Category: Race

What’s Wrong with Cultural Appropriation?

Is acting white cultural appropriation? No doubt, but what's wrong with that? What's wrong with cultural appropriation?

I culturally appropriate every day from the Greeks and the Romans and the Jews. Why shouldn't blacks borrow from and make use of the products of white culture?

I also appropriate culturally from the Jews who play the blues, who themselves 'culturally appropriated' the blues from black bluesmen. Mike Bloomfield, for example, not only appropriates, respectfully and gratefully, from the likes of B. B. King, but improves and outplays many of the originators as in Carmelita's Skiffle and Albert's Shuffle.  Call me a racist! Call me a Jew lover!

I appropriated 'p.c.-whipped' from Ed Feser. Where did he get it? No idea: maybe he coined it.  Maybe he 'appropriated' it. Heavens!

My Italian mother culturally appropriated the English language when she was ten years old. Later, she taught it to me. So I am a language appropriator at one remove.  How dare an Italian learn the English language? Doesn't it belong to the English? Don't they own it?

The early Christians culturally appropriated Greek philosophy in order to articulate and defend their worldview. And it's a good thing they did; else we wouldn't be talking about it.

And what is our entire philosophical tradition if not a series of cultural appropriations from the Greeks, and Plato in particular?

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.  I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings.  I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them.  [. . .] Thus in one sense by stating my belief that the train of thought in these lectures is Platonic, I am doing no more than expressing the hope that it falls within the European tradition. (Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, Corrected Edition, The Free Press, 1978, p. 39)

I could go on. But you get the point unless you are either stupid or a liberal.  Is there any content to the latter disjunction? Or is it like 'firefly or glow bug'?

Liberals and Segregation

When a liberal hears 'segregation,' he thinks of racial segregation, thereby confusing the genus with one of its species, and of course, being the bien-pensant fellow he is, he reflexively comes out against it in words for public consumption. But in his private life he practices segregation, racial and otherwise: he lives in a lily-white, non-deplorable, gated and guarded enclave with  his own ilk and would not think of sending his children to public schools, there to enjoy a truly 'diverse' educational 'experience.' 

Surely it is racist to want to deprive your children of close contact with 'people of color.' No?

Why are So Many Jews Democrats?

Paul Gottfried may have part of the explanation:

Most Jews dislike the Republican Party because they associate it with the idea of a Christian America. And since the 1960s, as Peter Novick exhaustively shows in The Holocaust in American Life, blame for the Nazis’ attempted extermination of the Jews has shifted in both Jewish and non-Jewish accounts from Nazi pagans to white Christians. The Holocaust is now routinely—perhaps most starkly in a book by Daniel Goldhagen—placed at the doorstep of Christian civilization. In my view, this shift is based on reckless generalization and feeds into an unjustified Jewish hostility toward religious Christians. But it’s nonetheless convinced many Jews that even Christians who appear to be effusively philosemitic are really anti-Jewish. Democrats, meanwhile, are supposedly friendlier to Jews because they are cleansing public life of traditional biblical morality, most of which ironically comes from Hebrew Scripture. From 2016 to 2018, while the Trump administration was trying to hammer home that Democrats were unfriendly to Israel and, by implication, to American Jews, Jewish identification with the Democratic Party went from 71 percent to 79 percent.

Related: Paul Gottfried on Propositionalism

Race, Social Construction, and Lewontin’s Fallacy

I asked a correspondent what it means when leftists say that race is a social construct. Here is his response with my comments:

What do they even mean?  I wonder about that too.  What could it mean to say that race is a "social construct"?  Do they mean that there are no biological or ancestral differences at all between Whites and Blacks and Orientals?  That's just ridiculous — like saying there are no biological differences between human beings and gorillas. 

It is indeed ridiculous on the face of it. It's like saying that the difference between fish and mammals is a mere artifact of our conceptual decisions and classificatory activities. It implies that reality has no inherent structure or intelligibility; whatever intelligibility it has it acquires from us. But that is tantamount to saying that there is no reality. It is Kant gone wild: the Critical Philosophy without the Ding an sich and without an invariant categorial framework.

Here is perhaps the deepest metaphysical error of the Left: leftists deny that there is a reality antecedent to our classifications and conceptualizations. (V. I. Lenin was of course an exception.) Everything becomes a social-political construct. How convenient for identity-political totalitarians! The bird of reality can be carved up any way that suits the will to power of some interest group — because there is no bird to carve. Next stop: the Twilight Zone. Rachel Dolezal is black. Elizabeth Warren is a Cherokee. Warren, a.k.a. Fauxcahontas, despite her contribution of a recipe for lobster bisque to Pow Wow Chow, that must-have cook book for the bien pensant, is the Rachel Dolezal of American politics. Continuing in the alimentary mode, she is now anent her Presidential pretensions, 'toast.'

I think in most cases they don't mean anything much.  They haven't thought about it.  It's a smart-sounding phrase they picked up from PBS or from some half-wit university lecturer.  It's the kind of thing the bien pensant people say.  So they say it too.  And they know that, whatever it really means, it must be true and morally right to say it.  They know that only Nazis disagree.  I've talked to some educated intelligent Leftists who say stuff like this.  They usually just retreat to Lewontin's fallacy–more differences within races than between, and all of that.  Again, it seems they just don't want to think about it and they use these dumb phrases as a way to avoid thinking.  The dumb phrases change once in a while.  I guess in earlier decades we'd hear more about how "There is only one race, the human race".  But it may be a mistake to expect any clear or coherent meaning behind these propaganda phrases.  

That's right. You might think that those who inhabit academe would be critical thinkers; the truth, however, is that many if not most are all-too-ready to succumb to groupthink, whether to advance themselves career-wise, or to fit in and be accepted, or just because they lack the skeptical, scientific spirit.

Lewontin's Fallacy?

A. W. F. Edwards on Lewontin's Fallacy

Wikipedia on Lewontin's Fallacy

Neven Sesardic, Race: The Social Destruction of a Biological Concept

Celebrity Privilege

Add that to Black Privilege and Leftist Privilege and you've got some serious privileging going on. Not to mention the tribalism of blacks which makes it very difficult for them to be objective about members of their own race. Remember the O. J. Simpson trial?

And to those on the Reactionary Right, I say: white tribalism is no good and truly ameliorative response to black and Hispanic tribalism, although it is a natural response: Get in whitey's face and he may come to discover that he too has an identity . . . .

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Why Would Anyone Consider Islam a Race?

Islam is obviously not a race, but a religion.  If you hesitate to call Islam a religion, then it is either a political ideology masquerading as a religion, or a hybrid ideology that blends features of religion and political ideology, or a Christian heresy.  On any of these interpretations it is not a race.  That should be perfectly clear.

No race has apostates. Islam has apostates. Ergo, etc.

With respect to religions and political ideologies, there are conversions and de-conversions. One cannot convert to, or de-convert from, one's race. Ergo, etc.

Why then do some want to call Islam a race?  Here is a very plausible answer. I know of no better:

Criticizing Islam is not racism.  There is no such thing as "anti-Muslim racism" any more than there is "anti-Christian racism," "anti-Republican racism," or "anti-Capitalist racism." 

So why would anyone claim differently?

It is because the battle over Islam is being fought in the West, the only arena in which it can still be critically debated.  It is also here that repugnance toward racism is strong and nearly universal.  From politics to high-risk mortgages and illegal immigration, fear of the race card is one of the strongest influences on public policy.

At the same time, it is nearly impossible to defend Islam on its own merits in the West in free and open debate.  According to its own texts, the religion was founded in terror.  Its political and social code is deeply incompatible with liberal values.

Muslims societies usually rely on threat of violence to suppress intellectual critique of Islam and the freedom of other religion to fairly compete, which, if allowed, would be the slow death of Islam.  Their counterparts in the West have learned to rely on the race card.  If they can paint any criticism of their religion as "racism," then the massive evidence against Islam can be dismissed out of hand without having to contend with it.

Slinging the worst of all slurs to compensate for deficiency of fact and logic is weak enough, but it is ironic given that what is being defended in such cheap fashion is an ideology that is overtly supremacist in nature. 

That's right. Islam is supremacist in nature. Not racially supremacist, but ideologically supremacist. Leftists try to hide this fact by calling critics of Islam racists, from which they then slide to the vicious slur that these critics are white supremacists, which brings them back to the 'race card,' the only card in their deck and the one they never leave home without.

A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste

Welcome to the delusional world of Ta-Nehisi Coates, that darling of 'liberal' elitists and winner of numerous awards and accolades. I read his Between the World and Me a while back. Here are a couple of quotations:

'White America' is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies, Sometimes this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining). But however it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, "white people" would cease to exist for want of reasons. 

[. . .]

There is no them without you, and without the right to break you they must necessarily fall from the mountain, lose their divinity, and tumble out of the Dream. And then they would have to determine how to build their suburbs on something other than human bones, how to angle their jails toward something other than a human stockyard, how to erect a democracy independent of cannibalism. But because they believe themselves to be white, they would rather countenance a man choked to death on film under their laws. And they would rather subscribe to the myth of Trayvon Martin, slight teenager, hands full of candy and soft drinks, transforming into a murderous juggernaut. And they would rather see Prince Jones followed through three jurisdictions and shot down for acting like a human.

Who is sicker, Coates, or the 'liberals' who fete him?

You say I should respond to the above? Why? In his case quotation is refutation.

Proof that I am a Native American

A while back a front page story in the  local rag of record, The Arizona Republic, implied  that one is either a native American, a black, or an Anglo. Now with my kind of surname, I am certainly no Anglo. And even though I am a 'person of color,' my color inclining toward a sort of tanned ruddiness, I am undoubtedly not black either.

It follows that I am a native American. This conclusion is independently supported by the following argument:

1. I am a native Californian.
2. California is in America.
3. If x is native to locality L, and L is within the boundaries of M, then x is a native M-er.
Therefore
4. I am a native American.

This argument is impeccable in point of logical form, and sports manifestly true premises. What more do you want?

Note that (2) is true whether 'America' is taken to refer to the USA or to the continent of North America.

Let us also observe that since I am a native American, it cannot be the case that "we are all immigrants" as far too many 'liberal' knuckleheads like to claim.

We need more mockery of 'liberals.' There is little point in attempts to engage them on the plane of reason, for that is not the plane they inhabit.

Slavoj Zizek remarks (jokingly I think) that  ‘native Americans’ hate this term, mentioning one who preferred to be call an ‘Indian’ on the ground that ‘native’ American is racist. For it means that someone so denominated  is part of nature, and is therefore beneath the cultural American. The Indian in question prefers to be called an ‘Indian’ for this moniker implies the white man's stupidity.

The Left’s Attack on Merit

I regularly speak of the destructive Left. There is no exaggeration in that.  Whether they intend it or not, leftists promote policies that are destructive.  They attack merit, for example, bizarrely considering it to be 'racist.' 

For example, there is the case of New York Mayor, Bill de Blasio, who has proposed to do away with Stuyvesant High School's entrance exam. Why is it 'racist'?  Well, Asians do better than anyone else, better than whites who do better that Hispanics, who do better than blacks.  Here is the composition of the incoming class:

Asian — 613
White — 151
Hispanic — 27
Black — 10

There is no proportional representation! A lack of diversity! And therefore it's 'racist'!

But seriously now, how can it be racist if it is true? Answer me that one.

Full Disclosure: I am not now and never have been Asian. (And I am on record as denying the possibility of race change.) If Asians are better at math than whites, that's just the way it is.  We conservatives respect reality, a reality that is no social construction but lies beyond all of our talk with its mewling and pining, wishing and whining.  We conservatives stand our ground, that ground being the terra firma of antecedent reality, to cop a beautiful line from Richard M. Weaver (1910-1963):

It is my contention that a conservative is a realist, who believes that there is a structure of reality independent of his own will and desire. He believes that there is a creation which was here before him, which exists now not just by his sufferance, and which will be here after he is gone. This structure consists not merely of the great physical world but also of many laws, principles, and regulations which control human behavior. Though this reality is independent of the individual, it is not hostile to him. It is in fact amenable by him in many ways, but it cannot be changed radically and arbitrarily. This is the cardinal point. The conservative holds that man in this world cannot make his will his law without any regard to limits and to the fixed nature of things . . . . The conservative I therefore see as standing on the terra firma of antecedent reality; having accepted some things as given, lasting and good, he is in a position to use his effort where effort will produce solid results. (Quoted from Fred Douglas Young, Richard M. Weaver 1910-1963, University of Missouri Press, 1995, pp. 144-145.)

It ought to be self-evident that we ought to promote excellence, but it is not self-evident to destructive leftists. I do not say that diversity is no value at all. But in this case it ought to be obvious that merit trumps diversity. 

I want you people to realize that if you vote for Democrats you are voting for this sort of Bozo de Blasio insanity, and a lot of other insanity to boot.  But is it really insanity? Or is it worse?

I am toying with what I will call the Leftist Trilemma: leftists are either stupid/insane or ignorant/uneducated or willfully evil.

But I may be missing a fourth possibility. 

More on the Hate-Filled Left

Jacques comments on yesterday's Shelby Steele entry:

Shelby Steele is clearly right about the Left's need for hate objects (as a source of power) but I think he is wrong to say this is "a death rattle".  Or at least I'm skeptical.  We've already been through so many phases of this same dynamic, and it hasn't yet killed the Left or even slowed it down.  On the contrary, it seems to me that as their stories of evil Republicans and evil white men (etc) become ever more absurd the fanaticism and power of Leftists grows.  For example, the Tawana Brawley story was utterly absurd even at the time.  Any reasonable person would have regarded the story as highly dubious, even before all the decisive evidence of lies was available.  And yet the absurdity of the story–even its demonstrable falsity–didn't do anything to convince Leftists that their campaign against "white supremacists" was mistaken.  As far as I can tell the absurdity of the story did nothing to harm Al Sharpton's career.  Similarly, it was obviously absurd to believe that Trayvon Martin was a victim of white racism, or a white supremacist, or whatever.  There was, at the very least, enough evidence from the very beginning for any reasonable person to suspend judgment–to doubt that Trayvon was just an innocent little child victim, to doubt that George Zimmerman had any racial motivation, etc.  But that also did nothing to stop the Left, and seems on the contrary to have emboldened them in their endless campaign against "racism" and "racists". 

I agree. Trayvon Martin was no victim of white racism. He was no Emmett Till. The boy brought about his own death. If Martin had been taught, or rather had learned, to control himself he would most likely be alive today.  But he wasn't or didn't.  He blew his cool when questioned about his trespassing in a gated community on a rainy night.  He was no child on the way to the candy store. By all appearances he was up to no good. He punched a man in the face and broke his nose, then jumped on him, pinned him down, did the 'ground and pound' and told him that he was going to die that night.  So, naturally, the man defended himself against the deadly attack with deadly force.  What Zimmerman did was both morally and legally permissible.  If some strapping youth is pounding your head into the pavement, you are about to suffer "grave bodily harm" if not death.  What we have here is clearly a case of self-defense. The verdict of acquittal for Zimmerman was clearly correct.  Only a blind ideologue could fail to understand this. 

Does race enter into this?  In one way it does. But not in the way leftists think say. Blacks as a group have a rather more emotional nature than whites as a group.  (If you deny this, you have never lived in a black neighborhood or worked with blacks, as I have.)  Martin's lack of self-control got him killed.  He couldn't keep a lid on his mindless hatred of the "creepy-assed cracker." White-on-black racism did not enter into it at all. So, while self-control is important for all, the early inculcation of self-control is even more important for blacks. I suspect Shelby Steele would agree.

And I think this is true of almost all their hate objects.  Remember when Ronald Reagan was supposed to be a neo-Nazi, a right-wing dictator, a woman-hater…?  Wasn't it obvious in the '80s that these ideas were false, indeed preposterous?  Or the idea that Richard Nixon was some kind of uniquely vile criminal–as opposed to Ted Kennedy, for example, or JFK or Bill Clinton?  Or the idea that Mitt Romney–Mitt Romney, that pathetic liberal squish–was some kind of hard-right authoritarian bent on destroying women and minorities?  Or what about the utterly absurd idea of "white privilege" or "microaggression" or "transgenderism"?  These things are demonstrably false or simply incoherent, but it only took a few years for all of them to be nailed down as the central principles of a new moral code that no one in human history had ever even imagined.  

Of course you are right about all of this.

In all of these cases, and a zillion others, the Left's hatred was totally divorced from any kind of realistic adult assessment of reality.  And yet it has never made any difference.  It's never set them back significantly, and instead what generally happens is that their deranged absurd demonstrably false narrative ends up being entrenched as the only mainstream reasonable opinion within a few years at most. 

 So I'd propose an additional hypothesis to explain this phenomenon:

The absurdity of the story is part of its appeal.  Leftists derive self-esteem from their (supposed) ability to understand problems that regular people can't understand, and their (supposed) deep concern for victims.  It makes them feel intellectually and morally superior to regular people, and they are addicted to that high.  The more seemingly absurd the theory, the more brilliant and sensitive and complicated you must be in order to really 'get' it–and, of course, the more it will repel the dumb rednecks and normies, who don't get it and can't be in the club.  And this in turn strengthens them as a mass movement.  They control the institutions and media, so they're able to reach an ever-growing audience of new people who also want to feel good about themselves, superior to the hated white male conservative Other.  By contrast, a more rational and realistic assessment of the world offers little to these people–no special social status and opportunities for preening and validation, no sense of being exalted above the dumb masses.

What needs explaining is the uncontrolled, largely inarticulate, animal rage of the Left. (e.g., Robert de Niro: Fuck Trump!) Steele's hypothesis is that the Left is raging because it is losing its power and moral authority due to  the drying up of sources of legitimate moral indignation. The civil wrongs were righted. And so leftists have traded in righteous anger for mindless hatred. In order to hold on to its power the Left is inventing bogus sources of moral outrage.

Jacques speak of an "additional hypothesis," but is he trying to explain the same phenomenon, the Left's hyperbolic rage?  Or a different phenomenon, the need leftists have to feel superior to Hillary's "deplorables"?

It looks like the explananda are different and so are the explanantia.  The rage and the need to feel superior, on the one hand, and the the lust for power and the concoction of pseudo-intellectual gobbledygook, on the other.

Finally, if this line of thought is reasonable, it makes me wonder whether Steele is perhaps being a bit naive about the Left's track record.  Did the Left really "rescue America" from "the great menace of racism"?  Is the story since the 60s really one of "the greatest moral evolutions ever"?  I suspect that this whole hallowed narrative might be not so different, ultimately, from the Left's current stories about Trayvon and Michael Brown "the gentle giant", or this ridiculous thing about Judge Kavanaugh's high school sins.  Maybe they've been telling absurd lies all along–just as they lied about the USSR, for example.  Maybe "racism" in the past was a far more ambiguous phenomenon–not something that needed to be simply eradicated using essentially totalitarian methods, but something that needed to be moderated, understood in its context and judged more realistically.  Take lynching, for example, one of their favorite mythologies.  Who was being lynched, and why?  Lots of blacks, but lots of whites too.  Maybe the reason was mainly that blacks were committing a disproportionate number of murders and rapes.  Maybe the reality of lynching was about as complex and ambiguous as the reality of so-called "racial profiling".  And the same goes for their other narratives–about women, immigrants, sex and so on.  I would expect that in 50 years people will have been trained to believe in the "great menace" of "heterosexism" or "microaggressions" or "hate speech" on the internet.  Maybe they've always been crazy.

"Lots of blacks, but lots of whites too."  Here I need some references.  Lot of whites were lynched? By whom?

It is true that blacks are disproportionately more criminally prone than whites. (And since it is true, this statement cannot be dismissed as racist.  A statement whose subject matter is race is not eo ipso a racist statement.)  I hope Jacques is not suggesting that the extra-judicial lynching of blacks was justified by their disproportionate engaging in rape and murder.

I differ from Jacques in that I hold that the original Civil Rights movement was basically on the right track, and that Steele, while he exaggerates, is right to point this out. We should not conflate that movement with the insane leftism of the present day.

Kavanaugh is in Like Flynn

And what little credibility the Dems had left is out like Stout. (G. F. Stout?)

Here:

Opponents of Kavanaugh lost the fight when they lost their marbles. His foes on the Senate Judiciary Committee and allied activists ensured that opponents to the nomination appear to be a pack of wild cranks. 

[. . .]

Not only did the outbursts seem uncivil and destructive of Senate decorum, they may have violated federal criminal laws — including 40 U.S.C. 5104 — against disrupting congressional proceedings. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), instead of criticizing the criminal bedlam, called it “the noise of democracy.”

There's that word 'democracy' again! The chuckleheads need to define it or drop it. What do the Dems mean? Mob rule? The rejection of all procedural rules? The treating of the Constitution as if it were a tabula rasa?

Do Dicky Durbin and his ilk think the word has a talismanic power? Please do tell us what you mean, Dicky. 

Then Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) made his contribution.  With great fanfare, Booker announced his “Spartacus moment,” daring to disclose committee confidential documents that revealed Kavanaugh’s opinions about racial profiling. Of course, breaking rules appeals to the disruptive gang in the gallery, so Booker’s play seemed well-designed.

Yet, in execution, Booker’s plan was a disaster for Kavanaugh foes. Not only did Kavanaugh not support racial profiling, the documents were not subject to committee confidential restraints in the first place.

And then there is an important point I make in a very fine entry that I warmly recommend for your perusal, namely, that there is no such thing as racial profiling.

More on Whether Non-Whites Can be Racist

Jacques writes,

I had a few thoughts about your post on the definition of "racism".  

First, I think your definition and almost everything you say here is reasonable, but you may not be engaging with the enemy's reasoning (if we can call it that).  As you anticipate, Leftists will say that only whites can be "racist" because only whites have power as a racial group over others, only whites oppress others, and so on.  Your response is to say that in that case they are using the wrong word.  Why talk about "racism" rather than "oppressivism" if really we're talking about oppression and power rather than race. 

But the Leftists would say that they are talking about race too, or racial oppression.  They say race is a "social construct" but, of course, a social construct can be real and socially important.  So their idea is that in our evil western societies some people–the "white" people–are given special privileges and power over other people; this is how the biologically meaningless notion of race comes to be important, and how racial (or "racial") power and privilege are sustained.  From this perspective, then, it would still make sense to talk about racial oppression or "racism" for short.  By analogy, someone who doesn't believe in the Nazi ideology of Aryanism could still reasonably describe Nazi Germany as a society based on Aryan supremacy or "Aryan" oppression of non-Aryans.  It makes sense for them to continue to call this "racism" because the system of oppression is based on this false mythology of race that underwrites the distinction between oppressors and oppressed.

 I think there are two good responses to this standard Leftist claim:

(1) Grant that "racism" in this sense of the term refers only to systemic privilege and oppression (etc.) based on socially recognized racial categories.  That's a matter of how their concept or principle is supposed to work.  But now we just point out that it's an empirical question whether, in a given society at a given time, some particular socially recognized race is in fact systemically privileged, oppresses other groups, and so on.  And on the empirical side, isn't it ludicrous to claim that whites are the systemically privileged oppressors in any western country in 2018?  Whites are the only group that faces severe social costs and often serious legal trouble merely for publicly defending their own racial interests.  Whites are the only group against whom racial discrimination is legal.  And on and on.  I think we have to press them to defend the empirical part of their thesis.  It's ridiculous, indefensible…

You are right to raise the empirical question., Jacques. Since I was concerned to make a merely conceptual point, I conceded arguendo that whites as a group oppress blacks and other non-whites as groups. As you point out, it is false at the present time, and indeed ridiculous as witness the case of Sarah Jeong.

(2) Grant for the sake of argument that whites can't be "racist" in their sense of the term.  But now just point out that whites can still be victims of racially-motivated hate, racially-motivated bias and injustice, racially-motivated violence, and so on.  (Basically, whites can be victims of "racism" in your sense of the term.)  All these things are plainly bad and wrong in themselves, regardless of the larger "systemic" context.  Press them to explain why it doesn't matter morally or politically when blacks torture a mentally retarded white man live on Facebook, because they hate whites as a group.  Or at least, ask them why this doesn't matter anywhere near as much as the fact that some black guy who wasn't buying anything wasn't allowed to use the bathroom at Starbucks.  

I recommend adding these two lines of argument to yours because I know Leftists are going to dismiss your entirely reasonable arguments by saying you just don't get it.  These other arguments are directly targeting their (absurd) understanding of racism.

Right. We might just give leftists the word 'racist' to use in their way, according to which non-whites cannot be racists, and then challenge them to explain why it is morally acceptable to act in violent, bigoted , and unjust ways towards whites.

We could grant them that Sarah Jeong, being Asian, cannot possibly be racist, but then ask how her membership in a group oppressed by whitey justifies her vicious anti-white tweets.  For even if Asians as a group at the present time are being terribly oppressed by whites, Jeong herself is enjoying all sorts of advantages.

I am reminded of the identity-schmidentity move that Saul Kripke makes in Naming and Necessity.  "You say what you are doing is not (reverse) racism? Racism-schmacism! What you are doing is morally wrong."

In re: the Starbucks dude, we could say to lefties "OK, the black loiterer was treated in a racist manner, on your idiosyncratic understanding of 'racist' according to which a member of a group that is on the bottom is an object of racism even when he does something objectively unacceptable. But that doesn't change the fact that he was loitering, refusing to buy anything, taking space away from paying customers, and thereby violating important social norms."

But deeper than all this are the Left's absurd claims that race is a social construct and that there is such a thing as institutional or systemic racism.

My question to Jacques: since these claims are prima facie absurd, how is it that lefties can convince themselves otherwise? And what exactly do they mean by them?

Can a Black be a Racist?

More generally, can a non-white be a racist?  It depends on what a racist is. The unfortunate tendency is to bandy the term about undefined. This serves the purposes of those who want an all-purpose verbal cudgel with which to attack their opponents. I will give you my definition, one that ought to appeal to sane and well-intentioned people. 

A racist is a person who harbors an abiding irrational hatred of all or most of the members of one or more other races just because of their racial membership. 

Racism is a standing disposition that manifests itself in hateful or contemptuous words and deeds.  These words and deeds are not rational responses to particular provocations but express a blanket, irrational negative attitude to an entire group. This is why "all or most" figures in my definition. Obviously, hatred of a person of a different race needn't be racist: the hater may have good reason to hate the other person. Racism comes into it when the person is hated because of his membership in the other race.

On the above definition a black can be a racist, and indeed some are.  And so can Hispanics and Asians, including Sarah Jeong.

For the record, I condemn racism as above defined, and you should too. 

If you don't like my definition, do you have any reason not to like it? Do you have a better definition?

Notice that I didn't mention skin color in my definition.  People who should know better regularly conflate skin color with race.  Skin color, however, is at best a phenotypical indicator of race.  Suppose you have two guys, one from India, the other from Africa. Suppose they are dark in color to the same degree. They are both 'blacks' — black in color to the same degree of blackness. But they are of different races. Therefore, race is not the same as skin color.  

For the politically correct, however, blacks cannot be racists.  The reason, apparently, is that whites oppress blacks but blacks don't oppress whites.  If so, racism is really about power and oppression, and not about race.

If racism is not about race, then why speak of racism as opposed to oppressivism?

After all, some whites oppress other whites. White males oppress white females.  White-collar whites oppress blue-collar whites. 'Coastal' whites oppress 'heartland' whites. You could say that the former 'look down' on the latter as they 'fly over' them. And let's not forget the Jews. Are Jews white? Assume they are. And yet white goyim oppress them.  

White females oppress white females. The good-lookers oppress the plain Janes.  There is a whole lotta oppressin' goin' on.  Or at least the oppressed groups feel oppressed. 

'Liberal' blacks oppress conservative blacks by calling them Uncle Toms, traitors to their race, etc. Are 'liberal' blacks therefore racists?

I am making two main points.

First, on a sane definition of 'racism,' proffered above, non-whites can be racists.  

Second, if your beef is with the oppression or 'denigration' of one group by another, then  'racism' is not the word you want.

Blogging may not be good for me: I am writing like a damned journalist what with these one sentence paragraphs.

God help me. Journalists deserve about as much respect today as lawyers and Catholic priests.  I make an exception for journalists who courageously enter war zones to get the story and sometimes don't come home.