My ultimate “agenda” is probably, in the end, not too different from yours: I want people of every race to live together in harmony, without having to think all the time about what race they are or how that sets them apart from anyone else, and I want to live in a nation where there is no longer a racially marked underclass, where people no longer need to pay attention to skin color.
Where we probably disagree is on the question of how we can best approach that ideal. I’ve explained on Medium and elsewhere before that race-conscious approaches are actually making the problem worse:
Due to the prevalence of these approaches today, it feels like we’re living through some sort of new epidemic of racism, but the only epidemic we’re living through is an epidemic of people talking non-stop about racism. Despite all kinds of irresponsible and inflated claims being made, I haven’t seen any actual evidence that we’re suffering from some big problem of what gets called “systemic” or “institutional” racism in 2018. If you disagree, I highly recommend you read this excellent recent article from Quillette.com:
Among the many points it makes in countering the notion that some vaguely defined, all-encompassing monster called “white supremacy” is keeping anyone down in 2018 is the fact that blacks from the West Indies and Africa not only outperform African-Americans but also outperform white Americans. If anti-black racism were the real culprit, then that obviously wouldn’t be happening. As I’ve argued here, the main cause of the problem today isn’t white racism, but rather, what sociologists call black “cool-pose culture” that is prevalent among African Americans, especially African-American males, but isn’t as prevalent in these other people from the West Indies or Africa who look just as “black” or even “blacker” than African Americans:
I view #BlackLivesMatter as having already wreaked lots of havoc in the black community (as well as the larger American community) by tricking many African Americans into believing that they can’t succeed in America, that the deck is stacked against them, that cops are out to get them, and that whites will hate them no matter what they do. This is a recipe for antagonism, defeatism and failure. And it is a bad attitude reflected in several of the bogus #BlackLivesMatter incidents I described in the article of mine to which you’d responded.
