The Toxic Ignorance of White Progressives
This essay is a repost of an article I had written in the summer of 2020. Under the pandemic still in 2022 it remains pertinent, perhaps even more than before.
Link to the original: https://medium.com/@eimanaga/the-toxic-ignorance-of-white-progressives-3332ffddf220
‘The wrong side of history’ as an ‘ends justify the means’ approach to ideological absolutism. Both the internal and projected praxes of pro-riot ‘activists’ elevate civil disobedience as a virtuous pursuit of civil rights for black people.
The danger is that this narrative does not help black people — and is primarily propagated by individuals with only an aesthetic attachment to civil rights. For the black community at-large, the livelihood of which is directly impacted by their interactions with the police, the primarily white fetishization of civil rights is particularly problematic.
From the perspective of white agitators looking to stoke the flames of racial discontent — the benefits are reasonably simple, and stem from a deeply ingrained emphasis on protecting their own social standing. The white progressive aversion to being ‘on the wrong side of history’ necessarily leads to foregoing independent value judgment and to an interpretation of real events purely on the basis of their theoretical value despite their actual consequences. The ideological absolutism and social determinism advanced by white agitators does not serve the black community — it serves only the neuroses of disconnected progressive white Americans, and treats black people as a monolith to be deployed for political favor (instead of treating black people as…people).
The appeal of the ‘ends justify the means’ logic for white agitators operating under the auspices of ‘racial justice’ relies principally on the tokenization of black issues. This tokenization implies black oppression — and specifically issues between police and the black community — are inherently an element of structural inequality that carries value only as far as it represents theoretical constructs already cemented as fact in the mind of the white agitator. To the extent that the black community expresses disagreement with the white agitator — they are dismissed as misguided, uneducated, or actively harmful to the black community.
These are positions taken by white agitators with no legitimate interest in the safety of the black community. The tokenization of the black community for these purposes is directly tied to a broader logic of oppression inherent to white agitators. That this is an issue for the black community is not good enough. It has to be an issue of broad social inequity (racial, gender, economic, really does not matter), rather than any specific issue that can capably be addressed within the current systemic framework of American politics and society. Does this mean the system and society broadly must change? Yes — obviously. Why else would half of America vote for a candidate in 2016 that stood for barely anything outside of upending the systemic assumptions governing the American socio-political bureaucracy?
Systemic issues integral to the American political state are correspondingly integral to the communities subject to these systems — and broad discontent across all manners of the political spectrum is reasonably apparent. With all of this said, the issue at-hand is the murder of black men by American police. Addressing this issue — the safety of black people in America in their interactions with the state — is not an invitation for white agitators to apply their own internally constructed worldview onto the justified anger of the black community.
Dead black people at the hands of militarized police become both a necessary and desired means to materially achieving the ends contrived from the internally constructed neuroses of privileged white agitators. A dangerously twisted victim complex, an enduring desire to accumulate social currency in the face of independent thought, and a deep emotional attachment to sweeping societal generalizations that privilege their position in their insular social hierarchy — all contribute to the most racist aspect of their activism.
Promoting protests against police killing of unarmed black people is noble. Rioting takes attention away from these protests. Reframing the issue as inherently attached to broader social structures (patriarchy, capitalism, neoliberal internationalism, etc) — as opposed to a specifically terrible injustice against a specific community (black Americans) intentionally moves the attention of the protests away from achievable goals and into escalating tension with state authorities. All of this could be excusable if the white rioters were facing equal consequences to black rioters who hear and attach themselves to the logic of the white agitator. But they aren’t, and that’s literally the problem the protests initially sought to address.
The black community is disproportionately engaged in close interaction with elderly black people (a reality white agitators cannot intuitively conceive of, and therefore reject out of hand), who are in turn far more likely to get ill or die if exposed to the coronavirus (we’re still in the middle of a pandemic — epidemiology isn’t invalidated by racial injustice).
The fact of this interaction — and its implicit or explicit rejection by the white agitator — is best understood as violence against the black community. The white agitators who promote these riots are killing black people — they are not helping black people. They will not be impacted by the spread of the pandemic to elderly members of their community in nearly the same way. They will not face the harm that will come to black rioters and protesters as a consequence of escalating interactions between them and the police.
They get to experience civil rights protests while objectively doing more harm to the black community than if they just shut up and stayed home. Their sense of intellectual superiority supersedes objective claims to harm in vulnerable groups and they are nearly impossible to engage with — their ideological conclusions having been reached internally well before these protests started. To them, the primary function of reality is to serve as evidence in support of previously reached conclusions. There is no questioning of core components of their ideology, only finding new ways to interpret reality to fit their pre-existing narrative.
In short — police need to stop killing unarmed black people. White progressives and ‘radicals’ need to shut up and stay home. White agitators are (or will be) responsible for the deaths of far more people in the black community than they will ever have the capacity to admit — and very possibly more than the actions of the police they are ostensibly demonstrating against.