The War on the West

by Douglas Murray

the most shocking aspect of today’s mainstream antiracist discourse is the extent to which it mirrors ideas of race—specifically the specialness of whiteness—that white supremacist thinkers cherish. “Woke” antiracism proceeds from the premise that race is real—if not biological, then socially constructed and therefore equally if not more significant still—putting it in sync with toxic presumptions of white supremacism that would also like to insist on the fundamentality of racial difference. Working toward opposing conclusions, racists and many antiracists alike eagerly reduce people to abstract color categories, all the while feeding off of and legitimizing each other, while any of us searching for gray areas and common ground get devoured twice.18 It may seem today that there are more people on the side of Kendi and DiAngelo than there are on the side of Williams. But history is on Williams’s side. And not just in the presumptuous, too often heard claim that the future will bear him out. But in the sense that the recent and distant past already does so. Glenn Loury, Adrian Piper, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and many others have made a similar point, and like a growing number of others, Williams marshals them to his side. For all have understood that the best of human knowledge and culture must be transferable