Arwa Mahdawi: If hipster racism is basically just racism, why bother with the “hipster” bit? Why qualify it? As Dubrofsky explains, the phrase is “important because it forces us to look at the many different ways racism functions. It also pushes us to look beyond the question of intent.”
She says: “Hipster racism helps us understand that even though someone might not have intended to be racist, they were. Hipster racism also makes apparent that racism is not a result of a lack of formal education. Racism is not only the domain of the supposedly ignorant.”
Hipster racism may be a 21st-century term, but progressives inadvertently perpetuating racism while supposedly challenging it has been happening for centuries. In his book, Kendi chronicles the history of “assimilationist ideas – these are ideas that consider themselves to be well-meaning – they reject a biological hierarchy but believe in a cultural or behavioral hierarchy.” Abolitionists, for example, thought slavery was wrong but also believed it had turned black people into brutes and therefore advocated the civilizing of black people.
In the 20th century, the 1965 Moynihan report famously pathologized black families, arguing that the problems many African Americans were facing were down to the instability of their family structures. This idea persists, that broken black families are to blame for racial inequality in America. You can see it, for example, in a 2015 New York Times op-ed about the Baltimore riots in which David Brooks wrote: “The real barriers to mobility are matters of social psychology, the quality of relationships in a home and a neighborhood.”
With white supremacists marching on the streets, one might be tempted to dismiss hipster racism as not as serious as racism-racism. Hipster racists are not Richard Spencer. But increasingly light is been shed on a type of unwitting racism that, at best, trivializes people’s experience. And that is no laughing matter. More here.