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Notes -
Freddie De Boer and the Limits of Anti-Classificationist Discourse
Typically in my life my views on racial law have tended towards the Anti-Classificationist rather than the Anti-Subordinationist school, or I suppose to represent all sides on the Motte to the Hierarchical or Purity schools of thought. In my mind, discrimination and group conflict follow naturally once you define groups, and therefore the best thing to do if your goal is to avoid discrimination is to avoid formally classifying groups. Religious denomination used to be a very heavily classified, tracked, and studied American demographic. We used to have a Catholic Seat, and then a Jewish Seat on the SCOTUS; now we have only a single Protestant on the Court, with seven Catholics and one Jew. And forget anyone being able to tell the difference between a Presbyterian and a Babtist; I once completely tanked a job interview lunch by asking a woman who had just told me she was on the board of her local Methodist church what exactly the "method" was and she couldn't tell me. Ketanji Brown Jackson was widely celebrated for increasing the Diversity of the court, but almost no mainstream news outlet mentioned that her appointment was striking a blow against Hebrew and Papist over-representation, nor has the decline of the Jewish justices from three seats to just one sparked a series of hand-wringing op-eds about rising antisemitism. Other contrasting examples include Hutus and Tutsis, where the colonial creation of the categories cemented existing divisions and created conflict. Or how people with Norman surnames still out-earn other Englishmen. While the Norman descendants have faced group conflict on terms of social class, modern Britain did not face a large racial clash, because it was not a classification used by English law, and so you don’t have the congealing of the identity groups that creates conflict.
However, reading Freddie’s latest has me noticin’ a little. The core of the piece is asking why the liberal media tolerates Tyson while continuously reviling somebody like Woody Allen:
And the difference seems so blindingly obvious that it’s punching me in the face, and that’s sort of ruining my anti-classicationist plan. Ctrl-F-ing the article: zero hits for White, zero hits for Black, zero hits for Religion, zero hits for Jew, zero hits for Ethnic-, zero hits for African. Freddie doesn’t mention the possible role that race would seem to play, even to refute it. And in my mind this would be perceived as a failure by either side of the political spectrum.
If one views the media as broadly anti-White, one would say that Allen is still in trouble because he is white, while Tyson is forgiven because Tyson is Black, and PC society demands that we forgive the Black criminal and celebrate Black Excellence. Or, at the very least, that weenie turbolibs at TheRinger are uncomfortable criticizing Black celebrities in ways that might code as racist if taken out of context and uncharitably, and that in an abundance of caution the hosts at TheRinger choose to criticize white rather than Black celebs, softer targets.
If one views society as broadly anti-Black, one would say that Allen is still in trouble because Allen’s victims are white, while Tyson is easily forgiven because Tyson only committed violence against Black women. That the act of forgiving Black men for violence against Black women is itself Anti-Black, it is the failure to provision public goods for Black communities; the protection provided by legal and social sanction against those who commit crimes against Black Women, who if only for reasons of proximity will always be primarily Black men. Hence Bill Cosby eventually got his, he drugged and sodomized white women in between as well.
But neither side will see much logic in DeBoer’s steadfast refusal to acknowledge the obviously relevant facts around the cases he is comparing.
Personally, I find it definitely relevant. Tyson is forgiven thanks to a particularly grim version of the soft bigotry of low expectations, combined with racism against his victims by race and by class. Black celebrities are allowed to act in ways that turbolibs won’t tolerate in white men. White feminists love to start panics around college campus rape or similar problems, while ignoring that women in the college age-range who don’t attend college are more likely to be victimized. The prime targets of Feminism are men like Brett Kavanaugh, while they ignore the much more numerous and more violent men like Chris Brown, because for your average Wesleyan Critical Theorist she is under very little threat from men like Chris Brown and much more from men she actually interacts with. Your media or academia or twitterati feminist will never hang out with anyone who looks or acts like Mike Tyson, she does hang out with people who look and act like Woody Allen or Brett Kavanaugh.
It's all making me question some of my anti-classification bona fides.
This seems like a flaw with the most pure form of anti-classificationism that could be addressed by a minor adjustment to a tit-for-tat strategy, which is mostly where my position is. It would be ideal if people mostly just didn't talk about race. Other people do talk about race, and therefore it makes it very difficult to communicate or model them if you just naively pretend that race doesn't exist while everyone else does. If you just let all the racists run around being racist but don't acknowledge their motivations then you can't even talk about them coherently, let alone come up with strategies to combat them.
Instead, it seems like the best strategy is to only talk about race on the meta level. You do not define categories for people, you do not treat people differently based on what categories other people put them in. But when other people put people into categories, you acknowledge that they have done so and respond accordingly, and discuss the categories that exist in their minds. People are not forgiving Mike Tyson because he is black on the object level and his black skin causes him to emit forgiveness pheromones or something, people are forgiving Mike Tyson because they have categorized him as "black" in their minds and have allowed him to inherit all of the baggage about victims and oppressors that our society associates with that. This seems acceptable to mention and criticize.
Race does matters in the real world as a self-fulfilling prophecy because people treat it like it does. But if more people adopt this form of anti-classification then discussions about race become rarer and rarer since fewer people would bring it up in the first place on the object level, and thus the amount race matters would exponentially decay as it being discussed less would make it matter less which would make it be discussed less, back and forth.
I agree. I think hard classifications in any subject where the classes created aren’t material to the discussion tend to limit the discussion while creating very fertile ground for anti-intellectual arguments and thought terminating accusations.
The truest statement I’ve ever read about racism is that accusations of bigotry are what The Last Psychiatrist called “cognitive kill switches”. No matter what the actual conversation was about, up to and including flavors of ice cream, the minute someone accuses another person of racism, the conversation is now about defending that charge of racism. If I say that vanilla ice cream is racist because it’s white, we are not going to be discussing ice cream but rather the claim that vanilla is racist. This doesn’t generate light, just heat. And further, at least as long as the discussion is about policy issues, you can’t get to the point of actually solving the problems because quite often a proposed solution will be considered racist, or the way the conversation is had is racist, thus it goes unsolved. Police brutality was probably solvable before it got mixed up with BLM. Lots of people were talking about excessive force and looking for better solutions to those problems. But, once policing became a racial issue, simply saying something like “the police are too likely to engage in violence where none is needed” meant silencing blacks. So nothing can be done about it unless it tickles the right people’s fancy.
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