I think there’s something fishy about your claps when your comment is seen that much more than my article itself.

If you actually look at the people who “clapped” for my comment, they are almost all direct followers of mine, so there’s nothing mystifying about the fact that there are more people who clapped for the comment than for the original article. They came upon the comment not through reading your article but simply through me. What I do find a bit odd is that so few people clapped for your original article, because you have a decent number of followers yourself, and although I personally disagreed with your article, I thought it was well-written and articulated a coherent thesis, so I’d have expected more people to have liked it. This, to me, bespeaks a larger problem with Medium, which is that here, as elsewhere on the internet, clickbait prevails over content. That’s unfortunate.

However polite you think you were, you can’t just jump into a discourse saying the “systemic” argument is dead, when its the very premise of sociology. We look at the big picture. Whatever you’re political persuasions, people who use “whiteness” as you have have not read the critiques in the first place. You’re jumping past it.

First, I never said the “‘systemic’ argument is dead.” It’s very much alive, insofar as it’s being spoken of incessantly. My point is not that it’s dead, but rather, that it’s misguided and unsustainable.

Second, the fact that something is accepted as “the very premise of sociology,” one of the most ideologically biased and unrepresentative fields in academia, does not make it so.

Third, you are incorrect that I have not read the critiques of “whiteness.” For instance, the Mills paper on “white ignorance” that you’d mentioned in your earlier response to me is something I read some years ago, and as I recall, I found it highly simplistic and reductive. My memory of it is not fresh, but my recollection is that he actually wasn’t saying anything more interesting than the bare fact that a group that constitutes a majority in any nation — whether a racial group or an ethnic group or any other identifiable group — is likely to perceive reality in a certain way that privileges its own, often self-serving, ways of understanding and categorizing the world. He did not succeed in particularizing this obvious truism to “white” people beyond that general observation. Nor did he (like almost all others who adopt similar perspectives to his) take note of the critical and more remarkable fact that Western culture has been virtually unique in developing and implementing a robust and lasting notion of abstract, universal rights that extend beyond a narrow tribal or ethno-national identity. In other words, what is actually interesting and different about our societies (in America and Western Europe) is not that we have some tendency, in the broadest terms, toward self-serving tribal affiliations of the sort Mills and many other sociologists that speak of “whiteness” and other such trite and racialized nonsense identify — such self-serving tribal affiliations being a near-universal feature of all human societies, historically speaking — but rather, that we have succeeded in developing such a robust framework to combat those very sorts of tribal affiliations, which makes us an unprecedented historical outlier. Mills is actually merely identifying the extent to which we still hold to (and see the world through) tribal affiliations despite the extent to which we’ve aspired to emancipate ourselves from such parochial ways of seeing the world, but he’s treating this unremarkable fact as though he were saying something profound and as though we are somehow uniquely culpable in failing to get beyond our more primal instincts rather than uniquely praiseworthy in succeeding to get beyond those primal instincts to such a spectacular extent.

In addition, in pointing to the phenomenon of “white ignorance,” he is not only recklessly deploying a racist label (consider how a label of “black ignorance” would sound to us), which is a general issue I’ve discussed in the context of “white privilege” here, but he is, on a deeper level, also failing to address the dialectical nature of superiority-inferiority relations. This is something Toni Morrison has addressed in discussing G.W.F. Hegel’s famed master-slave dialectic in the specific context of American race relations. The point Hegel makes is that the master-slave relation (and, by extension, any power relation) defines and deforms both the master and the slave. There is and cannot be a “white ignorance” (or a portion of reality to which whites are blind) without a concomitant “black ignorance” (or a portion of reality to which blacks are blind). I can understand and take note of W.E.B. Du Bois’ objection that black people, as long-time inferiors in the American power structure, have had to be conscious of white people in a way that is not true vice versa, and yet the superior-inferior relation has certainly profoundly over-defined — and, I would argue, profoundly distorted — the perception of whites that many black Americans have. This is really just the dialectical flipside of Du Bois’ argument. To the extent that white people have been able to afford to go around in blissful ignorance of blacks, black people have been almost myopically and pathologically focused on whites and been driven to the brink of obsessive paranoid delusion about the extent to which black destinies are shaped and accounted for by white oppression (the sad case of Ta-Nehisi Coates seems to me an extreme demonstration of this phenomena, a would-be talented writer whose consciousness has been so profoundly deformed by his obsessively racialist outlook that his entire body of work exists in that paranoid hinterland). This is part of what accounts for the unproductive and self-destructive culture of blame within the American black community, the attribution of every adverse or disproportionate societal and personal outcome to white racism, etc. Both “white ignorance” and “black ignorance,” in other words, are cases of assuming you know everything there is to know about the other, while, in reality, having your ways of “knowing” completely refracted through a racialized prism.

The real question is why are you arguing at all? Certain laws are wrong and have racist effects. The war-on-drugs being case in point, because it reinforces racist effects across the whole spectrum of society; it creates all these pathological social forms like gangs, or corrupt police, or police just following order (enforcing unjust laws). Systemic/institutional racism is a serious problem, and so is ‘whiteness’ culture, but these are very very abstract things. That is the problem. They are hard to talk about. They are not absolute. Whatever things you are saying that might be true don’t invalidate my thesis here; that the problem is abstraction, in many ways. The incarceration of millions of black people who are otherwise innocent is racist because the whole set of assumptions of the war-on-drugs is false, at a very fundamentally abstract level.

Personally, I’m against most drug laws, but when you say that “[c]ertain laws are wrong and have racist effects,” I’m not sure what standard of right and wrong you’re appealing to. If what you’re saying is that certain laws are wrong because they have racist effects, then what I’d say is that the system of laws that we and virtually every other nation have is always going to be highly tethered to cultural preferences of all sorts. For instance, most U.S. states have an “age of consent,” hovering around 16 or 18 or whatever, and define various instances of sexual assault or statutory rape based on violations of those consent laws. Those laws are informed by deep-seated taboos we now have, and most of us, hearing about matters such as Roy Moore’s alleged sexual overtures towards a 14-yr.-old, instinctively recoil. And yet if we go back in time 100 years or less, the age of consent was a very different matter. In most societies back then, any post-pubescent girl was already of marriageable age, and that remains the case in many developing nations today, so that an older man being attracted to a 14-yr.-old girl would be in no way remarkable. The law defining the age of consent changed because our norms and taboos changed, and those norms and taboos changed because our modern-day economy and lifestyle require many more years of schooling and a longer education/maturation period, such that humans are deemed “children” until they, more or less, graduate from high school, if not later. So does that mean age of consent laws are “wrong”? No … they’re just culturally relative, and that’s perfectly okay.

Now, take drug laws. In 1990, the U.S. Supreme Court decided a case, Employment Division, Department of Human Resources of Oregon v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872 (1990), that involved a prohibition by the State of Oregon on the use of the drug peyote. That drug, however, was used in certain traditional Native American ceremonies, so the question the Supreme Court had to answer was whether the prohibition, as applied to these Native Americans, violated their First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion. The Supreme Court concluded that the drug law did not violate their right to free exercise because it was just a neutral law of general application, and the Supreme Court probably saw a slippery slope here: if we allow people to violate our drug laws because their religion says it’s okay, where does it stop?: do we next have to allow hardline Muslims to stone homosexuals or adulterers? Again, there’s no right and wrong here, at least as far as I’m concerned. The use of peyote is not something a majority of this society finds to be okay, and so we ban its use, even though that impacts a particular group that tends to use that drug more than others. The same is true of marijuana use (though that’s obviously changing with time). Personally, I don’t see much logic in banning peyote or marijuana use but permitting alcohol use, and I would favor legalizing all these things and taxing them all at a high rate so that the U.S. and state governments at least get tax revenue from people’s dumb behavior rather than allowing such profits from the sale of illegal drugs to fall into the hands of gangs and cartels, but for the moment, peyote and marijuana are illegal in most states, while alcohol sales (to those over a certain age) are okay. Yes, these choices, like the age of consent choice, always are culturally relative and likely to have a disproportionate adverse impact on certain groups that have different norms. But that’s part of what living in a democracy is all about.

Our laws largely reflect majoritarian lifestyles and preferences. Talmudic law or Sharia law may call for certain punishments for certain things most of us don’t even perceive as crimes, and insofar as our laws don’t reflect such preferences, our laws discriminate against these groups. But we have to make choices. We can’t allow Islamic fundamentalists living among us to impose the death penalty for homosexuality, adultery or apostasy. They can do that in their own society. To say all of this another way, “systemic racism,” in most of its forms, isn’t an interesting phenomenon because democratic norms and laws are inherently one and the same as “systemic racism” and ethnocentrism and Islamophobia and every other one of these politicized bugaboos. This does not mean that we cannot identify and flag instances of egregious discrimination when we encounter it. What it does mean is that when we turn from such egregious instances to these more “subtle,” “pernicious,” “systemic,” “institutionalized” forms of discrimination, there is no analytical clarity, no logical stopping point and no end in sight ….

Although — judging from the amount of coverage identity-obsessed academics and the infotainment industrial complex devote to black Americans, race issues, racism, etc. — it may sometime seem like black Americans are 75% of the population, the reality is that they are more like 12–13%. Whites are around 63%. That means that our society, which is a republic built around democratic preferences reined in by some checks and balances, is largely going to be centered on the preferences of that white majority. These preferences are not immutable, and you and I can make arguments against drug laws and try to push public opinion in a certain direction. But for the moment, those preferences, as expressed in laws, are what they are. That they tend to be ethnically and racially salient in their effect is not surprising in the least. But despite such inherent discrimination, immigrant groups in America and all kinds of people I would call the “Other” have been able to be successful here to an extent that is almost beyond compare. The fact that American blacks have been uniquely unsuccessful, as a group, even in spite of the extent to which our society has bent over backwards in recent decades to rewire itself in order to give them a boost in nearly every aspect of life, is a scandal in need of an explanation. And instead of offering such an explanation, entrenched interests in academia and in the media have gone to great lengths to deploy and propagate the kinds of “vicious abstractions” I described in response to your article — “people of color,” “marginalized people,” “whiteness,” “white supremacy,” “institutional racism,” “systemic racism,” etc. — in order to engage in obfuscation and distort the real issues that remain largely unexamined. And that, to answer your question, is “why [I am] arguing at all.”