But if anti-racism is the new religion for secular people, as John McWhorter argues in his forthcoming book, isn’t it a relatively benign one? What’s wrong with grounding one’s spiritual identity in a tangible cause? After all, since racism is still a problem, is it so bad that a sense of mystery, wonder, and absolution emerge from the impulse to fight what’s left of it? My response to this, simply, is that religion is not politics. The effectiveness of policy on real world outcomes is either beside the point of, or completely antithetical to, what fulfills the essential human need to be part of something bigger than themselves. It is this subtle leap from the material to the symbolic that explains the belief that what’s happening in the consciences of white people is the cause of black poverty.
The sign of a truly meaningful protest is the acknowledgement of conditions under which protest would cease to be necessary. But a clear condition for the end of anti-racist activism no longer exists in America since the end of Jim Crow. If that condition is a world without any disparities between racial groups in a multiracial society, without any cosmic injustices or unfairness of any kind, then all that’s left is an endless quest for spiritual salvation in the guise of progressive politics.
There is nothing wrong with elevating anti-racism in one’s own life. But there is something wrong with imposing one’s moral reality upon total strangers. What works for us doesn’t necessarily work for other people. The point of representative democracy in a diverse society is to balance conflicting interests without devolving into ethnic tribalism. Moral zealotry—the absolute certainty of one’s own personal sense of good and evil—cannot be reconciled with the complex system of trade-offs involved in societal decision-making. Any moral theory is necessarily black and white. But reality, to paraphrase Albert Murray, is the color of infinity
