In 1958, the Rodgers and Hammerstein movie musical South Pacific was released, seasoned with what were at that time bold reflections on race.  The musical included the song “Carefully Taught,” with the lyrics “you’ve got to be taught before it’s too late ... to hate all the people your relatives hate.”  Implicit was the idea that racism, not anti-racism, was the artificial social construct that would struggle to survive human nature, common sense, and decency.

As the next half-century would confirm, related ideas such as colorblindness, content of character, the emphasis on the individual over the group would successfully minimize racial prejudice.  What appeared to many to be the triumphant culmination of racial progress with the 2008 election of Obama, which even Obama’s political adversaries found consolation in, would instead be the high watermark for racial relations, an inflection point at which a new racialism, utterly inconceivable at the time, would arise to divide, distract, and divert the country into a fundamental transformation of America.

The cathartic victory over historical demons was a unifying opportunity in an already divided country to celebrate racial harmony and remain attentive to its upkeep.  Yet Obama and the left decided to use this consensus over the inhumanity of racism as the basis for a new racialism.  There were the many supporters who would benefit or all the fawning liberals terrified at being called a racist while rejoicing in calling someone else racist.  There were the arrogance and intolerance from a thin-skinned theoretician who had little experience in the tradeoffs and complexities when attempting to solve real-world problems.  There was the discovery of a largely uniform unaccountable media establishment and shadowy government eager to protect with lies powers far exceeding levels the community organizing crowd would have historically hysterically opposed.  There was the rapidly fading dream that economic inequality could foment enough hatred necessary for an American Marxism to be restored, with a manufactured inequality and grievance problem that would beckon for that authoritarian solution leftists have always audaciously hoped for.  So Obama snatched that race card just in time, before it fell into history’s dustbin.

Elevating the perceived threat of racism to crisis levels would begin with manipulating the definition of racism.  Media became saturated with anguish narratives.  Racial outliers were used to define adversarial individuals and groups.  A binary scale instead of a continuum was used to incriminate and intimidate those who might occasionally or unintentionally act or utter statements with only infinitesimal deviations from racial probity.  There was present trauma from historical racism never experienced by the traumatized.  There were subconscious racism and systemic racism, composed of lingering negative stereotypes and microaggresions and mysterious remnants of our racist history that may not even be seen or heard but are present nevertheless.  As a representative of the new racialism during the George Floyd celebrations explained, “Even if there are no racists left, there will still be racism.”

Once racism becomes a clear and present danger, it is not good enough to not be racist; one must be anti-racist, actively inspecting all surfaces and subsurfaces for the slightest trace of racism and vigorously eradicating it.  Equality of outcome must replace equality of opportunity as the standard of measurement for racism.  (No other explanation for disparate outcomes is possible.)  Any action or thought contributing to a disparity in outcomes is racist, as interpreted by the racialists.  Colorblindness becomes racist, for it is necessary for the racially advantaged to see color, perceive their own privilege, and acknowledge their debt.  Finally, the racist model is applied to biological sex or sexual orientation or anything else deemed to have oppressors and oppressed.  Intersectionality is introduced as the meter of aggregated victimhood.

To broaden intersectionality’s appeal, intersectional self-interest and non-intersectional fear and guilt need to be supplemented with joy.  The joys of intersectionality begin with the material benefits granted to the highly intersectional and the operatives whose livelihood and status depend on intersectional oppression.  Intersectionality then offers meaning for the purposeless, merit to the meritless, scapegoating to the blameworthy, belonging to the increasingly alienated in a virtually connected world, and easy virtue to the guilty and cruel, relieved from obligations toward the more complex and demanding non-intersectional empathy that intersectionality crowds out.  A mob of haters forms, whether motivated by envy or the unearned sense of importance from bullying (yesterday’s racist bullies are today’s anti-racist bullies) or misplaced grievances.

The hateful mob that craves the joy from the suffering of the hated will cancel or destroy any individual, group, organization, institution, belief, or idea branded with some form of intersectional bigotry.  Show me the person or policy, and the leftist “intellectual elite in a far-distant capital” will show you the bigotry.  Dissent from the left is easily equated with bigotry, extremism, domestic terrorism.  The extra-constitutional military surveillance state built to combat the most barbaric and formidable foreign enemies is repurposed, turning inward, joining forces with the repurposed dehumanizing racial model of the past and the hateful mobs against these domestic terrorists, formerly known as the patriots who made America great.

It is not long before the wrecking ball of intersectionality reaches the core of American exceptionalism.  Multi-tiered standards according to the intersectional hierarchy are used to distribute not only material benefits, but also fundamental rights.  The economic, legal, and political systems erode without the now stigmatized merit system, equality before the law, and civil liberties.  A perverse incentive system rewards victims with power and privilege while punishing achievers with daunting financial burdens, juries of one’s persecutors, and presumptions of guilt until proven woke.  The foundational principles and institutions designed to protect, strengthen independence, and unify are unavailable.  We are left distracted and divided and dependent, unable to resist the demagogues’ corruption and tyranny.

Perhaps the greatest joy is to free people from freedom, ending once and for all that radical experiment of a largely self-governing people.  In Dostoyevsky’s “Grand Inquisitor,” the Grand Inquisitor condemns Jesus for burdening people with the free will Jesus believed people were worthy of rather than offering the security and joy of bread and circuses.  It is an archetypical question plaguing the human condition.  To renounce one’s heritage, one’s independence of thought and choice, one’s ability to achieve through one’s own efforts would be to submit to a form of slavery.  How would one ever make such a choice?  One needs only to be taught, carefully and joyfully, with the prosecutorial rod dangling from above should anyone color outside the lines.

The teachers will be there from cradle to grave, coopting parents, religion, tradition, history, reason, and common sense.  There are the teachers in K–12, the professors in college, the government entertainment media complex, and converted peers in adulthood.  You will be trained, programmed, propagandized what to think, feel, how to act, whom to emulate, whom to hate.  You will have security, equality, approval, community.  As long as you obey, a veritable Garden of Eden awaits.  And you must remember never to take from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, for that is reserved for God, I mean government — an indoctrinator and a prosecutor currently vying for the top positions, last I checked.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.