Fighting For Racial Justice Is The Moral Good

 ... not succeeding, at least not by any objective definition. That is, the moral good is the act of talking and writing about it. Your talking doesn't even need to make sense.

Over the weekend, Erika Edwards, an associate professor of history at UTEP and previous Fulbright scholar, wrote this piece for the WaPo. Here's the setup.

As fans keep up with Argentina’s success in this year’s World Cup, a familiar question arises: Why doesn’t Argentina’s team have more Black players? In stark contrast to other South American countries such as Brazil, Argentina’s soccer team pales in comparison in terms of its Black representation.

Argentina, by the author's own admission, is about 1% black. According to FIFA, Argentina has the 3rd best national team in the world. So there are almost no blacks in the population and Argentina is clearly using performance to guide its team selections. Erika's article is gibberish. It got published anyway. Here's more from it.

But more recent studies have instead revealed that some Black women in Argentina made concerted decisions to pass as White or Amerindian to obtain the benefits afforded by whiteness for their children and themselves.

Black and white are colors. They are discernable even to the colorblind. It's not exactly something you can disguise. The rest of the essay goes along those lines. Blacks in Argentina are hiding the fact that they're black.

Most of the slaves in South America came from what is now Angola, captured by the Ngola tribe and sold to Europeans. It stands to reason that they would have looked like Angolans.

This is the president of Angola, João Lourenço. Imagine how hard he would have to work to pass himself off as white.

The premise of the article is idiocy and so are the proposed mechanics.

According to KT's Theory of the Three Modern Virtues, atomic-level virtues such as honesty, forgiveness and conscientiousness have been replaced by large-scale causes which act as lowest-level virtues. Three such causes are Global Warming Climate Change, racial justice and gender affirmation. The essay in the WaPo, written by a credentialed university professor with a good CV, published in one of our most prestigious newspapers, is a perfect example of it.

In addition to being complete nonsense, even if it was true none of it would lead to anything useful. If Argentina's alleged secret black population suddenly dropped their masks and declared that they were actually black, what would happen? Would they be more productive? Would their children do better in school? Would their businesses take off and grow? I can't see any connection between her essay and anything of value.

It's The Act, Not The Results Or The Truth

Her virtue comes from the act of writing about racial justice, from professing her undying loyalty to fighting for racial justice. This is why I see it as their low-level virtue. Just as honesty was a virtue, independent of anything else, so pledging yourself to the cause of racial justice is a virtue, independent of anything else.

There's no need for your actions to make sense and there's no need for them to produce any tangible results. The pledge itself is the virtue.

Arguments That Don't Work, Arguments The Do

For zealots like Erika, I don't think there's a way to reach them. The replies to her tweet about this article were blistering, many of them coming from Argentinians. She's never going to hear them. She couldn't hear them if they were standing right in front of her in a quiet room.

Similarly, yelling at progressive foot soldiers who subscribe to this virtue exchange isn't going to work. They're not evil or stupid, they're just operating under a different set of metrics.

As far as I can figure out, the only argument that might work would be to ask about the desired goals and the mechanisms by which they would be achieved. The racial justice movement is a disastrous failure in this regards and I can't imagine that the ordinary person would be willing to continue failure in the name of a fantasy virtue.