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Classic Socialist Criticisms of Liberal Anti-Racism
For decades, only a few voices on the left were willing to criticize liberal identitarianism. These especially inspired me:
Thandeka is a Unitarian-Universalist minister who wrote to explain why race reductionism is incompatible with a universalist religion. Two of her points apply to the general public:
1. It is not a privilege to not be oppressed.
Imagine that business and government leaders decreed that all left-handed people must have their left hand amputated. Special police forces and armies are established to find such persons and oversee the procedure. University professors and theologians begin to write tracts to justify this new policy. Soon right-handed persons begin to think of themselves as having right-hand privilege. The actual content of this privilege, of course, is negative: it’s the privilege of not having one’s left hand cut off. The privilege, in short, is the avoidance of being tortured by the ruling elite. To speak of such a privilege — if we must call it that — is not to speak of power but rather of powerlessness in the midst of a pervasive system of abuse — and to admit that the best we can do in the face of injustice is duck and thus avoid being a target.
2. Privilege comes from wealth.
80 percent of the wealth in this country is owned by 20 percent of the population. The top 1 percent owns 47% of this wealth. These…
