Of the many odd headlines that the politics of an election cycle turn up, “Black Lives Matter Endorses Donald Trump” may be one of the most bizarre. Yet that’s exactly what happened in late November in the state of Rhode Island, thanks to a decidedly against-the-grain individual by the name of Mark Fisher. Fisher made headlines, predictably becoming a 15-minute-darling of right-learning media outlets, after breaking with the BLM movement and endorsing former president Trump in his 2024 presidential bid. “We’re not stupid. The brothers are not stupid,” Fisher remarked on Fox. “We understand when someone’s for us and when someone is not. And it’s obvious that the Democratic Party is not for us.” Welcome to the wonderfully weird world of negative polarization.
The Trump and BLM tribes have not generally enjoyed the rosiest of relationships, and in true form, Trump welcomed the endorsement, demonstrating that the man is somehow capable of fumbling his interactions with every extremist group that finds him worthy of faint praise—from the KKK to the true believers within Black Lives Matter. For his part, Fisher paid the price for such an infraction. Fisher was anathematized for his heresy against the religion of modern antiracism: Rhode Island BLM distanced themselves from the man they once considered a “respected advocate,” because according to such devotees advocacy for marginalized people becomes meaningless unless you fulfill the additional office of an obedient box-checker. Once his current wave of fame wears off, it’s quite likely that Mark Fisher will find himself a man without political allies.
Yet the point to be made here from Fisher’s tale isn’t about the way such ‘team-flips’ are treated as the worst of political sins, or to point out how the excesses of progressivism are driving Americans of color out of their camp. It’s about being appropriately angry over how much the modern antiracist movement has poisoned everything.
It’s no new insight to point out that antiracism functions much like a religion. Far more brilliant minds than I, most notably linguist John McWhorter in his 2015 treatise at The Daily Beast and later in his 2019 book Woke Racism, have made this connection. Yet, for McWhorter, the analogy reads like a de facto criticism—if antiracism is a religion, it must inherently suffer from a “certain illogic” that its religious nature provides. But what about religious types who defy modern antiracism? Can we too find meaning from this criticism? And what implications does this frameshift have for how we view the current race debate?
Astute readers will note the inspiration for this piece’s title as the 2007 tome God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, wherein atheist Christopher Hitchens launches an allegedly withering attack on organized religion in the sophist style that came to characterize much of the New Atheist movement. This parallel may elicit an initial objection that I share Hitchens’ view on organized religion. I do not. As a devout Christian, I see tremendous value in religious institutions. Yet that’s actually where the criticism gains traction for me. Religion may not poison everything, but bad religion does—it destroys both its victims and the legitimate religious institutions that it associates with.
And antiracism is bad religion.
Ibram X. Kendi has run the gamut from intriguing political newcomer to bona fide political radical in the space of less than a decade. From his beginnings as a fresh, alternative perspective on understanding race in America to a key cog in the machine which worsens our race debate, Kendi’s persona has evolved into something far more akin to a cult leader than a true public intellectual. Between his current media offerings, which are masterclasses in the art of media manipulation, and the speculation regarding the finances of Kendi’s Boston University Center for Antiracist Research, his trajectory is currently in a very concerning place.
As I wrote at National Review after Kendi’s latest documentary,
If antiracism truly is so apparent and obviously true that any opposition to it constitutes racism . . . why lie? Why obscure context? Lying to defend the truth is no more legitimate in the realm of ideas than it is in the realm of religion. In fact, it’s a key sign of bad religion. When paired with a pointed intolerance for its critics and the allegedly ‘exploitative’ environment that surrounds Kendi’s center at Boston University, it raises some serious questions about what kind of movement, exactly, the hardline leaders of the antiracist movement are creating.
Modern antiracism has changed from an arguably legitimate social movement designed to cast light on issues of police brutality and injustice to a system of thought with zero tolerance for those who question the party line. The anathematization of Fisher plays this drama out. Fisher’s belief that the Democratic Party no longer serves communities of color—a belief increasingly shared by prominent black cultural figures such as radio host Charlamagne tha God—is not allowable or legitimate under antiracist doctrine. He and his ilk must be excommunicated to preserve the partisan side of Black Lives Matter’s doctrine, to say nothing of the right-of-center people of color who’ve never gotten anywhere near such fellowship in the first place. Black Lives Matter may care about black lives in the broadest possible sense—but Dissenting Black Voices couldn’t matter less.
So where does that leave us, the people on the outside of the toxic microcosm of modern antiracist culture? As with many areas of culture currently under progressive control, it leaves us with the opportunity to create a positive counterculture, and perhaps there’s no more relevant example of its necessity than the moment we’re currently in: Black History Month. You’d be hard-pressed to find evidence that the state of American race relations today is viewed positively. The current discourse is not making America’s racial trauma any better. Two-fifths of Americans believe that the increased focus on race/racial inequality has created positive change for Americans of color—three years ago, more than half did.
This general souring mirrors downward trends for the institutions that fuel this ‘increased focus.’ The most prominent organization purporting to address issues of race in America is Black Lives Matter—and Americans are increasingly weary and wary of it. BLM support peaked at more than two-thirds (67 percent) in June 2020, but has since dropped down to barely over half (51 percent). The message is clear: there’s something about an organization that attacks the notion of Western nuclear family structures and whose believers smash $2 billion of Target windows that rubs Americans entirely the wrong way.
The question BLM and its many acolytes and friends are asking is a legitimate one: given America’s struggles with brutal racism and prejudice, how can Americans of color reconcile their innate opposition to such practices with their love of a country with such a history? Many legitimate debates can be had here, but the fact remains: the BLM way, the way of opposing America’s founding ideals and destroying its industries in a fiendish and bastardized pursuit of justice, is not the way forward. It is, in fact, the way backward, the way back to a world where tribes fought each other and opposed societal betterment out of blind devotion to the most primitive form of identity politics.
It’s counter-culture time, but let the institution-builder beware: the answer to BLM’s monolithic vision of Americans of color is not to create a similarly monolithic culture on the Right. Luckily or unluckily, there’s a simple reason that this isn’t a likely possibility: minorities aren’t exactly flocking to the political Right. As I’ve written for the Acton Institute, the Right has historically bungled minority outreach and ceded the field to progressives’ superior marketing and communication, all but ensuring the Democratic Party’s stranglehold on voters of color. The current moment offers only half the strategy: voters are waking up and realizing just how stifling that hold is. Yet, we have to this point failed to leverage one of the most powerful tools in our arsenal: our commitment to respecting diverse paths to human flourishing.
Truly forward-looking thinkers understand this. I’m talking about visionaries like Ian Rowe, whose network of charter schools is creating the kind of flourishing that’s capable of propelling generations of Americans out of crushing poverty and despair. On the political side, I’m looking at thinkers like Justin Giboney, whose AND Campaign offers a respectable alternative for Americans of faith looking for a way out of the conservative-progressive binary.
The modern antiracist movement is not serving Americans of any color—its intolerance and blind opposition to Western ideals seems wildly incapable of bettering anyone’s status beyond its chosen saints of the Kendi and Robin DiAngelo varieties. It is far past time for Americans of all colors to reject such corrosive false religion. The struggle for us in the counterculture is practical, if not familiar: resist the urge to treat Americans of any color as culturally or politically monolithic, and realize that the shared values of liberty and human flourishing won’t lead us all to exactly the same point. In fact, we’re better off for that.
Isaac Willour is an award-winning journalist focusing on race, culture, and American conservatism, as well as a corporate relations analyst at Bowyer Research. He is in his senior year at Grove City College, and has been featured at outlets including National Review, the Wall Street Journal Opinion, and the New York Times Opinion. He tweets @IsaacWillour.
