The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The Zero-Sum Logic of Racial Hatred

Posted on | September 20, 2026 | No Comments

Many years ago, I realized that it is a mistake to think too much about race. The evidence is sufficiently grim, the trend so discouraging, that dwelling on the subject involves a risk of utter madness, until you end up like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness: “Exterminate all the brutes.”

“Colorblindness” is a trap, Nikole Hannah-Jones asserts and I agree with her — but not the sense she means it. Hannah-Jones was criticizing the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision that ruled racial quotas (in the name of “diversity” or “affirmative action”) to be unconstitutional:

[Conservatives] are using civil rights law to claim that the Constitution requires “colorblindness” and that efforts targeted at ameliorating the suffering of descendants of slavery illegally discriminate against white people. They have co-opted both the rhetoric of colorblindness and the legal legacy of Black activism not to advance racial progress, but to stall it. Or worse, reverse it.

The tendentious wording — the implicit assumption that “descendants of slavery” are suffering, and that “ameliorating” the aforesaid suffering is a political imperative — functions as intended, portraying opponents of racial quotas as heartless opponents of “racial progress.”

There are so many things wrong with that single paragraph that I could write an entire essay exploding her errors, but that’s irrelevant to the larger point, namely that racial obsession is at least as dangerous for black people as it is for white people. Whether it’s Nikole Hannah-Jones pushing an idealistic commitment to “racial progress” or some kind of crypto-Nazi devotee of Aryan supremacy, there will be such a vast distance between reality and your racial ideal that it will drive you crazy.

We are more than 150 years past the end of slavery in America, and yet Nikole Hannah-Jones is more obsessed with race than any Confederate leaders whose likenesses are carved upon the side of Stone Mountain.

At some point, the craziness of racial obsession becomes so obvious that everyone can see it, and Nikole Hannah-Jones has passed that point.

“In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?” is the headline on her New York Times article, which is paywalled, but can be summarized briefly: Believing that majority-black public schools in New York City were unfairly disparaged, Hannah-Jones decided to send her daughter to such a school. When it came time to make a decision for high school, however, the daughter insisted on attending one of the city’s more prestigious public schools, which are majority-white. In other words, her daughter had ideas about “racial progress” that were more in line with old-fashioned liberal ideas about integration, rather than the separatist vision of “Black Power” radicals. Everybody’s laughing at this irony.

We could endlessly victory-lap here, or we could learn something useful. Racial hatred involves a zero-sum logic. That’s true no matter which groups are involved, or where the conflict occurs. The hater develops an Us-versus-Them mentality of permanent conflict, and magnifies the group differences so that the hated Them is conceived as demonic.

From this worldview emerges a zero-sum belief that anything bad that happens to Them is good for Us; anytime They win, it’s a defeat for Us. It is this deranged mentality which explains Nikole Hannah-Jones’s belief that she must reject “colorblindness” in favor of a vision of “racial progress” that contradicts whatever the conservative Them may advocate.

One sees that, in her view, “conservative” is simply a synonym for racist — white Republicans are the demonized Them — and she apparently never considers alternative explanations, including the possibility that a commitment to colorblind meritocracy in education policy might actually benefit black people, including her own daughter. It is wrong to assume that all our problems are due to the malicious intent of others.

One of the great lessons from the Bible is the story of Joseph, who was sold into slavery because of his brothers’ jealousy. Joseph became a mighty ruler in Egypt. Famine brought his brothers to Egypt seeking help, and when he revealed the truth to them — that he was the brother they’d sold into slavery — they were afraid of Joseph’s wrath, but he said, fear not: You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.

Even the malice of our enemies can ultimately benefit us. Life is not always a popularity contest, so we are not entirely dependent upon whether or not other people like us, and thank God for that. If we correctly discern the right thing to do, we should not fear to do it, merely because we are slandered by our opponents. Nikole Hannah-Jones has devoted her life to slandering others as “racist,” and like Joseph we may answer her: You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.

By their folly, progressives have demonstrated the idiocy of supposing that white racism is the source of all the “suffering” that Hannah-Jones considers definitive of the black experience in America. For years I have said there are five A’s in “RAAAAACIST” — the bogus accusation hurled at conservatives, for which evidence is not necessary — but you see it doesn’t actually matter whether or not these accusations are true. You may be unfairly prejudiced, or not, but the question is, how could the mere prejudice of white people explain everything that Nikole Hannah-Jones says it explains? She lives in one of the most liberal cities on the entire planet. Kamala Harris got 68% of the vote in New York City, so where is the evidence of pervasive racism that supposedly explains the poor performance of black students in New York City schools? And why should Trump voters like you or I, who don’t live anywhere near New York City, be made to feel responsible for this? It’s absurd.

Hannah Nikole-Jones is an answered prayer, if you pray like I do: Dear God, always give me fools for enemies! Deo vindice.



 

Category: Racism

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