, this school of thought says that you should be racist in order to be anti-racist. Got it?
Anyhow, Hughes patiently explained his ideas. But like most television shows in America, and Britain, the aim is never to get to the source of an argument and make people think. Instead, the tendency is to occasionally invite a heretic on in order to beat them about a bit and remind the audience why the fare they’re usually fed is correct.
In this case that task was done by a panellist called Sunny Hostin. Any viewer could see that she was clearly deeply antagonistic to what he was saying. After all, if you had made a media career out of talking about racism being everywhere, you too might feel threatened by someone younger and smarter coming along and saying that perhaps we need to move past all this.
Hostin duly took the most patronising and abusive position she could. She claimed to have read Hughes’s book twice ‘to give it a chance’ but said that it was ‘really fundamentally flawed’. Because Hughes invoked the name of Martin Luther King she also had to put him down about that. ‘I’m not only a student of Dr King,’ she said, ‘I know his daughter Bernice, right.’ This is a very sketchy way to try to gain the upper hand: there is no reason why knowing the daughter of somebody should give you a superior understanding of, or claim to, their work. But Hostin was gearing up for the personal attack she deeply wanted to make. She eventually got there when she said that ‘to be honest… many in the black community believe that you are being used as a pawn by the right and are a charlatan of sorts’. Hughes, she claimed, had been sinisterly ‘co-opted’.
Hughes is a nicer person than me, and promptly answered the substance of her argument rather than the ad hominem. In fact he said that ‘it would be better for everyone if we stuck to the topics rather than make it about me’. But of course people like Hostin cannot do that. Everything has to be about ‘me’, because otherwise you might fail in your great climb to the top of the moral hill where you can proclaim yourself winner (preferably with the added crampon of a vague connection to the King family).
Why did this midday moment mean something for once? Because in the desperation of a figure like Hostin – the desperate need to hold the ‘anti-racist’ racist line at all costs (even that of being wildly rude) – you can feel the breaking of a narrative. It was always a hideous idea to counter one type of racism by massively fuelling another one. The cleverer and more decent young people, Hughes among them, recognise that. If some of their elders don’t, well never mind. As people like Hostin and Whoopi Goldberg often say, with their penetrating insight, young people are the future.
