The War on the West

by Douglas Murray

The hallmarks were there from the beginning. An absolute obsession with race as the primary means to understand the world and all injustice. The claim is that white people are in their totality guilty of prejudice, specifically racism, from birth. That racism is interwoven so deeply into white-majority societies that the white people in those societies do not even realize that they live in racist societies. Asking for proof was proof of racism. And, finally, there is also the insistence that none of the answers Western societies have come up with to address racism are remotely adequate or capable of dealing with the task at hand. The work of Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and others insisted that even the concept of aspiring to be “color-blind” when it comes to issues of race is itself deeply racist.4 But what was racism by this new and assertive definition? It was, it was repeatedly asserted, “prejudice plus power.” Partly thanks to the influence of Michel Foucault, these academics had become obsessed with the issue of power.5 They saw it both as the central issue of a free society and as being wielded negatively by all state institutions. As a result, the priority was to wrestle power out of these hands and wield it elsewhere. Attributing power, or taking power, on the basis of skin color was enormously advantageous to these academics, even if their thinking on the matter remained wildly confused. For instance, they maintained that someone could not be guilty of racism if they ha...