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Anti-anti racism

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From a Thomas Edsall essay about increasing polarization in American life:

Wetts and Willer call this ideology “anti-antiracism” and argue that it “is prevalent among white Americans, particularly Republicans, is a powerful predictor of several policy positions, and is strongly associated with — though conceptually distinct from — various measures of anti-Black prejudice.”

Sympathy versus opposition to antiracism, they continue, “may have cohered into a distinct axis of ideological disagreement which uniquely shapes contemporary racial views that divide partisan groups.”

They propose a three-part definition of anti-antiracism:

Opposition to antiracism involves (1) rejecting factual claims about the prevalence and severity of anti-Black racism, discrimination, and racial inequality; (2) disagreeing with normative beliefs that racism, discrimination and racial inequality are important moral concerns that society and/or government should address; and (3) displaying affective reactions of frustration, anger and fatigue with these factual and normative claims as well as the activists and movements who make them.

(1) involves straightforward empirical questions, the answers to which are not controversial, unless of course you’re a white supremacist, in which case the massive economic and social racial gaps in American life are “natural,” and not a product of racism, which both doesn’t exist and is actually a good thing (note the parallel here with the way Holocaust deniers talk about the Holocaust).

(2) is just another way of describing a racist worldview. In that worldview, racial discrimination is not a big deal, morally speaking, because again it doesn’t really exist at all, and to the extent it does it’s actually justified.

(3) is the inevitable consequence of a culture war between people who are opposed to racism and people who are either indifferent to it or actively embrace it.

The rest of Edsall’s essay describes how the political divide in America today is a product of fundamentally opposed world views, between progressives, broadly speaking, and reactionaries, broadly speaking. For example:

The sense of loss is acute among many Republican voters. Geoffrey Layman, a political scientist at Notre Dame, emailed me to say:

They see the face of America changing, with white people set to become a minority of Americans in the not-too-distant future. They see church membership declining and some churches closing. They see interracial and same-sex couples in TV commercials. They support Trump because they think he is the last, best hope for bringing back the America they knew and loved.

Basically, every time a Fox News viewer sees a commercial with an interracial couple, he’s reminded that America’s status as a white Christian nation is under assault, by people (progressives) who don’t want America to be either particularly white or particularly Christian. That viewer’s definition of “patriotism” is precisely the embrace of America as the white Christian nation of the viewer’s highly idealized youth, and he interprets the rejection of that vision as a kind of treason.

Republicans are committing literal treason because they are being subjected to this other kind of treason, which is cultural and metaphorical.

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