One of the things I find most disturbing about “anti-racists” is their demand that you must either agree to everything they say or else you are a “racist.” Popular authors Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo claim that if you are not an “anti-racist” you are a racist. There are only two options. Thus speak the anti-racists.  This false dilemma, this unjustified dichotomy, is just “because.”

“Anti-racism” is not the opposite of racism, despite the misleading nomenclature. It is virulent new form of racism. To pull off this minor miracle of creativity, the “anti-racists” have invoked a new expansive definition of “racism” that has nothing to do with specific unfair attitudes or behavior of specific people. The “anti-racists” invoke a Manichean claim that it is OK to judge people as good and bad (respectively Blacks and whites) based on immutable physical appearance, just because. In doing this, they are dusting off that old disreputable idea that melanin should serve as a guilt barometer. This is something they have in common with racists of the Civil War and Jim Crow eras, although the new barometer is upside-down.

This “anti-racist” formula has worked all too well for the past several years. Well-meaning people who fervently disagree with this “anti-racist” claim, however, including the specific claim that “all white people are racist,” are being held emotional hostage. They are afraid to speak up, to disagree in public places. It is truly bizarre to see so many people who disagree with these “anti-racist” claims who are afraid to speak up. I know this from numerous private conversations. It’s starting to look like many religions, where the preachers preach at the flock and members of the flock merely nod their heads, even thought they know in every bone of their bodies that the Earth is not 6,000 years old, that virgins don’t have babies and that (an example from my Catholic upbringing) eating the host is not literally eating bloody muscles and capillaries. Members of the flock sat in total silence when the NYT promoted claims that the American Revolution was primarily for the purpose of promoting slavery, a central claim of “The 1619 Project.”

So this is where we are: the preachers are preaching and members of the flock keep sitting silently because they are afraid of going to “anti-racist” hell. For them, hell is what would happen is they were publicly called “racist.”  Thus, members of the flock will sit in paralyzed silence, even when the anti-racists call all “white” people and their Black intellectual allies “racist” no matter how exemplary their lives have been. Isn’t that weird? “White” people are already being called racists as a group merely by their skin color, yet they fear being called “racist” as individuals. And what drives this fear is, ironically, that they hate racism. This is stranger than any fiction any creative writer could concoct. These “anti-racist” threats of name-calling are successfully turning many people into Zombies (this reminds me of how many types of wasps sting and zombify other bugs to use as hatcheries). After getting stung by the threat of being called “racists,” the fearful zombified flock is willing to sit in silence even when the “anti-racists” make patently false claims that no racial progress has occurred since 1619, since the Civil War or since the Civil Rights era.  They sit in silence while the “anti-racists” ridicule Martin Luther King’s idea that we should not be judged by the color of our skin, but only by the content of character.

Once this creepy dynamic settled into place, anti-racists, such as Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, began getting free rides from individuals who knew better but who were afraid to speak out. More troublesome, the anti-racists’ fact-free and oftentimes false diatribes also began getting luxury free rides from corporate HR departments, government agencies (and here) and many members of our sense-making institutions, including left-leaning legacy media. In addition to securing the silence of people who disagree under threat of being called names, the “anti-racists” employ another big weapon: the rage of Woke mobs who are willing to destroy the careers of anyone who dares to dissent (recent example).

Linguist John McWhorter has not been afraid to call out the anti-racists.  He has done this in many places, including his article in The Atlantic,  “The Dehumanizing Condescension of White Fragility: The popular book aims to combat racism but talks down to Black people.” McWorther, a professor of linguistics, has taken a lot of flack from the far left for repeatedly calling out that the Emperor Has No Clothes.

McWhorter had more than his fill, however, when Ibram X. Kendi recently and publicly called McWhorter’s ideas “racist.”  Kendi has made dozens of claims that should be vigorously scrutinized by academics, book reviewers and the general public, but he has been surfing on the waves of fearful silence. That silence meant that the normally unflappable McWhorter had to fend for himself.  He decided it was time to push back dramatically, in a public way. Hence these excerpts from the November 23, 2020 episode of The Glenn Show with Glenn Loury: