I think you're right, but why get bogged down in these debates? How about this: any left worth the name should be in favor of decency and being nice to people. Try growing up in "liberal" and "anti-racist" America with brown skin. I am a brown person who believes that class is at the center of politics in the United States and the rest of the world. I am on the side of the poor white people I grew up next to, even though sometimes the daily fact of brute exploitation and the influence of the dominant ideology can make them act towards me in ways that are completely fucked up. So, is the left on my side or not? Is my right to walk into a rural gas station without being called a terrorist worth defending? How about my right to sit in a university environment without being treated as a native informant with a cute and fascinating heritage? One comes from grassroots conservatism and the other from multicultural liberalism but both sound like the same enemy to me. I'm amazed by the arrogance of white left-wing intellectuals who think that they have invented every idea. I don't know of many people who have struggled against racism who failed to understand that the racism of the poor white person is insignificant next to the power of capital and its fully racist establishment multiculturalism. Recall Malcolm X:
"The white conservatives aren’t friends of the Negro either, but they at least don’t try to hide it. They are like wolves; they show their teeth in a snarl that keeps the Negro always aware of where he stands with them. But the white liberals are foxes, who also show their teeth to the Negro but pretend that they are smiling. The white liberals are more dangerous than the conservatives; they lure the Negro, and as the Negro runs from the growling wolf, he flees into the open jaws of the 'smiling' fox."
The insipid politically correct policing that today passes for "anti-racism" should NOT be confused with a real anti-racist politics.
Seems to me that the anti-anti-racist backlash is one step towards renewing and revitalizing the peculiar tradition that extends from Max Eastman to Christopher Hitchens, and I would hope that the sections of the American left that pay serious attention to class can learn to avoid adopting reactionary attitudes in response to the dangers of bourgeois liberalism. Otherwise I am afraid this cynical scorn could be directed in even more dangerous directions.