The concept of racism is a novelty of the twentieth century that in recent times has been treated as a timeless truth. In the last century, the best people decided that their fellow white people had been living in sin because they had not welcomed the descendants of former slaves into their lives, so they set about correcting it. What started as a project to better the material condition of black people and include them into general society, slowly transformed into a cult of leukophobia.

It is a good example of how a negative identity can both spread and slowly destroy the people who embrace it. The first “antiracists” were sober minded compared to the modern version, in that they simply wanted to address the practical problem of incorporating the black population into the American legal system. As a practical matter, the United States had two legal frameworks into the twentieth century, one for the white population and one for the black population.

The fact that this dual legal system existed in America is a great example of how practical necessity must always come before the ideal. America was born, in part, in the notion of equality before the law. It nearly tore itself apart in a civil war over this very same issue, but into the twentieth century the majority of Americans, of both races, were comfortable with a two-tier legal system. It was this gap between the ideal and reality through which antiracism entered.

Those first “antiracists” were opposed to this dual legal system. Soon they were opposed to the people who defended it and then opposed to the human reality that perpetuated it despite reforms in the law. The civil rights revolution in the middle of the last century went beyond eliminating the dual legal system. It was aimed at eradicating the conditions that made it possible. Those conditions, it was assumed, were in the hearts and minds of the white population.

This version of the Great Awakening was motivated by a desire to once and for all eliminate that which makes racial inequality possible. Instead of pulling up at the water’s edge of biological reality, the reformers imagined that they were smashing into the final defenses of racism and the racists who made it possible. That sin of racism discovered in the last century was anthropomorphized into an army of imaginary devils, against which the great and the good could rally.

The last generation of madness has been in pursuit of what Chief Justice John Roberts called the folly of trying to create equality from inequality. Not only are differences in individual people immutable, differences on groups of people are immutable, but that itself became one of the deadly sins of antiracism. The stubbornness of this reality just made the antiracist more determined until they embraced state sponsored violence against this imaginary evil.

Whether they understood what they were doing is unclear, but what antiracism became was a mirror of what they claimed was white racism. This started with shifting the definition of racism from “prejudice based on race” to “prejudice plus power”, which meant only whites could be racist. Since hating white people was not new, they shifted to hating whiteness, the conditions that produce white people. The result was a moral code built on the hatred of white people, leukophobia.

In the final decades of the last century, American children were taught about the cultural lunacy in communist countries like Russia and China. They would struggle to accept that people could submit to reeducation camps and struggle sessions run by crazy people at war with reality. In the fullness of time, children will look at the diversity pogroms of this age the same way. Future children will struggle to believe that psychopathic con artist like Robin DiAngelo were real.

Like the madness of Mao’s Cultural Revolution or the bloody madness of Stalin’s purges, the madness of antiracism has run its course. Yesterday, Trump signed another executive order, this one rescinding Lyndon Johnson’s EO 11246, which established affirmative action in government contracting. Ten years ago, anyone suggesting this was called a white nationalist and purged from polite company. Suddenly it is in the trophy case of the most banal political activists.

What we are experiencing right now is a preference cascade. Long ago, a wiseman said that antiracism would collapse on the day a so-called conservative professed his antiracism in front of a gathering and that gathering started to chuckle and then burst into uproarious laughter as they all realized the same thing. That thing was that everyone else was sick of this nuttiness too. All sudden, it was okay to laugh at it and so everyone indulged in hysterical laughter.

This is not to suggest that we will be restoring segregation or that television actors will start casually dropping racial epithets. It simply means that the social movement built around antiracism has reached the end of the line. The quest to eliminate race as a defining feature of public discourse ended with race as the defining feature of public discourse, leaving it with nowhere to go but away. The solution to a racialized public square is a de-racialized public square.

Another way of looking at this is the old expression, shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations. This refers to the idea that wealth gained in one generation will be lost by the third. The founder starts the business, turning it over to his son who competently manages it. His son then runs it into the ground. There are a lot of variations on this same theme, but all point to the same idea. Regression to the mean is undefeated over a long enough time span.

The concepts of racism and antiracism were created by clever people seeking to capitalize on that gap between the American ideal and reality. They got the social movement going and the next generation established it as a fixture of American political discourse. For a couple of decades, antiracism provided good jobs at good wages to college educated people with no real skills. They just had to show up and play their role, but instead they brought the movement to ruin.

One could also look at the death of racism, the political cause, and its moral claims, as part of the overall decline of the American empire. Racism and antiracism were made possible by the emergence of the American superpower after the two great industrial wars of the twentieth century. This last spasm of racism was made possible by the final victory over the other great ideology to emerge from those wars. Now that the empire is on the wane, its social movements are dying with it.

Regardless of your preferred narrative, there is no escaping the fact that the world has suddenly shifted on the issue of race. The moral center is coming to rest where it belonged all along with regards to race and that it is a private matter. One chooses to live with who they like, for any reason they like. It is not a collective matter. We are seeing the line between the private and public reappear. The first casualty is the concept of racism and its traveling partner antiracism.

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