How do you make genocide acceptable?

The rot in diversity training and its roots

Possibly the greatest massacre in human history was the Sichuan massacre of 1645, in which a peasant rebel leader killed 1 million people. Another of history’s greatest massacres, more recent and also in China, was the Nanjing massacre of 1937 in which Imperial Japanese forces took over 300,000 souls.

Yet neither of these events, nor any other massacre in history, are held in quite the same regard as genocide. The Holocaust, the Cambodian genocide, the Rwandan genocide—these tower in our imagination in a way no other sin compares.

We have hate crime legislation precisely because we feel targeting people for their racial or other identity traits is particularly heinous. There is a famous line, misattributed to Joseph Stalin but actually written by the German journalist Kurt Tucholsky, which says, “The death of one man is a catastrophe. A hundred thousand dead is a statistic.”

It is more painful to bear witness to the suffering of an individual with all their failures and triumphs than to read a staggering number, even if the number represents millions of people, but when you talk about an ethnic group suddenly the faceless mob has an identity, a culture, a history. The crowd now has a face. This is perhaps why genocide rings in our hearts more sharply than massacres even when the numbers are the same.

We are meant to have learned by now, especially after World War II, how easily we are drawn into genocidal thinking. We are discriminatory beings. The architecture of choice is also the architecture of discernment, or discrimination by another name. Consider how easily Hitler reached for antisemitism as his answer.

Consider the Milgram experiment. Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram wanted to know how so many Germans during the Holocaust could follow such evil orders. In 1961, he took subjects and had a man in a lab coat with a clipboard tell them to administer electric shocks to someone in the next room if they got test answers wrong. The person in the next room was an actor, but Milgram found that 65% of people were willing to administer up 450 volts. Less than 100 volts is enough to kill.

Or consider the Third Wave experiment. In 1967, California high school history teacher Ron Jones was having a hard time explaining to his students how people could have accepted Nazism. He made up a movement called the Third Wave based on Nazism and ran the class through a series of training exercises that only lasted about five days, but soon students began performing his made-up salute and repeating his classroom slogans outside school. The movement gained hundreds of followers within days. Jones announced a meeting where he would name a Third Wave presidential candidate and, when everyone showed up, he played a film about Nazism.

We as Americans are especially focused on genocide because of its connection to our own history and because our society is a multicultural one. We are a diverse and beautiful array of people living together and living free. So how did Americans reach the point where genocidal rhetoric is not only being openly preached, but where no one is really pushing back against it?

In June 2021, the Yale Child Study Center hosted a lecture by forensic psychiatrist Aruba Khilanani. The live Zoom lecture was titled “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind.” During her lecture, Khilanani said, “Nothing makes me angrier than a white person who tells me not to be angry. White people make my blood boil.”

She added:

I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step, like I did the world a fucking favor.

This is not genocidal rhetoric, but it shows that racist rhetoric toward white people has been normalized to such an extent that medical professionals speaking at a Yale event feel comfortable openly fantasizing about murdering white people. Not murdering people who happen to be white but murdering people because they are white.

Last week, The Free Press published a story by

Rupa Subramanya

and

Speakeasy's Newsletter

about a man named Richard Bilkszto. I encourage you to read the story. It includes audio clips of the actual exchange. To summarize, in April 2021, a black diversity trainer in Toronto named Kike Ojo-Thompson told her class of about 200 public school administrators that Canada is far more racist than the United States.

Numerous studies have attempted to quantify racism in different countries, including the World Values Survey, and there is no evidence to suggest Canada is far more racist than the United States. None. But, Thompson claimed, “The racism we experience is far worse here than there.”

Bilkszto, the principal of Burnhamthorpe Collegiate Institute and Adult Learning Centre, an educator of 24 years, a white man and, from every account I could find, a truly decent human being, raised his hand. Citing research on school admissions and other factors, he suggested that Canada is a more just society than the United States.

“You and your whiteness think that you can tell me what’s really going on with black people,” Thompson snapped back, “like, is that what you’re doing, cause I think that’s what you’re doing.”

Bilkszto tried to explain this was not what he was saying.

A black woman in the class said to Thompson, “I believe I heard you say—I’m a black woman, I’m telling you this—yet the whiteness said, ‘No, this is what I’m telling you,’ and that’s often the posture.’ They don’t want to hear what you’re saying.”

Pause for a moment and try to imagine speaking about any other person’s ethnic identity in such a dehumanizing manner. Imagine saying, “the Jew doesn’t want to listen, but that’s how they are.” Or imagine if Bilkszto’s initial comment had begun, “you and your blackness think you can tell me, a white man, about Canada?”

The obvious counter-argument here is to mention something about power differentials and how talking about black people is not the same as talking about white people. I’m not saying blacks and whites have it the same in Canada, but I do think there should be a basic level of decency in how we discuss any person’s ethnic identity.

Thompson finished the class by saying, “I just want to thank everybody for a proper, thorough session today. We got into the weeds and got the weed whacker out apparently. It was hot today. It was good. It was really good.”

This is genocidal rhetoric. Thompson is dehumanizing a fellow human being, reducing him to his racial identity by calling him the “whiteness,” equating that identity with white supremacy, or evil, and insinuating he is a weed. As a reminder, any time you reduce people to their race and equate that with evil, you are engaging in genocidal rhetoric. Any time you compare someone to weeds, insects or viruses because of their race, you are engaging in genocidal rhetoric.

No one in the class spoke up to defend Bilkszto. The psychological trauma he experienced was profound and, last month, he died by suicide.

So how did we get to a point where we do not even recognize this as racist or speak out when someone is being abused this way directly in front of us?

The answer is Patricia Bidol-Padva. In her 1972 work Developing New Perspectives on Race, this Michigan school superintendent argued that “only whites can be racists because it is whites that have control over the institutions that create and enforce American cultural norms and values.”

This definition of racism has become known as the power plus prejudice formula. This is not the origin of the phrase “institutional racism.” That was coined in 1967 by civil rights leaders Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton in their book Black Power: The Politics of Liberation. They argued there are two types of racism, individual racism that is readily identifiable, and institutional racism that is far more subtle.

But since then, Bidol-Padva’s supporters have asserted that the original definition no longer exists. Moreover, they have taken the new definition to even greater extremes. Bidol-Padva claimed only whites can be racist. Then the claim became, all whites are racist but only in the sense that they are the beneficiaries of systemic racism. Now the literal reading of that claim is becoming more common. Namely, all whites are racist according to the old definition of racism. It’s a motte-and-bailey fallacy.

The solution here is simple. We need to be honest about the perils of genocidal rhetoric and we have to name racism when we see it. Yes, arguments about systemic racism and the ways in which white people benefit from it are important. But when we absolve everyone else of the charge of racism, we not only allow racism and genocidal hatred to spread, we also convince ourselves it isn’t happening.

Stanley Milgram and Ron Jones must be turning in their graves. But if we can admit that people like Thompson are racists and that our denial of this fact has allowed them to make a profitable living preaching genocidal rhetoric, we can begin to regain our sanity on this crucial issue. More importantly, we may literally save lives.