The confusion about “racism” emerges because people mean different things by the word and the left exploits the ambiguity. What the man on the street thinks “racism” means is as follows: a. mean, rude, or offensive remarks made on a racial basis—the banana thrown onto a football pitch at a black player; b. a dismissive attitude towards other cultures, countries, and civilisations—so that you show someone a Ming vase and they say, “I don’t like that foreign muck” (i.e. Philistinism); c. to prejudge and dismiss someone due to their race (analogous to saying, “He’s from the North, I can’t be doing with a Northerner,” when you’ve never even met the person).
The three categories above could be reorganised—were in the past—under the headings politeness and modesty. For the most part, people think themselves to be polite and modest (even if they are not—they aspire to be, anyway) and, in consequence, most people believe themselves to be “not racist”—since that is what they think “racism” is; they think it is a sub-type of rudeness and arrogance. Now, it must be admitted that there are people who are straightforwardly anti-social—who are rude not only on the basis of race but of everything else; and they are useful to the left, just like self-consciously “offensive” rightists, because they solidify the link between “racism” and “low-status uneducated behaviour”.
The reason why many “race controversies” erupt is that the left does not mean by “racism” the above three categories. It means the assertion that race exists at all as an objective fact—whether biological or spiritual; and, in fact, this includes the family, since the family is race in microcosm and the nation (race) is just an extended family. What happens is that a man on the street says, “The Chinese are different from the English,” with no negative or positive connotation and a leftist says, “That’s racism.”
The man on the street—actually, often conservative politicians—then gets incensed and angry and absolutely insists he is not racist (of course, it is difficult to prove a negative—so to prove you are not a racist is a losing proposition from the start). The two sides then become increasingly angry—yet the difficulty would be removed if conservatives would reject the term “racism”; they really mean “I am a polite and modest person who would not insult someone for no reason and does not arrogantly believe himself to be superior to everyone else”.
The problem is that the leftist concept “racism”—along with “sexism” etc—has gained purchase in the popular imagination to such an extent that even conservatives speak about it as if it is real. In fact, what the left does is advance behind the screen of what most people take to be politeness and modesty (e.g. it’s wrong to throw bananas at black players) to promulgate ideas that demand total societal reorganisation—the destruction of nation (race), family, and, in fact, the individual. This is not what most people think “anti-racism” means at all—and it is why they tie themselves in knots in attempts to escape the situation by saying things like, “The blacks are very good at music and sports.” “Oh really, and are they not good at rocket engineering too?” “Um…err…<<much sweat>>.”
This is why you sometimes see conservatives, often married to East Asian women, say things like, “I can’t be racist because me wife is Thai for chrissake and me kids are mixed race.” Of course, to say “I prefer Asian women for their porcelain China-doll features” is racism—it says there’s some objective and immutable difference between the races, even if it’s good (for your sexual gratification in this case). Given that leftist ideas are rooted in feminine narcissism, to say “I’m married to a woman from another race” is like pouring petrol on the fire—to understand why, next time you’re with a white woman explain to her why you find the features on Asian women so attractive and see what the result is.
The point is not whether you say good or bad things about a race—it is to assert it exists at all that is the crime; and if the left could (it can’t because the family is too innate) it would make it as socially unacceptable to say “I have a mother and father” (notice that transgender beliefs get very close to this assertion with compulsory pronouns—they’ve built on the success from the “abolition of race”, since the two concepts “family” and “race” are on a continuum). It can’t quite be done, but they’re very close to someone saying, “My father,” and the return being, “Oh, your father—so you’re a cis supremacist, like, that’s not cool.”
It’s a blind that particularly exploits the middle-class desire to be respectable and polite, not a yob in a football stadium, to advance what is, in fact, a project for total societal reorganisation that most people, if it were explained to them, would think is just total nonsense. Yet the concept is used as freely by conservatives—and also by some “highly scientific” people on the radical right who insist on using “racism” in its original sense, the scientific taxonomy of races; they do this for attention, really—they get a frisson by saying, “I’m a racist,” and then saying, “but, actually, that doesn’t mean what you think it means—here’s my chart about Ashkenazi IQ and Japanese conscientiousness. I don’t hold anything against anyone—it’s science, totally objective.”
What they want to say is that “racism” is just a descriptive term, just like “astronomy” is the study of stars—the problem is that the concept is very established as a normative comment on acceptable behaviour, and they’re never going to get it back to being purely descriptive (and, actually, to be purely descriptive is included in what makes the concept anti-social; to describe race is itself an anti-social act). This is why I refuse to accept there is such a thing as “racism”—a word that only dates from the 20th century—because the concept itself is incoherent when understood in the sense it is predominantly used; and all the ordinary people who think they are “good people” who are “not racist” really just mean that they aspire to politeness and modesty.
Notice that we do not talk about politeness and modesty because those are values—“racism” itself comes from science (i.e. the scientific study of race, just like the radical right race scientists say), and its dominance on both left and right merely reflects that we live in a valueless society where our morality is supposedly “scientific”. The left injects values into “racism” and makes it a normative category but if you look at their justification for this assertion it is not that racism is “wrong” (although it is also implied, people cannot help recreating values) it is that it is “unscientific” or is used as a tool by one social class (or “culturally-constructed racial group”—e.g. white supremacy) to dominate others in a system that is not “evil” but irrational and unscientific.
Hence it is the scientific worldview that is the ultimate problem; it is disintegrative in all respects—really, for the left, even the individual is “racist”; to be a differentiated organism makes you dissimilar to others, hence implies inequality—and so advanced leftist theorists, such as Deleuze, advocate the schizophrenic state to dissolve the “fascistic” boundaries between “inside” and “outside” and so do away with the “racist” concept “individual”; in effect, Deleuze advocates for perverted shamanism, since schizophrenics have certain psychic insights because they live the Hermetic reality that the “inside is the outside, the outside is the inside” (“as above, so below”)—if we all become “schizo”, the inequality caused by differentiated individuals will vanish; to have psychological boundaries is itself “racist”—no borders, no boundaries, schizo world (it’s a Satanic inversion of true priesthood). Race, family, individual—all must dissolve to permit equality.