This much is clear, however: The deployment of power always attracts acolytes and entrepreneurs. So it is no surprise that a thriving cottage industry has grown up around accusations of racism. We might call the resulting enterprise “Racism, Inc.” There is no shortage of workers on that assembly line. On college campuses (but not only on college campuses, as such names as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton remind us), the bludgeon of “racism” is a popular and effective instrument of moral oneupmanship and social control, not to mention intellectual conformity and economic blackmail.

A full exploration of this phenomenon would fill a book, maybe several. A diligent student might start by drawing on Norman Cohn’s analysis, in The Pursuit of the Millennium, of collective madness, especially the shared conviction of spiritual election and higher virtue, in various medieval heresies. Here, I offer merely a few observations about Racism, Inc., touching along the way on some notable academic concessions and specialty outlets of the industry.

Let me begin by noting an oddity. Given the prominence of “racism” in today’s lexicon of moral opprobrium, it is curious that the word itself is of very recent vintage. Indeed, it is a neologism so recent that it does not appear in the 1971 Oxford English Dictionary. The Supplement to our edition of the OED (printed in 1961) introduces “racialism”—the “tendency to racial feeling; antagonism between different races of men”—but fails to provide an equivalent of our multipurpose imprecation “racism.” (A later edition managed to turn up an instance of the word from the early 1930s.) Perhaps that fact is itself evidence of a particularly insidious form of racism—all the more insidious because unacknowledged. Or perhaps that fact, along with the recentness of the word in any currency, suggests that there is something artificial, manufactured, or even cynically manipulative about the tort it describes. Doubtless there are spokesmen for both alternatives.