ABSTRACT
Liberals should henceforth admit the differences but deny their biological foundation. Liberals can continue to reject racism by preserving the Boasian distinction between race and culture. For a generation, liberals have treated racism as a form of psychological dementia in need of increasingly coercive forms of enlightenment. The racist fallacy, as Anthony Appiah contends, is the act of “biologizing what is culture.” Hate speech and hate crime laws that impose punishment or enhanced penalties for proscribed motives and viewpoints are inherently illiberal and destructive of intellectual independence and conscience. Just as racism is a distortion of the principle of merit, so proportional representation is a distortion of the principle of equality. Proportional representation erodes the principle of merit which constitutes the only unifying principle for a multiracial society. Proportional representation assures an unceasing racialization of American society. Proportional representation seeks to institutionalize race and make it a permanent feature of American public life.
