This is going to be very meta-. Since Matthew and I are doing this little project, neither of us having any idea what we're doing, I thought it might be useful—if only on my part—to make a longer preliminary statement. I do this, in part, because misunderstandings can arise in these discussions, particularly if the issue is race, one is black and one has a significant parting-of-the-ways with what could be called ideological orthodoxy. I am not a political conservative. By any reasonable definition, I am a Socialist for most practical economic purposes. I am a social libertarian meaning that unless there is some compellingly good reason for a non-harmfulact or substance to be illegal, it should not be illegal. I am, on principle, on board with the idea that you get to end your own life as you choose. I believe that the war-on-drugs is a massive and tragic failure. I believe that a woman's right to make decisions about her own reproductivity is an inherent right. I believe that marriage should be a contract that people can enter into and if some wish to impose religious ceremony or meaning on it, bully for them. Since there is no reason why two women or two men could not enter into such a contract, I strongly support gay marriage. I oppose the death penalty on a number of fronts although, to be perfectly honest, not categorically. If someone were to, for instance, release smallpox back into the ecology, death would be a fate altogether too good for them. I believe that it is indicative of racism that so many black men are on death row, relative to their representation in the population as a whole. I am no fan of free-market capitalism (regulated capitalism is another story).
In other words, I am a pretty typical left-coast Progressive. That said, my views on race and multiculturalism, in its strongest forms, are not in keeping with Progressive orthodoxy. Why this is so is the subject of this post.
Firstly, it would be helpful to define what I mean when I use terms like 'justice' and 'social contract' because they're very relevant.
I am a Rawlsian Liberal. Meaning that I take a lot of my thinking about Justice from John Rawls' seminal work, “A Theory of Justice”. In it, he articulates the idea of justice as fairness. As a thought experiment, he asks us to imagine creating a society ex nihilo. We get to make a truly just society, wipe the slate clean and start all over. Everyone involved in the negotiation starts from exactly the same place, as equals. The really clever bit is this, no one knows where they will end up in the social hierarchy; meaning that you don't know whether you will be rich or poor, in the ethnic majority or an ethnic or religious minority. No one knows if they will be male or female. The set of rules that this group of self-interested parties would come up with for ordering a society will tend to be a just one. There is a great deal more to it than that, of course. (It's a difficult book, it took me a long time to get through it because it's very dense but well worth the read. )
One cannot help but notice that this assumes a social contract which is the other grounding assumption I make. I believe that humans order society by sets of agreements between parties. We form coalitions, build alliances, have hierarchies, etc. All of these are relational and, ultimately, contractual arrangements. This may be a good thing or it may not be, for my purposes this is simply what is and what we have to work with if we desire to see great social justice and equality.
There is one last important grounding assumption I feel the need to confess. I believe that human beings are animals and that means that we are what we are because evolution. Whatever transcendence we may attain, however brief, we carry our Pleistocene past with us. We are not creatures of the city so much as we are creatures of the village. This also means that we are neither angels nor are we monsters. This means that there are practical limits to the perfectability of humans and thus, to our societies. I think we are not there. This is not it, there's a lot of work to do, but I think a better world is possible just very difficult to obtain and it can only be so much better.
Again, I felt the need to put this out there first before going to the meat of the matter. So here we go.
In order for there to be racial progress, and I think most folks would say that things have ground to some kind of impasse to some degree, we must re-envision what it is we are trying to achieve. We have to re-think what the struggle is about and this will change how we go about thinking about solving the problem. This is not my parent's civil rights struggle. They were involved in the Struggle during the 40's, 50's and 60's in Alabama. That is not where my life is lived, it is not really the life lived by any black folks in America today. This struggle is different and, to some degree, the greater part of it must take place within the black community. It pains me to write that. It pains me deeply to write it. But it must be said. This is not to say that this work is the whole of the thing, merely that it is a large part of the thing.
It is time for the black community, particularly the black intelligentsia, to abandon the strong form of multiculturalism. The strong form states that cultures are sacrosanct. All cultures are sacrosanct and have rights that transcend the rights of people within those cultures. Such that if one is a person of goodwill one is obligated never to criticize a culture except for the dominant one. What this has meant is that a number of things that really shouldn't be tolerated are tolerated and I am talking about things that have been going on in the black community, certainly as long as I have been aware.
Afrocentrism must die.
I will start with the most ridiculous (yes, that's the word I'm using) idea that I think does harm to race relations in America and that is Afrocentrism. At the core of this ideology is the idea that black children will only identify with figures of historical note or with various achievements if the people who performed these feats are of the same color. So the fact that someone built the pyramids is secondary to the idea that these people were black (which they weren't—these were not sub-Saharan Africans). Aristotle did not get his ideas from the library at Alexandria because when he lived,
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