by Micah Tillman

Introduction

"When fascism comes to America, it will not be in brown and black shirts. It will not be with jack-boots. It will be Nike sneakers and Smiley shirts. Smiley-smiley."

So said George Carlin, and Jonah Goldberg's graphic designer ran with it.

But what if racism were to politically take over America, become (once again) institutionalized by government? How would it be attired?

I had always assumed it would come "wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross," like fascism. But after encountering three devotees of institutionalized love who were unknowingly working the soil in which racism grows, I fear there is another possibility.

Each person teaches a lesson — prompted by a desire for justice, compassion, fairness — in how to begin thinking like a racist.

Lesson 1 (video): by Sharon Stone

You may have seen the following headline on Drudge recently: "'KARMA': Sharon Stone Blames Treatment Of Tibet For Earthquake." Here's what she said:

"[I]t was very interesting because at first I'm . . . not happy about the way the Chinese are treating the Tibetans . . . . And then I've been . . . concerned about, 'Oh, how should we deal with the Olympics?' because they're not being nice to the Dalai Lama, who's a good friend of mine.

And then . . . this earthquake and all this stuff happened, and I thought, 'Is that karma? When you're not nice, that the bad things happen to you?'

And then I got a letter for the Tibetan Foundation that they wanted to go and be helpful. And that made me cry. . . . [I]t was a big lesson to me: that sometimes you have to learn to put your head down and be of service even to people who aren't nice to you . . . .

The lesson wasn't that karma can tell the difference between a government in Beijing and citizens in a province almost a thousand miles away. The lesson was: Even though people — who have nothing to do with what their communist government does — get punished by the Moral Order of the Universe, we should be nice to them.

This kind of group-think (pun intended), which treats people as group-members rather than persons, is a necessary condition for racist thinking. It produces the inability to distinguish between members of groups, to recognize individuality:

If Chinese people (in government) were mean to Tibetans, and you're Chinese, you must have been mean to the Tibetans too.

Lesson 2 (PDF): by Chief Justice Ronald George

The conclusion which Chief Justice George reached in the recent California Supreme Court decision on marriage makes sense to me. The "reasoning" he used to get to it, however, is not only irrational but insulting.

Chief Justice George argues that the individual Californian's right to marry should be re-understood to include the right to marry a person of the same sex.

To get from the original understanding of the individual's right to marry to the new understanding of the individual's right to marry, however, Chief Justice George chose to go through groups:

Given that individuals have a right to marry, both individuals in a couple have a right to marry. Therefore, "the couple as a whole" has the right to marry (p. 53, n. 34).

Therefore, (same-sex) couples have the right to marry.

Therefore, the individual's right to marry includes the right to marry any other person, regardless of gender.

For Chief Justice George, the individual's new right is derived from a corporate right, held not by individuals but by couples. The person is subordinated to the group in an attempt to show persons greater respect.

This type of collectivist thinking, where persons are seen as group-members, and assigned their properties/qualities/rights on the basis of their group-membership — not on the basis of their individual personhood — is a necessary condition for racist thinking:

The individuals of the privileged race derive their "rights" (to dominance) from their group-membership. The individuals of the subordinate races derive their responsibilities (to submission, servitude, punishment) from their group-membership.

Lesson 3: by Ron Rosenbaum

Lastly, we have "In Praise of Liberal Guilt," which just won an Honorary WEeding Award. Again, the motivations are noble: Rosenbaum wants us to recognize problems and work to solve them.

In the process, however, he joins Stone and George in group-reification. For Stone it is "the Chinese" and "the Tibetans." For George it is "the couple" (or "the family"). For Rosenbaum it is "America."

America has "virtues" and "sins" in Rosenbaum's worldview, and if — against your better judgment — you were born an American, you're saddled with both.

One wants to break into song with the anti-imperialist cultural critics of Gilbert and Sullivan's day (namely, Gilbert and Sullivan):

He is an [American]!
For he himself has said it,
And it's greatly to his [(dis)]credit,
That he is an [American]!
. . .
But in spite of all temptations
To belong to other nations,
He remains an [American]!

Rosenbaum's thinking is so distorted, he can't tell the difference between William F. Buckley Jr.'s feeling guilty about something he himself wrote, and people feeling guilty for things they haven't done and would never do.

Even those who took part in the Civil Rights movement were guilty, according to Rosenbaum, because they were part of a guilty nation.

How someone as knowledgeable about Hitler as Rosenbaum, who argues that he (Rosenbaum) has a "a right to be angry, still, about the Holocaust, even though it happened before [he] was born," could miss the similarity between the corporate guilt he champions and the Nazi/KKK rationalization for anti-Semitism is a mystery.

According to Hitler, all Jews were guilty because they were Jews (whether or not they did what Hitler said Jews were doing). According to some (all?) American anti-Semites, Jews are guilty because "their people killed Christ." According to Rosenbaum, all Americans are guilty because of "our shameful racial past."

In the name of spurring us to correct the injustices of racism, Rosenbaum celebrates a pattern of thinking without which racism would be impossible.

Conclusion

To subordinate the human person to the group is to fertilize the soil in which racism grows. And you'll find both progressive and conservative hands unwittingly working the field.

Whether racism can be kept from springing from such soil, whether anything good can grow therefrom instead, and whether this article's semantic leakiness is different from some of the very thought-patterns it critiques are questions I hope to eventually sort out.

Till then, however, let's not get blindsided because we expected the attack to come from across the aisle.

Micah Tillman (micahtillman.com) is a lecturer in the School of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America, and the curator of the WEeding Awards.