Frankly, it’s sad to see someone as obviously thoughtful and reflective as you are misled by a bunch of trendy bad ideas about race and identity …. It doesn’t bode well for our collective future.

You wrote: “I did not bring up Asians until you did. I mentioned it very briefly after you had talked about Asians at length, but then you talked about your vapid anecdote about Chinese immigrants. I suspect that you wanted to appeal to me by invoking the ‘struggle’ of Asians under affirmative action.”

Yes, I brought up Asians, but I brought them up after you brought up affirmative action. Asians are the main victims of affirmative action policies, so it’s natural to bring them up in that context. You’d never even mentioned anything about being Asian yourself, and I had no particular reason to focus on or care about what you were, beyond the things you were writing. If every time someone mentions the word “Asian” in a crowded room anywhere in your vicinity, you think you’re the reason, you must live amidst a constant influx of paranoid thoughts. The “Chinese” thing is even more bizarre. If you’re not Chinese, why would you think that my mentioning immigrants in Chinatown, where I live, has anything to do with you? I’m trying to imagine someone in a Medium post mentioning something to me about Polish immigrants in his neighborhood, and then my responding, “Stop bringing up Polish people; I’m not even Polish.” Does that make any sense to you?

You then write, “Just stop bringing up Asians as some token example of the ‘model minority.’ We are not living the American Dream or even the Korean Dream with our high suicide rates, under-representation in popular culture, and life-denying work culture. Climbing up the ladder and establishing yourself as a middle class person in White America is not good enough; nor is it good enough for South Korea or Japan to become wealthy, for it brings about absurdly high suicide rates, wealth inequality, and corrupt politics. No one is living the Dream under capitalism.”

I’m repeatedly bringing up (East) Asians not because they’re the model minority, but rather, because (i) as explained above, they are the ones with the highest standardized test scores and grades and, thus, the ones hurt most by affirmative action; (ii) they are one of many groups of immigrants I’ve listed who’ve come to this country largely poor and uneducated, lived in poor conditions, faced discrimination and yet largely succeeded; and (iii) unlike black Americans, they (as well as all the other groups I’ve listed), didn’t get where they got by whining and casting blame, but rather, by working hard and defying stereotypes and low expectations. You, in response, point to problems that tend to exist within East Asian communities. Who would deny that? Problems exist for everyone, no matter how successful. Material success is just one facet of life, of course, and it’s probably not the most important one, even if it’s the one that gets the most attention in our comfort-and-commodity-obsessed society.

You write: “You keep relying on your silly anecdote as sufficient evidence for the claim that the state that targeted Black activists like MLK, Angela Davis, and Stokely Carmichael just a few decades ago is not disproportionately targeting Black people because ‘they smoke weed outside.’ This is absurd. Plus, it doesn’t even matter. The results are horrifying, like you admitted, and it should not be happening either way.”

It’s not “[my] silly anecdote.” It’s a Human Rights Watch Report finding. I’ll quote for you the portion of the report that makes this point, so you don’t think I’m making it up:

The circumstances of life and the public nature of drug transactions in low income urban neighborhoods make arrests far easier there than in other neighborhoods.95 In poor black neighborhoods, drug transactions are more likely to be conducted on the streets, in public, and between strangers, whereas in white neighborhoods — working class through upper class — drugs are more likely to be sold indoors, in bars, clubs, and private homes. “[I]n poor urban minority neighborhoods, it is easier for undercover narcotics officers to penetrate networks of friends and acquaintances than in more stable and closely knit working-class and middle-class neighborhoods. The stranger buying drugs on the urban street corner or in an alley, or overcoming local suspicions by hanging around for a few days and then buying drugs, was commonplace. Police undercover operations can succeed [in working and middle-class neighborhoods] but they take longer, cost more, and are less likely to succeed.”96

The point is that this is about something other than racism. That’s important because it’s counter to the paranoid cultural narrative that any disproportionate outcome that afflicts black Americans is due to white racism, which was part of what you’d started out by claiming with respect to the drug issue. Now you’re saying, well, anyway, it doesn’t matter what the reason is, because the results are horrifying for black communities. And I’ve already said that I’m against the whole war on drugs. Criminalizing drugs leads directly to making drug trafficking a profitable, dangerous criminal enterprise, and if drugs weren’t criminal, they would get regulated just like cigarettes and alcohol and become, instead, a profitable source of tax revenue for the government, and I’m personally all for letting dumb people with poor judgment make bad choices and kill themselves off instead of spending our time and money pursuing them and incarcerating them. But this just isn’t a racial issue to me. That’s where we differ. I’ve repeatedly seen data suggesting that where there are poor urban white communities, the rate of drug use, criminal arrests, etc. is remarkably similar to that of poor urban blacks. Blacks are getting disproportionately victimized because of the reality of black poverty. That, not the illusory spectre of omnipresent racism, is the problem that needs to be addressed.

You write: “You are downplaying the unique history of African Americans by continually blaming their ‘culture’ for their struggles, rather than discussing the substantial systemic injustice that still exist to this day. It doesn’t matter whether you pay lip service to those real struggles in the past. If your next move and primary opinions on race amount to blaming their ‘culture,’ you are essentially downplaying the systemic injustices that still plague Black communities. Asians and Jews came from societies that actually produced a substantial class of doctors and lawyers (and some of the immigrants indeed were doctors and lawyers) than Black people who were slaves. So, I don’t see why you’re bringing them up if you truly believe that the Black experience is uniquely difficult.”

I am not blaming black culture for the history of slavery, Jim Crow, housing discrimination, employment discrimination and other such things and for the enormous impact this history has had on the current shape of black poverty in America. Rather, I am pointing to today’s toxic African-American culture as something that is currently further holding black Americans back and exacerbating the problem rather than helping to fix it. It’s creating a poisonous brew of misdirected anger, anti-white racism, blame and dependency. It’s also creating, through the kind of cool-pose culture I’d discussed earlier, a cultural force emanating from within the black community (and encouraged by the opportunistic kitsch-and-schlock-peddling entertainment industry) that actively drags would-be-successful blacks back down by making it look like it’s “cool” and “real” to look, act, speak and think like a low-class thug. You and the many others like you with a simplistic worldview who look to racism to explain everything that’s wrong with African-Americans today are just turning a blind eye to these real issues.

You write: “Black people are not the only entities criticizing and struggling against oppressive entities. Palestinians, Koreans (against the Japanese), the IRA, Indians, and many more are still criticizing and demanding justice from their oppressors. There are countless Asian American and Latin American activists and ordinary persons speaking out against racism. In fact, I believe that this struggle is essential to improving their conditions.”

You’re talking about Palestianians and other complex international matters of that sort (as a side note, I don’t know why everyone cares so much about and seems to have an outspoken opinion on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; personally, I don’t think I know enough about it to have a particular position on it, but from everything I’ve read, it just seems to be a very complicated mess where blame falls on all sides), but I was talking, of course, about America, where, although you have whiners of every race, creed and persuasion, by and large, it’s black Americans who are overwhelmingly over-represented among the whiners and among the ones making life unpleasant for the rest of us through their ceaseless and destructive attacks upon the West, high culture, law enforcement and all the other revered institutions of what Hegel would have called “civil society.” They’ve been remarkably successful in this kind of attack because, as I’ve described in detail here, they’ve been able to co-opt elite white liberals and their Establishment institutions in the media and academia. The Democratic Party, of course, needs to pander to these aggressive blacks in order to get the black vote, which was Hillary Clinton’s main strategy to defeat the far more progressive candidacy of Bernie Sanders. Sanders could and would have represented the interests of both poor and working-class blacks and poor and working-class whites by banding them together on an economic basis rather than dividing and polarizing them on a racial basis, but the regressive identity politics wing of the Democratic Party represented by people like you undid his candidacy, which then led directly to the election of a very different sort of populist candidate. That’s why I’m saying that to make any actual progress in this country, all the rest of us need to band together and stand up against these polarizing and divisive black nationalists and their supporters among the white elites and shut them up and shut them down, because they’re obviously too stupid or short-sighted to see that their own best interests are in mobilizing on the basis of class (the 99% vs. the 1%) rather than fragmenting on the basis of race and playing right into the hands of the regressive corporate cronyism of the Neo-Liberal Democrats and Country Club Republicans. To this extent, I completely disagree with your statement that the current brand of identity politics “is essential to improving their conditions.” The main “condition” that needs to be improved is black poverty (all the rest will follow), and the only way that’s going to get improved is by mobilizing a cross-racial coalition, not by alienating and demonizing poor and struggling white people, who will then predictably flock to candidates who make racial appeals to them on the basis of their own race and lead to a political deadlock from which only those in favor of the status quo benefit.

You write, “MLK was not a Santa Clause who just told Black People to work harder like Booker T. Washington. He worked with Angela Davis, Malcolm X, and Stokely Carmichael. He recognized the necessity of these folks. So, I am surprised that you just denigrate these critics and their descendants as merely ‘whiners.’”

Please don’t compare MLK to our current crop of idiots. He fought the good fight by trying to unite people, to combat laws and practices that were discriminatory and to have everyone seen on the basis of their individual humanity rather than their race. Today’s identity politics pundits are doing the exact opposite. They are trying to divide people, to institute laws and practices that are discriminatory and to have everyone seen on the basis of their race rather than their individual humanity. These people are, thus, in no way his descendants. Their beliefs are far closer in spirit to the white nationalists MLK was fighting than they are to him. Drawing a direct line between Martin Luther King Jr. and the likes of Ta-Nehisi Coates is like drawing a direct line between Voltaire and Robespierre.

You write: “It is quite interesting that you are against private universities. It seems to me that you are not someone who simply obeys the laissez-faire religion.”

Correct. I am not even close to laissez-faire or libertarian in my politics. I have positions that are a complete mix of those associated with the extreme left, the extreme right and everyone in between, so I feel out of place in any political party or political orthodoxy.

You write: “Race is obviously an arbitrary feature we use to differentiate each other. I understand why many wish to discard it as a category of demarcation. But, race is essential to the American identity. Unlike American philosophers, African philosophers like Achille Mbembe do not analyze race. They criticize colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism instead. This is because the American identity, I believe, molded itself from the concept of race. Our history is intimately tied to race. This means that Black history or Asian American history formed itself from the concept of race. Denying these people the concept of race is a denial of their history and their sense of identity. Plus, in a society that is still plagued by racism, losing the vocabulary of race disarms a person from speaking about the injustices that occur due to a certain interpretation of race — that it is a marker of power and hierarchy. Rather than trying to dispense with race as a cultural signifier, I believe that we should try to transform its meaning — as Hegel once asked us to do so with the death of Christ. This, I believe, is more in line with the American character. I believe Wittgenstein’s metaphor of language as an ancient city shows us that our language does not simply dispense with concepts because they’re inconvenient or inefficient. It is a slow process that builds from the ruins of the past.”

This is eloquent, but I believe it’s terribly misguided. Yes, race has been essential to the American identity, but we don’t have to be permanent victims of our past. As the well-known Einstein quip goes, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” Race is a pernicious paradigm that has been used, historically speaking, for the sole purpose of asserting one group’s alleged superiority over another. As long as it exists, that is how it will be used. A different notion from Hegel from the one you invoked comes to mind, his famed master-slave dialectic, with his point being that the master-slave relationship defines and deforms both the master and the slave for as long as their relationship is structured by that dialectic. (Toni Morrison has specifically applied his notion in the context of race relations in America.) To get out of the trap that we’re going to keep falling into as long as the racial paradigm persists, we need to get beyond that whole paradigm, which is precisely what Martin Luther King Jr. was trying to do (and which he’d progressively been moving towards until the rollback of the last five or ten years began). You don’t have to embrace race in order to remember the history of slavery and discrimination, just as you don’t have to embrace Nazi race theories in order to remember the Holocaust. History is full of bad ideas that we commemorate for the purpose of making sure we don’t mistakenly take them up again. Race is such an idea.