Ken Ham has frightening ideas of what it means to be anti-racist. Yesterday he declared himself to be “not a white person” adding “there are no black people. Using terms like ‘white’ & ‘black’ promotes division … all are brown”.
While I got this from RawStory where they highlighted a couple of tweets mocking Ham, I think the most interesting and on point criticism that they reported (From AMcBay_NSS: “And using terms like Christian, Muslim, Catholic, Mormon promotes division & prejudice, but that is the intent, isn’t it?”) still came across as missing important nuances of an obviously white person denying the racial system that white people created. It reminds me of the white genocide campaign against the peoples indigenous to (in this case) North America: in the US that consisted in no small part of killing those people who resisted kidnapping, forced placement on “reservations,” and institutional robbery and neglect under a treaty system designed and exploited by white US citizens. But when the terms of those treaties were eventually successfully asserted in court by indigenous persons and tribes and nations, the self-governance provisions that white people used to justify neglect and widespread malnourishment – if not outright starvation – turned out to not specifically exclude autonomy with respect to state anti-gambling laws. Joy! Even though forced onto (frequently valueless and always insufficient in area to support the population) land, and even though white people had told starving members of First Nations across the US that if they wanted to eat, they ought to leave their homes and sovereignty behind, many peoples found a way to use their sovereignty to their advantage and stay in their homes at the same time by building casinos. What did the white folks do? The very same white folks that couldn’t cross the road to feed Indian children because, hey, sovereignty means they get to make their own government and support themselves by themselves? Campaigned against sovereignty.
Of course.
In many places now many more white folks – including me for a time many years ago, though fortunately that was just a stage in learning – feel compelled to assert there is no such thing as race. Though, of course, you didn’t catch very many white people saying that before “Black Power” became a recognizable phrase, before
The Olympic Games were rocked by Black Power – but unfortunately not by Public Enemy.
It is the same phenomenon that leads certain white folks to oppose equal rights protections while screaming in fear that white people might become a minority in their neck of the woods in some dystopian near-future if white women don’t give up this silly notion that they have the right to deny sexual consent to white men.
Ken Ham is a creationist, not an MGTOW internet troll, but Ham and those trolls do have certain things in common, not least how racism has gotten under their skins.