The Real Reason Not to Be Racist

And it’s not the misguided rationale that inspires the Left’s anti[white]racism, cancel culture, and endless moral panics about racial issues.

There is a real reason not to be racist, but it’s not the misguided rationale that inspires the Left’s anti[white]racism, cancel culture, or endless moral panics about racial issues.

The real reason not to be racist . . . (Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash)

For 21st-Century Americans, there are few religious taboos left to violate. All the old mores about sex, drugs, and rock and roll have fallen by the wayside. If he was still alive, George Carlin still could not legally say his infamous “seven words” bit on regular radio, but even if he did, almost nobody would care; those words pack nowhere near the punch today that they did back in 1973. But even though the old Church-lady style morality is gone, we now have a whole new set of blasphemy laws around racial and gender issues. Violate such norms, and the penalties can be catastrophic.

But are these new wokeist taboos helpful? Do they actually reduce racism or mitigate its harmful effects? What if they do the opposite, giving racist ideas all the allure of “forbidden fruit?” What if these blasphemy laws actually backfire and encourage curious and intelligent people to consider racist ideas more closely? What if, by steadfastly refusing to discuss or even acknowledge facts that contradict the politically-correct orthodoxy, mainstream Americans are inadvertently pushing young truth-seekers towards actual white supremacists for answers?

Group differences do exist, and people do notice them. As I said in my post on antisemitism, I don’t think it is healthy or helpful to hand-wave away people’s genuine questions and honest observations by heaping judgmental platitudes and knee-jerk condemnation on them. Doing so won’t stop them from wondering about these issues, but it will make them stop listening to you. And next time they have a good-faith question that they wish to raise about racial issues, they may raise it with an actual white supremacist, because at least he’ll listen. The white supremacist will certainly have his own ideological bent that skews his view of the world, and he will probably use a lot of fallacious reasoning (particularly the fallacy of division, the fallacy of composition, and the ecological fallacy — incidentally the same fallacies that plague DEI-motivated reasoning on the Left); but at least the white supremacist won’t condemn the genuine truth-seeker out of hand merely for broaching these topics.

Fortunately, there is another, better reason not to be racist than the one that motivates the Left’s recurring moral panics on the subject. And this other reason does not rely on appeals to authority or threats of punishment to give it weight. Instead, it appeals to what is best and most noble in people: their desire for Truth and Virtue.

The real reason not to be racist is this: there are some incredibly talented, capable, competent, intelligent, creative, virtuous, and benevolent people among every race. By pre-emptively rejecting them on racial grounds, you harm yourself, them, and the world at large.

To make this argument, I don’t need to cite some peer-reviewed circle-jerk publication full of fallacious reasoning and massaged data that supposedly shows group differences don’t actually exist — even though anyone with enough real-life experience and a functioning pair of eyes and ears can readily observe general patterns that differ among society’s various groups. I don’t need to pretend that the numbers in each and every field of human endeavor will align perfectly with the racial and ethnic demographics of the general population. None of that matters. All I need to know is that some people who are capable of excelling in any given field are found in every race and ethnicity. And if you meet enough people and sample the offerings of enough cultural groups, you will find this to be true.