The anti-racism movement was spearheaded by academics and incubated in the upper echelons of America’s cultural hierarchy: universities, legacy media, Hollywood, Silicon Valley.

It is funded by the wealthiest and most powerful people in the country. Last summer, in the wake of nationwide race riots, Jack Dorsey, the founder and CEO of Twitter, gave Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research, at Boston University, $10 million. MacKenzie Scott, Jeff Bezos’ ex-wife, gave away $4.2 billion in four months of 2020; the top line item she listed, in July 2020, was racial equity ($ 586,700,000) followed by LGBTQ+ Equity for a fraction of the amount: ($46,000,000). And so forth.

It has all the aesthetic trappings of “justice,” but race-based reforms aren’t really about that. They’re about protecting institutions that, in an age of rampant inequality and simmering populism, are rapidly losing their legitimacy. They’re meant to bring an aura of cosmetic righteousness to the American aristocracy — recasting that aristocracy as the vanquishers of the very hierarchy they preside over, and in so doing, preserving their waning moral authority. It is much easier to throw a few crumbs at social-media-savvy activists peddling anti-racism than it is to make big, structural reforms that might actually do something.

All of which is to say that the fight over anti-racism isn’t actually about race or black people or righting ancient wrongs. It’s about propping up the old, morally bankrupt order in an effort to keep out the new.