The Immoral Lie of "Metaracism"
A review of another risibly anemic recent effort to defend the empty concept of structural racism
Something more in the way of my ongoing effort to destroy the “structural racism” orthodoxy in my discipline is now up at Academic Questions.
Kirkus Reviews says this about the book: “A brilliant guide to a systemic malady that cannot be denied.”
Cannot be denied. That is, do not dare to question, the time for scientific skepticism is long past. The dogma has been established, and all will bend the knee and preach the gospel.
Yeah, well, I deny it all the same, and I would happily accept a position on a stage, uncompensated, opposite Tricia Rose or anybody else—hell, any team of such people—who wants to defend it against my criticisms, and I would make the case for its denial still more assertively. If you are able to set that up, please do get in touch.
You needn’t remind me. I am aware of how much my efforts here matter, that is, not at all. I have on and off contemplated writing a book refuting this foolishness, but then I remember how much time I have left to write and how little anything anyone writes in opposition to this new orthodoxy matters, and I know that would be a waste of my precious time. Such efforts have no effect on what is taught to students in sociology. In my own institution, every other member of the department adheres to the cult and virtually every time a sociology major shows up in one of my classes (they typically avoid me, as my reputation is generally known) I have to spend significant time just convincing them that a good deal of what they have been led to believe is taken-for-granted truth about the world by the orthodox malpractitioners of social science must in fact be defended, and indeed that much of it is indefensible, at least if one wants to remain in the realm of the real.
I understand that I am talking to the wind, which is why I am doing less and less of this kind of writing. I believe the whole discipline of sociology would meet the best possible end if it just fell into the ocean soon (but wait until I’m retired, please), as I see no reason to believe it will be reformed back to intellectual respectability.
Rose’s book was published with a major press, and she has been making the rounds on all the mainstream media talking about it with no pushback whatsoever. I don’t have figures on how many courses in the country are using the book or parts of it, but I’m sure it’s a substantial number. If you read a bit of my review, you’ll quickly discern just how empty I found it, and you’ll be able to understand what a cultural disaster it is that this kind of nonsense is being taught to young people. Not one of the major claims of the book is true, and any moderately attentive critical reader can spend minutes with the book and find additional erroneous or mendacious claims that I did not have space to discuss in the review. Nearly every single time a claim is attached to a footnote, a brief investigation of the footnote source reveals either that Rose did not understand it correctly or that she deliberately misrepresented it. She has no scholarly record of publication in social theory, which is the field one should know to write on theoretical topics such as structure and agency, and it is not clear that she has spent any time at all investigating that literature. The entirety of her publication record before this book has to do with her cheerleading about rap music and how much of it offers “resistance” to racism. She has no pedigree at all to be talking about this complex issue, and the result demonstrates clearly how unsuited she is for such an effort. In an academic world of any integrity, this book would be enough to strip her of tenure and of her position, as it reveals a combination of incompetence and dishonesty that would startle if it were not so common these days.
But this is where we are. Empty is the state of affairs in much of academia. I wish I knew what could be done about it. In all frankness, I feel very depressed about the future of higher education, and there are many days that I look forward longingly to retirement and the effort I will then undertake to forget the American academic social sciences altogether.
Much longer version of the review, with more empirical examples of grave errors and/or outright deception in Rose’s reasoning, below.
A Slave to Whatever Has Mastered You: A Review of Tricia Rose, Metaracism
The concepts of “structure” and “system” are among the more amorphous and abstract in the social sciences. They are used frequently, and frequently by writers who do not trouble themselves to carefully define them. You can find writers in my discipline of sociology, for example, talking about structure as the overall abstract scaffolding of positions in a social hierarchy, or as institutions such as marriage, or as a relational grid of various subgroups in a society. Sociologists will also discuss systems at a range of equally diverse levels and perspective: social systems, cultural systems, organizational systems, and world systems are a few examples.
Whatever one thinks about all of this disparate and disunified deployment of these concepts, and however drawn one might be to the language of structures and systems in thinking about the human world, it has to be admitted that we are not working at the level of science when we endeavor to use “structure” and “system” as mechanisms for explaining why things happen as they do in a given human society. There is a long tradition of serious effort to theoretically elaborate these concepts in greater precision, but that effort has not yielded much in the way of a coherent and empirically testable theoretical framework for understanding and predicting what goes on in human societies that uses “structure” or “system” as the cause of human action. Most serious thinkers in the social sciences who are partial to structural perspectives on society admit that we are not in a position to use such theories to adequately discuss cause and effect in the social world. At best, structural theories can give us a kind of not very well-defined Gestalt, an imprecise hermeneutical lens for thinking about a society, but when we want to try to calculate causes and effects, we are always impelled to look at the level of the micro, that is, at the actions of the elements that make up human societies—human beings themselves.
As just noted, some intellectually respectable efforts to refine these concepts into something more usable do exist. But the burgeoning literature on “structural” and “systemic” racism—and now on metaracism—is not part of that serious effort to elaborate these concepts. Tricia Rose makes clear early in her book that she is not serious by not citing any serious literature on structural or systems thought in the social sciences. One would be safe betting she is entirely unaware of it. She refers in footnotes to other activist ideologues such as Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and Joe Feagin and to the online trivialities of bloggers that have not even survived since the publication of her book.
The payload of approaches like Rose’s can be found in a single and scientifically unsustainable explanatory move. Rose wants to go from vague statements about the existence of different parts of a society—its educational institutions, its economy, its criminal justice apparatus—to a causal argument about their production of black disparities. But this cannot be done in the simplistic way she thinks it can. She thinks she has proven the existence of a causal racist system simply by observing that blacks perform differently—and typically worse—than whites in many of the separate parts of the social system. That is not a demonstration that those parts of the system have that disparity as their goal (and indeed none of those components of the American social system do state that as their objective), or that, even if they do, they are able to achieve that end independent of and despite any action on the part of the individuals in the system to avoid those ends.
For, as all students of the social sciences know, though Rose gives no indication she has thought at all about this, structure is but one side of the theoretical binary that motivates social science efforts to understand how things happen in societies. The other side of the binary is agency, or the ability of individuals to negotiate through an existing social order in ways that are not identical as a result of their freedom to make independent decisions and to act differently. Any careful structural theory—and any such theory that is not fully determinist--recognizes there is always some degree of agency available in any structure or system, however much it is informed and bounded by the parameters of the structure or system.
Rose devotes a chapter each to two of the most publicized recent cases of, according to the race radicals, racial injustice, those of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. A summary walk through these chapters, and at the manner in which she ineptly attempts to massage their cases out into claims about macro-social matters, demonstrates the flimsiness of this book’s perspective.
In both cases, Rose carefully avoids any significant discussion of the facts of the interactions that produced the deaths of Martin and Brown, contenting herself with superficial reiteration of claims about the cases that were presented by activists and other partisans in the early public discussion of the cases. Her claim is that the micro-data of the cases should not be our focus because a “structural” perspective requires us to move to a macro-level and to realize that what happens on the ground in actual human interaction is always powerfully informed, perhaps even determined, by broader social facts. It is undeniably a boon to her cause to have a justification to avoid looking closely at what Martin and Brown did to precipitate the acts of defensive violence that ended their lives. But even the supposedly “systemic” factors on which Rose concentrates her attention crumble to pieces on the slightest inquiry.
“No Chance Encounter”: Metaracism and the Trayvon Martin Case
As the case is now more than a decade in our rearview mirror, we might do well to lay out its important factual elements. George Zimmerman, the volunteer security guard at the Retreat at Twin Lakes who shot and killed Martin, testified that he had witnessed Martin, a stranger in the guarded community which had experienced a significant recent uptick in home burglaries, walking slowly in the rain and looking carefully at houses. He called 911 and began following Martin, but turned back toward his car after the 911 operator advised him not to follow the suspect. Martin then surprised Zimmerman as the latter was walking toward his car and punched him in the face, unprovoked. He was slamming Zimmerman’s head against the sidewalk when Zimmerman managed to shoot him. Forensic evidence showed that Zimmerman’s account that Martin had been straddling him while he lay prone on the ground at the moment Zimmerman fired was consistent with that evidence. Zimmerman bore wounds on his nose and back of his head that were consistent with his testimony.
Rose engages in a long discussion of how racial tensions had been recently heightened in the Retreat at Twin Lakes, contextualized by boilerplate academic left claims about housing segregation by race. The percentage of the population at Twin Lakes that was black had risen in recent years to its highest point, nearly 20%. This rise in the black population there had been accompanied, Rose surprisingly admits, by a rise in burglaries in the neighborhood, which Zimmerman claimed was the motivation for his efforts in the community’s neighborhood watch program. Rose downplays the role of the increase in crime in the confrontation between Zimmerman and Martin. Only systemic racism can properly frame it. “When faced with racial integration,” she writes, “whites resist.” But a proper explanatory framework for understanding this “resistance” needs to account any negative consequences of “integration” to which it might be a reaction. Rose cites a paper in a law review that cites another source (a book by NBC news analyst Lisa Bloom) that claimed “only 7%...of the reported [recent break-ins and attempted break-ins in the Retreat at Twin Lakes] were confirmed to involved Black males.” That is, blacks are rarely involved in such offenses, and so any policing and neighborhood watch efforts that would understand young black men like Martin as potential threats here are motivated by factually unsupported racial bias.
But tracing down the actual facts that Rose purports to be citing here is informative concerning her reliability and her trustworthiness in claims about empirical evidence. When one consults the law review article she cited, one finds this claim on p. 1178: “[O]nly two of the neighborhood’s 44 burglaries, attempted break-ins, and suspected break-ins were confirmed to have involved black males.” That yields a percentage (4.5%) still lower than Rose’s claim, though the mistake of calculating two as 7% of 44 originates with the law review authors and Rose seems to have uncritically copied it.
But work through the logic of these data and you see how the law review authors and Rose are manipulating them to insinuate something (low black participation in such offenses) that is not a legitimate conclusion from them. Thirty-six of the forty-four incidents were “attempted” or “suspected break-ins” for which there was no information provided in the law review article about the identities of the suspects. What number of them were black? We do not know, though national statistics on black participation in such crimes shows them participating in them at disproportionately high rates. Even with the eight burglaries, we are not told in the law review article how many of them yielded arrests, and so it is not clear that we know the racial identities of all eight of these cases. All we know is that two of eight burglaries at Twin Lakes are confirmed to have been committed by blacks. That is 25%, which is already higher than the black percentage of the population there. Everything that we know about race and street crime leads us to the reasonable suspicion that if we had greater information about the racial identities of other suspects in these cases, the black percentage would grow.
Rose talks about white association of blacks with crime as an aspect of the systemic racism she is purporting to theorize, but it matters that any white belief (or a belief of another other racial group, including blacks themselves) that blacks are disproportionately likely to be involved in violent street crime is consistent with the empirical evidence. She notes with disdain in this particular case that Zimmerman’s recorded calls to police indicate a “fixa[tion] on black men he thought looked suspicious.” In her mind, this proves Zimmerman’s malevolent racist ideology. But if blacks are in fact committing burglaries in Twin Lakes at rates above their representation in the population, a neighborhood watchman would be negligent in his duties if he did not take that fact into account in his efforts to discern which strangers in the community might represent greater or lesser threats. The parallel here to security screening at the airport is useful. TSA personnel who are dedicating equal time to interrogating and searching 75-year-old white women and 25-year-old men who appear phenotypically Arab are doing their work poorly.
The dynamics of racial neighborhood demography and the decision-making processes that drive it are far more complex than Rose’s simplistic model. There is evidence, for example, that new black immigrants moving into predominantly native-born black neighborhoods prompts the relative population of the latter to drop and causes the white percentage of the population there to rise. Rose claims that once black percentages in a neighborhood approach 20%, white flight is inevitable, but stable racially integrated neighborhoods are in fact not rare in the United States. And to the extent that white flight and broader white reluctance to purchase homes in areas with significant numbers of blacks, these phenomena are almost certainly driven by reasonable generalizations, not at all wildly out of touch with reality, that at least some whites make about living in proximity to significant numbers of blacks. According to a 2018 Brookings Institute study, [h]omes of similar quality in neighborhoods with similar amenities are worth 23 percent less…in majority Black neighborhoods, compared to those with very few or no Black residents.” The study’s authors insinuate, as authors of such studies typically do, that the only possible cause could be racism. But it turns out that average rates of violent crime are significantly higher in majority black neighborhoods. This fact has been present in the research for some time, and there is no indication that this fact is changing. Even as crime rates have fallen in the country, the racial difference remains.
The Brookings study compares neighborhoods with zero blacks and those that are at least 50% black. They do not include in their list of variables to compare between such neighborhoods two that almost certainly any responsible potential homeowner (and by extension an appraiser looking to price a home for those potential homeowners) would be looking at closely: neighborhood crime rate and quality of local school system. Clearly, not all, and perhaps not many potential homeowners are carefully studying the empirical data on both of those two variables, but they are certainly able to apply generalizations in a way that is likely to yield accurate predictions about them. It is true, as people like Tricia Rose never tire of telling us, that many Americans suspect that neighborhoods with more blacks in them are likely to have higher crime rates and worse school systems than those with fewer whites. What those like Rose never go on to note is that there are plenty of objective data to support those suspicions. Rose presents, outraged, the claim that “a large number of studies have shown that whites perceive Black [sic] people to be much more criminal and dangerous than whites” (105). But this perception is consistent with statistical truths about the two populations and their relative propensities to violent crime. Controlling for other variables, blacks in fact are significantly more likely to commit serious crime than whites.
Rose also spend a good deal of time in this chapter discussing Stand Your Ground laws around the country. She wants to show that there is systemic racial bias in their nature and practice, that is, that blacks are unfairly targeted and harmed by such laws. Specifically, she believes that Stand Your Ground laws have “legitimized and found to be justified…racially motivated murders of unarmed black people…at staggeringly high rates” (105). The racially disparate and racist outcomes of Stand Your Ground are, in her view, “stunningly consistent.” The only piece of evidence to which she refers in support of this claim is a PBS Frontline program that cited an Urban Institute Justice Policy Center study. This study looked at all single shooter, single victim stranger homicides between 2005 and 2009. Rose reproduces a chart from the study that shows that of this set of homicides, white-on-black killings were more likely than others to be ruled as justified, and this is especially so in Stand Your Ground states.
What Rose does not tell her readers, and what they will have to look more carefully into the sources she cites to learn, is that the very PBS program she is citing and the study on which it is based make claims about what these data show regarding racial bias that are directly contrary to her systemic racism insinuation. “[T]he figures don’t yet prove bias,” the PBS report notes, because “[a]s [the study’s author] points out, the data doesn’t show the circumstances behind the killings, for example whether the people who were shot were involved in home invasions or in a confrontation on the street.”
In other words, these figures on which homicides are determined to be justified tell us exactly nothing about any systemic racism because there is no control for the details of the homicides. What if (as is reasonably predictable from crime rates by racial group) many more of the white-on-black shootings involve e.g., a victim who is illegally inside the home of the shooter, or in his driveway and breaking into his car, and more of the black-on-white shootings involve e.g., obviously unjustified use of violence by the shooter as in, e.g., the two had an argument in the street and one pulled out a gun and opened fire? What if more of the black-on-black shootings are gang-related events in which one individual involved in the illegal drug market is shooting another such individual?
None of this complexity is of the slightest interest to Rose.
She provides another claim about racist bias as the unquestionable causal mechanism at work in determining the unjust disparity in racial outcomes on Stand Your Ground: “A large number of studies have shown that whites perceive black people to be much more criminal and dangerous than whites” (ibid.). Those studies have demonstrated that whites have accurate perceptions on this matter.
Rose attempts to turn the evidence of Martin’s serious misbehavior at school and related suspensions into still more discovery of “systemic racism.” She claims there is evidence that, contrary to stereotypes, blacks do not misbehave more than whites in schools. A lone study is cited as the support for this claim. But that study relies on self-reporting of misbehavior by subjects. It is widely known in the research community on this question that a discrepancy exists between the self-reporting survey research that purports to show no racial disparity in school rates of misbehavior and the official statistics that demonstrate blacks as much more likely to seriously offend in schools. Survey research, and self-reporting surveys in particular, shows racial disparities in response and accuracy. Blacks respond in significantly lower frequency to surveys when prompted. There is evidence that typical self-reporting surveys do not accurately capture racial differences in misbehavior and criminal offense. A widely recognized (though, for reasons of its lack of ideological fit to the leftward tilt of most sociologists and other social scientists studying this question, unpalatable) landmark study on this discrepancy (Elliott and Ageton 1980) endeavored with great methodological care to explore and correct for possible causes of this discrepancy, and they managed to discover failures of sensitivity in widely used methods of self-reporting. One of the central problems is that the small number of individuals who offend at very high rates, and who frequently radically misrepresent the frequency of their offending when they self-report, skews very heavily black. They are easily missed in small surveys and even when surveyed they can be counted on to misrepresent their offending. When considering only the largest portions of the white and black populations, self-reporting and official data on offense do significantly coincide. But this small number of heavy offenders, again, in which blacks are highly overrepresented, who reliably lie in self-reporting is a methodological issue that has to be carefully teased out of the data. Once it is controlled for, self-reporting and official statistics reveal the same racial disparity in offending.
The study Rose cites here has other, still more significant problems than its failure to deal with this methodological problem. For, buried in its text, either unnoticed or carefully avoided by Rose, is the acknowledgement that, despite the claim in the article’s abstract and in its conclusion that no significant racial disparities were apparent in the self-reporting data gathered, blacks in fact had significant higher rates of involvement in the single most serious form of school misbehavior, which is fighting. Whites self-reported alcohol use and smoking in schools at rates higher than blacks (which of course is something distinct from objective evidence of the actual racial rates of those offenses), but who would not recognize which of two hypothetical students—one of whom drinks a beer in the locker room, the other of whom engages in fistfights at school—presents an objectively greater threat to security and safety in a school and which of the two is more likely, and more justifiably, suspended as a threat to the schooling environment?
We do not know what the disparity in actual misbehaviors is because we do not have objective data on the misbehaviors, only self-reporting. But even those data give a justification for higher black suspension rates, for they demonstrate that blacks are more predisposed to engage in misbehaviors that pose harm to other students rather than misbehaviors that are much more limited in their negative effects to themselves.
Rose argues that there is evidence that “[a] black young person’s movement through space alone…is perceived by their instructors as aggressive, low-achieving, and a mandate for [special education]” (115). But, yet again, the actual study she relies on for support offers a far more complicated picture than Rose wants us to see. The study she cites (Neal et al. 2003) showed middle school teachers (almost all white women) video of two students, one black, one white, alternatively walking normally and then walking in the exaggerated black “stroll” style of walking. The teachers did interpret the “stroll” as indicative of comparative aggression and low achievement (and we might imagine testing this stereotype against reality, to see how effectively it comports with real tendencies to aggression, although the study does not endeavor to do this). But, the study notes clearly, it was the stroll, not the race of the student strolling, that mattered in their reading of the student’s likelihood to be aggressive. When both white and black students walked normally, teachers rated the black student higher in achievement and there was no racial difference in their evaluation of level of aggression. When both walked in the stroll, the white student was ranked lower in achievement and the students were evenly ranked in aggression. In other words, it was not race, but a particular behavioral attitude, that was evaluated by teachers as a sign of aggression, and both whites and blacks who engaged in the behavior were seen as more aggressive than whites and blacks who did not.
“Manner of Walking Along Roadway”: Metaracism and the Michael Brown Case
This case is also more than a decade in the past now. The bare bones facts are as follows: Michael Brown, 18, and a friend, Dorian Johnson, 22, both black, were walking in the middle of a street in Ferguson, Missouri, blocking traffic, when police officer Darren Wilson, arrived in his cruiser and ordered them to the sidewalk. Brown responded by attacking Wilson through the open window of his cruiser, which he had not yet exited, and attempted to take Wilson’s sidearm. The pistol was fired during the struggle to control it, and Brown was hit in the hand. He and Johnson then fled as Wilson exited and demanded they stop. Brown then charged Wilson, who fired to stop him, hitting him six times and fatally wounding him. A grand jury investigated the case and corroborated all the major details of Wilson’s account of the event. That investigation also demonstrated that Johnson’s contrary account (he claimed, among other falsehoods, that Wilson had tried to strangle Brown, that Brown never reached inside the cruiser, and that Wilson had fired at Brown as the latter was fleeing) was in conflict with basic elements of the forensic and other eyewitness evidence. A Department of Justice investigation of the matter (under President Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder) subsequently affirmed all the major findings of the grand jury. Wilson was not charged, and the DOJ did not pursue any civil rights charges against him.
As in the Martin chapter, Rose does not linger over the micro-details of the case. It may well be that she understands how impossible it is to look at them and see Brown as a victim. It is worth reemphasizing how overwhelmingly consistently both the grand jury and the DOJ findings demonstrate Brown’s culpability and the perfect reasonableness of Wilson’s response to his aggression. Both forensic evidence and voluminous eyewitness accounts agreed with Wilson’s account. Most of the eyewitnesses who corroborated Wilson’s story were black. One, an elderly black man, told police emphatically he “would have shot that fucking boy too.” The Department of Justice classified witnesses into two camps: 1) those whose testimony was internally consistent and squared with material evidence, and would therefore have seemed reliable to a jury; and 2) those whose testimony was not consistent and/or otherwise marred by clear failure to fit material evidence. They sub-divided the first category into two further categories: those whose testimony inculpated Wilson, and those who gave evidence that exculpated him. There were zero witnesses in the first category. That bears repeating, in slightly different language: The DOJ found no one among the claimed eyewitnesses who gave reliable testimony that demonstrated that Wilson’s account of the encounter with Brown was inaccurate in any significant way.
But again, Rose’s argument is that these micro-details are not as relevant as ghostly “structural” factors of much greater pertinence to understanding why this event happened. The chapter on Brown is titled “Manner of Walking Along Roadway,” implying that the central factor involved in Michael Brown’s death was the fact that he and his friend were walking in the street rather than on the sidewalk. She attempts to defend their way of navigating through the city and insinuates that penalties for walking in the street are targeted specifically at blacks. The sidewalks were too narrow, she claims, to allow two adults to comfortably walk side by side and “not be forced to walk in the grass.” It is a distinct and harmless marker of youthful and especially black rebellion to walk in the middle of the street. Brown was stopped merely for “Walking Black.”
But even if one imagines Brown was somehow singled out because of his race for walking in the street (there is no evidence whatsoever to support this idea), and that Wilson would never have stopped him were he white (again, no evidence to support this), we are still left trying to understand how a stop for such a minor level offense ended in the death of the suspect. Is Tricia Rose suggesting that Michael Brown had absolutely no agency whatever in the direction of that exchange? What if, instead of attacking Wilson while he was still inside his squad car and attempting to take his pistol, as many eyewitnesses to the event testified he did, Brown had simply moved out of the street to the sidewalk as requested? Are we to believe Wilson would have shot him anyway? What if, if even after Brown obeyed Wilson’s command to get out of the street Wilson had decided to arrest Brown, Brown had peaceably submitted and gotten into the squad car? Would the structural oppression of blacks in Ferguson somehow still have produced his death? It is clear that Michael Brown did precisely the kinds of things in interaction with a police officer that are likely to lead to injury or death on the part of the suspect. Does he have no responsibility at all for having taken these actions? Rose’s framework suggests she thinks the answer to that question is “No, none at all.”
Rose also spends time in the chapter discussing the fact that Ferguson maintained a rigorous system of municipal fines and fees that, in her analysis, kept blacks in a state of oppression through overzealous enforcement and escalating fine amounts for those delinquent in payments. But here too, the question of black agency is not addressed. If a legal regime of steep fines for parking and moving violations exists, a rational citizen response to that is to avoid parking and moving violations. Here is a telling example from Ferguson. A group of black residents there brought a class action suit against the city in 2015, claiming a variation on Rose’s claim, that is, that they were being unfairly targeted by a legal system that was biased against blacks. Keilee Fant was one of the lead plaintiffs. Ms. Fant, a single mother, had accrued dozens of parking tickets over a twenty-year period, she had systematically failed to pay them, and she was jailed many times during that period for failure to appear at court dates related to these charges. Whatever the details of the Ferguson municipal fine system and their rigor of enforcement, one wonders how much sympathy such a person is entitled to receive regarding the consequences of their demonstrated negligence. What kind of person accumulates dozens of parking violations knowing she does not have the funds to pay the fines, and then repeatedly does not appear for court dates related to those charges, in which she would have had the opportunity to present the case for her inability to pay and perhaps make arrangements for smaller payments over time, imagining that this will not have negative consequences at any point at which she comes into contact with police? Should we design our legal systems with the personal negligence and irresponsibility of a person like this as our model citizen? The implication of Rose’s analysis is that, if we do not so design our legal regime of fines and punishments, we are engaged in metaracism.
Metaracism as “Unlearning”: How to Avoid Seeing Reality and Thereby Enslave Yourself
At one point in the book, Rose unwittingly tells the reader what is required to believe in metaracism. We have to “unlearn” to see from her perspective. A vast amount of what we take as knowledge, informed by our common sense and our own two eyes and ears has to be rejected and replaced with the phantasms of her imagination so that we can see clearly. “A great deal of energy,” she tell us, “has gone into making systemic racism invisible.” And yet, somehow, she has seen through it. Another curiosity about the argument: systemic racism makes it impossible for blacks to exercise any will in decision-making, for example, when they are pulled over by police for walking in the street, and presumably they are structurally required to attack police in such situations. Yet, in a mystery for the ages, they are presumed to be capable of exercising the will required to bracket all the untruth they have learned previously and learn about metaracism and, presumably, subsequently engage in resistance to it.
One story Rose tells in the book gives away the whole game on “systemic racism” and its sob story about how terribly blacks have been harmed by these invisible shackles that she so gleefully invents and defends. She gives an account (220) of a black medical school dean who attended one of Rose’s public talks on metaracism. After the talk, he approached her and related to her that, after the death of his father, he had found among the dead man’s files a denial letter for a G.I. Bill-related mortgage from half a century earlier. In morally charged prose, Rose describes her effort to comprehend the tremendous amount of harm this had inflicted on the family of the deceased man. This terrible narrative of systemic oppression is “his family’s story…the story of Black Americans…our collective story.”
She seems to have forgotten that she had just told us that the son of the man who received the denial letter is the dean of a medical school. In 2023-24, medical school deans in the United States made a median annual salary of $833,200. This is precisely how much metaracism has affected this man’s life. Who knows what heights he might have attained if only he had not been so burdened by malevolent structures and systems beyond his control? Rose somehow believes she has hit a home run for her “theory” with this story, when she has in fact gone to the plate without a bat and struck out looking on three pitches.
In The Second Epistle of Peter 2:19, the apostle writes that “[a] man is a slave to whatever has mastered him.” The antiracist/systemic racism/metaracism cult refuses their own obvious freedom and the freedom of the people they describe. It insists on eternal enslavement to the unfaltering belief in their own slavery. This cult is not only wrong; it is a moral evil.
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