Charlotte Allen, TWS, as quoted by Ernst in the comments to one of my posts yesterday:

The main premise of “The Color of Empire” seemed to be that white people had created the idea of race, “the sole purpose of which is to rationalize the white race[.]” [W]hites some 400 years ago had created a skin-color-based category called “red” even though there are “500 different Native American nations, bands, and tribes.” They had also devised a category called “brown” for “Latinos,” “even though there’s no ‘Latino’ food and no ‘Latino’ language[.]”

This actually made some sense: If racial classifications are artificial (“socially constructed” was the way Hackman put it), lumping people together under a skin-color label who may have nothing linguistically or culturally in common, why not just get rid of the classifications altogether? Isn’t that exactly why conservatives like me oppose racial preferences and set-asides? But Hackman in fact focused obsessively on race, race, race, and color, color, color. [….] When I asked Hackman about why race seemed to be the prime focus of her workshop even though it supposedly didn’t exist, she told me that I needed to read up on “critical race theory.” She added: “We’re talking about a reclamation of racial categories.” In other words, racial categories are an oppressive white fantasy —until they prove to be useful for promoting race-based identity politics.

— and this piece, which I’ve reposted here several times, originally written in 1996 and published in the U of Denver student newspaper, and first published here at protein wisdom in early 2002, an excerpt from the conclusion I’ll offer here:

The point of all this being that to think of race as somehow socially constructed is to think of race, ultimately, as something essentially essential. Because what makes your memories yours, what makes your heritage yours, and what makes your culture yours is your insistence, ultimately, that it is yours by right, yours by birth, yours by essence. And so race, as it turns out, is either an essence or an illusion. Those who believe race to be an essence (say, the KKK, who base their ideas on bad science) have no need for a project of qualifying race as a social construct; and those who believe race to be non-essential have no grounds, theoretically, for promoting racial identity other than that same bad science (which, it turns out, underlies the constructivist argument), or else their social concern that we somehow need to continue the project of racial identity, for whatever the political reasons. [emphasis added]

And perhaps they are right. But maybe it’s time to seize on the lessons learned in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks; that is, maybe it’s time we put aside our differences in order to construct a singular American identity. After all, we are each individuals, which is what makes us, ultimately, a nation.

Look:  if we as classical liberals / legal conservatives are ever going to effectively combat the underlying ideological propositions that drive progressivism — and that we have been conditioned (by bullying, shame, and the sophistry of the academy and the emotional blackmail of identity groups) to accept or at least allow some degree of legitimacy — we will always be in the process of losing, of transformation away from individual autonomy and toward collectivism marked at particular points by the influence of favored identity blocs.

I point this out today because I have been trying to drive the very same arguments Ms Allen is now making since the very onset of this site — and well before that, even.

This isn’t complicated once you can be made to see it:  the way the left manipulates language allows them to manipulate categories; it also allows them to manipulate thought by way of institutionalizing certain epistemological ideas as not only legitimate but “settled” as such (textualism being one important example that continues to hamstring many on the right who abide it and rely upon it for their own personal uses).

Here, the logic of their position is laid bare in a step by step analysis of how “social constructionism” of race works:   and the irrefutable conclusion is that their position cannot withstand logical pressure, as Hackman admits.

Consequently, the leftist’s next move is to tell tell us — to demand, in fact — that  logic isn’t a legitimate factor in determining the usefulness of what is logically incoherent.  Instead, the usefulness itself is the thing — and it is one’s ability to wield the logically incoherent effectively, to in effect assert their epistemological will, that comes to count as what matters rather than any linguistic coherence, which is dismissed as inconsequential, the tyranny of the Enlightenment, the tyranny of the foundational.

I guess our best hope going forward is that conservative opinion leaders who haven’t been marginalized by the textualists and pragmatists begin picking up on such arguments and putting together the pieces to the point where they can make coherent arguments that reach the broad audience they’ve denied me.

And who knows? Maybe in another 11 years or so they’ll be ready to recognize the role of language in all of this, and begin putting together arguments that will help us overcome our blindspots, caught as we are inside the left’s game and operating under the left’s rules.