About : Where is antiracism going? For or against universalism, Paris, Hermann, 2023.
Pierre-André Taguieff, “For neo-antiracists, the question is how to “unwhitewash” the world order” (comments collected by Étienne Campion), Marianne, June 8, 2023 (“The big Thursday interview”); https://www.marianne.net/agora/entretiens-et-debats/la-negrophobie-des-racistes-a-lancienne-a-fait-place-a-la-haine-des-blancs-des-neo-antiracistes.
Dance Where is antiracism going? For or against universalism (Hermann) Pierre-André Taguieff questions the future of antiracism in France after the chaotic emergence in France of American concepts such as "systemic racism" or that of the new antiracism with a decolonial tendency. The philosopher evaluates the conditions of possibility of a strong comeback of republican antiracism.
How do you distinguish between anti-racism and neo-anti-racism?
PAT. This is a conceptual or ideal-typical distinction, which applies as much to racism as to antiracism, as I have tried to show since my work at the end of the 1980s (see in particular The Power of Prejudice, 1988). Antiracism, which can be called classical, in its many variants, is based on the postulate that humans are equal in rights and dignity, regardless of their community affiliations or their so-called cultural, ethnic or racial identities. It presupposes that belonging to the human race takes precedence over belonging to particular groups. In particular, it calls for no value judgment to be associated with skin color. This is why it can be called universalist, or even humanist. This voluntary blindness to color, which is an ethical norm, distinguishes it from neo-antiracism. It symbolizes the principle according to which there is no insurmountable barrier between human groups. It is therefore directly opposed to the thesis of the inequality of human races. The emphasis can be placed on the equality of said races or on their non-existence (or even on their indefinability). But since racist ideology also includes the motive of rejecting the other (xenophobia) and that of miscegenation as a cause of decadence (mixophobia), universalist antiracism aims to be both xenophile and mixophile. In the order of passions and that of virtues, it proposes to substitute respect for contempt, love for hatred, hospitality for fear, openness for self-closure.
Neo-antiracism, for its part, postulates that group affiliations prevail over belonging to the human race, which it tends to reduce to an abstraction of little interest. This is why its orientation is anti-universalist. It follows that neo-antiracism can be described as identitarian or differentialist: it consists in absolutizing and sanctifying particular collective identities, which it perceives as permanently threatened by forces moving in the direction of uniformity or undifferentiation. But the good identities are "minority" identities, supposedly "non-white". It substitutes the marriage of the universal and the demand for equality with that of identity and diversity. From this perspective, the very idea of assimilation is denounced as a racist idea. Neo-antiracism is a racialist antiracism, which multiplies the quasi-races or pseudo-races constructed by the process of "racialization". Because any collective identity or community can be "racialized". This is what leads to a paranoid vision of "minority" identities that are threatened, discriminated against or "racialized", and that must be defended unconditionally.
The political or metapolitical program of the neo-antiracists, which excludes assimilation, oscillates between two normative models: on the one hand, that of ethno-racial mixing or creolization involving cultural crossbreeding, and, on the other hand, that of the pluri-ethnic and multicultural society that must be built, after the destruction of ethnically and culturally homogeneous nations (a repulsive ideal never realized). It takes the utopian form of the harmonious coexistence of ethno-racial, cultural or religious communities. This ideal of coexistence takes the place occupied by the idea of the common good.
Anti-racist organizations have become auxiliaries of power, you write. How?
PAT. I note that in nation states where racism is considered illegal and illicit, most anti-racist organizations no longer function as countervailing powers and that they surreptitiously transform themselves into auxiliaries of power. Many of them function as armed wings or agents of influence of political movements, lobbies or states that instrumentalize the fight against racism in the same way that they instrumentalize the fight against human rights violations. In France, left-wing and far-left parties, particularly the Communist Party, have long monopolized the fight against racism. Outlined following the Dreyfus affair, this monopolization was established in a lasting way on the basis of the anti-fascism of the 1930s, whose main target was Nazi racial anti-Semitism. The anti-racist mobilizations were part of the vast mobilization of democracies against the Nazi regime and its allies.
When the left came to power in 1981, and had to face the rise of the National Front, it made anti-racism its banner. This was an anti-racism that was now less focused on the fight against anti-Semitism than on the fight against anti-immigrant xenophobia, defined as the heart of the "new racism". This instrumental anti-racism of a moral nature, appealing to the values of "openness to others" and "tolerance", was in reality aimed at demonizing a nationalist anti-immigrant movement that appealed to many worried French citizens, while allowing them to mask or deny the social, political and cultural problems posed by massive immigration from outside Europe. It was also aimed at fueling suspicion towards the liberal and conservative right, constantly accused of being seduced by the "anti-immigrant racism" of the National Front.
This neo-antiracism was a break with the antiracist tradition founded at the time of the Dreyfus affair. It must be remembered that the antiracism of the Dreyfusards was driven by the revolt against injustice and lies, that the Dreyfusard intellectuals fought with the weapons of the intellect, in the name of universal values (Justice, Truth), against official prejudices and dominant ideas, in short, that Dreyfusism was situated on the side of nonconformism, of spiritual rebellion and that it was perfectly foreign to political calculations or electoral strategies. However, the neo-antiracism of the left in power was a political antiracism. The spiritual revolt had been reduced to the recitation of an antiracist catechism taking place in an anti-right propaganda discourse.
How do you understand the notion of “systemic racism”?
PAT. The notion of "systemic racism", "institutional" or "structural" was created on American campuses in the late 1960s to analyze and denounce, from an anti-racist perspective centered on the "black question" as it was then posed in the United States, a form of negrophobic racism inscribed in social functioning and mentalities. In France, where it was imported late by far-left activists anxious to renew their combat lexicon, the notion of "systemic racism" turns out to be devoid of descriptive value. But the meaning of the stigmatizing expression is clear: by using it and trivializing it in academic-activist language, it is implied that France is a "racist society", intrinsically and in all its aspects. It is thus assumed that in France there is a "black question", therefore that "blacks" suffer from discrimination and segregation there. This negative Americanization of France is both an illusion and an imposture. It fuels the self-hatred of some French citizens, who no longer have any other political perspective than wanting to destroy what they believe to be the "racist society" in which they live.
It is in the name of defending minorities who are made victims that extremist, political, politico-religious or ethno-political groups are thus trying to monopolize the fight against racism. The new extreme left, converted to the decolonialist dogma according to which racism in France is "systemic" in that it is a persistent colonial legacy, has made anti-racism its hobbyhorse, while the Islamists have engaged in a political-cultural jihad based on the instrumentalization of the fight against racism, reduced to the fight against what they call "Islamophobia", this ill-defined phobia (supposed to target Islam, Muslims and Islamism) being erected as the main form of racism (also called "anti-Muslim racism").
The presupposition of the "systemic racism" denounced by neo-antiracists is that racism is always the work of "Whites" (Westerners of European origin) whose victims are always "non-Whites". The neo-antiracist vulgate, which derives from it, is based on the subjective definition of the racist incident found in 1999 in the famous "MacPherson inquiry" (Great Britain), which opened the door to arbitrary or false accusations of racism: a racist incident is "any incident perceived as racist by the victim or by a third party, whoever they may be." One can only be concerned to see the testimony of anyone, as long as it is accusatory, erected as irrefutable proof of a racist act. What is no less worrying is that this pseudo-proof of a racist act by the perception that the victim or a witness would have of it is part of a Manichean racialist vision ordered by the difference of skin colors, making "Whites" suspects by nature and "non-Whites" potential victims. The same goes for accusations of "Islamophobia", deemed admissible as soon as they are made by self-designated victims, their spokespersons or their defenders. Non-Whites and Muslims become potential victims of racism.
The alliance of the cult of minorities and victim religion has led anti-racism into a conceptual impasse while promoting smear campaigns or instigating witch hunts targeting unfortunate "whites" accused of "racism" because they are worried about the Islamist threat or the negative effects of uncontrolled migratory flows.
You say that “neo-identitarian anti-racism” is a political gnosis. What do you mean by that?
PAT. By political gnosis, I mean, in general, a method of salvation of a particular human group based on a Manichean vision of the world, opposing the representatives of Good and those of Evil, or those who are judged good to others, the bad or the wicked. One could just as easily speak of secular or political religion, or, in a more vague way, of ideology. Such a political gnosis also postulates that the world order is bad and that it must therefore be destroyed in order to build a new world, populated by a new humanity, purified of its bad elements characterized, in the eyes of the Moderns, by their condemnable impulses, their false beliefs, their prejudices and their stereotypes. A political gnosis therefore includes a supposedly explanatory ideological component, a set of moral judgments and a program of action whose final objective is to make humans better. This is what allows us to consider this program as "progressive" in its declared intentions.
What distinguishes neo-identitarian anti-racism is its denunciation of universalism, which it reduces to an illusion, even an imposture, in that it would be the deceptive mask of imperialism, colonialism and racism, the latter being defined by the rejection or lowering of diversity, differences or so-called multiple or plural identities. This radical anti-universalism is inseparable from a summary Manichaeism, based on racialist oppositions such as "Whites vs. non-Whites" or, to put it less simply, "Whites (cisgender, heterosexual) vs. non-Whites (LGBTQIA+)". This is why neo-anti-racists call themselves followers of "critical race theory" and "intersectionality".
Racism has gone from individual to collective…
PAT. It is necessary to point out the historical shift in the target of anti-racist accusations: we have moved from racists (individuals or groups) to institutional (or systemic) racism and from the latter to "white societies", then to the entire "modern world", an expression of a leucocentric racial order. The denunciation of "white domination", "white supremacy" and "white privilege" is the main commonplace of academic neo-anti-racism, as it was formulated in the United States before being exported worldwide. At the very beginning of his book entitled The Racial Contract (1997), which has become required reading in many American universities, the Jamaican-American intellectual Charles W. Mills states his main thesis: "White supremacy is the political system that, without ever being named, has made the modern world what it is today." The "revolutionary" critique of the modern world is thus based on the dogmatic belief that "white supremacy," under the cover of a deceptive "social contract," would have created the said modern world. The real contract, the expression of a racial injustice from which "whites" would have continued to profit, would be a "racial contract." All inequalities would derive from racism. This is to endow "racism" with an incomparable explanatory omnipotence. For neo-antiracist ideologues, not only is "racism" everywhere, but it explains all the misfortunes of the world. The elimination of racism therefore makes it possible to save the human race. We are indeed in the presence of a neo-gnostic vision.
You consider neo-antiracism to be driven by resentment. Does this mean that Nietzschean categories could help us understand it?
PAT. The Nietzschean concepts of resentment and bad conscience indeed help to shed light on the functioning of neo-antiracism. Through identity-based neo-antiracism, a new racism based on skin color has been formed: a leucophobic or anti-white neo-racism. “Whites,” especially “white males,” are all potential culprits and, while awaiting their punishment, undesirables who must be humiliated, marginalized, silenced, and neutralized. In neo-antiracism, the bad conscience of “Whites” slides into self-hatred. This hatred, the object of which is the "we", this "We, the Whites", supposedly racist by nature, history and culture, illustrates the "negative" ethnocentrism that has been at work in the Western world since the 1950s. If the postulate of ordinary or "positive" ethnocentrism is none other than "we are the best", that of "negative" ethnocentrism is "we are the worst". Many "Whites", mainly among the political and cultural elites, profess that "Whites" are the worst of racists, even the only real racists. If racism is "the truly capital sin" (Etiemble), they are therefore designated as the chosen ones of hell.
For the most radical and frenzied anti-racists, the question is how to "unwhiten" the world order, with the hope that "whites" will disappear from the face of the planet as quickly as possible. Neo-anti-racist ideologues teach us that "whites" cannot escape a "racial framing that naturalizes their ascendancy," namely the "white racial framing." All specialists in "critical race theory" and "critical whiteness studies" affirm it: there are always traces of "whiteness" among the most "progressive" of the best "educated" "whites." Their displayed "good intentions," anti-racist and progressive, cannot change anything. When they deny being racist, "whites" prove in spite of themselves, by their vehemence which betrays their anxiety, that they are. This is the “white fragility” described by American activist Robin DiAngelo.
This neo-antiracist configuration can be interpreted globally as the expression of a new form of religiosity which, strongly imbued with the culture " Woke ", defines "white privilege" as the real original sin - as the African-American linguist John H. McWorther (Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America, 2021) –, or as a new revolutionary ideology that would have succeeded communism, “white domination” having replaced capitalist exploitation. The belief in “systemic racism” is a machine for creating racists (“whites”) who are not aware of being so and for accusing them whatever they say and do. The dogma of racial fatality thus passed from the negrophobic “white” racist theorists of the XNUMXth centurye century and the first half of the XXe to contemporary anti-white anti-racist theorists: "Whites" would be racist by virtue of their racial affiliation ("race" being a category with variable definitions: from the subspecies of the old naturalists to a social construction according to "critical race theory"). The negrophobia of old-style racists has given way to the leukophobia of neo-antiracists - or more precisely to their "leukomia", their hatred of "Whites" - neo-antiracists who are therefore entitled to be considered pseudo-antiracists.
What are the conditions of possibility for republican anti-racism?
PAT. Antiracism is not destined to constitute itself as a messianic utopia taking the form of a new gnosis containing a promise of salvation. The condition of possibility of a republican antiracism resides in a conception of citizenship based on the preeminence of universalist values and norms. It is these which, for example, make possible and desirable the cultural and social assimilation of immigrants of non-European culture, as long as they aspire to it. Respect for these values and norms implies the principle of secularism, which in particular prohibits the absolutization of ethno-racial identities and their respective cultures. The reference to the common good is a presupposition of the republican vision of the nation, in relation to which the fight against all racism takes on its meaning and allows us to think of a fraternity that is not tribal.
It is on the question of assimilation, or more precisely of assimilability, that the division takes place: neo-antiracists denounce assimilation as a form of racism, even though it is desired by the candidates for assimilation. They conceive of it as a neocolonial operation consisting of imposing on the dominated the lifestyles and thoughts of the dominants. The universalist conception of citizenship is therefore opposed to ethno-racial and cultural relativism, the reverse of which is the absolutization of collective identities when they are perceived as minorities, as well as to the multiculturalist conception of citizenship, which recognizes specific rights to groups, according to the principle: as many differences, as many different rights, a principle which inevitably leads to forms of separatist communitarianism.
Republican anti-racism aims to achieve equality of opportunity in the community of citizens that is the nation, without distinction of origin, which presupposes an indifference to skin color – this “color blindness” (color blindness) that neo-anti-racist activists denounce. It therefore requires a continued fight against discrimination based on ethno-racial or religious grounds, particularly in access to employment or housing. But it refuses to resort to positive discrimination (" affirmative action »), a machine for producing injustice in the name of "good feelings", which are often the masks of resentment. The inversion of discrimination remains discrimination. We cannot fight an injustice with another injustice. However, the ideological logic of neo-antiracism, imported from American culture, is centered on the thesis that we can only fight against discrimination by opposing discrimination. Discrimination thus plays the double role of pharmakon : that of poison and remedy.
This is to remain in magical thinking, taking the risk of locking oneself in ambiguity, a fertile ground for demagogy. This is evidenced by the excesses of contemporary victim-based and demonological anti-racism, with its dreams of purification and vengeance, against a backdrop of racialized relativism and subjectivism. An anti-racism that claims to be republican can only develop on the ground of verified facts and rationality. It must respond in its own way to the demand for truth, without accepting the instrumentalization of its struggles by competing political forces. The exercise of critical thinking is not to be confused with the practice of delusional accusation and edifying denunciation, based on indignations with variable geometry. "Feelings" have no value as proof. When a genocide has taken place, the question is not who benefits from denouncing the said genocide, a biased question that allows certain committed intellectuals to deny its existence or to minimize it. It must be absolutely condemned and those responsible identified. Examining their motivations or the context cannot allow us to relativize the crime against humanity that they committed. Let us recall here that regarding the genocide committed by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the anti-imperialist intellectual Noam Chomsky dared to speak of an "enlightened" genocide, since it was part of the history of the long struggle for the emancipation of the human race. Supposed "good intentions" justify everything. But true morality mocks the tactical-strategic moralism of anti-racist preachers with a clear conscience. Hyper-politicized, having become a machine for intimidation and criminalization, anti-racism must urgently rediscover its true mission, which is to pacify and integrate. We must hope that this reconversion is still possible.
