The Real Anti-Racism

Andre Archie: The Virtue of Color-Blindness. Washington: Regnery Gateway, 2024.

 

With the United States at “a crossroads when it comes to race relations,” its citizens hesitating about whether to adhere to its longtime defense of the natural rights of individuals or to endorse “anti-racism” in the form of group rights, Professor Archie urges conservatives to “join me in reclaiming a noble racial tradition: color blindness.” As a scholar whose work has centered on classical political philosophy (he has published a monograph of Plato’s Greater Hippias), he knows that virtue “comes through practice and habit;” “we become morally good by performing actions that embody moral qualities.” “Natural, sympathetic relations among Americans” can develop if we guide our practice and habituation by the principle of color-blindness, conserving “the hard-won gains achieved on the racial front by reminding ourselves of the spirit of 1776 and 1863.” The emancipation of slaves followed from the color-blind principle of the American Revolution, that all men are created equal in their natural rights, as individuals of one species, one kind, regardless of skin color. So did the gains made by the civil rights movement, two generations ago.

Yet “I cannot think of any contemporary author on the Left or Right who doesn’t think the color-blind approach is at least outdated and probably naive.” (I can think of several but let the claim pass as generally true.) Beyond the chattering classes, “the false accusation of systemic racism has now been embraced by titans of the tech and financial industries,” while “color-blindness, a once commonplace approach to race relations, is now considered heresy.” Accordingly, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts caused a stir in a 2007 opinion in which he ventured to suggest, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race” by means of ‘affirmative action.’ As Archie elaborates, “To be color-blind is to understand that an individual’s or a group’s racial membership should be irrelevant when choices are made or attitudes formed.” But for a long time, American conservatives have “failed to see just how corrosive and revolutionary the anti-color-blind pedagogy is.”

On the Supreme Court, Justice John Marshall Harlan called the Constitution “color-blind” in his dissent in the wrongly decided 1896 case, Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld laws enforcing racial segregation. The Constitution, Harlan wrote, “neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens,” who “are equal before the law” when it comes to civil rights because “the law regards man as man.” But, as Archie writes, “racial segregation has returned in full, ugly force” via “the diversity training industry,” a “Trojan horse for far more insidious racial doctrines like Critical Race Theory and ‘Antiracism.'” The “true intention” of this industry is “to promote intimidation and psychological control over concerned, but racially passive white Americans.” That is, diversity training, affirmative action, and the like are instruments of rule, rule by a new ruling class in alliance with existing business and academic elites playing divide-and-rule against Americans by “encourag[ing] racial balkanization on the part of blacks and whites,” thereby undermining a hitherto republican regime animated by “a sense of American identity.” Archie sets as his goal “to reacquaint Americans” with the tradition of color-blindness “and to fight against modern-day segregationists.”

The false anti-racists of the ‘Woke’ ideology charge that Western civilization has been racist from the start. A classicist has no difficulty batting that down, citing Frank M. Snowden Jr.’s scholarship concluding “that classical antiquity was familiar with black people through black-skinned Ethiopians and Nubians, and that neither the Greeks nor the Romans expressed racial animosity toward either.” Classical moralists centered on character, the ethos of individuals and peoples, asking what is the best way to live, not what complexion one might have. Their moral theory was “person-centered.” Modern moral theory has emphasized not virtue but “criteria for selecting the best action,” whether those criteria were ‘deontological’ (e.g., Kant’s categorical imperative) utilitarian. Utilitarianism is especially “susceptible to attributing moral status to ascriptive qualities like race” because the principle of utility cannot “prevent race or racial characteristic from being used as a criterion in deciding whether or not an action produces the greatest amount of utility, happiness, or well-being.” When the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., wanted to be judged by the content of his character, not the color of his skin, he appealed to the principle of classical morality, not that of the moderns, as that personalism has been affirmed by Christianity, whose Founder commands, “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” “Character is everything. It’s all you really have at the end of the day.”

Frederick Douglass had already articulated decisive arguments against the claim that American racism is “systemic” in principle. As a former slave, he could have no doubt that “in the nineteenth century, discrimination against African Americans was factually systemic. Even after the abolition of slavery, “emancipation and reconstruction promised very little in the face of organized violence, political and economic marginalization, and segregation that blacks experienced.” Nevertheless, Douglass never conceded that the United States Constitution and the philosophic principles behind it were anything less than color-blind. In this, he opposed the claims of the prominent Abolitionist agitator, William Lloyd Garrison, who stigmatized the Constitution as a “covenant with death” and the American founding as designed to perpetuate slavery. “Garrison believ[ed] that the Founding documents were anti-black through and through.” Douglass believed no such thing.

“Garrison’s constitutional beliefs were, fundamentally, informed by his acceptance of perfectionism,” the belief that human beings can be purged of their sins and that, “through will and faith, man can achieve perfection on earth” through obedience to Christ. Renouncing human government as an unnecessary hierarchy, Garrison also rejected the warfare governments undertake, advocating “nonresistant pacifism.” Garrison’s analysis of law was, accordingly, positivist; laws express only the ruling opinion of the regime that sets it down—in the United States, majority opinion. Human law has no real underpinning in the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. Unsurprisingly, then, the Constitution should be regarded as a pro-slavery document because it includes the ‘three-fifths’ and fugitive slave clauses. And before it, the Articles of Confederation had relegated slavery to the status of an issue to be decided by the states, a feature the Constitution did not eliminate. In the 1850s, Garrison pushed for secession—secession of the Northern states from union with the slaveholding South. This was in keeping with his moral perfectionism; secession would have done nothing to put slavery on the road to extinction, but it would have made Abolitionists feel purer.

Douglass initially concurred. But in 1851, having read the arguments of abolitionists Gerrit Smith, Lysander Spooner, and William Goodell, he began to see the Preamble to the Constitution as the link between the supreme law of the land and the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God cited in the Declaration. Congressman Smith had turned his hometown of Peterboro, New York into a center of anti-slavery activity, particularly the Underground Railroad; Douglass dedicated My Bondage and My Freedom to him. Spooner, and ally of Smith, was an Abolitionist anarchist, opposed to the Constitution because opposed to governments generally, but still moved to write The Unconstitutionality of Slavery, a book on the Constitution as an anti-slavery document. Goodell, a New York publisher and 1852 Liberty Party candidate for the presidency, held similar convictions. “Their racial advocacy and intellectual focus on behalf of helping black Americans achieve equality before the law were quite remarkable,” and Archie doubts “that the Frederick Douglass we revere so much today would have achieved the status he presently occupies without having been shaped by the ideas he inherited from these men.” They, in turn, had consulted the writings of the great English jurist, William Blackstone, who considered the law of nature as the foundation of English common law. “Unlike positive law, the law of nature is unhistorical,” valid everywhere human beings exist, and so long as they do. The law of nature “exists objectively both as a norm for individuals, communities, and the state, and as a limiting principle in the political arena where objective right could be repudiated by the legislator.” Blackstone in turn derived his natural law principles from John Locke, who argues that the natural law supports the individual’s natural rights to life, liberty, and property.

As one of the greatest orators of his time, Douglass understood that those opposed to slavery and to the racism of its advocates (notably, Senator John C. Calhoun and his disciples, including then-Senator and future Confederate States of America president Jefferson Davis) would best win hearts as well as minds by showing Americans that their country was founded upon the anti-slavery principles of natural law. Nor was this a mere rhetorical ploy. In the 1805 case, United States v. Fisher, Chief Justice John Marshall had written, “Where rights are infringed, where fundamental principle are overthrown, where the general system of the law is departed from, the legislative intention must be expressed with irresistible clearness, to induce a court of justice to suppose a design to affect such objects.” As a member of the founding generation, Marshall understood the fundamental principle of the Constitution he was interpreting to be the natural law; in Archie’s words, if a law under review by the Court is “ambiguous or simply unclear, and can be interpreted in line with natural rights or in opposition to natural rights, the interpretation consistent with natural rights is the meaning that should be given to the words under consideration.” Smith, Spooner, and Goodell were in good legal company, and by 1851 Douglass had joined them.

Their most distinguished ally at the time was the Free-Soil Party United States Senator from Ohio, Salmon P. Chase. “Chase held two political beliefs that especially appealed to Douglass: that slavery “perverted the idea of labor” by “pitting slave labor against free labor” and thereby diverting the government from its rightful task of securing unalienable natural rights; and that slavery’s extension into western territories “posed a mortal threat to republican government” by bringing the anti-republican, oligarchic regime of slaveholders to the western states, which would then ally themselves with the Southern state oligarchs. But, as the Northwest Ordinance had shown, “the Federal government has the power to outlaw slavery in all Federal territories” and thus to defend American republicanism against its enemies. As a founder of the Republican Party, a few years later, Chase helped to insert these Constitutional arguments against slavery into the 1856 and 1860 platforms. 

Concluding his refutation of claims that the United States has always exhibited “systemic” racism, racism valorized by the principles of the regime, Archie endorses Douglass’s approach. “For right-thinking African Americans what America is and what it stands for has never been the issue: the issue has been to get America to stand by the principles expressed in the Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the constitution and the Constitution itself.”

In the second third of his book, Archie turns, with more than a touch of distaste, to what he rightly terms the “sophistry” of the principal publicists for pseudo-anti-racism, whose arguments pervade the African-American Studies programs in American universities and colleges. “A narrative of separateness has been their constant refrain from the beginning: The United States and its history is irredeemably racist and exploitative. Slavery is America’s original sin.” Not only African-American Studies departments, but ethnic studies generally “have played an influential role both in academia and in undermining an American identity that is grounded in color-blind principles and transcends race.” For a professor of classical philosophy, a certain impatience with the flyweight intellectuals of Wokeness is understandable and, sure enough, Archie quotes Socrates in Plato, dissing the poets: “the more poetic they are, the less they should be heard.” And Socrates was talking about the likes of Homer and Aristophanes, not Derrick Bell, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ibran X. Kendi, or Robin Di Angelo. So, to the critic who might chide, “Archie, you are no Socrates,” the professor might reply, “and the likes of these are no Aeschyluses.”

The late Professor Bell wrote Race, Racism, and American Law and Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism. A law professor, he replaced the Founders’ principle of natural right and the Progressive’s principle of historical growth with Critical Race Theory. As a short story writer (as it were on the side), he sought to dramatize that theory. Bell claims that racism is permanent in American because “it serves the material and psychic interests of both white elites and working-class whites,” an argument that Douglass had already rejected on the materialist side and worked to correct on the personal side by pointing to the repeatedly expressed opinions of the American Founders and their latter-day allies in the Abolitionist and Free-Soil movements. But, as Archie remarks, Bell prefers a “politically motivated, results oriented, and anti-color blind” use of law “to practice positive discrimination,” i.e., discrimination on the basis of skin color, now for the benefit of people of color. He has the practical sense to understand that African Americans will only make real advances “if white America sees its interest as also advancing at the same time”—a “power dynamic” Bell calls “Interest Convergence,” not unlike the ‘Convergence Theory’ left-wing Americans proposed during the Cold War, in their (futile) attempt to reconcile the United States and the Soviet Union. But whereas the color-blind approach brings ‘whites’ to frame their mutual self-interest with ‘black’ and ‘brown’ Americans within the framework of natural rights, and thereby the dignity of persons, the anti-color-blind approach works to reduce ‘whites’ to shameful and silent acquiescence. “The abolitionist movement alone is a counter narrative to Bell’s Interest Convergence thesis and its assumption that African Americans lack agency to improve their own well-being in America, but “Bell has no interest in historical facts, nor is he interested in racial fraternity.” Bell prefers to tell “subjective and preachy” stories of Caucasian oppression. “For no other group in America, except for white Americans, would we tolerate the wholesale racial demonization of a group.”

Journalist Ta-Nehesi Coates’s Between the World and Me taps “the thrill of militancy.” Coates writes in the line of James Baldwin’s polemic, The Fire Next Time, a work in what Archie calls “the exhortative tradition” of black American literary production. The book consists of a series of letters to Coates’s adolescent son, calling ‘white’ people (as Coates himself puts it) “destroyers” who enforce “the whims of our country.” These whims extend to putatively rational enterprises: “You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the aggression all land, with great violence, upon the body.” Take that, Margaret Mead. “Here we see Coates’s tendency to exaggerate for literary effect,” Archie observes, understatedly. Although addressing his son, Coates keeps a careful eye on his ‘white’ readers, “speak[ing] to a deep vulnerability in the national psyche of Americans, especially elite white Americans,” hoping that they will behave rather as a previous generation of rich Manhattanites were persuaded to fund The Nation —the sort of behavior Tom Wolfe satirized in Radical Chic. By tapping into such sentiments, Coates hopes to sucker ‘whites’ into paying ‘reparations’ to ‘people of color,’ the least they can do to redress past and present abuses. Reparations are the obvious consequence of group rights (and of group wrongs). Archie brings a bit of sanity to the fore, recognizing that while “the majority of African Americans were introduced to America through slavery…they were not permanently scarred by the experience of slavery” and so “are not in need of constant moral cheerleading from their betters,” to say nothing of constant monetary restitution. 

History professor Ibrahim X. Kendi explains How to Be an Antiracist, not a mere non-racist, which simply won’t do, in his eyes. “His ideology and the political movement it represents are, on the most basic level, antithetical to individual autonomy and the individual right enshrined in the Bill of Rights”; the practical upshot of his pseudo-anti-racism entails denial of freedom of conscience and civil liberties to “blatant racists.” In Kendi’s words, “if discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist.” The problem, Archie remarks, is that racially discriminative laws, however well-intended (and that is questionable), contribute to “the modern segregationist trends we see today in any parts of our society,” the valorization of “affinity groups” that “foster divisiveness, mainly along the lines of race, gender, and sexuality.” As an academic, Archie deplores the policy of requiring college and university employees and students to sign “diversity statements,” even before they are allowed to enter academia. Such statements are the contemporary equivalent to the confessions of faith churches and church-related institutions once required of prospective members. The articles of the new faith are simple: “systematically racist” America, ruled by ‘whites,’ aims at exploiting ‘peoples of color. Such injustice can only be remedied by “various schemes to socially engineer desired outcomes” under the assumption that “if it weren’t for discrimination, the achievements and outcomes of various racial groups would be random or even.” Against this claim, Archie points to the research of the economist Thomas Sowell, who attributes economic and social differences among various ethnic groups to their “cultural traits,” their habits of mind and heart, especially those that either encourage or discourage adaptation to changes in demand for certain types of labor and for the skills required to perform them. 

Robin Di Angelo, a professor of “multicultural education” at Westfield State University, wrote White Fragility: The Challenges of Talking to White People About Racism. “White fragility,” a term she coined, adroitly bathes ‘whiteness’ in the waters of condescension, putting her fellow Caucasians firmly in their place. It serves as a rhetorical expression of her “abiding disdain for enlightenment concepts such as neutrality, objectivity, impartiality equality, individualism, and formalism”—the whole roster of ‘postmodernist’ bugbears. Bathwater, baby, Archie replies: “Despite the fact that the European Enlightenment as a political movement had some drawbacks”—you know, the Jacobin Terror during the French Revolution—such concepts as “objectivity and impartiality, mostly in the context of law, were crucial to the modern era’s efforts at extending the notion of equality to broader segments of the population in Western societies,” as seen in the Declaration of Independence and indeed in the earliest phase of the French Revolution. In her book, and in her work as a “diversity trainer,” Di Angelo exhibits “the ugliest aspects of tribalism and racial atavism” as “good and necessary in the quest to heighten the racial consciousness”—a.k.a. ‘wokeness’—of “her intended audience: the white middle upper class.” She dislikes individualism, and rights held by individuals, on the basis of the age-old structuralist argument that says the naive among us believe that their actions are due to their own efforts, and that the ascriptive qualities that define them socially—race, class, gender—have very little sway over how they exercise their capacities to express themselves, to express their characters, as they see fit as individuals.” On the contrary, human beings “belong to groups first and foremost,” groups that “define how we see ourselves, as individuals, in relation to other groups.” This supposed fact is supposed to make “the relations between white Americans and people of color, particularly black Americans, as a zero-sum contest for economic and political power,” with ‘whites’ having taken most of the marbles, so far. ‘Whites’ are “biased,” given their superior economic, social, and political position, which imposes the wrong moral and intellectual perspective upon them. This is where the classicist Archie might recall the work of Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges (no democrat, he), who described in his book, The Ancient City, the way in which the small, closed poleis of antiquity assiduously framed a nearly airtight set of civil-religious beliefs upon their citizens, before those naughty philosophers arose to subvert the laws. ‘Whites’ are analogous to such citizens, Di Angelo in effect argues, and she is the subversive philosopher. But the hemlock will be served to her fellow ‘whites,’ who will be required to call it ambrosia. 

Whatever the differences between the classical political philosophers and the Enlightenment philosophes —and they are considerable—they share an interest in setting “epistemic standards that govern the relationships between groups” in ‘the city,’ the political community. “Rational discourse” requires that “we put aside, or bracket, our differences in order to be impartial or neutral with regard to our own biases and predilection” in order to “rise above” them—a more modest version of the Socratic-Platonic ascent from the cave. In contemporary America, “relationships are fraught with confusion, tension, and posturing when they are governed by irrational standards that essentialize individuals based upon their racial characteristics,” but those are the standards “the diversity training industry operates under.” With those standards in hand, the legerdemain begins, as the diversity trainer frames “questions or issues in a specific way to enhance the chances of achieving a desired end,” very much in the manner of the slightly older techniques deployed in ‘values clarification’ school exercises. [1] Despite the pretense of dialectical questioning, “the diversity trainer’s main goal is to quiet white people by conducting the session under the assumptions that all black people experience racism, whether they know or not, and that white people just can’t relate to such experiences.” (In this, diversity training mimics feminist ‘sensitivity training,’ with its assumption that men, renamed ‘males’ for the occasion, are insensitive brutes which, like brutes, better not open their snouts.) Meanwhile, “skeptical blacks”—Professor Archie may have been one of them?—are “shamed into not speaking out in disagreement with the trainer or the racial victimhood narrative that’s told, and, most important, white attendees now feel duty bound to remain quiet or they will be ostracized and called out.” It is as if John Locke’s “law of opinion” has been redeployed for decidedly un-Lockean ends. Lockean-liberal toleration has no place in the new illiberalism, which permits “no tolerance for alternative points of view, nor tolerance for any point of view other than the official racial line.” Jim Crow redivivus, with the bottom rail on top, this time. 

To restore the virtue of color-blindness, Archie appropriates a phrase of Roger Scruton’s, “oikophobia” or fear of one’s own, giving it a new application. Classical political philosophy and Enlightenment rationalism both moderated inordinate love of one’s own. (In the case of some Enlighteners, they moved to suppress it altogether, leading to the reaction of nationalism.) In contemporary politics, we now see the opposite of the love of one’s own. The Oikophobe or, abbreviatedly, the Oik, has unmoored himself, or has been unmoored from, his “native soil, home, community, and country.” “Think of it as an imperious attitude toward his compatriots, coupled with a radicalization of the spirit of democracy,” extreme egalitarianism. He prefers the foreign enemy to his fellow-citizen, as when the Left sympathizes with Islamist terrorists who would line them up for a throat-cutting, given the opportunity. “The Oik has a deep disdain for America, its way of life, and its institutions”—its regime. To put it in Platonic terms, as Archie is happily wont to do, the ‘identity politics’ of the Left subordinates the economics-based analyses of the Old Left, its emphasis on the needs of the body and the cravings of the appetites, for the spirited passions of the thymotic aspect of the human soul. For this reason, “it’s no longer enough” for Americans “to appeal to a creedal identity in the way Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement did,” although it is necessary to continue to do so. “The other part of the American identity is cultural,” a matter of families, neighborhoods, and local “associations,” as Tocqueville calls them. Abraham Lincoln understood that, citing the principles of the Declaration of Independence in the Gettysburg Address but also the “mystic cords of memory” in his First Inaugural Address because “the principles and way of life animated by the spirit of 1776 is both felt and believed in,” felt especially in “a particular geographic location, among a particular culture, and among a particular people.” Conservatives have long admired Edmund Burke’s invocation of the “little platoons” that foster humane sentiments, sociality without ‘socialism” and indeed without any ‘ism,’ any ideology (very much including racism) that abstracts from the humanity of humans. Such little platoons need to be tempered by reasoned thought, both prudential and theoretical, if they are not to become thoughtless. Americans have reasoned together in the past, and they are capable of doing so again.

 

Note

1. On ‘values clarification’ and its ideological uses, see Paul Eidelberg and Will Morrisey: Our Culture, ‘Left’ or ‘Right’: Litterateurs Confront Nihilism (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1992), chapter 5, “Self-Made Moralism: John Dewey and ‘Values Clarification.'” The main difference between values clarification and diversity training is that values clarifiers assumed a pose of moral relativism or neutrality, as befit latter-day heirs of modern rationalism, while diversity trainers wear no such mask, as befits ‘postmodernism.’