A seemingly novel ideology of “woke” anti-racism has swept the United States in the past half-decade. Emanating from no apparent center and organized around neither definite goals nor clear ideas, it has become one of the dominant forces in politics and culture. Critiques both from the Marxist Left and conservative Right have proven powerless against its rise. To many, particularly the young and college-educated, racism now appears as the greatest threat to a decent political order, and the division between self-declared anti-racists and their foes is the most salient division in public life.
The conflict between a “dominant anti-racism” and its “designated enemy,” however, was forewarned over 30 years ago. In The Force of Prejudice (1988), French sociologist Pierre-Andre Taguieff argued that anti-racism, which had become central to the political culture of Western democracies during the 1930s and ’40s as a response to the biological racism of Nazi Germany, contained a hidden danger. It was, he warned, developing into a new kind of politics that replicated disturbing features of mid-20th-century totalitarianism but in a postmodern form strangely indifferent to material realities.
The emerging anti-racism, Taguieff argued, echoes communism and fascism in denouncing the supposed neutrality and universalism of liberal democracy as a sham. It likewise sees humanity as divided into opposing groups and believes that the purpose of politics is to reveal this opposition rather than constrain it. But its “limitless” struggle against racism, Taguieff observed, is strangely “impotent.” On the one hand, it conflates any negative feelings between members of distinct human populations with acts of discrimination and hatred. It sees even the most minor expressions of “racism” — say, expressing a negative stereotype about a minority group — as a form of violence that merits a violent response. It posits the existence of “racists,” who reveal their threatening inner essence through such subtle acts of hate, as public enemies who must be eliminated. But anti-racism never manages to eradicate, or even reduce, racism. It “necessarily avoids acting on the real causes of what it pretends to combat,” pursuing a symbol-obsessed and counterproductive agenda.
Taguieff’s analysis reflected the French politics of his own day, but it has been confirmed by later developments. The most immediate cause of racism in French society was and continues to be immigration from Africa and the Middle East, which the French state initially encouraged to meet the country’s post-war demand for labor. After the mid-1970s, however, France’s economic boom came to a halt, leading to permanent mass unemployment. Efforts to restrict immigration were thwarted by France’s policy of family reunification, which allowed the largely male population of African and Arab immigrants to bring their spouses, children, and parents to France. In 1977, the Conseil d’Etat, one of the institutions that fills the role of a supreme court, ruled that immigrants have the “right” to family life, making reunification legally inviolable.
In the following four decades, unemployment has remained dire while immigration through family reunification has continued unabated. The result has been multigenerational poverty in communities of immigrants, who have little opportunity or incentive to assimilate into French society through work or intermarriage. “White” Frenchmen, meanwhile, often resent the immigrants’ presence, which they associate with criminality (including terrorism), welfare dependency, and the erosion of a shared sense of national identity.
The modern politics of anti-racism, Taguieff argued, are a product of the failure of the French Left to respond adequately to these new circumstances. In the early 1980s, the socialist government of President Francois Mitterrand made a brief attempt to eliminate unemployment and reverse the country’s economic downturn by nationalizing key industries, including the banking sector. But these policies led to inflation and capital flight, forcing the government to abandon them. Unable to differentiate itself from the Right meaningfully on economic policy, the French Left began to focus on culture. One of its favorite tactics was mobilizing against the supposed menace of the racist far-Right, incarnated by the leader of the National Front, Jean-Marie Le Pen.
In the 1980s, Le Pen represented only a sliver of the French electorate. But by opposing him and his party with moralizing campaigns about the evils of racism, successive governments have been able to avoid challenging the status quo of economic stagnation and demographic transformation. In this sense, anti-racism is a “vicious circle” that attacks those identified as racists while ignoring and indeed worsening the causes of actual racism.
Taguieff ended Force of Prejudice by sketching an alternative form of anti-racism that, rather than persecuting supposed racists, would aim at “demonstrating successful forms of ‘non-racist’ life.” The goal, Taguieff believed, should not be to punish and denounce racists but to create social conditions in which racial conflict is submerged beneath shared experiences of cooperation and mutual benefit. In the exact center of the book, however, Taguieff suggested that this “non-racist” utopia might be, at best, a “noble lie.”
In a long digression, Taguieff invoked Leo Strauss’s Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952), in which the German-Jewish-American philosopher argued that, prior to the era of modern liberalism, the great thinkers of the past wrote in an “esoteric” mode. That is, to avoid openly disagreeing with the beliefs of the powerful, which would invite censorship or worse, they disguised their most heterodox ideas under layers of ambiguity and hidden meaning. But they left clues to alert perspicacious readers to the truth.
Strauss went out of his way to insist that this mode of writing was no longer necessary in such free societies as the United States. Taguieff held, however, that we should expect authors, including Strauss, to continue to practice esoteric writing even in liberal democracies. Strauss, in other words, was esoterically inciting thoughtful Americans to consider how their own society might persecute independent thought and how independent thinkers might survive that persecution.
Whether in pre-modern authoritarian regimes or in modern liberal society, Taguieff believed, there will always “be an esoteric center of every true philosophy … the mark of philosophy is that it resists public dissemination.” We should expect, therefore, that anyone, including Taguieff, who writes about such a sensitive topic as race, surrounded by so many political and moral taboos, will also practice esoteric writing. And we should expect, insofar as the new anti-racism Taguieff warned of grows steadily more dominant, becoming stronger as it stokes the racial tensions it purport to oppose, that the “strategies of dissimulation” identified by Strauss will be the favorite refuge of critics fearing persecution.
Blake Smith is a historian of modern France and a literary translator.
