Third-wave antiracism makes sense, but it's a dead end

" In fact, however, third-wave antiracism is a profoundly religious movement in everything but terminology. The idea that whites are permanently stained by their white privilege, gaining moral absolution only by eternally attesting to it, is the third wave’s version of original sin. The idea of a someday when America will “come to terms with race” is as vaguely specified a guidepost as Judgment Day. Explorations as to whether an opinion is “problematic” are equivalent to explorations of that which may be blasphemous. The social mauling of the person with “problematic” thoughts parallels the excommunication of the heretic. What is called “virtue signaling,” then, channels the impulse that might lead a Christian to an aggressive display of her faith in Jesus. There is even a certain Church Lady air to much of the patrolling on race these days, an almost performative joy in dog-piling on the transgressor, which under a religious analysis is perfectly predictable."

Very accurate analysis imho.

Growing up around fundamentalist Christians, I'm pretty tuned into people who use moral posturing to gain status within their social group. The resemblance with the virtue signalling is uncanny.

Postmodernists had it right. It’s all socially constructed. Where the modern left gets it wrong is that they’ve destroyed the foundations of the house that we lived in without building a new one. Truly, black and white (and yellow, ugh) don’t describe the world so much anymore. We’re already in a post-racial society, and so few people realize it. The new language to describe our 21st century America will be lords (the .01%) and peasants (not pejoratively either, peasants historically enjoyed nice things in life).

We’re for sure in a multi-ethnic society. There’s no question about this. But when a ‘black’ man is elected to the highest office, when ‘black’ people continue to hold institutional power, both in government and universities, the actual practice of racism becomes hard to prove. It becomes ethnocentrism.

The irony of this fact is how so many ‘whites’ (mostly uneducated) know it to be true, and so many ‘blacks’ refuse to believe it, instead calling on the European-American burgousie to feel guilt and dole out pity. There’s this belief that to be ‘black’ means to be cursed. Fuck that, African-Americans have reason to be proud of their accomplishments in this country.

If anything, white guilt is racism. You can’t look someone in the eye when you’re looking down on them.

What bothers me most about the discussion today is how tightly bound sins and virtues - even traumas suffers by one's ancestors - are to genetics.

So we now have not just a racism / sexism morality based on actions and statements, but a religious viewpoint (good / evil), eugenics (because it's all baked into our genes), and caste (separating and ranking various human phenotypes.)

History may not repeat itself, but it sometimes has a similar chord progression.

> Feminist history is typically described in three waves:

No, even when using the (profoundly flawed, but not entirely useless) “waves” framework, it's usually described in at least four waves now.

> The struggle to secure voting rights, then workplace rights, and third—roughly—to upend stereotypes.

This is not an accurate summary of the usual description of the first three waves of feminism; first wave feminism is typically associated with the early struggle for legal rights in terms of access to basic political and economic institutions (suffrage, independent property rights, access to work, access to education).

Second-wave feminism is typically associated with a fight for equality within institutions to which women already had access as a result of successes of first-wave feminism (especially education and employment) and recognition of rights addressing areas where women were uniquely situated either inherently or by traditional gender roles (reproductive rights including contraception and abortion, protection against domestic violence and marital rape, etc.) Third-wave feminism is associated not merely with upending stereotypes (that's part of it, but more in the context of recognizing a diversity in the female experience and the challenges of women that feminism should be addressing; intersectionality is probably a better short summary than upending stereotypes.)

> The battle against racism and its effects is often described in a similar three-part timeline, with movements against slavery and segregation, and then—vaguely—the post-civil-rights era.

No, it's not often described that way especially by people in the activist community, who describe themselves as civil rights activists, not add part of some vague post-civil-rights antiracism wave. To the extent that multiple waves are identified in racial justice activism in the US, they tend to be abolition, the immediate post-abolition civil rights movement, and the modern civil rights movement.

> third-wave antiracism may seem parallel to third-wave feminism in moving on to a different form of abuse, psychological rather than institutional.

Third-wave feminism doesn't focus on psychological abuse (though that's an emergent focus of fourth wave feminism, though it does focus on informal social and institutional discrimination (as opposed to legal and other formal social and institutional discrimination.) The author here send to conflate the two concerns.

> But this focus on the psychological has morphed, of late, from a pragmatic mission to change minds into a witch hunt driven by the personal benefits of virtue signaling, obsessed with unconscious and subconscious bias.

No, it hasn't; first, virtue signalling is a social hack targeting members of a movement by those who are not genuinely committed who wish to be seen as part of it. Second, feminist virtue signalling had been around at least as long as the suffrage movement, and continuously evolves to target current tends in feminist thought, ditto with racial justice since at least the immediate post-abolition period; the current level is nothing novel. Third, targeting unconscious and subconscious bias isn't a recent evolution compared to either “third-wave” (by feminism standards) style thought it the second-wave style thought the author misattributes to as characterizing third wave initially (or, a fortiori, the fourth-wave style thought he later claims is the focus of the third wave.) It's classic third-wave feminism (and, if anything, even older within the racial justice movement), because sucks and unconscious vitae at the individual level is a pillar on which informal structural and institutionalized discrimination rests. But, moreover, while it is a concern of modern feminist and racial justice movements, is not the central focus on either a genuine or virtue signalling sense; this is particularly obvious if you look at the marquee hypercurrent racial justice group, BLM. They aren't focussed centrality on vague psychological bias, whether as a witch hunt or any other way; their central focus is material accountability for concrete instances of material injustice.

> The virally popular Stuff White People Like blog of 2010 was a wry self-parody of the cultural mores that had settled in by roughly the late 1990s amidst a certain stripe of educated white people. “Being Offended” was one of the cleverest entries, describing a kind of almost recreational quest to take umbrage on behalf of people other than whites. Already, the satirical tone of this entry dates awkwardly: Many of the people it describes would read it today as disrespectful to the urgency of attesting to one’s white privilege.

The whole point of the original satire “of the cultural mores that had settled in by roughly the late 1990s amidst a certain stripe of educated white people” if that everyone it describes would eat it that way. That's what was being satirized. White knighting isn't a new thing, not yet or suddenly become obligatory in the perception of the wider recital justice community, which is now, more than ever, not defined predominantly by the attitudes of the “educated white people” that are, of try to be by virtue signalling, associated with it.

And then, after all this confused, muddled inaccurate mess of framing, the examples (still generalizations that are far from concrete) he points to are all about efforts targeting institutional acceptance of concrete offensive behavior directed at members of minority communities or institutional endorsement and involvement in racist speech. While there might be valid complaints about these, either genuine or virtue signalling adherence to a movement that has moved on to a phase that has gotten away from dealing with concrete institutional discrimination to focus on un- or sub-conscious bias isn't among the them.

As it progresses from the most abstract background to the more detailed (but still fairly abstract and generalized) complaints, this piece builds a narrative that is both internally inconsistent at frequently misrepresents facts. But it manages to fit a litany of the standard complaints by elite defenders of the status quo about the modern racial justice movement (a perfect blackout of the bingo card is avoided only by the failure to work in the phrase “identity politics”.)

Perhaps the author is genuinely confused enough to believe this incoherent mess, or maybe it's just virtue signalling for a different audience. Whatever it is, it's not a useful or meaningful or even well-thought-out contribution to the discussion of racial politics in modern America.

I love how all the hand wringing about how protesters are really just virtue signaling is basically the same argument that the joker gives when hanging by his toes: YOU KNOW YOU’RE JUST LIKE ME UNDERNEATH BATMAN

I mean come on. The argument that we need to just have a calm, rational debate over whether some groups of people are just racially inferior is so absurd it deserves to be treated with ostracism and disgust. I’m sorry that these old Ivy League gentlemen are offended by a bit of truth. But this is not about idealized debate, it’s about power, and violence, and transformation, and you’re not going to get that without getting a little mad and making some noise.

Our author seems to be quite drastically mischaracterizing the intentions of what he calls the "contemporary left":

>The contemporary left’s concern is with the underlying biases that bolster the racism that remains. It seeks, as a way forward, a society not only without racist structures, but without racist thought, which, for one, can foster race-based disparities that eerily parallel those conditioned in the past by overt segregation.

This, as someone who spends a lot of time both in a very liberal college and in lefty online "safe spaces", is an ideology I've never encountered. Leftists generally Subscribe to an ideology that explains material conditions as the force that causes struggle in a society. Those conditions usually being economic structures, but usually include specific things like the power structure of a police force, private ownership of prisons, the "war on drugs", etc.

The author complains heavily about how "SJWs" call people White Supremacist too often, but doesn't give any specific example of this happening and why the label was inappropriate. In fact, nearly every one of the "examples" of leftist speech seems to be your average dismissive "laugh at the cuck cringe complication" quotes attributed without context to nobody in particular:

>The new normal is, “If you don’t like it, cry loudly and then louder, because you’re always right and they’re just bad.”

I don't actually think anybody really thinks this. I've never heard this ideology espoused by anybody, except anti-sjws, as they're sometimes referred to as, who are trying to strawman and discredit someone.

The times I have heard people call people White Supremacist is, for example, when a white person starts arguing about IQ scores, which is an explicitly white supremacist argument, and uncontroversially so unless you're unfamiliar with WHY iq tests are inherently biased, in which case you might not see why the label is appropriate and will only see a lib getting mad for no reason.

I believe the author has simply collected a few instances of college liberals losing their temper on camera and extrapolated that into an entire incoherent worldview without any analysis of what the leftist cucks actually believe.

Additionally, the phrase "virtue signalling" is extremely sloppy. Is there any action done, aside from those done under the privacy of total anonymity that could not be motivationally attributed to wishing the signal virtue? Perhaps I'm virtue signalling for writing this reply. Maybe you're virtue signalling for upvoting it. Maybe the author is virtue signalling for having written the article about virtue signalling. Even if what he says about progressives was true, why would wishing to change the psychology of percieved white racists be "virtue signalling"?