Anti-Racism Is Weird

“Weird is the only word available to describe the implicit rules, rituals, and taboos that surround the issue.”

The massive wave of Black Lives Matter protests that jolted the nation after the death of George Floyd was met with an institutional purge of dissenting voices from mainstream institutions. This has sparked wide ranging critiques of the prevailing progressive narrative on race across the political spectrum. The question naturally arises: Is this what progress looks like? If we want to make an omelette, as the saying goes, is it necessary to break some eggs? And if so, how do we know that we are breaking the correct ones?

Most arguments against Black Lives Matter and its animating ideology can be placed in one of three baskets: Either it worsens polarization by reinforcing racial and political tribalism, is excessively moralizing in ways that ring of religiosity, or that it ultimately harms the people that it intends to help by encouraging a victim/savior dynamic. However, another, more obvious argument is that modern anti-racism is deeply, truly, and overwhelmingly strange. The mental contortions necessary to navigate our morally charged racial politics—a politics that views people exclusively through the singular lens of historically determined social categories (in an increasingly multi-ethnic society no less)—makes any humanist approach to these issues almost impossible.

The ways in which we think and talk about race would never strike anyone as natural or sane were it broached in a vacuum, outside the context of our history and culture. Weird is the only word available to describe the implicit rules, rituals, and taboos that surround the issue. A martian visiting from another planet would be very confused by the double standards, contradictions, and oddities that most of us accept as the norm.