
Third-wave antiracism makes sense, but it's a dead end - toufiqbarhamov
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/why-third-wave-anti-racism-dead-end/578764/
======
JPKab
" In fact, however, third-wave antiracism is a profoundly religious movement
in everything but terminology. The idea that whites are permanently stained by
their white privilege, gaining moral absolution only by eternally attesting to
it, is the third wave’s version of original sin. The idea of a someday when
America will “come to terms with race” is as vaguely specified a guidepost as
Judgment Day. Explorations as to whether an opinion is “problematic” are
equivalent to explorations of that which may be blasphemous. The social
mauling of the person with “problematic” thoughts parallels the
excommunication of the heretic. What is called “virtue signaling,” then,
channels the impulse that might lead a Christian to an aggressive display of
her faith in Jesus. There is even a certain Church Lady air to much of the
patrolling on race these days, an almost performative joy in dog-piling on the
transgressor, which under a religious analysis is perfectly predictable."

Very accurate analysis imho.

Growing up around fundamentalist Christians, I'm pretty tuned into people who
use moral posturing to gain status within their social group. The resemblance
with the virtue signalling is uncanny.

~~~
wwright
Shunning of heretics was designed to centralize power in the church and
affiliated groups.

Modern social progressives do perform analogous shunnings, yes, but these acts
are for the explicit purpose of decentralizing power _away_ from groups who
have it.

~~~
haberman
Shunning of heretics was ostensibly done to defend the honor of God. The fact
that it increased the power of the people doing the shunning was surely viewed
as a means to a noble and right end, just as today.

~~~
toufiqbarhamov
Shunning was almost certainly also a matter of not wanting to be tainted by
association, which also can find parallels here.

------
pesmhey
Postmodernists had it right. It’s all socially constructed. Where the modern
left gets it wrong is that they’ve destroyed the foundations of the house that
we lived in without building a new one. Truly, black and white (and yellow,
ugh) don’t describe the world so much anymore. We’re already in a post-racial
society, and so few people realize it. The new language to describe our 21st
century America will be lords (the .01%) and peasants (not pejoratively
either, peasants historically enjoyed nice things in life).

We’re for sure in a multi-ethnic society. There’s no question about this. But
when a ‘black’ man is elected to the highest office, when ‘black’ people
continue to hold institutional power, both in government and universities, the
actual practice of racism becomes hard to prove. It becomes ethnocentrism.

The irony of this fact is how so many ‘whites’ (mostly uneducated) know it to
be true, and so many ‘blacks’ refuse to believe it, instead calling on the
European-American burgousie to feel guilt and dole out pity. There’s this
belief that to be ‘black’ means to be cursed. Fuck that, African-Americans
have reason to be proud of their accomplishments in this country.

If anything, white guilt is racism. You can’t look someone in the eye when
you’re looking down on them.

------
squozzer
What bothers me most about the discussion today is how tightly bound sins and
virtues - even traumas suffers by one's ancestors - are to genetics.

So we now have not just a racism / sexism morality based on actions and
statements, but a religious viewpoint (good / evil), eugenics (because it's
all baked into our genes), and caste (separating and ranking various human
phenotypes.)

History may not repeat itself, but it sometimes has a similar chord
progression.

------
dragonwriter
> Feminist history is typically described in three waves:

No, even when using the (profoundly flawed, but not entirely useless) “waves”
framework, it's usually described in at least four waves now.

> The struggle to secure voting rights, then workplace rights, and
> third—roughly—to upend stereotypes.

This is not an accurate summary of the usual description of the first three
waves of feminism; first wave feminism is typically associated with the early
struggle for legal rights in terms of access to basic political and economic
institutions (suffrage, independent property rights, access to work, access to
education).

Second-wave feminism is typically associated with a fight for equality within
institutions to which women already had access as a result of successes of
first-wave feminism (especially education and employment) and recognition of
rights addressing areas where women were uniquely situated either inherently
or by traditional gender roles (reproductive rights including contraception
and abortion, protection against domestic violence and marital rape, etc.)
Third-wave feminism is associated not merely with upending stereotypes (that's
part of it, but more in the context of recognizing a diversity in the female
experience and the challenges of women that feminism should be addressing;
intersectionality is probably a better short summary than upending
stereotypes.)

> The battle against racism and its effects is often described in a similar
> three-part timeline, with movements against slavery and segregation, and
> then—vaguely—the post-civil-rights era.

No, it's not often described that way especially by people in the activist
community, who describe themselves as civil rights activists, not add part of
some vague post-civil-rights antiracism wave. To the extent that multiple
waves are identified in racial justice activism in the US, they tend to be
abolition, the immediate post-abolition civil rights movement, and the modern
civil rights movement.

> third-wave antiracism may seem parallel to third-wave feminism in moving on
> to a different form of abuse, psychological rather than institutional.

Third-wave feminism doesn't focus on psychological abuse (though that's an
emergent focus of _fourth wave feminism_ , though it does focus on informal
social and institutional discrimination (as opposed to legal and other formal
social and institutional discrimination.) The author here send to conflate the
two concerns.

> But this focus on the psychological has morphed, of late, from a pragmatic
> mission to change minds into a witch hunt driven by the personal benefits of
> virtue signaling, obsessed with unconscious and subconscious bias.

No, it hasn't; first, virtue signalling is a social hack targeting members of
a movement by those who are not genuinely committed who wish to be seen as
part of it. Second, feminist virtue signalling had been around at least as
long as the suffrage movement, and continuously evolves to target current
tends in feminist thought, ditto with racial justice since at least the
immediate post-abolition period; the current level is nothing novel. Third,
targeting unconscious and subconscious bias isn't a recent evolution compared
to either “third-wave” (by feminism standards) style thought it the second-
wave style thought the author misattributes to as characterizing third wave
initially (or, a fortiori, the fourth-wave style thought he later claims is
the focus of the third wave.) It's classic third-wave feminism (and, if
anything, even older within the racial justice movement), because sucks and
unconscious vitae at the individual level is a pillar on which informal
structural and institutionalized discrimination rests. But, moreover, while it
is a concern of modern feminist and racial justice movements, is not the
central focus on either a genuine or virtue signalling sense; this is
particularly obvious if you look at the marquee hypercurrent racial justice
group, BLM. They aren't focussed centrality on vague psychological bias,
whether as a witch hunt or any other way; their central focus is material
accountability for concrete instances of material injustice.

> The virally popular Stuff White People Like blog of 2010 was a wry self-
> parody of the cultural mores that had settled in by roughly the late 1990s
> amidst a certain stripe of educated white people. “Being Offended” was one
> of the cleverest entries, describing a kind of almost recreational quest to
> take umbrage on behalf of people other than whites. Already, the satirical
> tone of this entry dates awkwardly: Many of the people it describes would
> read it today as disrespectful to the urgency of attesting to one’s white
> privilege.

The whole point of the original satire “of the cultural mores that had settled
in by roughly the late 1990s amidst a certain stripe of educated white people”
if that _everyone_ it describes would eat it that way. That's what was being
satirized. White knighting isn't a new thing, not yet or suddenly become
obligatory in the perception of the wider recital justice community, which is
now, more than ever, not defined predominantly by the attitudes of the
“educated white people” that are, of try to be by virtue signalling,
associated with it.

And then, after all this confused, muddled inaccurate mess of framing, the
examples (still generalizations that are far from concrete) he points to are
all about efforts targeting institutional acceptance of concrete offensive
behavior directed at members of minority communities or institutional
endorsement and involvement in racist speech. While there might be valid
complaints about these, either genuine or virtue signalling adherence to a
movement that has moved on to a phase that has gotten away from dealing with
concrete institutional discrimination to focus on un- or sub-conscious bias
isn't among the them.

As it progresses from the most abstract background to the more detailed (but
still fairly abstract and generalized) complaints, this piece builds a
narrative that is both internally inconsistent at frequently misrepresents
facts. But it manages to fit a litany of the standard complaints by elite
defenders of the status quo about the modern racial justice movement (a
perfect blackout of the bingo card is avoided only by the failure to work in
the phrase “identity politics”.)

Perhaps the author is genuinely confused enough to believe this incoherent
mess, or maybe it's just virtue signalling for a different audience. Whatever
it is, it's not a useful or meaningful or even well-thought-out contribution
to the discussion of racial politics in modern America.

~~~
toufiqbarhamov
I’m really struggling to see the difference between your description of 4th
wave feminism, and the author’s more succinct summation. I’m also struggling
to see how what seems to be bikeshedding around some fairly innocuous
semantics which don’t particularly change the point of the article, leads to
your conclusion of the article being an incoherent mess.

The majority of what’s being held up as problematic is very much a matter of
approach rather than goals, while you seem to be hung up on goals. Or maybe
I’m missing something? He doesn’t seem to be anything other than supportive of
fighting for the _aims_ you’re discussing, he’s questioning the degree to
which moral posturing online along with crude mobs really serves those goals
in the long run. I guess it feels like you e cherrypicked a strange and
minimal assortment of content to analyze, and it doesn’t seem like it supports
your extremely harsh conclusions.

------
fallingfrog
I love how all the hand wringing about how protesters are really just virtue
signaling is basically the same argument that the joker gives when hanging by
his toes: YOU KNOW YOU’RE JUST LIKE ME UNDERNEATH BATMAN

I mean come on. The argument that we need to just have a calm, rational debate
over whether some groups of people are just racially inferior is so absurd it
deserves to be treated with ostracism and disgust. I’m sorry that these old
Ivy League gentlemen are offended by a bit of truth. But this is not about
idealized debate, it’s about power, and violence, and transformation, and
you’re not going to get that without getting a little mad and making some
noise.

~~~
dang
Please do not post in the flamewar style to Hacker News. It's beyond tedious,
and we're hoping for something more interesting here.

It's good to remember that authors of magazine articles don't pick their
titles. We've switched to the subtitle above (shortened to fit HN's 80-char
limit).

~~~
fallingfrog
The article doesn’t belong on hn at all, but if people are going to upvote it,
then I think it’s fair game to trash it. I mean it’s got nothing to do with
technology and it’s not news.

~~~
dang
Please read the site guidelines:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

The first paragraph says " _On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find
interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to
reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one 's
intellectual curiosity._"

The second half is an extended plea not to engage in "trashing" on this site.

~~~
T2_t2
And startups are populated by young people, so the cultural shifts that exist
matter. If you have any employees at all between 18 and 30, the current
culture is something you need to understand.

And I don't think even big companies like Google do. The backlash against
drones and that China SE were telling.

I don't have any answers to those problems, and these sorts of articles are
interesting as background to what it all is.

------
cazum
Our author seems to be quite drastically mischaracterizing the intentions of
what he calls the "contemporary left":

>The contemporary left’s concern is with the underlying biases that bolster
the racism that remains. It seeks, as a way forward, a society not only
without racist structures, but without racist thought, which, for one, can
foster race-based disparities that eerily parallel those conditioned in the
past by overt segregation.

This, as someone who spends a lot of time both in a very liberal college and
in lefty online "safe spaces", is an ideology I've never encountered. Leftists
generally Subscribe to an ideology that explains material conditions as the
force that causes struggle in a society. Those conditions usually being
economic structures, but usually include specific things like the power
structure of a police force, private ownership of prisons, the "war on drugs",
etc.

The author complains heavily about how "SJWs" call people White Supremacist
too often, but doesn't give any specific example of this happening and why the
label was inappropriate. In fact, nearly every one of the "examples" of
leftist speech seems to be your average dismissive "laugh at the cuck cringe
complication" quotes attributed without context to nobody in particular:

>The new normal is, “If you don’t like it, cry loudly and then louder, because
you’re always right and they’re just bad.”

I don't actually think anybody really thinks this. I've never heard this
ideology espoused by anybody, except anti-sjws, as they're sometimes referred
to as, who are trying to strawman and discredit someone.

The times I have heard people call people White Supremacist is, for example,
when a white person starts arguing about IQ scores, which is an explicitly
white supremacist argument, and uncontroversially so unless you're unfamiliar
with WHY iq tests are inherently biased, in which case you might not see why
the label is appropriate and will only see a lib getting mad for no reason.

I believe the author has simply collected a few instances of college liberals
losing their temper on camera and extrapolated that into an entire incoherent
worldview without any analysis of what the leftist cucks actually believe.

Additionally, the phrase "virtue signalling" is extremely sloppy. Is there any
action done, aside from those done under the privacy of total anonymity that
could not be motivationally attributed to wishing the signal virtue? Perhaps
I'm virtue signalling for writing this reply. Maybe you're virtue signalling
for upvoting it. Maybe the author is virtue signalling for having written the
article about virtue signalling. Even if what he says about progressives was
true, why would wishing to change the psychology of percieved white racists be
"virtue signalling"?

~~~
claudiawerner
Not only that, but the author has displayed a poverty of knowledge on the
topic they're writing about, in particular the theory which drives the
movements the author is arguing against. For instance,

>Contrast this approach with that of people lionized today who worked within a
racism none could disagree was more implacably overt and hostile than today.

This is exactly the issue being raised by the people the author decries. The
fact that these issues have become less overt and hostile is part of the
problem - we compare current racisms to the more "overt" ones and therefore
conclude they have disappeared rather than change form, just as Zizek notes
the new forms of dominance in the workplace are no longer to command you to
work, but for your boss to befriend you such that you feel bad for not
working. I think the superego is at work in racism and in the workplace.

>fostering social justice requires fashioning oneself as vulnerable, injured,
and/or broken by things

Does this apply to the large body of academics in the social and philosophical
sciences who have usually maintained a large degree of professionalism, or is
the author only criticising young people who are, like any other generation,
interested in drawing attention to themselves, in addition to whatever
legitimate grievances they might have?

>She believed that the speech rights blacks had fought for so hard must be
extended to people she found noxious, including on issues as personal to her
as race.

This is one example where the author cites a black person to maintain the
notion that if a civil rights leader has done something correctly, then it
_must_ have been right. Could it not, on the contrary, be argued that modern
times have called for a change in tactics and a renewed set of problems, even
if the author had previously suggested that they are less overt, could it not
also be that they are different in kind not merely degree? Is the author aware
of the work of Herbert Marcuse in his criticism of J.S. Mill's idea of speech
and tolerance, or indeed the left criticism of human rights? I'd actually
suppose that if the people he decries are putting forward strong anti-racist
arguments then he should also be willing to consider the critique of ideology
which drives them.

He is thus either not willing to look deeply into what he criticises (i.e he
will focus on the appearance of "woke" college students rather than the
essence of why they do what they do psyhcoanalytically or philosophically) or
he is unable to look that deep for one reason or another.

~~~
zepto
The author isn’t doing any of the things you’re claiming.

He agrees that racism has changed form and supports the goals of 3rd wave
anti-racists, and understands why they do what they do.

He just argues that the tactics they use are self-defeating.

~~~
claudiawerner
Except he is doing what I'm claiming; but claiming that racism manifests
itself differently (which, if it is his only position, I agree with him) isn't
only what he's doing, he's also implying that the racism of today is less
pernicious, and leaving no scope for it to be equally as pernicious. If racism
has changed form, shouldn't the responses to it also change form? The author
also brings up racist viewpoints as merely "challenging the orthodoxy of
race".

The issue here is very simple; the author sees the tactics as self defeating
because he doesn't agree with them, or because they don't want to accomplish
his own aims - because they challenge the liberal orthodoxy, which he defends
by mentioning several _policies_. To him, only policies can be challenged, and
anything other than a policy doesn't count for institutional racism at all.
The only exceptions he's willing to make are when racism is _so bad_ that
liberal approaches don't work so well - in Dr. King's instance. But I would
contend that racism (and indeed sexism and classism) manifests itself in a
much more overt and discreet way, but this only makes them categorically
worse, just as the workplace example I used.

I'm not entirely convinced he does understand what they want to do, having
opted to go for a standard "they just want to control what we think" line
rather than addressing their issues with the process as it actually stands.
It's a bizarre article which hasn't looked into the history of the movement as
it exists, and what its strengths and shortcomings are.

~~~
manfredo
I'm struggling to understand how one _would_ attempt to claim that the racism
of today is equally or more pernicious than the racism of first and second
wave antiracism movements? Is it your genuine belief that racism today exceeds
that during 2nd wave antiracism? That people in 2018 suffer racism of equal
magnitude as compared to poll taxes, explicit refusal to hire certain races,
de-facto legal lynching, etc. ? Or first wave antiracism (abolitionism)? It
seems incredibly difficult to make either of these claims.

No doubt, any amount of racism is more than what is ideal. But to criticize
the article for, "implying that the racism of today is less pernicious, and
leaving no scope for it to be equally as pernicious" strikes me as non-
sensical, since the overwhelming majority of people would agree that it is
less pernicious.

~~~
james-mcelwain
Liberals have a tendency to focus on legal frameworks and equality before the
law while ignoring the material conditions and the lived experiences of black
people.

In some sense, it's trivially true that legal equality means things are
"better", but there's plenty of empirical evidence that suggests that material
gains won by the civil rights movement have regressed significantly.

For example, in many places, schools are more segregated than they've been
since the 60s [1]. Further, the housing crisis erased gains in black wealth
back to levels of the 80s and 90s [2].

This is too large a subject to get into in an HN comment, but if you're
curious, I'd highly suggest reading Michelle Alexander's excellent book _The
New Jim Crow_ [3], which focuses particularly on incarceration.

[1]: [https://www.vox.com/2018/3/5/17080218/school-segregation-
get...](https://www.vox.com/2018/3/5/17080218/school-segregation-getting-
worse-data) [2]: [https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/wp-
content/uploads/2017...](https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/wp-
content/uploads/2017/12/Foreclosed.pdf) [3]:
[https://www.vanderbilt.edu/ctp/The_New_Jim_Crow.pdf](https://www.vanderbilt.edu/ctp/The_New_Jim_Crow.pdf)

~~~
manfredo
No doubt that the lived experiences of black people aren't entirely captured
by legal changes. But the point remains: how can one reasonably make the claim
that the lived experiences of black people between reconstruction and the
Civil Rights movement, or before abolition of slavery are the same or better
than today?

