Race - now there's a dangerous topic, and I'm not going to march blindly into that minefield today, but in the right-wing media yesterday there was a column by Theodore Dalrymple about which I feel bound to comment. Dalrymple was reporting on moves in France to remove the word "race" from all official documentation, including the French Constitution, and - moreover - including clauses and statutes that forbid discrimination on the basis of "race". The reason for these moves is that "race" is now regarded as an "unscientific" word, because, as Dalrymple explains, there is no scientific basis for dividing human beings up into "races". That is - scientifically speaking - there is no such thing as "race" and therefore there can be no such thing as racial discrimination. It is a strange argument, but it is now Left wing orthodoxy and the Socialist government in France is determined to legislate the word "race" out of existence. It is controversial because not everyone who is anti-racist is happy about it. The Socialists want to remove the word "race" from the constitutional clauses that forbid discrimination on the basis of "gender, nationality, religion and race"but those who feel they are indeed subject to discrimination on the basis of "race" feel that this is a bad idea. Supporters of the move point out that the word "race" was only added to the French constitution in 1939 and the current clause was added in 1945, specifically to outlaw Nazi racism. It is now argued that the word is redundant.
The issue that draws my attention here is, once again, the Left wing preoccupation with language and the political control of words. In this case, remarkably, the Left's war on words has even overcome the actual battle against racism; it has become more important to eradicate the word "race" than to actually acknowledge and do something about racism. In the strange contortions of Left wing logic, it seems that if we eliminate the word "race" then, somehow, we have eliminated the thing itself. This has raised some alarm among those who regularly experience the impact of racism. Louis-George Tin, founder of the Representative Council of Black Associations of France - very astutely noted that "to believe that it is sufficient to suppress a word to suppress an evil smacks of magical thinking."
I have always thought so. The New Left's obsession with controlling language is, deep down, rooted in magical thinking: the idea that words are power. The notion that removing the word "race" from French officialdom - because science tells us its an unscientific idea - as a move against "racism" (which cannot really exist because there's no such thing as "race") is in the same order of ideas as writing your enemy's name in a peace of paper and sticking it in your freezer, a common act of urban witchcraft. It is craziness. We can see where it is heading. Next it will be the word "gender" and, by extension, words like "man" and "woman". The argument goes that "gender" is unscientific. Like "race" it is purely a social construct. It has no basis in nature. Therefore, the whole idea must be eradicated from our language. There can be no discrimination on the basis of gender because there is no such thing as gender. This sort of logic now permeates New Left intellectuality.
I have a personal encounter to relate. Working in Academia, I have been at the forefront of these battles over language. One of the defining moments for me was in the late 1990s when a cabal of mad feminists tried to introduce University regulations whereby all instances of genderised language were to be treated as spelling errors. This was to be made compulsory and all academics in the Faculty had to comply. Thus, if a student submitted an essay in which they used the offensive word "mankind", it had to be treated as a spelling error and the essay marked down accordingly. Where a student is quoting someone who used the word "mankind" (or similar) then it had to be indicated as a spelling error by adding the Latin (sic) afterwords. Thus: "mankind (sic)". Since this regime was to be written into Faculty standards, academics who didn't comply might be guilty of academic misconduct.
At the time, teaching in Religious Studies, I had two post-graduates writing theses in the field of Patristics - the scholarly study of the twelve or so volumes of ancient writings left to us by the so-called 'Church Fathers'. As you can imagine, these new language regulations impacted severely upon these students. Were they seriously expected to write (sic) every time they mentioned the 'Church Fathers'? I pointed this out to one of the academic sisterhood. "It makes the study of Patristics impossible!" I said. To which she said, "Good." It was, as I say, a defining moment for me. I suddenly realised that I was looking into the smiling face of feminist fascism. This was, I realised, a deliberate act of intellectual vandalism.
Until that moment I'd usually considered myself a moderate left-of-centre small l liberal. Suddenly, I looked around and realised that I was now stranded on the right-wing side of the political spectrum. This is not because I'd moved further into conservatism, but because the Left had moved further into loony land.
There are plenty of other instances one could cite. A recent one was the case of a fellow in Canberra whose seriously ill wife was in hospital. He arrived at the hospital and declared that he was her "husband" only to be told "No you're not, you're her carer." He begged to differ. "I am her husband," he insisted. They insisted that the word "husband" had been removed from all official documentation in the ACT and he was the poor woman's "carer" or he was nothing.
If, like me, you find that case just a bit fascistic, then - whether you like it or not - you are now on the right-wing side of politics. Regarding race, it used to be the case that left-wingers supported racial harmony and took steps to stop racial abuse. But the Left has now moved well beyond that very reasonable position. They've moved on to the Orwellean control of the very words we speak, even if it inadvertently makes a nonsense of the whole idea of "racial harmony". The New Left doesn't pursue "racial harmony" anymore because there's no such thing as race - there are no races to be in harmony. As Dalrymple observes, Louis-George Tin's, Representative Council of Black Associations of France "could exist only on the assumption that black people have some interests in common on the basis of their blackness." The French Socialists seem to be saying: "What blackness? We don't see any blackness. All we see are people who all share 99% of the same DNA. Blackness is unscientific." Tell that to a black man who is refused entry to a restaurant or made to sit at the back of a bus.
The no-such-thing-as-race argument makes no sense in real life, regardless of how "scientific" it might be and how appealing to scientistic technocrats it might be. Although, in fact, even then, it is based on a spurious use of science. It is true, there are no solid genetic distinctions to be made between a white man and a black man. But so what? It is a spurious criterion. Human beings share 99% of their DNA with bananas. We live in times when soft-brained people are dazzled by all the discoveries of DNA, but in fact DNA is not a very useful measure of social realities, and often biological ones too. The point is that "race" may not have any genetic basis (although, in fact, it is the 1% of different DNA that makes all the difference) but it is, undeniably, a social reality. As Dalrymple says, "Even if races do not exist, racism does." Somehow, the Left have lost view of this stunningly simple fact. They've succumbed to magical thinking, a war on words divorced from reality.
- Harper McAlpine Black
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