The Religion of Affirmative Action
If you wish to expel religion from our European civilization you can only do it through another system of doctrines, and from the outset this would take over all the psychological characteristics of religion, the same sanctity, rigidity and intolerance, the same prohibition of thought in self-defense.
— Sigmund Freud (1927)
From the beginning of civilization, those in power have seen religion as a way to control the powerless. People need hope. The powerful need to manipulate that hope. As Washington displaced town-level power in the hands of local wealthy, the Democratic welfare state used Christianity to support the New Deal, then to back wars against Fascism and Communism, but saw is usefulness wane during the 1960s anti-war social revolution. Now the Green New Deal combined with Anti-racism have emerged as a full-blown new religion, proselytizing to America’s non-white-male majority.
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| John McWhorter |
Elite blacks push race-based affirmative action; it enables them to both live well and remain victims. Elite whites happily fight for black “equity” as a deflection from attempts to curb elite power. McWhorter writes about the new religion confronting us, its appeal, and its black and white disciples.
The Joy of Faith
White commitment to this new religion can be driven more by how it feels to be someone with the message than it is to the message itself. McWhorter speaks of “folk politics” where venting trumps reason, bringing “complexity down to a human scale.” Joining the cause as a “chosen one” is an easy step, and one attractive to most.
What we see in dictatorships is true for democracies as well: conformity brings with it a sense of relief, even pleasure in having figured it out. One can both feel guilt for something you didn’t do, and feel good about the guilt.
McWhorter quotes Douglas Murray on religion:
People imbibe because they like it. It lifts them up and exalts them. Rather than being people responsible for themselves and answerable to those they know, they become the self-appointed representatives of the living and the dead, the bearers of a terrible history as well as the self-appointed redeemers of mankind. From being nobody one becomes somebody.
It’s what Émile Durkheim called a “collective effervescence,” this overcoming the white awkwardness of being more woke than most blacks. For many whites, good guilt fills the hole left after the 1960s took away old-time religion. When institutional religion no longer grounds one’s thought, something similar must sooner or later take its place.
Why Blacks Embrace It
McWhorter believes insecurity explains black enthusiasm for race-based politics:
a people treated like animals for centuries, under slavery, Jim Crow, and then redlining, came out with a damaged racial self-image. . . Segregation was outlawed, and outward racial attitudes began changing with unprecedented rapidity. In 1960 black America lived under pitiless Jim Crow and many whites, even educated ones, barely understood when they were accused of prejudice against black people.
A decade later, radical change. Jim Crow was gone and educated whites appreciated what racial prejudice meant. McWhorter points to 1970s sitcoms like “All in the Family” and “Maude”, where audiences could laugh at how far they had come.
But for blacks, segregation was outlawed from above without the long, slow claw to self-sufficiency that has been true for immigrant Americans. They were denied the pride in having come the whole way despite dismissal and overt roadblocks. Changing the rules was less useful in fostering pride. Take slogans such as “Black is Beautiful.” In fact, they project an inferiority complex. Why does black being beautiful need to be stressed at all?
McWhorter says racial discourse exaggerates both how bigoted most whites are and how little whites oppose black achievements since 1970. But if you are insecure, it’s convenient to point to the bad things others do to you.
The White Mission
A critical white mass have taken on the mission of helping blacks. The white mission allows blacks to shout racism even as it recedes into the past. Blacks feeling disrespected — embracing “victimhood” — gain a self-confidence boost.
Many educated blacks wrestle with a sense of having left “The Struggle.” So they adopt the identity of a beleaguered person, united by having suffered the discrimination laid upon all black people regardless of class or education.
Seeking to fill an empty hole is a human response. When black people insist that black America is stuck until we have the “equity” of no racism or racial disparities with all Americans have mastered black social history, they are fixing their own holes.
Actually, McWhorter believes, black American gains since the 1960s have happened in spite of, not because of, black radicalism. Whites are now picking up the same banner, but does white participation prove the black agenda is truth?
While being oppressed by white racism defines the black American condition, what’s different today is so many whites now think they too must evangelize oppression. And when anyone challenges oppression’s continuing “truth,” the “chosen ones” respond with white-hot fury — McWhorter’s evidence one is stepping on actual religious beliefs.
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