The Racism of Extreme Woke Progressivism

The ideology that separates free individuals into groups and rewards or punishes them for the supposed sins or goodness of these groups is a recipe for Totalitarian disaster.

Photo by Alex Radelich on Unsplash

Recent developments have made clear what many of us have long believed - the neoMarxism of extreme woke progressivism is a racist ideology that leads to terrible outcomes. One only need look at the rampant holocaust-like chantings of the woke Ivy League students, or the racist rantings of Ibrahim X. Kendi to see that this ideology leads to an intellectual cul-de-sac where racial groups are left to tear each other apart.

The real trouble begins with grouping people by innate characteristics out of their control, like race or sex. It rejects the greatest gifts to mankind that the New Testament and Western culture more generally have ushered in - the focus of the individual over the group and/or state.

“And Jesus answering said unto them, Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's. And they marvelled at him.” Mark 12:17, King James Bible

They marveled at him because this was such a new idea and a radical philosophy for the time. It took the world some 15 centuries and more to begin to unravel this mystery, which continues today under threat from woke progressives. At the time of Jesus, the state was preeminent - combining politics and religion into a single ideology that ruled with an iron fist - and the individual was a fanciful afterthought. Jesus was nothing if not a revolutionary, turning over the tables at the temple in Jerusalem and preaching a radical new method of religious practice. Religion was, however, so tied up in the state that he was killed for these views, if the stories are to be believed. Regardless of its historicity, the teachings of Christ would reshape the world.

Nowhere has the implications of this philosophy been implemented more fully than in Western civilization, and in the Constitution of the United States. In it, we find the individual as state power: We The People. Our founding documents enshrine the best parts of individual rights and freedoms, shedding the cloak of authoritarian rule and sovereign absolutism.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness - That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed…” Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence

[Please note (copied precisely from the original text) the capitalizations of Men, Rights, Life, Liberty, Pursuit of Happiness and Consent, just as Creator and Government are capitalized.]

Indeed, the founding of America was a promise to hold individual rights paramount, with the state formed by these individuals to protect those rights and secure their lives, property and freedoms. But this forming was not perfect - there were many whose rights were still trampled by the state, and the nation has spent its years, with fits and starts, progress and setbacks, to complete the promise of our Founding. Humans and their institutions are invariably imperfect; this process of forming a more perfect Union will continue as long as there is a Union, God willing.

Later, in the 1960s, the Marxists and Communists that dominated intellectuals in France (Foucault and Lyotard among them) had a problem - the Communist utopia that was the Soviet Union had become a totalitarian hellscape. No one could justify the captivity, violence, genocide and utter hopelessness that subsumed the Russian people and their vassals after World War II. Rather than admit they were fundamentally mistaken, these men began instead to tear down the ideas and institutions of the Enlightenment, root and stem. They rejected the concept of the realized individual, rejected any philosophy that valued ethics, reason or clarity. They attacked science and ultimately objective knowledge through a lens of nihilism, usually describing the world and all of its inhabitants as captured and beholden to a single variable - power. The oppressor versus oppressed narrative was born, focusing on the revolution of all oppressed peoples against the establishment, which was, to the postmodernists, Western “bourgeois” values. These neoMarxists and their intellectual descendants will tell you that the sins of the world are firmly rooted in Western civilization and, primarily, its whiteness. It’s telling that Karl Marx was extremely racist.

This ideology took hold in academia, and began to be taught in undergraduate and postgraduate courses in the late 1960s and 1970s. A teaching that would reject everything your parents believed was especially attractive to the Baby Boomers attending college at this time, and hoping to live up to the incredible accomplishments of the generation before them, which survived the Great Depression and won World War II. Rather than live up to the accomplishments of their parents’ generation, many chose instead an ideology weaponized to tear it all down.

Over time, this ideology evolved into the current struggle against power and societal hierarchies, in favor of identifying people as an oppressed group rather than as an individual with unique gifts. Like intersectionality, your identity becomes your race, your sex, the color of your skin, and with whom you chose to sleep at night. Groups are formed, battle lines drawn, and the fight to overthrow every institution and system (because they are all power-based discriminators of oppressed peoples) takes hold of the zeitgeist. This cancer continues to metastasize to this day.

You need no more examples than two recent ones: first, the outrageous defense of antisemitism and calls for the annihilation of Jews cloaked in the current chants for “Free Palestine” (translated to “Palestine is Arab” in Arabic) and “From the River to the Sea,” (which every one in the Levant knows calls for a single Muslim state in Palestine, eliminating the Jewish state of Israel and all of the Jews in it). This has been especially true on Ivy League college campuses, where antisemitic and genocidal statements have abounded since the October 7th terrorist attack by Hamas. College students recently called for Intifada, which is a call for the killing of Jews everywhere through terrorism. The Jewish people are perhaps the most oppressed group in the history of the world, but that does not stop the postmodernists’ rejection of history and facts to name them oppressors who must be extinguished.

Likewise, Critical Race Theory, one of the most pernicious permutations of the NeoMarxists, teaches that whiteness is inherently wrong and must be actively combatted. Here’s a recent example of this, from the incredibly racist and race-baiting philosophy of Ibram X. Kendi, the founder of the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, who recently said:

“I don't think white people worldwide have really reckoned with how much their own personal identity is shaped by constructions of whiteness, and how much that construction of whiteness prevents white people from connecting to humanity”

Translation: white people are not human like we are.

Perhaps there is some utility in postmodernism and its critiques of the Enlightenment and Western civilization - certainly we do not live in a perfect society; there is still much to fix. And a healthy criticism and reform of failing institutions is a necessary component of progress. But the ideology that separates free individuals into groups and rewards or punishes them for the supposed sins or goodness of these groups is a recipe for totalitarian disaster. It must be intellectually confronted at every opportunity, before the next generation brings about the collapse of the entire society. Perhaps this is what Nihilists like Foucault had in mind…