How Social Justice Killed Anti-Racism
by Jerry Barnett, Quillette:
[…] In the past few years, black nationalism has surged in popularity, protected by the shield of Black Lives Matter and ignored or played down by a liberal press anxious not to find itself on the wrong side of the racism debate. Violent (and sometimes deadly) antisemitic attacks, perpetrated by black people on both sides of the Atlantic, have been largely ignored, even as the cultural mainstream continues to insist that racism cannot be tolerated. In the past few days, the latest in a series of assaults on Jews in London by black men has been reported. In 2018, the head of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan, an outspoken antisemite and one of America’s most influential hate preachers, made an album with stars including Stevie Wonder, Chaka Khan, Snoop Dogg, and Common. Alice Walker, Nick Cannon, and other leading lights in the African American establishment have made antisemitic remarks. Even Whoopi Goldberg blundered into trouble as she clumsily navigated the new discourse on race. In the UK, there has been a rallying of support for Wiley, a well-known music artist, following a series of antisemitic outbursts over the past couple of years.
Jews have not been the only target. Violent attacks against East Asians—disproportionately carried out by black people—have recently spiked in America, a foreseeable consequence of a decade’s worth of antiracist agitprop that blamed white, Jewish, and Asian privilege for black oppression. The progressive response to this development has been to blame white supremacy. The antiracist narrative is so far through the looking glass that white people are now held entirely to blame for the worst behaviours of a small minority of black people. This denial of agency and moral responsibility is not just deeply patronising—a soft bigotry of low expectations—but it also amounts to a kind of incitement, as white progressives line up as apologists for racial violence.
White people have also become targets for black nationalists, a development even less likely to be publicly acknowledged than black attacks on Jews. The murderous attack on a Christmas parade in Wisconsin, which killed six and injured 62, was almost certainly racially motivated. The attacker had previously posted black nationalist sentiments, but the New York Times hastened to declare that the motive was unclear. This was a departure for a newspaper that in recent years has been quick to offer racial explanations for almost everything. A Black Lives Matter activist declared the Wisconsin attack to be the start of the revolution.
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