The Corner

Politics & Policy

What Name Should We Use for the Worldview of People like Ibram X. Kendi?

By
Ibram X. Kendi speaks about one of his books at Unitarian Universalist Church in Montclair, N.J., August 14, 2019. (Montclair Film/Wikimedia Commons)

America has been gripped by a lunatic set of beliefs revolving around racial disparities. The best-known proponents, people like Ibram X. Kendi, demand a racial transformation of the country to end all vestiges of racism. We must become “anti-racist.” Anyone who dissents must be a racist.

What name should we attach to such people and their movement? That is the question Bob Graboyes takes up in his latest “Bastiat’s Window ” post.

He begins:

EGALITARIANISM VERSUS ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The titanic social struggle of our era pits those favoring equality (in its traditional sense) against those demanding “equity” (in a sense far from its traditional meaning). One who advocates equality is an egalitarian, and his philosophy is egalitarianism. One who advocates “equity” has no name—or has scores of names; the same is true of his philosophy. This asymmetry of nomenclature and the divergent meanings of “equity” put egalitarians at a powerful rhetorical disadvantage. For effective argumentation, egalitarians need to level the rhetorical playing field, and I believe the most efficient way of doing so is to refer to anti-egalitarians as “equitists” and to their philosophy as “equitism”—as we’ll do here.

Bob makes a good argument, but I don’t like giving those people the benefit of a good word (equity) to use in their terribly coercive, inequitable quest.

What they demand is government coercion to ensure that “fair” percentages of people from each designated group (based on race, not on other things like religion, musical preferences, being right or left handed, having been adopted, or any other category) get into colleges (elite ones, anyway), get hired into good jobs, are chosen for orchestras, and so on. This calls for constant governmental favoritism toward some and discrimination against others. It utterly subverts the American commitment to individual rights in the name of a policy that must (probably forever) treat people unequally based on their ancestry, just so a few can pat themselves on the back and say, “We’re ending racism.”

I’d rather call it SGD — Selective Group Discrimination.

return-icon Return to The Corner

George Leef is the director of editorial content at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal. He is the author of The Awakening of Jennifer Van Arsdale: A Political Fable for Our Time.
Exit mobile version