https://www.frontpagemag.com/anti-racists-should-stop-talking-like-racists/
A paradox of the Civil Rights movement is that the driving force behind that great victory––the codification in law, acknowledged by a majority of the nation, that color could not and should not compromise black American’s political equality and unalienable rights––was quickly degraded by the continuation of the pseudo-concept of “race,” an artifact of racist scientism.
Ever since, our racialist discourse has continued to legitimize and prioritize the idea of “color” as the most essential dimension of our identities. As a result of this racial essentialism, racism has found a new life in the “woke” ideology of “systemic racism” and “white fragility,” which are predicated on the assumption that all so-called “white” people are indelibly stained with racist animus, even if they don’t know it. This claim is the real “Jim Crow 2.0” Joe Biden talked about in 2022, not the common-sense election reforms he was attacking.
So it is today that the central preposterous and destructive fallacy of racism––that every member of the “inferior” race is in all respects indelibly inferior to every member of the “superior” race––lives on.
This maximalist absolutism was necessary in the old South to protect the justification of slavery as a natural institution reflecting the alleged disparities between black and white. But bans on allowing slaves to learn to read, for example, were a tacit admission that totalizing inferiority was incoherent, since if all people of African descent were inferior, how could they learn to read or be further educated? And without that “natural” inferiority, on what grounds could slavery be justified?
Next, despite several decades of activist historians claiming to find racism based on appearance as far back as ancient Greece, “race” and “racism” as we know them were a product of the Enlightenment and the scientism it fostered. This is not to say that bigotry and prejudice didn’t exist, and often lead to violence and injustice. But such bigotry was in the main not based on how people looked or the color of their skin.
Indeed, the “father of history,” Herodotus, in his 5th century B.C. work Histories, wrote of Ethiopia that “its men are the tallest, the most handsome, and the longest lived,” and said of swarthy Egypt that “it has more wonders in it than any other country in the world and provides more works that defy description than any other place.”
Rather than physical appearance, Greek bigotry reflected a dislike for how other ethnicities lived, their mores, customs, language, laws and, for the Greeks, whether they were free citizens or unfree subjects. The Athenians’ contempt for the Persians, for example, was based on their subjecting themselves to a Great King, in whose presence they had to prostrate themselves and kiss the ground. Even if a Persian was rich, to the Greeks he was still a slave who groveled before a tyrannical master.
