Leftist professors will have you believe that racism is a historically recent invention of the West. Before the advent of Western colonialism, racism did not exist, they claim. It’s a variation of the noble savage myth. Racial and tribal discrimination has been endemic throughout all human history. To claim otherwise is fake history.
However, in one limited sense they are right. The actual word “racism” did not exist until the 1930s, and its precursor term “racialism” only dates to the 1880s. They are also right that the term was coined due to an ongoing debate spurred by Western exploration. Before global travel, people simply did not encounter many different races.
What they don’t tell you is that racism was a collectivist ideology. Collectivism holds group identity over individual sovereignty and therefore belongs naturally to the left. That is why The Democratic Party was the party of the KKK, Slavery, and Jim Crow. That is why the Swedish Social Democrats were pioneers in racial eugenics. That is why The German National Socialist Workers Party (the Nazis) saw socialism and race-based nationalism as two sides of the same coin. Racism is a leftist idea.
Far Left vs Center Left
Within the left there was a civil war, between the national and the international socialists. It was a war about boundaries. Those on the center-left accepted common cultural concepts such as nation, race, and private property, but when they mixed in their collectivism, the boundaries became a source of discrimination and in many cases persecution.
Rather than recognizing the horrors of collectivism, some attributed the injustice to the borders. Their diagnosis was that the left wasn’t far left enough, so the far left co-opted the concept of racism as part of their war against borders.
Racism vs In-group Preference
Today the term “racism” is used in that far-left communist sense. It lumps together the legitimate opposition to racial supremacy ideologies with everyday in-group preference that is both natural and common across the globe.
Think of a race as an extended family. Now substitute all arguments against race with family. Family does not exist – it’s a social construct. You love your children for no other reason than that they are your family. That’s discrimination against other children.
Doesn’t that sound like an unreasonable attack on the family? It sounds like a strawman, but the communists argued against all biological boundaries, including family. Although they have partially succeeded in separating children from their parents through public education and women in the workforce, they largely failed at demonizing the family the way they managed with race. The love of children ran too deep and people recognized that it was unreasonable.
However, if you show any form of affection for your extended family, your race, the far left has succeeded in branding you as a racial supremacist.
Leftist Olympics
The war against the racism of the center-left was so successful that it became a competition between leftists of who could become the most inclusive and knock down the most borders. In fact, the modern-day left-right spectrum as defined by leftist professors is a measure of how discriminatory a collectivist ideology is.
The green socialists were the first to knock down the walls of the communists. The greens claimed that the communists weren’t far left enough because they were discriminating animals and plants.
Much later came fourth wave feminism, which claims that all forms of biology and reality is discriminating the imaginary. Imaginary genders should be treated as more important than biological sex. Since transgender students are promoting the Gender Unicorn, we may, for lack of another word, call this unicornism. Unicorn lives matter.
The logical end station of knocking down all borders is nihilism. At the extreme end of leftism, you erase the distinction between life and death, and between existence and non-existence. It is a great injustice to the non-existent that anything should exist at all. In this final stage of leftism, equality means eradication of anything that exists or is alive.
Collectivism is The Problem
The right acknowledges borders of all kinds, whether it be between the sexes, the races, nations, or the animal kingdom. However, conservatarians also recognize that it is collectivism that is the main problem, not borders.
