Pandora's Racism Box

Unidirectional racism was unsustainable. The left was wrong to embrace it.

Remember when, eight or so years ago, the definition of racism changed? That was weird, right?

One day, it meant one thing - the thing it had always meant. Then the next day, it meant something markedly different.

I didn’t get a memo, so far as I can recall. I don’t remember being consulted or polled on the subject. We all just woke up one morning and found that the world had moved on.

If you tried to use the word the old way, it would come back declined. Address not found. Returned to sender. Like going to check on an old friend and finding him just…gone.

To most of us peasants, “racism” meant something like, “harboring prejudice against a racial group.” Or “believing a person to be superior or inferior based on their race.” We could haggle a bit over the precise verbiage. But prior to 2016 or so, I don’t think any of us would have taken real issue with those descriptions.

Then, quite all of a sudden, things were different.

Racism now meant, “Prejudice + Power.” You needed both for it to count, and that was a settled matter, motherfucker. If you didn’t agree, it was because you just didn’t get it. You lacked education. You needed to get yourself back to college. Maybe do some googling or something. But do it somewhere else, because it’s nobody’s job to perform this labor for you.

It was an unusual reframing; Prejudice + Power. The prejudice part, sure. We got that. That had been there before. Almost, it had been the whole thing.

But the power part was complicated. What kind of power were we talking about? Who was deciding who had it and who didn’t? And didn’t this - sorry, just taking a moment to digest here - didn’t this have the potential to exempt or excuse an enormous amount of what we formerly would have considered racist behavior? Wasn’t this a loophole through which one could pretty well drive an 18-wheeler?

Example:

A: “Man, I sure do hate [racial group]. They sure are [bad thing].”

B: “Hey now. That’s pretty racist.”

A: “In fact, it’s not. Look it up. [Racial group] has more power than me, so my sentiments cannot be racist. [Expletive] those [bad thing] [racial group]!”

So yes, complicated. And also, maybe, arguably, a little bit…convenient?

A consensus quickly emerged regarding who had power and who didn’t. That guidance appeared to have come from the same lexicographers who’d swapped out our trusty, tried-and-true racism definition with their strange new one.

Totally by coincidence, the people who did have power turned out to be the exact people our racism-reframers wanted to take a giant, steaming shit on. And the ones who didn’t were the exact ones they hoped to exempt from their new standards.

Huh. So crazy that it worked out that way.

The gunports just magically opened on the exact side of the ship that allowed barrage after barrage to be launched at the exact group who totally deserved it. And not at anyone else. How improbably lucky was that?

And, man. Good thing it wasn’t possible to be racist against *certain people* anymore, because if it had been, a lot of people would have been being really, really racist. Phew. Bullet dodged.

I don’t think it’s possible that I could live long enough for it to stop amazing me that so many went along with this. From the jump, this new definition of racism registered to me as the most transparently self-serving horseshit I’d ever seen, maybe in all my years following politics. And that is a high bar to clear.

As with most woke-coded ideas, the prejudice + power reboot wasn’t a brand new concept - it had been kicking around in academic and activist circles since the 60s. The pink-hairs just gave it institutional backing. The emperor was now actually wearing the new clothes, and insisting we all remark on them.

I’m going to try not to take this in any of the obvious directions.

I could mention, for example, that the left offering society its permission to demonize white people led to white people’s accelerating alienation from the left, and from the wider social justice movement.

Or I could talk about how singling out white people as the only group capable of perpetuating racism blinded us to some worryingly hateful rhetoric and behavior coming from other groups.

I could point out that by lapping up every drop of this garbage soup, Democrats electorally castrated themselves, and destroyed their political viability for God knows how many years into the future.

I could, technically - as a white guy - just spend the rest of this post crying about how hurt my feelings were and how victimized I felt.

I could do all of that, I guess, but I don’t want to. I don’t want to make this just my 90th post about how woke people are stupid and ruined everything. Though they are, and they did.

This is about much more than just being anti-woke. It’s deeper. More fundamental. And the slumbering dragon stirred by this nonsense had been asleep for much longer than the 8-10 years woke was with us.

Since the end of the 60s, America lived under a fragile truce. From the Civil Rights era on, our reckonings with race were governed by a social contract that, while shakily drafted and not consistently obeyed, provided us with decades of a mostly survivable status quo. The rules were simple:

We weren’t going to talk shit about other racial groups. That was really it.

Whatever we felt, whatever was in our hearts, we were all going to try to see past each other’s surfaces. We were going to try our damnedest to live up to lofty ideals about content of character and shared humanity. We even had an aspirational term to describe this: we were going to [pretend to] be “colorblind.”

There were some exceptions of course. Comedy was one. Comics were free to trespass the boundaries of ordinary racial courtesy, especially if they were actually funny while doing it. There were also, sort of, under some circumstances, de minimis exemptions in broader society.

Black and brown folks were allowed some not-super-polite words to describe white people. White people, in the company of other white people, were allowed to sing along to Biggie lyrics without self-bleeping, as long as they did it with the windows up and volume down. Or I don’t know, maybe they weren’t, but they definitely did.

Interestingly, the racial privilege hierarchies that would later be academized and trumpeted by woke people were mostly observed even before the wokes came along. We didn’t need them to tell us that saying “cracker” wasn’t as bad as saying the n-word. We knew already.

When racism was ultimately redefined, proponents of this new wisdom were fond of explaining themselves via the imagery of punching; specifically, “punching up” (good) vs. “punching down” (bad). They came frustratingly close to making a sound point with this.

If I rock up to Conor McGregor and throw him my best right cross, he’s going to laugh in my face, then kick my ass for me. If I throw that exact same punch, with that exact same fist at…a child? An old woman? Keanu Reeves, out of character? It becomes devastating. Earth-shattering. Evil. Same form and same muscle. But the difference in targets is the difference between Heaven and Hell. It’s everything.

The social justice folx were not wrong to notice this. Punching up with racism is different from punching down. But they had to go that one, crazy step further. Punching up was now…not punching at all. Racism against a privileged group was not racism. It was nothing. Just air.

That was, of course, utter twaddle. But no less dangerous for it. Because it willfully blinded them to the risk they were taking in violating this most fragile, but important, of peace accords.

The *don’t talk shit* agreement turned out to be binary. On or off. Either we weren’t talking shit, or we were. We thought maybe there was some middle ground, but we were wrong. All those de minimis examples, even all that great comedy, was still on the It’s Not Okay side of the scale. It was tolerated, but still transgressive.

Wokes, by clumsily tinkering with the language, thought they had achieved something revelatory. They thought they could use *wording* to harness the energy of hot-headed, racial animus but direct it only as a force for good. They were sure they could grip this weapon tightly enough to aim it. They were wrong though. It was too powerful.

They overcommitted. They thought they’d found a really fun tiger to ride, and I’m sure it felt great for a while. Tribalism always does. But tigers bite.

By now, you know where this is going.

“[They] delved too greedily and too deep. You know what they awoke in the darkness…” -LOTR

As it would turn out, elements of the right were all too happy about the new, it’s okay to talk shit now standard for race relations. They’d been waiting for this.

The existence of a truce, or a cease fire, or however you wish to conceive of the near 50-year period of racial cooling the United States experienced before woke people cooked it, implies that not all parties were initially on board with this colorblind harmony thing. Not everyone was super excited to just join hands and sing Kumbaya. A lot of resentment lingered.

That might have suggested that the happy, Whoville act we were all doing was, at least in part, scripted. That it was what was expected of us - part of the social contract - whether or not it reflected how well we’d really let go of our prejudices.

Woke people are correct that post-racism is fundamentally dishonest, and replete with history-by-victor. They are wrong in thinking that that invalidates it, or makes it a naive ideal. It may be all we have to save us.

Once the undergrads cracked it open, the first evils to fly out of Pandora’s Box probably felt tolerable. Releasing them was, after all, why they’d felt the box needed opening in the first place. So long as the discord was only traveling in one direction, the safe one, what was the harm?

Well, as certain commentators *AHEM* warned, wildfires are much easier to start than they are to put out.

When the winds shifted, and the right became dominant in both politics and in online spaces, its most stridently racist elements had an absolute field day - one that is still in full swing now. If racism was cool again, cool. They were well up for that. And they had a good 10 years of receipts to prove that, in fact, the left had started it this time.

With the trend moving away from aggressive content moderation on social media, racist views and ideas are reaching never-before-reached audiences. They are quite normalized now, except in rigidly siloed spaces - lookin’ at you, Bluesky. And the people they’re hitting hardest are the people most apt to reject the framing that racism doesn’t count if it’s racist against them.

Where this is headed is hard to say. I expect that, over time, normies will get as tired of the racist right’s shenanigans as they finally got of the racist left’s. Probably, things will reach a kind of equilibrium. I hope they will anyway.

But the landscape may be very different by the time they do. This now free genie might never be really forced back into his lamp. A degree of tolerance for open racism is likely to be with us for the foreseeable future. Whether that looks like Avenue Q or like the Balkans remains to be determined.

Washington DC’s nonstop generation of outrage porn tends to move us past important stories faster than might be good for us. A very instructive moment occurred in early February of this year, when Elon Musk's DOGE re-hired a formerly sacked employee whose history of boisterously racist tweets had just become public.

The kid, who’d said things like, “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” “Normalize Indian hate,” and “You could not pay me to marry outside my ethnicity,” was back on the job. Ouch. It was treated by the left as yet another in the long line of indications that the Trumpist right was racist, backwards, and morally inferior.

But the story was indicative of so much more than that.

Marko Elez, the young man at the center of the drama, hadn’t just said garden variety cancelable stuff and been busted for it. His comments would’ve gotten him canceled before getting canceled was even a thing. He said shit that would’ve been considered out of bounds in the 60s. In the South. Maybe even by people with Confederate flag bumper stickers.

Woke people have had a tremendous impact on our culture and politics, one orders of magnitude larger than any they think they’ve had. Still, you cannot credit them with having drawn the boundaries that made Marko Elez’s speech unacceptable. Those boundaries were in place before they galloped onto the scene. You kind of can credit the wokies with those boundaries not being there anymore.

J.D. Vance, the Vice President of the United States, whose wife is Indian, came out publicly in support of re-hiring the guy who said, “Normalize Indian hate.” He did it, not because he hates his wife, or because he hates Indians, but because he hates a culture that considers a person’s attention-seeking shitposting more important than their productivity. He grew up in that culture, it’s turned on him more than once, and he’s now powerful enough to crush it.

The left has sandblasted away a lot of the West’s sensitivity to expressions of racism. They didn’t mean to, but they did. They cried wolf so often, and so loudly, that many just no longer care about wolves. Wolves can hang out now.

To be considered a racist was, for the entirety of my childhood, about the worst reputational damage it was possible to suffer. It was up there with being considered a child molester. Right or left, you did not want to be called a racist, and if you were, you fought back hard or you apologized harder.

Are those days gone? Being a racist still isn’t ideal - Vance made that clear in his defense of Elez - but rather than being a banishment-worthy offense, is it more like having bad fashion sense now? A propensity to chew with your mouth open? Gross, and definitely something we don’t like, but a character flaw that ultimately subordinates to talent, usefulness, or general likability?

I ask, lefties, because you opened this box. Every escaped evil has found a home downstream of the dam you obliterated. The swamp of racist shit you’re trudging through right now was created by your arrogant certainty that you could force a partial draw down without flooding everything with bile and waste.

We begged you not to. We told you that what you were doing was dangerous and irresponsible. Not only did you blow off our warnings, you tried to destroy us for issuing them.

That dam was keeping at bay a reservoir of terribleness that we all knew was up there, but that we could generally, comfortably, pretend wasn’t. So long as it held, so long as the stewing trash was barricaded, we would be fine.

Well, we’re not fine. The stewing trash is here now. It’s bubbling up from drains and sewers and toilets. It’s seeping through our doors and windows, blanketing everything in its stench.

Returning to an earlier point, racial jousting can be light and funny, or it can lead to everyone getting slaughtered. It can be singing puppets making friendly jokes about each other, or it can be ethnic cleansing.

How you react to this new equilibrium - your new equilibrium - might determine which future we get. By all means, call out bald and harmful racism when you see it. But understand that your barometer for that has just spent 10 years being tinkered with and recalibrated by narcissists who get more value out of capitalizing on racism than they’d get from trying to heal it.

I don’t even know what to tell you to do right now. I have no idea. I’ve never seen anything like this.

You managed to make one of the *least okay things* in existence both okay and celebrated. Lucrative, even. I marvel at how you achieved this. The skinheads tried for decades, and never even approached the level of success you’ve seen in just a few years, and a few memes.

It could be that it’s time for you to revisit your priors, and reacquaint yourselves with your True North. If racism is bad, it has to be bad all the time. There can’t be goofy, motivated exceptions to that. It’s either/or.

But if you’re not ready for that - if you’re still really committed to the idea that some racisms are good racisms - you’ll need to at least face the fact that not everyone in your audience will make your same values judgement. They might decide that your racism flavor isn’t all you crack it up to be, and that their own one tastes better.

You put everyone on the left - even those of us who weren’t snorting your lines - in the impossible position of having to defend a long-held principle, while also defending your having pissed all over it.

You did it mostly because it was enjoyable for you. It was a way to land you on the Right Side of History. You weren’t concerned about what would happen when folks decided that your framing put them unalterably on the wrong side.

So, thanks. Really nice work, guys. It’s been really fun, having to contend with a bunch of freshly-awakened Nazis and segregationists, while you’ve all fucked off to Bluer Skies…

You didn’t listen to us before, but maybe you will now. You opened this box, but you can also help close it. No, you can’t stop people from being racist anymore - I’m afraid you’ve exhausted your credibility on that score. It would be like Coca Cola trying to lead the charge against sugary drinks, while still aggressively selling Coca Cola. But you can blunt the impact.

You can revert back to an emphasis on individual identity over group identity. You can hold people to account for what they do, rather than for what people who look like them have done. You can help make it verboten again to shit-talk about whole racial groups. It was an actually bad trend that allowed that.

If we play it right, we can survive. We can enter a world in which our differences are recognized, maybe even joked or complained about, but also one in which we regard noticing them as something other than grounds for permanent exile from society.

Or we could go the other way and destroy each other.

You world. Your rules. Let me know how I should play it.