They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder; perhaps, the same can hold true for certain forms of racism.
Although I’m conventionally unattractive, I’ve had the fortune of friends and romantic partners seeing me as beautiful, just as I’ve seen them. I’m not beautiful because I’m objectively beautiful but because they subjectively see me as so. Similarly, perhaps not all forms of racism are objectively racism, instead deemed so by those who subjectively perceive racism to be omnipresent. If beauty is all you see, you will find it everywhere. If racism is all you see, you will find it everywhere. From math to exercise to the “OK” hand gesture, the woke seem to have mastered the art of finding racism in every crevice of society.
Which is more likely to happen? The woke finding that which is racist today, not being so tomorrow? Or the woke finding that which is not racist today, being so tomorrow? Considering recent history with the woke definition of racism growing to include more that is racist rather than shrinking to less that is racist, there appears to be a greater likelihood that what is not racist today will be tomorrow than what is racist today not being so tomorrow, thus expanding the window of acceptable ideas.
Perhaps this trajectory toward an all-inclusive woke definition of racism, and all-isms for that matter, isn’t such a bad thing. Often when we’re met with viewpoints that conflict with our personal values, we tend to (a) oppose them to suggest they are not as they are proposed or (b) compete against them to suggest that other viewpoints are of greater validity. Instead, a third option could be to (c) saturate that viewpoint into dilution, thereby impotence.
This is the basis of my working theory of human behavior, which I call ‘Diluting X-ism’; if everything is (FILL-IN-THE-BLANK), then nothing is (FILL-IN-THE-BLANK). If everything is racist, then nothing is racist. If everything is sexist, then nothing is sexist. If everyone is racist or sexist, then nobody is racist or sexist.
The danger of adopting a woke dictionary is this: If everything and everyone is racist, then actual racism gets to operate in the shadows, protected by a veil of saturation that the woke seem to endorse as covert racists themselves.
The woke nomenclature train has long left the station, and perhaps it needs to go off the rails before we take our language back from the woke. My theory is that diluting x-ism — racism in this instance — will cloud what is and isn’t x-ist to the point of impotence. Actual racism cannot be addressed until we’ve taken back control of our language, until then, perhaps we should advance the clouding process by adding to what is defined as racist so that wokeness dissolves through saturation and common sense prevails. Cancel culture’s bondage-through-censorship imposed by woke ideology will eventually lead to freedom and liberty from the woke ideology that propagates racism under the guise of antiracism.
Deontology employs a “do no harm” strategy, while teleology employs a “greater good” strategy. For the teleological greater good, it may be time to out-woke the woke and call everything and everyone racist, sexist, transphobic, toxic, gaslighting, a social construct, a privilege, a microaggression, a trauma. Perhaps we should promote wearing helmets instead of masks, delisting 911 instead of defunding the police, fit-shaming instead of health-at-any-size, mansplaining how women are actually womxn, and Latin is actually Latinx. Once everything is canceled, nothing can be canceled.
History’s tyrants have believed themselves on the “right side of history.” How do we react when the woke talk about “being on the right side of history,” as though they can predict the future and assess the present in retrospect? The woke have often been more offended by my life experiences than I have, finding every valley to be racially motivated, even through internalized racism, and every peak to be a referendum on the potential of my race rather than myself as an individual.
Although I should not be penalized because of my race, I am also not owed anything because of my race. The next time we find the woke calling something that wasn’t racist yesterday racist today, ask: is this new thing really racist? Or do the woke covert racists refuse to believe something could ever be not racist because racism is all their eye beholds?
