National Review, that bastion of strong conservative intellectualism, has a race problem:
It therefore strengthens the anti-white racism it is meant to satirize which, as it happens, is a growing problem in the U.S. — not in the suburbs or backwoods but in the corporate executive suites, the media elites, the courts, the bureaucracy, and of course the entire industry of sensitivity training which used to go under the more honest title of “Political Reeducation” in the gulag.
And so the game goes. White intellectuals on the right prefer to engage in a twisted merry-go-round, rather than engage truthfully and openly about racism. They cannot dignify it, they cannot profess to understand its machinations, nor can they willingly give it any substantive thought– but they can mock, mollify, and twist it to resemble some odd metamorphosed caricature. Blacks engage in racism too, yet it is the media’s willingness to overlook that truth which renders racism into a rhetorical weapon, not a debilitating concrete one. Tit for tat. The sin does not wash itself away, it simply desensitizes the sinner from his pathology.
National Review and the John Derbyshire mess illustrates one thing clearly: many white intellectuals on the right still prefer rhetorical racism as their weapon of choice. Coates argues, quite successfully in my opinion, that racism is treated as a game — a mere annoyance with no firm structure. There are no arguments sufficient enough in their magnitude that would signify its importance. In fact, the argument does not matter. Only the game matters:
The conservative movement doesn’t understand anti-racism as a value, only as a rhetorical pose. This is how you end up tarring the oldest integrationist group in the country (the NAACP) as racist. The slur has no real moral content to them. It’s all a game of who can embarrass who. If you don’t think racism is an actual force in the country, then you can only understand it’s invocation as a tactic.
National Review continues to pander to the anti-white racism crowd. Sure John Derbyshire was relived of his duties; but his pedantic and highly bigoted screed about blacks lives on through voices such as Victor Hanson and Robert Weissberg. There are no true racists anymore. They’re all afforded the protection from a shroud of intellectual Schadenfreude
Racism is contemptible, and it is not an easy subject to discuss. It’s also not some gimmicky talking point or moral equalizer used to right a wrong. It exists as the wrong. I grow weary of some pundits engaging in humane arguments to defend those who use it as academic dogma.
