I recently came upon the antiracism belief that individualism and merit are “racist.” Antiracists refer to them as “American white values.” The racializing of individualism and merit-based achievement seem to be exclusive to those who share the antiracist worldview. More and more people are eagerly embracing the tenets of critical race theory and antiracism as a public posture that exemplifies the noble pursuit of “racial justice.” I want to highlight what should be obvious– the fad of racializing everything, even a long-standing virtue as individual merit, is further eroding our already-fragile civic ties while trivializing real racism.

One of the problems with antiracism is its practice of condensing the complexity of unique individuality into shallow representations of “race.” This antiracist position refuses to see people– as people. There’s nothing distinctive about individuals in antiracism’s anthropological methodology. Antiracist ideological convictions demand advocates ignore the intrinsic worth of people in favor of a racialized preconception that divides people into two classes: oppressed, (blacks and other non-white “minorities”) and oppressors (white people). Shelby Steele called this reductionism a form of racial blindness. He wrote,

People who are in the grip of [racial blindness] … always miss the human being inside the black skin…Your color represents you in the mind of such people. They will have built a large part of their moral identity and, possibly, their politics around how they respond to your color. Thus, a part of them–the moral part–is invested not in you but in some idea of what your color means. And [if] they see you– the individual–they instantly call to mind this investment and determine, once again, to honor it. They are very likely proud of the way they have learned to relate to your color, proud of the moral magnanimity it gives them an opportunity to express.