Connor Friedersdorf has been doing a great job rebutting some of the nastiness on the right, so I'm trying not to be too hard on him here, but this just isn't true:
But the mainstream backlash in American race relations isn't provoked by anti-racism and antagonism to it — the target here, what riles so many people, is faux-anti-racism, wherein poseurs exploit the powerful taboo against racism to accrue power. This is why Martin Luther King is revered and Al Sharpton loathed, why there is almost universal condemnation when a public figure is exposed saying the n-word, and simultaneous disgust at that story about the guy who got fired for using “niggardly” on the job.
The examples here are telling: Al Sharpton is the best example Friedersdorf can provide of someone who has "accrued power" through "faux anti-racism." How many aspiring pols wake up in the morning and think, "Someday, I want to be as big as Sharpton"?
The fact is that if "faux anti-racism" were as powerful a political tool as anti-anti-racism, the president would be chomping at the bit to paint health-care opponents as racists -- the same way Republicans jumped on Jimmy Carter for "playing the race card." In reality, because we live in a mostly white country, and most white people's experience with racism is abstract, the priority in our racial conversation is raising the threshold for racist behavior to a level where no reasonably decent person could ever be seen in engaging in it. Perhaps more importantly, often the explicit aim of anti-anti-racism is to defend racist policies without explicitly approving of racism itself.
The bulk of Friedersdorf's post is devoted to an anecdote explaining that, yes, sometimes people are falsely accused of racism, and so it provides a perfect example of what I'm talking about. Friedersdorf thinks racism is a much bigger problem than "faux-anti-racism," but he's more directly affected by the latter, so he spends a great deal of time talking about it. He continues:
It isn't controversial to say that murder is a far bigger problem than people falsely accused of murder — and that we should nevertheless be very attentive to innocent people being convicted. Nor is it controversial to say that child molestation is a bigger problem than people unfairly labeled sex offenders, and to support the backlash against foisting that label on people who are only guilty of streaking through their senior prom or dating a 16 year-old when they were 19 years old.
Well a very small minority of Americans are murderers, sex offenders, or child molesters. But I have yet to meet an American, black, white, or otherwise, who has never made a decision influenced in part by bias or prejudice. Friedersdorf writes that "There ought to be powerful taboos against racism." But there aren't. There are powerful taboos against expressing racism openly, and far more powerful taboos against dealing with the pervasive, subtle forms of racism that most directly affect people's lives today -- the biggest being the defining of racism as something that is only felt by "bad people." To deal openly with racism is to accuse someone of being a bad person, which dissuades us from confronting it openly -- in others and, most importantly, in ourselves.
Saying that "faux anti-racism" isn't as bad as racism is like acknowledging that having AIDS is worse than that thing that happens to your head when you eat ice cream too fast. Throughout American history, racism has resulted in the enslavement, rape, and murder of millions of people. Racism relegated millions of Americans to second class citizenship for another century after that. Racism has been a handmaiden to Republican and Democratic politicians throughout history from comptrollers to presidents. Racism has helped swell our prisons to capacity, helped preserve a separate and unequal system of education, and if you're a white guy with a record you're going to have an easier time finding a job than a black man without one.
Yet, despite this history, to suggest that racism is a factor in our political debate is suicide for any political figure outside of certain very limited contexts -- while doing the opposite pays direct dividends, particularly for black pols seeking office with a mostly white constituency. If you're really looking to "accrue power" you don't do what Al Sharpton does. You do what Barack Obama does -- which is pretend race isn't an issue, even when it is.
-- A. Serwer
