Ibram Kendi's Terrible, No Good Very Bad (Non-)Argument

 Yeah, there is no unique argument satisfying that description. But what I have in mind is this big, steaming pile of fallacy:

A racist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity between racial groups. An antiracist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial equity between racial groups. By policy, I mean written and unwritten laws, rules, procedures, processes, regulations, and guidelines that govern people. There is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy. Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity between racial groups.

   The fact that the entire progressive left seems to have adopted this laughably terrible argument tells you a lot about our current predicament. Worse, actually: it's normally treated as if it means that there's no non-racist anything at all. Which is utterly absurd.

   Of course most things in life, the universe, and everything are neither racist nor antiracist. Most things are nonracist without being antiracist. Quarks. Proxima Centauri. Trees. Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium. Water. Force. Mass. My left arm. And so on. 

   So that seemingly-widely-accepted extension of Kendi's argument is ridiculous.

   Kendi himself expands the argument to people without fanfare. Of course that's absurd, too. Undoubtedly vast numbers of people in human history haven't been racist but haven't been particularly against it. Most people in the neolithic probably didn't even know there were multiple races. Even by the IdP left's own lights many people were non- but not anti-, because, according to them, race was an Enlightenment invention. Prior to that fictional invention, it wasn't possible to be either pro- or anti-. 

   And, of course, it's possible for a time-slice of a person--a person-at-a-moment--to be neither. (And: a nonracist person is just a person made up of sufficiently many such time-slices.)

   The same would go for organizations and institutions.

   The same stuff is true of policies. 

   First: racist policy is mainly an intentional matter, not a matter of actual effects. The collection of policies that comprised the War on Poverty were antiracist  in intention--but racist (or "racist") in actual effects. Depolicing may be against racism in intention, but it's racist in effect. Kendi has to say such policies are racist--but he ought to count that as a reductio. 

   Furthermore, of course, as with any such definition that makes status depend purely on actual effects: for most policies, we don't know whether they're racist or not, since we don't know what their ultimate sum total of effects will be. Are late fees at public libraries racist or antiracist? In fact: neither. According to Kendi's view: humans will never know...

   Finally, Kendi has to say that the fate/status of policies that have basically no effect on racism at all is left to chance. That's what most policies are like, of course. But, under the (absurd) assumption that no policy is nonracist, the moral status of every in-fact-simply-not-racist policy is left, per Kendi, up to a coin-toss. Or, rather: lots of coin-tosses. Ultimately (under the absurd assumption), the policy of charging late fees at the library will either increase or decrease racism. Perhaps, via some circuitous conjunction of events, late fees cause some medical researcher to opt to check out fewer books, and this ultimately leads to an inordinate number of Aboriginal deaths...racism!

   And none of that even addresses questions of matters of degree...

  Finally: that "argument" isn't even an argument, but merely an (absurd) assertion.

  Bottom line: it's crap.