Charlottesville, Race, and the Mishnory Road: New at Reason

Many of those who would recoil in horror at racist notions find similar notions strangely beguiling when they are dressed up in more genteel language.

A. Barton Hinkle writes:

“To oppose something is to maintain it,” wrote Ursula K. Le Guin in her classic The Left Hand of Darkness, a sci-fi novel that anticipated our gender-bending age by nearly half a century. “To be sure, if you turn your back on Mishnory and walk away from it, you are still on the Mishnory road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.”

Those words seem especially apt now, after Charlottesville—because so many of those who oppose the white supremacists have fallen into the same trap as the white supremacists. They have embraced the same fallacy; they are caught in the same harmful patterns of thought.

Before discussing how this might be, a pre-emptive cringe: What follows is not meant to imply any sort of moral equivalence (let alone that of Donald Trump’s awful “many sides” statement on Saturday). The man who pushes a pedestrian into oncoming traffic and the man who pushes a pedestrian out of a speeding car’s way might both be engaged in the act of pushing a pedestrian—but the acts they commit are, morally speaking, vastly different.

So. The white supremacists who caused so much misery in Charlottesville drew anger and contempt from nearly everyone in the country. But much of the anger and contempt was reflexive, and it might help to step back and ask why. What precisely do they espouse that gives such great offense?

Racism, obviously. But what does that entail?

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