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The vast sums that have flowed from corporations, foundations and wealthy individuals into "antiracism" initiatives resemble the "indulgences" that, purchased from the medieval church, promised remission of punishment for sins: "When the coin in the coffer rings, A soul from Purgatory springs." Many of today's antiracists encourage donors to buy virtue, but use the donations to finance restoration of a retrograde principle.
Ibram X. Kendi attracted nearly $55 million for his Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University. The center's shambolic three years -- it has produced negligible research, and recently shed about 40 percent of its staff -- reflects Kendi's administrative shortcomings, and Boston University's inattention after its cash-grasping opportunism.
But moral panics are regularly recurring enjoyments for the many Americans who relish crusades and (other peoples') penances.
Because such antiracism will be fashionable for a while, its espousers and financiers should ponder this: Their antiracism shares the premise of Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court decision that buttressed Jim Crow racial segregation by authorizing "separate but equal" treatment of the races. Consider "Permissions to Hate: Antiracism and Plessy" in the Texas Review of Law & Politics.
In the article, GianCarlo Canaparo of the Heritage Foundation argues that like Plessy, much contemporary antiracism "abandons the idea that it is worthwhile or possible to create a society in which each person is treated equally regardless of race."
Post-Plessy, legislatures had broad, court-approved license to embrace whatever was the day's conventional wisdom regarding race.
Half a century passed before the civil rights movement began undoing Plessy's damage. The 1950s school desegregation decisions effected what Canaparo calls "a dramatic methodological shift on race issues from a focus on group interests to a focus on individuals' rights." But many of today's antiracists would, Canaparo writes, "replace the new with the old.
Hence today's advocacy of racial group preferences in government programs, from business financing to medical immunizations to racial "affinity groups" in public schools. Justice John Marshall Harlan, in his magisterial dissent in Plessy, foresaw the discord that today's antiracists are sowing by their revival of Plessy's premise.
As Yascha Mounk explains in "The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time," this century's most momentous development in political thought is progressivism's rejection of universalism. This great repudiation sweeps away governance focused on individual rights, which can be protected only by the universalist premise that, in Mounk's words, "for political purposes, all human beings are born equal."
Rejection of this precedes the belief that the world should be seen "through the prism of group identities," such as race. People who say that also say this: Universal values and neutral rules (e.g., free speech) are actually ruses concocted by the dominant group to prevent government from treating people justly, meaning according to their identity groups.
So, antiracists of Kendi's stripe have a stake in making social peace permanently impossible. Discord is lucrative. Hence the return to 1896.