As you have surely noticed many times over, the words “racism” and “racist” are in their high noon. These words are about ninety years old, give or take two or three. But in all probability, they have been made recourse of with higher frequency in the last three years than in the about a century that has passed since the British and American press misleadingly coined them, as back-formations from, and doubles as false friends of their French equivalent, racisme and raciste. These words are so often repeated and so loudly and indiscriminately you would think they are the language equivalent of new dieting fad. Pay careful attention to the wild proliferation of these words, and you might detect in the phenomenon the high degree of the irascibility that fuels public discourse and all types of interactions in society.
Herein I attempt to dig into reasons that it is so. As it goes, unless you are black or belong to any of the so-called people-of-color groups, if a polygraph test could be designed specifically for that purpose, the probability is high that you could be found to have practiced “racism” one way or another at some point in your life, whether you were aware or not. For surely, even if before the so-called social media multibillionaire business became the respiratory system of the vain, the narcissists, and the superfluous, and even if only once in your life you would have sold, bought, exchanged, seen, thought of, eaten, written, put on, spoken, asked, danced, or greeted someone in manners that a self-appointed antiracist of today would have an easy time showing that some of that, any of that, or the whole of that of what you did, is racist. For, as it happens, in our days not only people and institutions can practice something which the English use of the word has uncritically accepted to be “racism.” Things, objects, and activities in our days get attributed human qualities, they can also be viewed as exhibiting “racist” beliefs and attitudes. That is of course a textbook example of delusional irrationality. But that it is so would not keep any self-appointed professional racial ideologue from proclaiming and hectoring what they deem to be real. That is for example the case with pseudo-academic blacktivists like Ibram X. Kendi, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and it is also the case with one of the most successful representatives of black-minded whiteness, Robin DiAngelo. People of this ilk have decided, and while at it, monetized, what in our days must be taken to be constitutive of what the word “racism” and “racist” are supposed to mean to everybody.
That is what you get when for example politicians like Alexandra Ocasio Cortes would glibly offer the irrational TikTok harangue that your preference for cauliflower is not so innocent; if you prefer to eat cauliflower instead of yucca, you are a “racist” since, according to her woke ideology, for someone to decide to cultivate and go into the business of cultivating cauliflower when they could be cultivating yucca, is proof of what the word “racism” supposedly means. Cauliflower is “racist,” yucca is not. Of course, both these produces are “white” colored and there are many business rationales for going into the cultivation of cauliflower, and not of yucca, and as many health rationales for preferring to consume the former and not the latter, as it is a carb-bomb with very few nutrients, if at all. But none of those rationales mean anything when weighted on the irrational ideological scale of blacktivism and the self-appointed antiracist of whatever skin color.
It is due to the prevalent irrationality in the racial politics of woke antiracists that never before have “racism” and “racist” been so much bandied about, hurled, shouted, and celebrated by such a large diversity of peoples. Laymen and laywomen from opposite social classes, as well as celebrities of all kinds of questionable moralities, and members of the most diverse racial and ethnic groups no less than public and private entities such as international business corporations, and in conjunction with the media, by governments here and there across the international liberal landscape, are irrationally unanimous in support of the political program of blacktivism. Thus, both the politico-economic establishment and the “anti-establishment” forces, whatever that means, have come together to unanimously demand an end to the attitudes, dispositions, and the actions the words “racism” and “racist” are uncritically taken to be the linguistic sign of.
One is compelled to ask what has brought about this state of affairs. The answer, if one dared to look for one, would go like this. At some point in recent years, some blacktivists and their black-minded white supporters had an epiphany. After over four hundred years in America, first as free Africans interloping among whites; as servants and/or farm workers; as slaves and, later on, as free Americans, though all along suffering racial discrimination, physical abuse, social opprobrium, and often enough, loss of lives not only at the hands of begotten whites but as often at their own hands—something usually taken at face value as what goes without saying, finally dawned on them. As if overnight, blacks, and their black-minded liberal whites became abruptly aware that, hey, the lives of black people were worth preserving, and that their lives matter. Whereas Martin Luther King was sleeping and had a dream; awoken, blacktivists had an epiphany, and went “woke.” Yet, none of them has been able to see clearly or deeply enough into the roots of their ongoing reality.
Admittedly, as far as political propaganda goes, the epiphany that the lives of blacks matter and that therefore the police must stop the killing of black people, is a tour de force. And, admittedly too, so greatly to succeed in turning an epiphanic moment into at once a nationwide and international movement, is a masterpiece of political strategizing. However, that is not to deny that such success is also greatly aided in equal parts by the good-will and bad conscience of whites that misleads them into feeling guilt for a historical past that they are neither directly nor indirectly culpable for. But the dismal state of culture among whites that for a while has been rendering them intellectually incapacitated to raise compelling questions even where questions must be asked, is the other factor decisive in blacktivists having so greatly succeeded in turning a long-delayed epiphany into a political movement that has the whole white race either on the defensive or capitulating to its demands and kowtowing to everything claiming to be black.
Alas, in America and elsewhere, wherever they can be found in large numbers, blacks are having not their Juneteenth but their apogee. While they feel victorious and go about with the proud air of someone who has just made it at long-last—hail to them!!
However, in the same breath that we celebrate and congratulate them, it is also fitting to ask: how can a people or a race be believed in at all, who after more than four hundred years of suffering iniquity, ignominy, and death could manage only yesterday to gain awareness—could wake up to the most elementary existential reality that their own lives should matter, and hence go “woke”? What does such belated awakening indicate concerning the intellectual fitness and enlightenment of blacktivists and their black-minded white supporters, concerning the Woke Ideology under which they have finally come to the realization of the mattering of black lives? After all, the Marxism, Leninism, and Maoism movements BLM apes, have, taken together, been around for over more than two centuries. So, since we are here asking the questions that guilt-ridden, black-minded whites are incapacitated to ask, let’s go on asking some more. For example: could the rallying cry that “black lives matter” have been the perfect crie de Coeur in the face of the many thousands of black lives sadly taken away by other blacks throughout American history?
Of course, the reason those statistical deaths never amounted to be encouraging to go “woke” and to proclaim that the lives of black matter, is not so hard to figure. As would have usually been the case, the hypothetical circumstances surrounding most black-on-black deaths could likely be summarized as been the literal endgame of putative disputes over maybe some hypothetical bags of weed for sneakers money getting wrongly liberated by the right person, but under risky circumstances. And as often, ironically, many of those deaths would have been the literal endgame of disputes and misunderstandings among some black males over the lipid-rich backside of some overfed white girl, or over someone female of equally voluminous tail.
The point is black-on-black deaths hardly ever carry anything of social significance and cannot therefore be politically exploited to advance the interests of their race. Only the deaths of blacks by an abusive, brutal police, can offer blacktivists the perfect alibi for them to become “woke.” But then, in the wake of all the sympathy their movement has arisen from the powerful; in the wake of the radicalized interracial solidarity, alongside the systemic social promotion of blacks taking place all around; in the wake of all the perks and benefits that the BLM movement has been yielding, in the form of, for instance, well-placed and even better paid jobs in Hollywood and Big Tech, at Netflix, HBO, the US government, and at various corporations everywhere, and finally, in the wake of the largesse of filthy white moneys in speaking fees being donated to the personal coffers of quite many blacktivist honchos—another kind of question must be asked. One must ask, for example: who have the abusive white police forces of America been working for all these years? For, it would seem police brutality has its beneficiaries after all, and that it is not practiced for nothing.
The only possible answers to the putative questions above allow conclusions to be drawn that confirm that, to be able to gain a good conscience proclaiming the existentially elementary assumption that the lives of blacks “matter,” one must not know or ignore that there was a time in American history when blacks truly mattered the most. I will leave aside for now that unwittingly or not “black lives matter” is nothing but the cunning rallying cry for a budding black supremacism. Instead, I call attention to the historical fact that there was a long historical period in America in which, beginning in Virginia, the lives of black people mattered the most to everybody. Despicable? Abhorrent? Unconscionable? Yes, yes, and yes. But, nevertheless, no less true. Ironically and unfortunately, that was during slavery. During Colonial Virginia, when America had not even yet been born as a nation, and when therefore blacks were not yet and could not yet be Americans but also could not be contemplated as a matter from which an American nation could be forged, black lives mattered the most, and to everybody equally. However ironical, the simple reason for that was that black themselves were the matter of slave economy. The indispensability and irreplaceability of black labor force under the prevailing socio-economic and technological conditions of colonial society determined that to be so. Because black lives were economically indistinguishable from the labor literally embodied in them, economic production depended on keeping them alive, while also allowing to biologically reproduce themselves, so that they could keep being the matter that mattered most— as labor force. As it happened, in populations where blacks were harder to have or to come by, the more their lives mattered to society. That is why reminding oneself and others that “the lives of black people matter” should send freezing chills through spine of the whole society.
As even the American historians who are often referenced or alluded to by both blacktivists and mind-blackened whites know, when black lives mattered the most in America, a black person could be bought or sold for twice the amount that for example a white Irish destined to be a servant could be had in the labor-force market. Indeed, among authoritative American historians and writers on colonial life such as Edmund S. Morgan, George Fredrickson, Theodore W. Allen, Audrey Smedley, and Alden T. Vaughan—not even one of these oft-referenced historians ignore that, for instance, whereas an Irish person destined to be an indentured servant for the next seven years of their life was valued by the labor market at just one thousand dollars, any able-bodied black person would fetch twice that amount—and that even if they were not considered “able-bodied.”
Strangely, the iniquity of a black person being destined to work in bondage for life gave their lives increased worth over any white person’s life. Thereof were blacks recognized in their worth by the community, even if such recognition came necessarily accompanied by a bad conscience. But, as a bonus, the iniquity of enslaving blacks caused that the life of a black person mattered the most to all other blacks, too, not just to whites. You see, under slavery a black person taking the life of another black person would have been hardly ever heard of, and that precisely because it was too highly valued by the master; the lives of his slaves were literally precious to him: the material wellbeing of himself and his family depended on it. This simply means that whoever would kill a black person would not only be committing murder: they would have also been stealing and destroying property. And so, such state of affairs would have also offered protection to blacks from dying by white hands. What a confounding irony!
When today blacktivists and black-minded whites protest that, as they take pride in saying, America was built on slave labor, they are correct. But, taking that claim all the way to its logical conclusion, as one must in pursuit of truth, that is merely another way of stating that it was in slavery where the lives of blacks mattered most. At this point, any intelligent blackitivist should be shuddering: the proclamation and claim that Black Lives Matter implicitly begs the questions about what they matter for, and to whom are those lives presumed to matter. In other words, the assertion by any group that their lives matter communicates that the “mattereness” of those lives is not obvious—not self-evident, and therefore demands to be stated. Can this be made still clearer?
Lives lived productively; lives whose living represents an indispensable, objective contribution to the general wellbeing and permanence of the community (society) where their living takes place are never in need of asserting their worth. Their worth, that which makes those lives “matter,” is there for all to see, feel, and count on. That is, pragmatic socio-metric values can be and are implicitly and explicitly applied to it. Thus, the lives of those people matter because the totality of the communities that form a society function better toward the fulfillment of its ends. To offer the best example there is on this point: take the Jews. Maybe the one longest-suffering ethnic conglomerations in the world, oppressed, repressed, and suppressed through the centuries, the Jews have always managed to prove themselves worthy of having around, and have as result never felt the need to defend themselves protesting that their lives matter—not even when their lives are taken from them at a massive scale. But that is because in the first place, even their haters know the multifarious capabilities of the Jews and what the most diverse types of societies have throughout history needed them for. And that sums up everything that must be left out of this piece of writing. And yet, though never oppressed by black powers (maybe because blacks have never had enough power to oppress but themselves, or maybe because the Jews have instinctively known to avoid stepping on grounds where power concentrates in black hands), the Jews are nonetheless still consistently slandered by blacktivists and black-minded whites in America, England, France and everywhere that blacks are found in large numbers.
Taking all the above into consideration, the question must be asked: is the “Black Lives Matter” rallying cry the equivalent of an attempt by blacktivists to politically manufacture for their race a good conscience, by dint of spurring guilt feelings onto whites?
Alas! Unwittingly as that might be, they have been having great success at that. Have I not been clear enough yet? The success of the “black-lives-matter” supremacism is fundamentally owed to the ever-more diminished intellectual capacity of whites to raise pertinent questions. Their feelings of guilt about historical racial developments that nobody in particular is responsible for renders them incapable of seeing the racial supremacism presupposed in implicitly claiming “mattereness” for one race but not for the others. To decipher the undeclared threat therein, one just needs to imagine a future in which such an existential racial attitude becomes the official belief of a blacktivism that would have become a political power. Then, blacktivism would have made its Wakanda into a reality to lord it over the Whitedom realm. My advice to whites: learn well how to perform the Wakanda gestural greeting, and teach it to your children.
Americans, a people so well-known for not knowing their own history, could not find in it the philosophical rationales to rid themselves of their feelings of false, black-induced guilt. All the business corporations, universities, organizations, institutes, as well as celebrities and politicians who have at once with the mainstream media uncritically accepted the supremacist belief of blacktivism, are the exemplification of a people who does not know or understand its own history. Otherwise, that there was a time in America when black people’s lives mattered even more than the lives of some whites would have been widely known.
Becoming aware that there was a time in colonial America where black lives mattered the most should give blacktivists pause before continuing to proclaim the mattering of black lives. But would they have understood me?
___________________________________
As a personal note—If reading these reflections and looking at my picture makes the reader wonder about my racial affiliation, it is to be known that I do not personally see myself in racial terms. I leave that to whoever else would risk assigning me to this or to that race. But they would be often disappointed to realize in close inspection that I fit within no racial category: I possess my own system of racial valuations and am too multifarious in many ways to claim affiliation. I feel and think more like a Jew in this respect as in many others—but the Jews are not a race! Against the obvious Africanoid presence in my Hispanic ancestry, I feel most at home among the Western Mediterranean peoples and cultures. In short, as in every other thing, I am a freigeist on this as well. That allows me all the freedom needed to pursue the truth whatever the case may be.
You can read more from me here: https://www.newenglishreview.org/articles/agamben-on-covid-between-state-of-exception-and-the-limits-of-knowledge/