Trying to figure out why so many liberals/lefties believe that traditional/vernacular architecture is racist. Of course part of it is that among that set the word “racist” is used as a general epithet that means roughly what “asshole” means to other people.

That said, I genuinely think that many of them believe that anyone who doesn’t like modernist monstrosities is truly racist. Why, then? I believe it goes back to the to the Lockean “tabula rasa” conceptions that is implicit in most liberal thought. Inherent in this ideology is the idea that humans are infinitely moldable, infinitely adaptable, that we have no nature at all, and certainly nothing that can’t be shaped by a nudge, by education, or by outright coercion “for our own good.”

The idea then that humans naturally favor and better prosper in relatively small-scale communities with traditional-ish designs, operating at a human scale, is therefore “racist” because it further implies that there might be a human nature of some kind. And if there is a human nature, and innate human preferences, then there might be groups that have different, other, innate preferences that might be genetic in nature*. Thus, traditional architecture is definitionally racist to them.

*I’m not saying this is true, but that this is merely their “logic.”