The main “vicious abstractions” here are the very notions of “systemic racism” and “institutional racism” themselves, which conceal the following reality: as the juicy, express variety of overt racism, the kind that people could easily identify and combat, started to dissipate over time, the crusaders-against-racism who had themselves become pedigreed and institutionalized in academia, think-tanks, governmental bureaucracies and so on had to struggle to maintain what the renowned Marxist sociologist Pierre Bourdieu would call their “cultural capital,” and to do that, they had to invent new forms of subtle, pernicious and ineradicable “racism” that one needed to have a Ph.D. and/or degree conferred by one of these now entrenched ideological departments (African-American studies, gender studies, etc.) to identify. Thus, the original meaning of “racism,” which had required some semblance of actual prejudice against a group of people on the basis of race, came to be progressively undermined and diluted and all sorts of phenomena previously thought neutral (the criminal justice system, housing policy, corporate hiring practices, university admissions, etc.) came to be identified as embodying what came to be called “institutional” or “systemic” racism. To conceal the obvious fact that the main form of overt racism was now being directed by certain intemperate blacks and their allies against white people, anti-white racism was sought to be defined out of existence with a new breed of radicalized regressive identitarian leftists attempting to re-define “racism” as requiring prejudice + power (I explain here why that doesn’t work as a matter of both the philosophy of language and of pure practical common sense), and new, trendy racist abstractions such as “whiteness,” “white privilege” and “implicit bias” (now thoroughly debunked as pure junk science) came to dominate the airwaves. Furthermore, to cover up the obvious fact that African-Americans were really the ONLY group falling further and further behind in America despite all the anti-racist policies and campaigns, social programs, admissions preferences and other measures directed to helping their cause over many decades, further vicious abstractions such as “people of color,” “minorities,” “oppressed” and “marginalized” groups were concocted in an attempt to forge illusory alliances between groups of people — such as disproportionately poor and unsuccessful African-Americans and disproportionately wealthy and successful East Asians — that, in truth, had next to nothing in common and diametrically opposed political interests.
The results of this war of Orwellian dogma against reality was, eventually, that working-class white people started legitimately feeling like they were under attack by the elites and their infotainment industrial complex, and they retreated from the anti-racist ideas they had largely been raised to embrace, flocking back toward proponents of more overt forms of racism. I discuss that phenomenon in detail here:
Steve Bannon is surely correct, to this extent, in observing that his movement gains votes and converts each time the aggressive identitarian Alt-Left starts talking about racism, sexism, gay rights, Islamophobia and the like. My guess is that the convulsions we are currently experiencing will get worse before they get better, before those true progressives on the Real Left realize the bargain with the devil they have struck by making their bed with the shrill, angry scoundrels of the Alt-Left. It is my sincere hope that something less than an all-out race war will be sufficient to get message across.
