[themolecularman]

I'm hoping the company I work for will follow suit and ban discussions about this stuff in the workplace.

Two years ago we had Ibrahim X Kendi speak at our company, he's now considered by many to be a "neo racist". Within months our open Slack channel for Q&A was shut-down.

However we still have a lot of the internal activists.

[jjeaff]

I don't think he's considered by very many to be a neo-racist. Only in right wing circles and few of them would even know who he is anyway.

[krrrh]

It seems like the term neoracist has been promoted by John McWhorter more than any other public intellectual and you can hardly call him right wing unless your vision of the political spectrum is severely warped.

[jessaustin]

McWhorter recently wrote an entire Atlantic column about the actual word "racism" without once using the neologism for which you've blamed him. So, maybe he has reconsidered?

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/03/nation-div...

[krrrh]

I’m referring to his use of the word in his new book (which he is serializing for free on his substack), “The Elect: Neoracists Posing as Antiracists and Their Threat to a Progressive America”. [1] The first place I saw the term used (he has also used it on the Glenn Show podcast).

Regardless, I came not to blame him, but to praise him.

Though I do agree with Kmele Foster’s insistence that the term “racist” is well and good enough to describe the type of segregationist thinking and reification of the fiction of race that is promoted by so-called anti-racists.

[1] https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/the-elect-neoracists-po...

[jessaustin]

Thanks for the link! I wonder if you've read the whole thing? Several chapters in [0], we find:

...I’m realizing I can’t use the term neoracism in the subtitle of my The Elect book.

From assorted social media posts, I am realizing that if I say Neoracists Posing as Antiracists and Their Threat to a Progressive America, many understandably think I am referring to black people being racist against whites.

I need to specify – despite that it may dampen the enthusiasm for my book among some – that I do not think of black people being racist against whites and white people being racist against blacks as equally reprehensible.

Many whites are deeply aggrieved that they are assailed for being racists, but that no one seems to mind black people not liking white people. They want us to assail black racism as vociferously as we do white racism.

I must disappoint. I am fully on board with the idea that racism is about who is up versus down. Black racism against whites is, at least at its foundation, about resentment at being abused. To apply the same judgment to this as to blacks being racist against whites is facile, uninsightful – frankly, almost a debate team trick.

“But where does it lead if you hate me and I hate you and you hate me …?” – okay. But we live in our own limited time slices. There are two layers here.

One: just a few inches past about 1964, is it so unpardonable, so incomprehensible, that black people might be mad at white people?

Two: if you object that 1964 was a while ago now, then is it so unpardonable, so incomprehensible, that lots of black people might be mad at white people now when so many intellectuals and artists and community leaders have taught them to be that mad for decades?

Note – I didn’t ask whether it was right that they have been taught that. The issue is that they were. And they harbor what they were taught at a time – today -- when no one can deny that racism does exist. Anyone who thinks I don’t know that hasn’t read me much.

So. In this vein, I am seeing that “neoracism” sounds to many like I am decrying racism against whites. I get why they think that – and I know that quite a few will think that’s what I mean without subscribing to the white nationalist groups who have used the word that way.

Some in my position would try to reclaim the word and make it mean what they want it to mean. I, for example, meant “new racism against black people.” But my comfort zone cannot fashion community meaning. I am not interested in standing athwart common human understanding and hollering “Stop!,” watching it continue despite me, and then self-gratifyingly grumbling that nobody listens to me.

My strategy will be to eschew the word “neoracism.” If people are going to read it to mean that my book is about arguing against racism against white people, they will be massively disappointed by my book.

This is because my book is about how the modern conception of antiracism is racist against BLACK people.

Social media and Substack allow one to fashion a book according to public feedback in a way never possible before. My book will no longer be titled The Elect: Neoracists Posing as Antiracists and Their Threat to a Progressive America,” because I can see that this leads some whites to see me as defending them against black racism. My book will not do that, and I frankly suggest the whites in question learn to understand it. Racism punches down. Yes, I believe that, even though The Elect do too. I always have.

Instead I will try something new. The Elect: The Threat to a Progressive America from Anti-Black Antiracists.

In this passage McWhorter clearly disavows this word completely, because of just the misunderstanding seen ITT.

[0] https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/can-black-people-be-rac...

[krrrh]

Aha, thank you! I am actually quite behind on it, and also hadn’t read that post, which I largely agree with. I can see how the term has escaped his ability to define it in the context of his argument.

It seems like our era of fast decentralized media makes it tough to employ a neologism in a way that clarifies rather than confuses.

I also appreciate your good faith effort to help clear this up.

[ljm]

What's a 'neo racist'? Where are these odd labels coming from?

Is it racist subculture or something? It just sounds absurd compared to saying 'racist'.

[krrrh]

It is used to point out the perpetuation and reification of race as a concept by people who call themselves antiracist. There are many liberal thinkers who have not given up on the notion that race is a fiction, and that the best way to be not racist is to understand this.

Race abolitionists like Kmele Foster (Fifth Column podcast) and Thomas Chatterton Williams (Self Portrait in Black and White), as well as scholars like Barbara Fields (Racecraft) point out that what people call antiracist depends on re-centering race in the discourse, which they see as promoting a race-based system of evaluation, which results in racist thinking (in the normal dictionary, pre-Foucaultized definition of the term).

Hence some people who agree with this line of thinking (though not the three I mentioned afaik) prefer to call “antiracism” neoracism because it’s a very different thing promoted by different sorts of people than what we traditionally call racism, but it still requires one to think in terms of race and to believe that race exists in a meaningful sense.

[kyriee]

By who?

[yardie]

> he's now considered by many to be a "neo racist".

I'm sorry, what!? The author of "How to be Antiracist" is considered a "neo racist" by how many?

[fastball]

Also the Democratic People's Republic of Korea isn't actually a democracy?!

[yardie]

Do you actually have any evidence of the author, Kendi, being a neo racist or is this more right wing trash?

[fastball]

I'm just pointing out that someone saying they're not something doesn't mean they actually aren't, as you implied.

Kinda like how you will see a pastor rail against homosexuality, and then it turns out they have a boyfriend on the side...

"The lady doth protest too much, methinks" and all that.