George Orwell once said that "truth is treason in the empire of lies." By asserting oneself against the collective narrative, one will be besmirched and belittled by the arbiters of society. By uncovering the lies, deceptions, and double-think injected into the culture, one will forever be a pariah to those chosen to uphold the propaganda. By building a base upon lies, the truth is inconvenient. Case in point, Robin Diangelo is a white woman who insists that all white people are racist. Ibram Henry Rogers changed his name to Ibram Xoloni Kendi, further distancing his European name by including a Kenyan and a Zulu word into his new identity. Instead of addressing issues within the American culture, these academics inject destructive ideology into society, crafting a deconstructive narrative that serves only to cause antagonism. Nature abhors vacuums, and new ideas began to creep into the postmodern vacuum, intending to provide explanations and meanings of their own. These explanations were allowed to prosper through the teachings of American Marxism, the idea that only the "experts" know what is best, and the common man is not capable of rational thought.
According to Robin Diangelo, it is better to be white.[1] She bases this thought process on being part of the collective, which holds institutional power. Diangelo explains that the ten wealthiest Americans are white, ninety percent of Congress is white, and many other statistics prove that America is racist.[2] She continues her diatribe by explaining that prejudice determines how people see the world, and while POC (people of color) can be prejudiced, they cannot be racist since they have no institutional authority.[3] Diangelo further concludes that white people cannot be victims of racism, and those POC in a position of authority are a part of the "system." As she puts it:
Although rare individual people of color may be inside the circles of power-Colin Powell, Clarence Thomas, Marco Rubio, Barack Obama-they support the status quo and do not challenge racism in any way significant enough to be threatening. Their positions of power do not mean the public figures don't experience racism (Obama endured insults and resistance previously unheard-of), but the status quo remains intact.[4]
Throughout the book, Diangelo does not offer solutions deeper than intuitive efforts to quash "micro-aggressions" and hurls accusations of racism onto those whites who marched with Martin Luther King.[5] This division method is crucial for American Marxism to be achieved, creating an enemy and dividing the country by establishing who is good and who is evil.
Another famous race-baiter is Ibram Xoloni Kendi (Ibram Henry Rogers), who stated in How To Be An Antiracist that:
The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.[6]
When Kendi says "anti-racist," he defines it in circular logic, supporting an antiracist policy through their actions.[7] By this logic, so long as one is fighting on the right side, they are an Antiracist. The right side to Kendi is, of course, anyone who is against white people.[8] To bolster his position against whites, when it was revealed that Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett had adopted children who were black, Kendi responded with:
Some White colonizers 'adopted' Black children. They 'civilized' these 'savage' children in the 'superior' ways of White people, while using them as props in their lifelong pictures of denial, while cutting the biological parents of these children out of the picture of humanity. And whether this is Barrett or not is not the point. It is a belief too many White people have: if they have or adopt a child of color, then they can't be racist.[9]
By Kendi's logic, it would be better to have black children stay in unfavorable conditions should they be adopted by a white family.
The reason these two have been held in such high regard is simple: deconstruction is a political weapon. The most cited book in all of the humanities, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, lays out the concept of social construction. In it, Laclau and Mouffe explain that Orthodoxy is created by reducing the concrete to abstraction, that the more theory placed into a society, the more the Orthodoxy's defense is brought into question.[10] Both Diangelo and Kendi believe in this concept to the point where they both have changed the term "racist." Revisionism is crucial for the concept of "systemic racism" to function, as Laclau and Mouffe stated:
The reformist leader attempts to defend the gains and immediate interests of the class, and he consequently tends to consider it as a segregated sector, endowed with a perfectly defined identity and limits.[11]
Kendi does this expertly by stating that "Antiracist policies cannot eliminate class racism without anti-capitalist policies,"[12] and his book Stamped from the Beginning is cited in Diangelo's White Fragility.[13] These ideas are nothing new because, in 1969, Carol Hanisch stated, "Women, like Blacks, workers, must stop blaming ourselves for our' failures."[14] Should someone assume this thought process was simply a one-off, Kerry Birch writes that "they cite millions of women in public and private conversations as the phrase's collective authors."[15] One of these collective authors was Ernesto Laclau.[16]
The race-baiting from both Kendi and Diangelo are not their goals. Diangelo does not believe in "white fragility" any more than Kendi believes in "anti-racism." The goal of this duo has a long and tired history: the fragmentation of the American culture and the introduction of American Marxism. Being part of the elite through academic means, these two have respectfully obtained a 1 and 2 million wealth. By becoming part of the "woke" left, these two professors protected their ambitions through the hearts and minds of minorities who believe that the deck is stacked against them. This, in turn, makes their identity antifragile and grants them permanent membership in what Karl Marx would call the Petty Bourgeoisie,[17] the reactionary wealthy leadership who forgets the ultimate goal of Marxism: "the abolition of private property."[18] It will not be too long before Kendi and Diangelo's actions will inconvenience them, and they will once again assume the reactionary role.
[1] Robin Diangelo, White Fragility (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018), 19.
[2] Diangelo, White Fragility, 31.
[3] Ibid., 22.
[4] Ibid, 27.
[5] Ibid, 78.
[6] Ibram X. Kendi, How To Be An Antiracist (New York: One World, 2019), 19.
[7] Kendi, How To Be An Antiracist, 13.
[8] Ibid, 129.
[9] Lemon, Jason (September 27, 2020). "Why Ibram Kendi Is Facing a Backlash Over a Tweet About Amy Coney Barrett's Adopted Haitian Children". Newsweek. Retrieved July 18, 2021.
[10] Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 2014), 15-16.
[11] Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 24.
[12] Kendi, How To Be An Antiracist, 159.
[13] Diangelo, White Fragility, 161.
[14] Carol Hanisch, “The Personal is Political” carolhanisch.org. Retrieved 2021-07-18.
[15] Burch, Kerry T. (2012). Democratic transformations: Eight conflicts in the negotiation of American identity. London: Continuum. p. 139. ISBN 9781441112132.
[16] Ernesto Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory, London, 1977, 138.
[17] Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: International Publishers, 1948), 9-11.
[18] Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 23.
