Privileged Fragility

America in the Age of Racial Paranoia Part One

Seeing America As It Is

“But I am so put together that I do not have much of a herd instinct. Or if I must be connected with the flock, let me be the shepherd my ownself. That is just the way I am made.”

-Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks On A Road

When I was fifteen years old and suffering through the most traumatic experience of my life, I was called a “racist” and a “niggerlover” in the same year. For someone already under the psychological duress of adolescence and a parental divorce, I could not interpret how these two diametrically opposed words applied to me. Years would pass before I could rationalize the meaning that lay beneath their contempt:  No one is discriminated against more than the individual.

This is Part One of a multi-part commentary on the nature of racism in America today. Not only do I disagree with the notion that America is undergoing a racial reckoning, but I contend America is suffering from a state of racial paranoia. The death of George Floyd, no doubt tragic and unconscionable, ushered in a heightened awareness of racial disparities that exist throughout American society. Ironically, this awareness has centered around a white-black dichotomy, even though America is a genetically diverse nation. During the protests over the summer, many of my friends and acquaintances, who I never knew were so invested in the topic, became experts on racism overnight. They condemned white people, even though many are themselves white, and ranted against America using jargon and polemics popular within the Anti-Racism Movement. Since I have spent my entire academic career studying racism and the black experience in America, I knew much of what they were spewing had its roots in Critical Race Theory (CRT), an ideological framework I first encountered at NYU as a graduate student nearly twenty years ago. I dropped out halfway through the first semester.  

Because the Anti-Racism Movement regards any critique against it to be racist, those of us with opposing views have remained silent. Either we self-censor our dissent or risk being called a “racist.” Borrowing from Glenn Loury, Professor of Economics at Brown University, I spent the last few months feeling “like a man without a country.” Although I felt alienated and lamented America descending deeper into an Orwellian dystopia, I held firmly to my convictions and kept a pulse on like-minded intellectuals, who too were alarmed at the mass unbridled adulation for Black Lives Matter. Predicting President Trump would receive more votes from black Americans in 2020 than he did in 2016, I knew that black America, just like white America, was not a monolithic group (hence why I still insist on writing “white” and “black” as common nouns). No conception of Blackness or Black Identity is universal, and I knew there were black Americans, who prided themselves as individuals not part of some mindless herd. Assuredly, my prediction about the 2020 Presidential Election was correct.

This commentary is my attempt to speak out against the Anti-Racism Movement and the widely held belief that white supremacy and Anti-Black racism are prevalent in America today. While I am under no delusion that America is free from racism, even though the term itself is rather ambiguous, I cannot rationalize how our society today, generations beyond codified discrimination and segregation, is equally, if not more, racist than forty years ago. How can we measure racism’s extent when the prevailing ideology asserts that all disparities within America’s black community have no causation other than white supremacy? Such an absolute position on the nature of racism does not aid a society wishing to get rid of it. In fact, it clearly indicates a society that is race obsessed, symptomatic of a nation laboring through some form of psychosis. Instead of addressing disparities amongst black Americans as complex, multidimensional problems, the Anti-Racism Movement flaunts human suffering as a way to elicit hysterical black rage and self-deprecating white guilt. It institutes toxic ideology through diversity training within public and private institutions, thereby engendering more racial animus and discontent rather than achieving even a modicum of justice or equality. Its siren cry is so abrasive and convoluted, many do not know how to speak out against it. Those who try are either strong-armed into compliance or ostracized. This has created an American society catatonic with fear and sick with paranoia.