Racism Is Worse Than Anti-Racism. Why Is This So Hard?

Aaron Schlossberg hiding from the press behind his now infamous umbrella.

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Over at National Review, Dan McLaughlin writes about Aaron Schlossberg, the New York lawyer caught on video multiple times screaming racial epithets at people:

Naturally Schlossberg lit up Twitter and also provoked plenty of real-life protests. McLaughlin compares this public act of shaming to The Scarlet Letter, and sure, whatever. He also agrees that Schlossberg is a horrible person, with only the reasonable caveat that “it’s fair to ask — just as Hawthorne implicitly asked — how far we should go, and how indelibly the stain should endure.” So far, so good. But after all this throat clearing, he ends with this:

What is striking is the fact that the sorts of people most eager to exact punishment on Schlossberg are precisely the same folks who would lecture us no end about how terrible it is to be morally judgmental and how backward the world of the Puritans was. What we see today in the moral furies over racism is that the human need to enforce social norms against sin remains, and still extends beyond just the letter of the law. People who say they don’t want to judge sin invariably just want to judge different sins. They may denounce moralizers for hypocrisy in being against sin without being sinless, but theirs is the true hypocrisy. We have always needed moralizers, we have always wanted to be moralizers, and we always will.

This is a great example of how conservatives too often write about race: There always has to be a “but” that’s the real point of the piece. In this case, it’s liberals who are supposedly hypocrites because they condemn racism but don’t condemn every other form of human behavior that some people dislike. Why this is hypocrisy is beyond me, unless you literally think we should never pass judgment on anything—except racism. I’m not aware of anyone like that, though.

So what we’re left with is: humans all condemn certain behaviors; those behaviors depend on culture, era, and personal beliefs; and racism is bad. But even though McLaughlin is no ultra, he still can’t condemn an egregious act of racism and just leave it at that. Why not? Why does the real sin of racism always have to be the fact that liberals point it out and condemn it?

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate