The Crypto-Racism of PC Multiculturalism

To illustrate the crypto-racism of PC Multiculturalism, we can consider the Rwandan massacres of 1994. While not directly relevant to Islam (since neither of the tribes, the Hutus or the Tutsis, were Muslim), that outbreak of spectacularly gruesome violence—where, at its peak, approximately 800,000 people were murdered in the span of 100 days, which, when the math is done, amounts to 8,000 people murdered every day!—nevertheless helps to point to a peripherally related dynamic that is quite relevant to the Problem of Islam and the bigger Problem of PC that gets in the way of any rational analysis and action with respect to the Problem of Islam.

The way most people in the West reacted to the Rwandan massacres at the time, and the way they look back on it since that time, is not the way they would react if those massacres occurred among white Westerners in a white Western land: the ethical indignation, shock and condemnation of the perpetrators would have been lucid and electric, and action taken against them would have been unremarkably swift.

And in the years since that time, the amount of sociological and psychocultural analyses probing the cultural pathology that must have nourished such a colossal eruption of carnage, would have filled whole shelves in all major bookstores; would have been featured in college courses throughout the West; would have been the subject of countless television documentaries and perhaps a movie or two (even one by Michael Moore). Instead, we have gotten many analyses probing not the pathology of the black Africans and their cultures in Rwanda, but analyses probing the West’s pathology in its dereliction of duty! Because those massacres were one black African people against another black African people, most Westerners, deformed by PC Multuculturalism, do not adopt a posture of blaming either the main perpetrators (the Hutus) or the Tutsis (who did their share of violence in years preceding the massacres), nor do they hold up the general culture of black Africans in Rwanda and elsewhere in Africa to unflinching ethical scrutiny.

No, Western PC Multiculturalists have tended to look on that horrible event as though they were looking at a terrible natural tragedy of two species of sadly beautiful animals on the savannah, driven to turn against each other by various external causes: perhaps natural climactic changes, or perhaps things that white colonialists and traders had done to upset the delicate ecological balance. The actual perpetrators are not regarded as actual human ethical actors, morally responsible for their actions which, when gruesome and evil, would logically and immediately arouse our utter condemnation and disgust not only at the actors, but at their societies and cultures.

No, such condemnation and disgust would be, in the PC Multiculturalist way of looking at things, strange: were we to see lions go on an unusual rampage and kill a herd of gazelle, we wouldn’t “condemn” the lions, much less would we be “disgusted” with them and their ways. It’s just part of Nature, even if the balance of Nature was temporarily out of kilter for reasons probably due to human “interference”. Thus, in PC Multiculturalism, there is a crypto-racism lurking that does not raise up Third World peoples to the level of white Western man and call them to account when they do evil, nor call their culture to account when systemic evils become manifest.

And this crypto-racism is incoherently connected to an anti-Western anti-racism—for, it is only white Western man who is to be condemned for his evils, and his societies and culture critically examined and condemned when those evils seem to become systemic. It is important to underscore the implication here: this crypto-racism is not a negative racism—quite the reverse. It is a positive racism: a condescending paternalistic attitude, inherited from Western Colonialism, in fact, that treats Third World peoples as developmentally disabled children, or even as animals under our care. It is only the white West that is to be appropriately the target of a negative racism—which turns out to be, once analyzed, a project of reverse racism, in order to bring a retroactive revenge upon the West for the putative negative racism to which it subjected so many lovely Noble Savages during the epoch of Western Colonialism (16th century to the mid-20th century). In fact, it is true that Western Colonialism involved the widespread practice of both kinds of racism, negative and positive; however, too often the PC Multiculturalist ethos, under the aegis of its broader agenda of deconstructively criticizing its own West in order to utopianize it, has failed to contextualize those racisms of yore (see my previous essay on Racism).

At any rate, it is a supreme irony that PC Multiculturalism has so deeply and broadly inherited and integrated this negative racism from the very same Western Colonialism which it otherwise condemns and whose evils it claims to have relegated to the dustbin of history. The irony becomes even more acute when we consider that this negative paternalistic racism which guides PC Multiculturalism’s posture toward Third World peoples—as well as its flip side of the coin, the positive reverse racism by which it judges its own West—was (and continues to be) logically predicated upon a superiority of white Western man and culture. These ironies, needless to say, are camouflaged or ignored by the PC Multiculturalists, and their denial about this is maintained by generally incoherent argumentation and an indefinite equilibrium of the Ego Quoque argument (though any subjection of this balancing act to the most elementary analysis would reveal that it has no legs, and it would suffer an unceremonious pratfall the instant the slightest light of common sense were permitted to shine upon it).

And, as Muslims are the poster children for Third World peoples, this crypto-racism—incoherently connected, as we have noted, to an anti-Western positive racism as a vehicle for an anti-Western anti-racism—becomes very relevant to the pressing and perilous Problem of Islam in our day.