Antiracism is a great displacement exercise, a magic trick that transforms economic guilt into racial guilt, absolving the rich of any role in solving inequality because it’s rooted in the one thing they have no control over—their race. It was the perfect worldview for white liberals, increasingly college educated and affluent, a diffuse intelligentsia employed in creative, knowledge-based, and managerial jobs, convinced of their own superior virtue and desperate to telegraph it. America’s news media stepped in to show them how to keep their rarified status while also feeling like heroes. All
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