I know that a lot of people think that anybody who thinks that some (emphasize some) anti-racists activists have gone off the rails have, themselves, gone off the rails.
One needn't look much further than best selling authors Robin DeAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi to see that some people have gone completely off their rockers.
DeAngelo's book can basically be summed up as an argument that you're a racist if you're ignorant of the experiences of different people of a different race, you're also racist for asking a person of a different race to explain their experience to you, you're a racist if you're a white woman who cries in front of a black man, and, really the only way to be white and not be a racist is to be Robin DeAngelo.
Kendi doesn't believe that any opinion is racially neutral. Every opinion is either racist or anti-racist. I'm not making this up: when Ezra Klein asked Kendi about the capital-gains tax, Kendi said that it's racist to support a tax cut there. He went further. Kendi went so far as to insist that simply being neutral on the capital-gains tax is enough to make you racist.
These aren't fringe voices. DeAngelo's book White Fragility has been the best selling book in the USA for months. Kendi's book How to be an Anti-racist is a bestseller. Both of these people are insane at best and, at worst, using the real problems of racism to push bad ideas on our culture.
In Kendi's world, my simply pointing out the fact that tax revenue from capital-gains went up when we cut rates would make me a racist. That's where we've come. Is this really where you want to be?
