Brief notes on why we should remain skeptical of the new conventional wisdom of systems-level thinking that reduces the complexity and unpredictability of human action to a simple formula:
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White supremacy used to refer to the belief, encoded in both custom and law, that white people sit at the top of a biological racial hierarchy and that they must remain there. But in the past decade or so, it has become a much vaguer and more totalizing concept
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Now white supremacy denotes invisible structures, latent beliefs, and even innocuous practices, such as punctuality, that supposedly maintain the comparative advantage of white people at the expense of everyone else.
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Such moral reasoning has become conventional wisdom, embraced vocally by white liberals, among others. But white and nonwhite people alike should be wary of forfeiting their agency so easily.
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I should add that in this piece, I respond to the criticism raised, and I also address the psychologically acute point about black police that James Baldwin made, which has been going viral in the past few days.
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After the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and the reckoning that followed, all manner of experience was probed for evidence of “white supremacy.” Some on the left have adopted the term as a sort of shorthand for the the invisible hand of all American social and political life.
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This understanding of white supremacy has led progressive journalists and activists to bring attention to (some might say obsess over) racial background in lethal encounters involving white and nonwhite people. George Zimmerman, who killed Trayvon Martin, was a white Hispanic.
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Darren Wilson, who killed Michael Brown, was not merely an agent of the state but specifically a white police officer. Derek Chauvin, a white man in a multiracial group of officers responding to the scene, was the one to kneel on George Floyd.
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When Robert Aaron Long, a white man, murdered eight mostly Asian workers in three massage parlors in Atlanta in 2021, he said he was a sex addict and suggested he was driven by shame.
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But some community leaders insisted that anti-Asian animus was the X factor. According to one media narrative, repeating Long’s professed motive amounted to making “excuses” for “white male murderers.”
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The seamlessness with which the argument moves from "the race of the perpetrator is crucial" to "it's only the race of the victim that matters" feels a hell of a lot like gaslighting.
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