The ‘Anti-Racist’ Who Wasn’t

T oday’s edition of the Washington Post comes with the comforting news that the psychiatrist who told an audience at Yale’s medical school that “she fantasized about killing White people” was, in fact, simply expressing to the world how deeply she cares. In an April 6 lecture, prosaically titled “Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind,” Aruna Khilanani explained that she dreamed of “unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body, and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step, like I did the world a fu**ing favor.” Perhaps because they lacked the tools to interrogate and educate themselves, some observers responded rather negatively to these ideas. But, as Khilanani clarifies today, they have got her completely wrong: What she said was not the product of a demented, bigoted, Charles Manson–esque mind, but of a legitimate “frustration about minority mental health,” a desire to “have more serious conversations about race,” and, ultimately, love. Khilanani does what she does, she told the Post, “because I care.”

Well, that’s a relief.

It does not take an exquisitely trained mind to understand why the oft-trailed and much-coveted “Conversation about Race in America” never actually happens in earnest — and, indeed, why it is unlikely ever to happen in earnest. Thanks to the ever-shifting pseudo-scientific nonsense that underpins almost every contemporary “academic” framework, the plain words a given person uses when discussing race do not tend to matter much these days. What matters, instead, is how our self-appointed arbiters of taste wish those words to be perceived. Thus it is that any self-evidently racist comment made by a favored player is immediately justified in terms that would typically be reserved for an especially pretentious exhibit of modern art — “the intermittently blank canvas explores the tension between sound and electricity in an era of existential dread” — while the jokes, mainstream political opinions, unfortunate coincidences, and childhood indiscretions of the disfavored become crystallized into the permanent mark of the Klan. Who, in his right mind, would consent to talk on the record under these rules?

And why should he, when the results of the game have been facially preposterous? We are now living in a country in which an invited guest of Yale University can say aloud that she fantasizes about shooting white people dead to do the world “a fu**ing favor” and expect that her words will be explained away as a caring attempt to “start a conversation,” while a black Supreme Court justice who believes that racial discrimination is a legal problem in all circumstances can expect to be maligned as an “Uncle Tom” — or, even, as a white supremacist. We are now living in a country whose academic and media establishments have become increasingly deranged by a fringe theory with elementary premises that do not differ greatly from those once proffered by Alexander Stephens, while those who champion genuine equality and unalloyed freedom of expression are labeled casually as “fascists.” We are now living in a country in which corporations are happy to spend millions of dollars inviting Kafka Trap–peddling frauds to tell bewildered employees that they’re secret segregationists, while strongly backing legal initiatives that would literally reimpose government discrimination on the basis of race. It’s Calvinball, all the way down.

These paradoxes cannot stand. Racism cannot simultaneously be so diffuse that it implicates every American who voted for Donald Trump, and so narrow that it excludes Aruna Khilanani. It cannot be so important as to justify the abolition of the U.S. Constitution, and so irrelevant as to render the shocking words of its leading opponents mere distractions. And, most important of all, it cannot be so inchoate and flexible a concept that the only way to achieve redemption is to follow a protean catechism set by a handful of self-appointed priests. A paper published in May in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association takes Khilanani’s rhetoric to its logical conclusion. “Whiteness,” its author, Donald Moss, proposes, “is a condition one first acquires and then one has—a malignant, parasitic-like condition” that “renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse” and “to which ‘white’ people have a particular susceptibility.” Alas, Moss concludes, “once established, these appetites are nearly impossible to eliminate” — except, of course, via “a combination of psychic and social-historical interventions” to be prescribed on a permanent basis by figures such as . . . well, Donald Moss. Buttoning his summary, Moss laments that “there is not yet a permanent cure.” Presumably, Aruna Khilanani and the revolver of loving justice she fantasizes about would disagree.

Claims that one’s race is akin to a disease — and, by extension, that racism is so dependent upon intractable power structures that it serves as a form of original sin — may well be treated seriously in the nation’s universities, but, here in the outside world, they are regarded by people of all races and political persuasions as unmitigated garbage. Having successfully seized the nation’s attention after the killing of George Floyd, America’s self-professed “anti-racists” now have a choice to make. They can build atop the classically liberal work of Lincoln, Douglass, and King, and attempt to forge a broad coalition for their cause. Or they can assemble for themselves an exclusive club that makes up for its lack of real influence with its narrow — and lucrative — prestige. One of these approaches will have room for the Aruna Khilananis and Donald Mosses of the world. The other most certainly will not. Which path is taken will tell us a lot about how seriously that “national conversation” is being sought by its advocates — and about who actually “cares,” too.