Systemic radishes
Using an ontological void to curate the vibe and manufacture political disorder
People’s beliefs tend to solidify around affordances. By affordances, I mean what people deem legitimate when interacting with the world. Other people are likely to be subject to the affordances of our beliefs and these affordances won’t just be physical but perceptual. Beliefs afford perspectives, revelations, topics for conversation, glue for relationships, or, especially within a therapeutic-thought-policed society, ammunition against others. Beliefs, even in falsehoods, grant power to the believer. Often it is the power afforded by beliefs that render them legitimate. Many people won’t appreciate this because they consider their beliefs rational, calculated, carefully reasoned, and largely private, even though they are not.
To reflect on the affordances of beliefs, I want to focus on a certain leftist ideological category that prevails in our time, despite the best efforts of its apologists to render the category blatantly incoherent. The category in question is troublesome because its affordances are rooted in bad faith and, typically, self-deception. The belief I want to discuss here is captured in a phrase: systemic racism. I take this primarily as a striking example of a general leftist thought pattern, although such thinking is by no means absent from people of other political persuasions.
The contention that racism is systemic is fairly recent, historically speaking. Stokely Carmichael, later known as Kwame Turé, and Charles Hamilton first theorised the concept of systemic racism, sometimes calling it institutional racism, in their 1961 book Black Power: The Politics of Liberation. Later, as the New York Times and the Washington Post showed, an approximately 1000% increase in the use of these terms happened between 2013 and 2019. This indicates a massive shift in the discourse around race in the public sphere. What was once a fringe notion has gone viral.
Legacy media outlets, especially in America, played a large role in manufacturing consent around the idea. However, this made it clearer than ever that systemic racism is by no means a mere neutral descriptor of certain facts. It is a rhetorical device with ideological roots. What makes it powerful and even potentially dangerous is not its factual content but its affordances. This means that even if I prove the idea problematic here, which is my chief aim here, and even if some leftwing ideologue miraculously agrees with what I say, the chances of said ideologue giving up believing the lie are slim. Exposing bad faith seldom does much to dispel it. What ultimately needs to be dispelled is its affordances, and that’s something no single argument has the power to do.
The phrase systemic racism is commonly used in contrast with straightforward racism. Sometimes this contrasting idea is referred to as individual racism so that a distinction can be drawn between systemic racism and plain racism. However, this distinction is drawn not to suggest a simple shift in scale but to create a dramatic alteration, a distortion, in how we conceive of the problem itself. The distinction meddles with our capacity to perceive rightly.
As you know, the word systemic is added to other ideas. ‘Gender-based’ violence, for instance, which used to be called domestic violence‚ is also widely regarded as systemic. Indeed, an alarming number of leftist concerns are with all things systemic; that is, arrant, totalising, and complete. You see this in rhetorically loaded terms like decolonisation, patriarchy, and social justice, which have only whatever tentative positive content the word-wielder wants them to have even while they remain generally nebulous.
So here’s the question: does adding the word systemic to the word racism at least improve our understanding of racism? Well, no. As soon as the word systemic is added, we are propelled into a conceptual fog. The word creates the impression that our mental machinery is working harder even as it is being sabotaged. We are no longer discussing specific racist incidents, which have definable limits and can be interpreted and judged on an individual and context-sensitive basis. We are no longer dealing with injustice as a concrete and urgent concern. As soon as the word systemic is added, we are bullied into discussing a vague but supposedly pervasive set of not-specified conditions. Robin DiAngelo, famous for having duped the world with plagiarism and non-sequiturs, puts it this way: “The simplistic idea that racism is limited to individual intentional acts committed by unkind people is at the root of virtually all white defensiveness on this topic.”
Note DiAngelo’s psychoanalytic rhetoric (I almost said psychotic rhetoric)—the suggestion that any questioning of the belief in systemic racism can be reduced to defensiveness. Also pay attention to the clever sleight of hand by which specific racist incidents are shoved into the naughty corner for not being the whole story, as DiAngelo wants us to understand it. To follow her lead, which I am not recommending, means moving far too rapidly from the phenomenon of racism, as manifest in particular instances with observable limits, to something both indistinct and everywhere. This gives the imagination nothing to grip onto but that is precisely one of the affordances of the belief.
Right here, in this conceptual fog, having been stripped of our imaginative powers, reason may also be disarmed. But notice the logical fallacy at play in the shift from racism to systemic racism. It is not the only logical fallacy at work here, unfortunately, but it helps to start somewhere. Yes, people can be racist. I don’t think we need to debate this point. But just because this is true doesn’t mean you can therefore infer that some system caused the racism, which critical race theorists like DiAngelo not only assume but promote. You also cannot reasonably infer that the system is somehow founded upon racism, although race theorists both assume and promote this. Promotion, by the way, is a necessity in activist scholarship especially where conceptual foundations are shaky since the more people agree with your flimsy ideas, the more clout they have—and the more unlikely it will be that people on your team will challenge the idea since that would incur the embarrassment (and horror) that the crowd experienced in the tale of the Emperor’s New Clothes.
Here’s DiAngelo again: “White people raised in Western society are conditioned into a white supremacist worldview because it is the bedrock of our society and its institutions.” Wow, seriously? The bedrock of our society and its institutions?! The word conditioned used by DiAngelo is also potentially misleading. Many things will be named as components of these conditions but they will tend to infer a cause-and-effect relationship that is wobbly at best. But back to the primary claim here. Is racism really the substratum, substructure, understructure, and the very foundation of the West? That’s a bold claim! Is there any substance to back it up? There is not. It is proclaimed but not proven. This is what you get when you live in a time when people are actively encouraged to mistake their feelings for facts. It’s a claim no race theorist could back up with anything other than a biased and redacted history. History would need to be, and often has been, rewritten by the whiners. I’m not saying history is problem-free, obviously, but that it is not nearly as one-sided as all that. It can’t be because actual people are involved; and people are complicated. I’m not even saying that racism is not a common problem.
Unfortunately, the word systemic is so bewildering that some scholars become dimwits almost the instant it is uttered with a certain degree of seriousness. One reason for this is simple, which brings us to yet another logical fallacy at play here. As soon as something is said to be systemic, we’re dealing with a kafkatrap. Any evidence offered to refute the claim is taken as proof that the claim is right. If you say, “I am not racist because I refuse to act prejudicially towards another human being based on their so-called race,” the counterclaim would be something like the following: “You are so racist that you don’t even realise your complicity in the system that is prejudicial towards other people based on their race.” This is a significant affordance when you are, like the DiAngelos of the world, both intellectually impaired and trying to make money off the guilt-ridden by peddling an ideology. Any individual case of racism is taken as incontestable proof that the system is racist and therefore incontestable proof that you need a critical race theorist’s hallucinatory help to discern the nature of this unseen monster. Even the very absence—the veritable nonexistence—of explicit so-called individual racism can be taken as proof, somehow, that the system is racist. There’s no winning—unless, of course, you’re a critical race theorist or some other person in power who can wield this belief in their favour. Who benefits? That’s a good question to ask if you want to figure out the affordances of this terminological fog.
Critical race hustlers suppose that racism is so much a part of the system that it functions like an important block in a game of Jenga. The assumption is that if you pull out the block, the Jenga tower will collapse. Take out the racism and the West will collapse. But is this true? I mean, is it demonstrably true? The answer, yet again, is in the negative. If everyone started treating others fairly, with deference to their merits and skills, while keen to put the best people in positions of authority, systems would not collapse. They would be improved. People would be happier. They’d get along better. They’d know, for instance, that they were hired on merit and not because they were at the mercy of a diversity quota.
This is all to say that at the heart of the addition of the adjective systemic to the word racism is an inference that makes no reasonable sense. Again: you cannot infer from the fact that some people act unfairly towards others based on race that, therefore, the entire system is racist. You cannot even infer from the fact that, say, a person of one race is rude to a person of another race, that the first person is therefore obviously a racist. The reason for that person’s rudeness may have absolutely nothing to do with race and everything to do with some other violation. Maybe he judged the other person by the content of his character and not the colour of his skin and discovered, alas, that the content of his character was deplorable.
The surface is not, logically, metaphysically, or ethically speaking, conflatable with the substance, even though this is a common mistake in social media discourse. But to ascertain what is going on, you would need to have access to a great number of circumstantial details. Understanding the concrete particulars would teach us a thing or two about what is happening without us having to resort to sweeping statements. Perhaps this would annoy people who lack intellectual integrity but want to be perceived as clever and morally superior. I know I’d be asking for a lot given the nature of the current regime.
Again, you cannot assume that just because some people in a given society are racist, it is therefore impossible to separate racism from the entire social order. Just because some people farm and distribute and buy radishes doesn’t mean the radishes are now automatically systemic radishes. If we want clarity to help address a problem, it is simply not effective to supply obfuscation.
The funny thing is that if there were no radishes, the kafkatrap noted above would still allow you to claim that you have an awful lot of systemic radishes on your hands. This is one of the weird consequences of giving discursive priority to systemic racism over individual racism, which is that individual racism can be absent, while claims of systemic racism still hold rhetorical sway. I find it very weird that any leftist would want to use the phrase systemic racism since by rendering racism systemic, you can effectively refuse to deal with actual racism, even while you inflame it. The fruit of the belief is not harmonious race or ethnic relations. The fruit is typically even worse racism. Oh yes, and lots of money for the critical race hustlers.
In the Christian tradition, theologically speaking, there is the bold and brilliant contention that any given sin is not ontological, even if it has ontological and existential implications. In actual and practical fact, and very much against the NPCs who take their sins as identity markers, we can legitimately hate the sin even while we love the sinner. This beautiful insight is reversed in critical race theory. Even if you haven’t committed the sin of racism yourself, the system is racist, which is to say that even the innocent are guilty. Everyone becomes complicit through the invocation of a phrase. Even if you don’t have radishes, you are somehow always a benefactor or victim of systemic radishes. There is no forgiveness, no absolution, and no freedom. This is fatalism, in this case race fatalism, written in the language of identity politics. Ironically, in theological terms, such fatalism is known as slavery. This is especially evident in how even being pleasant towards someone of another ethnic group might be construed by critical race theorists as ‘nice racism.’
The phrase systemic racism is also an example of yet another fallacy: the ontological fallacy. It denotes the mistake of assuming that having a term for something means the thing exists. This echoes Whitehead’s notion of a fallacy of misplaced concreteness, where the abstract is confused with the concrete. To ontologise (i.e. render concrete) the abstraction of systemic racism has the consequence of reframing the entire way we perceive reality. It casts the shadow of sin over the whole world. Another way to understand this idea is as an example of what Jacques Lacan calls the big Other. It is, in Lacan’s work, not something that exists but something that insists. This echoes the point I made right at the start of this article. This belief has certain affordances. This little ontological void, this little nothing put into words and conceived of as an inescapable diagnosis of everything, affects us and the world. It is a terminological nocebo—a non-thing that does something less because of its nature than because it becomes an organising principle around which people can decompose their sense of the world. Ontological fallacies like this one are attempts to curate the vibe and by curating the vibe it becomes possible to destroy all genuine political discourse. How do you fight a monster that doesn’t exist?
But let’s look more closely at separating the sin from the sinner. If you are the sort of person I take you for, which is to say someone who has truly loved someone else—a family member or friend or spouse, say—you know that ontologising sin (rendering it implicit in reality itself) is a relational catastrophe waiting to happen. You also know that the sinner can, in practice and not just in theory, be separated from the sin. At one time or another, your rage may explode into an impression that the sinner and his sin are immediately the same. But give it time. You’ll see. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory but we are not our wrongdoings or ontological lack. All can be forgiven (we can be released from resentment and cynical resentment theory), even while justice is served (because natural consequences are not necessarily erased by forgiveness).
Critical race theorists sometimes want to absolve people of their sins, of course, given that they generally allocate responsibility not to individuals but to society as a whole. This is often done by attributing to misfortune or bad luck the status of injustice. But the price they pay for this semantic trick is to ensure that the sin is inescapable. The system itself, of which everyone is a part, is to blame; and so we all become complicit. “Try to be less white,” said DiAngelo in a conversion therapy session with Coca-Cola personnel. The implication was this: if you are white, you are racist not because you have said or done anything but because of the colour of your skin. But, honestly, how is that not racist? How does this not presuppose what has not been shown?
This sort of thinking allows the cretinous race fatalist to appear especially conscious. She sees what others don’t. She notices what others overlook. For normal people, racism is, by definition, an inward problem with certain outward manifestations; it concerns a prejudice that is inwardly held and not always outwardly evident. But to claim that the system itself is racist allows for a certain bad-faith gnosticism. The race-conscious person is somehow more aware of the problem than someone who wants to pick out or pinpoint any specific racist incident. She becomes a member of a priestly class of people in the know. She writes books that sell well to the easily duped (those with a tendency to feel guilty for crimes they haven’t committed); and big companies hire her to talk to their employees because she sees what they are too stupid to see on their own. They need her help. She needs their money. It’s a win-win. Oh, and there’s another affordance in this. Since racism is never solvable—because, after all, the system itself is the supposed problem—the critical race fatalist can always be hired in the same way as the psychologist whose therapy doesn’t work can always be counted on to offer more therapy.
Before I get to the most significant of the affordances of this nominal occlusion, systemic racism, allow me to look at an adjacent example, found in the work of Slavoj Žižek. This will help us to see more clearly something of the logic at work. In the opening of his book Violence (2009), Žižek distinguishes between two types of violence. These echo the two types of racism suggested above—individual racism, which I’ve said is real, and systemic racism, which I’ve said isn’t.
The first type of violence Žižek calls subjective violence. This is violence performed by an identifiable agent and has identifiable victims. Subjective violence refers to the disturbance of the norm, which is perceptible against the backdrop of its absence. At least, this is what Žižek claims, given that he has no philosophical reason for adhering to the natural law. But then Žižek names a second kind of violence. He calls this objective violence or symbolic violence. The words objective and symbolic here function like the word systemic; so, to be consistent, let’s just call this made-up entity systemic violence. Žižek takes this as equal to the backdrop of the absence of subjective violence. Systemic violence is not experienced as violence but is experienced, rather, as peace; in other words, as normal. We can’t see it because we have been socially conditioned, somehow, into accepting this so-called systemic violence as the norm. Does this ring a bell? It sounds an awful lot like a propagandistic proposal, the implication of which is that if we can’t see it or don’t see it, we must be blind. We might feel so stupid for having missed something so obvious that we might pretend, like the people in the Emperor’s New Clothes, that everything is violence or that everything is racist, even when it isn’t. Who, after all, would want to appear so morally deficient? That’s how oblivion to the systemic whatchamacallit will be interpreted.
Let me slow down for a moment to give Žižek—and by implication the critical race theorists—a little leeway. Not too much, of course, because in the end, they are wrong. It is a basic fact of human psychology that we are so habituated to some things that we can become numb to their problems or even their existence. We adapt to our environments and perhaps overlook the ways these environments work against our flourishing. In other words, real issues can become somewhat invisible. It can help when someone else points out where we may have bought into a falsehood. However, what help is it to declare in wild and sweeping terms that the entire system is violent or racist? The answer is that it doesn’t help to quell violence and racism but it has affordances nevertheless.
Without any careful guiding criteria, we are opened up to the possibility that any specific aspect of our world, or any object in our environment, is a manifestation of the so-called systemic problem. We are also opened up to the possibility of being massively manipulated. If we can believe in something that not even logical inference can bring us to accept, we might believe in anything. We live, after all, in the age of social engineering; the age of the gaslightenment. Cleverly, the claim is that if we don’t believe in the so-called systemic problem, it must be because of conditioning; and yet it is upon this basis that we’ll be conditioned into accepting the new conditioning. We don’t want to be duped—and thus, we are duped.
Because of vague invisible conditioning, we get untenable inferences along the lines that shopping malls are violent because capitalism is violence, and, remember, as that other charlatan race hustler Ibram Kendi has said, capitalism is also racist. We get told that being an individualist is equal to being a white supremacist which is like claiming that knowing how to arrange flowers makes you a communist. But let us not confuse what is possible with what is actual. Let us not confuse a connection made in the mind with a connection that can be supported in reality. And, by the way, merely clumping one term that barely makes any sense with another term that also barely makes any sense doesn’t somehow make everything make sense. If you fuse one incomprehensible thing to another incomprehensible thing, you aren’t suddenly blessed with comprehension. But this is precisely what adding systemic to racism is about. This is the same awful thinking at work in the current trend to name every second normal, ordinary thing as evidence of fascism or far-right bigotry. The wider the terminological net, the more blatant the ontological fallacy, the more extravagant the affordances, and the more likely reason will not be allowed to get a word in edgewise.
But as I have already said, what makes the extravagant affordances possible is the crowd that repeats the jargon. A lie believed by a sufficiently large number of people can do terrible damage. Just ask Solzhenitsyn. This crowd-supported lie-propounding adopts the ‘logic’ behind so many floating signifiers that haunt our social media timelines. When the shift from specific crimes to systemic crimes is taken as inherently unquestionable, instances of perfectly normal behaviours are soon regarded as manifestations of that so-called systemic evil. A floating or empty signifier is a shifting signifier without a clear referent. It resists unitary meaning by remaining endlessly open to the fluctuations of context. People can project whatever meaning they like onto or into the empty signifier to justify whatever they do or believe. In reality, they are projecting themselves into the meaning they take. At the level of generalisation, almost anything may be plausible.
And this is the most significant affordance allowed for by reframing anything as systemic. It allows the race-fatalist gnostic or just any aspiring social engineer to point fingers at any part of a monumental civilisational Jenga tower to justify their claims and suggestions. It allows them to suggest changing anything, even if it has nothing to do with racism or race relations. Whereas ordinary racism must be dealt with in a very individual fashion, by tediously and carefully, and hopefully humanely, weighing up every minute detail of that specific case and by properly attending to the humanity or inhumanity of the people involved, the claim of systemic racism suggests a total system overhaul, starting with—well, whatever you happen to want to change.
I’ve already noted one stupid example of this but here’s another. If you’re not very conscientious, for example, you can claim, as some critical race fatalists have, that being punctual is an expression of white supremacy. Being late or oblivious to someone else’s schedule can then be admitted as a way to dismantle white supremacy. Amazingly, then, the original desire, which is to have laziness and unconscientiousness applauded rather than criticised, is smuggled in under the guise of anti-racism. It is fairly easy to see by this example that critical race fatalism is a hydra-shaped monster battling every Herculean standard that society has held rather than being an active attempt to deal with poor race relations. As we have seen, it inflames racial hatred because, as my example here shows, instead of creating a fairer society, it simply reifies the contrast between ‘whiteness’ and ‘non-whiteness’.
Moreover, if anything you don’t like can be indicated as a manifestation of ‘white supremacy’, then maybe the whole system needs to be destroyed or overhauled. This is such a monumental job that the work can never be done. It can never be complete. It must always be on the go. You can legitimate whatever you want to, simply because you have used one teeny, tiny, three-syllable word: systemic.
Well, I refuse to play the game that reduces people to racial or ethnic characteristics, which sets up the zero-sum seesaw—yet another fallacy—of oppressors versus the oppressed, which generates social conflict and resentment, which inflames hatred even where no hatred needs to exist. I refuse to play the game that conflates what seems with what is. It’s not a game worth playing if you want peace. It’s not a game worth playing if you want to set up a fair system of governance. It’s not a game worth playing if you want to learn to love your neighbour as yourself. If justice is your real aim, then ontological fallacies have to go. In the end, both racism and anti-racism (as used in critical race theory) are founded on a negative—and beliefs that are merely negative will never free you from what you oppose. What is needed is a positive aim, a clear goal, to get us out of the kafkatrap. What is needed, desperately needed, is an aim that transcends the confines of a belief system that resists reason.