This is one of several public excerpts from my book Defusing American Anger, which covered contentious political topics from a depolarizing angle. This excerpt is from the 'Race and racism' chapter; it's aimed at understanding the more rational and defensible objections to antiracism stances and DEI initiatives (diversity, equity, and inclusion) efforts.
To be clear, the goal of this work (and my work more broadly) is to help people see that people on the "other side" of various hot button issues are not the monsters we often imagine them to be. In order to help people see that, I must explain the more defensible and rational reasons for people's stances on both sides. This is not to argue for any particular view, but to help people have more empathy for their fellow citizens' views and goals.
Examples of divisive liberal-side ideas
I’m going to include a few examples of prominent liberal-side stances on race and racism that have angered people. This is, admittedly, cherry-picking, but it’s purposeful cherry-picking, with the goal of helping show the kinds of things that shape how conservatives perceive liberals. The point of these inclusions is not to say, “This represents liberal-side thinking,” but to say, “These are some of the things that contribute to conservative views about the left.”
Ibram X. Kendi is one of the more influential people in the modern antiracism movement. His 2019 book How To Be Antiracist was a New York Times best-seller and won the National Book Award in 2016. He’s the founder of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research.
Kendi has been criticized for ideas some people, including liberal people, view as simplistic and divisive. Here’s one controversial segment from his book How To Be Antiracist about the O.J. Simpson verdict:
Two weeks before the Million Man March, I sat in my eighth-grade classroom, waiting patiently with my Black classmates, listening to the radio. When “not guilty” sliced the silence like a cleaver, we leapt from behind our desks, shouting, hugging each other, wanting to call our friends and parents to celebrate. (Too bad we didn’t have cellphones.)
Over in Manhattan, my father assembled with his accounting co-workers in a stuffed, stiff, and silent conference room to watch the verdict on television. After the not-guilty verdict was read, my father and his Black co-workers migrated out of the room with grins under their frowns, leaving their baffled White co-workers behind.
Back in my classroom, amid the hugging happiness, I glanced over at my White eight-grade teacher. Her red face shook as she held back tears, maybe feeling that same overwhelming sensation of hopelessness and discouragement that Black people feel all too many times. I smiled at her—I didn’t really care. I wanted O.J. to run free. I had been listening to what the Black adults around me had been lecturing about for months in 1995. They did not think O.J. was innocent of murder any more than they thought he was innocent of selling out his people. But they knew the criminal-justice system was guilty, too.
This excerpt resulted in Kendi receiving a lot of flak, and hopefully you can see why. In this worldview, it can make sense to celebrate a murderer going free if you perceive it as some sort of victory for your “team,” or perhaps as some sort of loss for your perceived enemies. Many people would say it’s possible to work towards justice and equality, of whatever sort, while not celebrating murderers going free. Regardless of what you think of Kendi’s thoughts here, hopefully it’s possible to see what it is here that can strike people as divisive.
And Kendi has a long history of saying racially divisive things. The following is from a 2019 New Yorker article by Kelefa Sanneh titled The Fight To Redefine Racism:
Sixteen years ago, in 2003, the student newspaper at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, a historically black institution in Tallahassee, published a lively column about white people. “I don’t hate whites,” the author, a senior named Ibram Rogers [later Ibram X. Kendi], wrote. “How can you hate a group of people for being who they are?” He explained that “Europeans” had been “socialized to be aggressive people,” and “raised to be racist.” His theory was that white people were fending off racial extinction, using “psychological brainwashing” and “the AIDS virus.” [...]
[Kendi’s] infamous newspaper column was actually a fairly mild representation of his collegiate beliefs, which included a dalliance with the notion that white people were literally aliens [...]
Another prominent voice in the modern antiracism space is Ta-Nehisi Coates. In Coates’ book Between the World and Me, he describes his reaction to the 9-11 terrorist attacks:
We arrived two months before September 11, 2002. I suppose everyone who was in New York that day has a story. Here is mine: That evening, I stood on the roof of an apartment building with your mother, your aunt Chana, and her boyfriend, Jamal. So we were there on the roof, talking and taking in the sight—great plumes of smoke covered Manhattan Island. Everyone knew someone who knew someone who was missing.
But looking out upon the ruins of America, my heart was cold. I had disasters all my own. The officer who killed Prince Jones [Coates’ college acquaintance], like all the officers who regard us so warily, was the sword of the American citizenry. I would never consider any American citizen pure. I was out of sync with the city. I kept thinking about how southern Manhattan had always been Ground Zero for us. They auctioned our bodies down there, in that same devastated, and rightly named, financial district. And there was once a burial ground for the auctioned there. They built a department store over part of it and then tried to erect a government building over another part. Only a community of right-thinking black people stopped them.
I had not formed any of this into a coherent theory. But I did know that Bin Laden was not the first man to bring terror to that section of the city. I never forgot that. Neither should you. In the days after, I watched the ridiculous pageantry of flags, the machismo of firemen, the overwrought slogans. Damn it all. Prince Jones was dead. And hell upon those who tell us to be twice as good and shoot us no matter. Hell for ancestral fear that put black parents under terror. And hell upon those who shatter the holy vessel.
I could see no difference between the office who killed Prince Jones and the police who died, or the firefighters who died. They were not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they were the menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could—with no justification—shatter my body.
Coates uses Prince Jones’s death to bolster a highly pessimistic narrative about America being a brutally racist and oppressive country. But the police officer who shot Jones, the officer who, “like all the officers who regard us so warily,” as Coates put it, was himself black. A 2015 piece on Politico.com by Richard Lowry criticized Coates’ avoidance of nuance:
“‘White America’ is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies,” [Coates] writes.
What is this white America? Is it Nancy Pelosi or Ted Cruz? Is it Massachusetts or is it Utah? Is it supporters of affirmative action or opponents? Is it teachers who work in the inner city, or gap-toothed yokels who chortle over racist jokes?
This white America contains multitudes. Coates blames it for the death of an acquaintance of his from Howard University, Prince Jones. He was shot by a black cop from a relatively affluent black-majority area governed by blacks. This doesn’t make it less awful, but suggests the picture is more complicated than Coates’ eloquent reductiveness suggests.
Kendi and Coates have both influenced recent antiracism views and activists. If we can see the rational objections people can have to the narratives they’ve helped create, we can better understand broader objections to liberal-side race-related framings.
One objection to these highly pessimistic narratives is that they can be seen to promote racial division and an us-versus-them animosity. One area we can see this play out is with anti-white rhetoric becoming more common and accepted. This includes both the more academic framings related to “whiteness studies” and “whiteness being problematic,” and also a growing cultural acceptance of criticizing and insulting white people.
I’ll give one example of this from my own life. In 2021, I attended a virtual event on “How to be an ally for BIPOC people.” This was a well attended event, with most people being tech industry workers. One of the antiracism activists presenting at the event said the following things (this is from my notes but will be close to verbatim):
She said, “That is what whiteness is; it's only about taking.”
She said, “That is the parasitic nature of whiteness; every time there's an opportunity for whiteness to center itself, it will.”
In the context of talking about how some white people who called themselves allies seem to often make the work too much about themselves, the activist said, “White supremacy is only designed for destruction and chaos.”
She said, “Your role as an ally is to go to jail with me and other activists when we're getting arrested. Your job is to put your physical body between the harmed and the most vulnerable. If you can't do that, I have no use for you.”
Regardless of what you personally think of this language, hopefully you can see how this kind of rhetoric strikes many people as hysterical, insulting, and divisive. (And in a little bit, we’ll examine the “whiteness” language a little more.)
In a 2020 paper titled Separate but Equal on College Campuses: A Case of “Déjà Vu All Over Again”, C.W. Von Bergen and others examined some incidents from college campuses that an appreciation for racial segregation was growing amongst racial minorities. Here’s a look at a few of the examples listed in that paper:
“Students4Justice” at the University of Michigan have demanded that campus authorities provide “a permanent designated space on central campus for Black students and students of color” (Carnick, 2017).
New York University (NYU), students demanded “an entire floor...be entirely dedicated to Students of Color, and another for Queer Students on campus” (Dent, 2016).
At Oberlin, students demanded “safe spaces” for “Africana identifying students. (Dent, 2016).
At UCLA, the Afrikan Student Union stated, “Black students lack spaces where they feel safe and comfortable...The floor should be branded as a safe space for all Black students” (Griffin, 2019).
Columbia University hosted a no-Whites-allowed student leadership retreat, and students who identify as a person of color can apply to attend a racially segregated retreat (Airaksinen, 2016).
Harvard has alternative Black commencements for the graduates of the prestigious law, divinity, business, government and medical schools, a Black undergraduate ceremony, and a “Latinx” commencement ceremony for Hispanic-identifying students (Hartocollis, 2017).
Students at the University of California-Berkeley petitioned the creation of an African-American Student Development Resource Center. “The resource center will serve as a space on campus for Black students to gather, host programming, and to offer support to Black student organizations...” (Ayers, 2015).
In 2017, Evergreen College in Washington state held a “Day of Absence” where White students and faculty were asked to stay off-campus for a day of diversity programming (Gockowski, 2017).
The apparent increase in demand for segregated spaces, and the justifications for such things, can be perceived as an outgrowth of highly pessimistic liberal-side narratives.
A 2021 New York Times piece by Erin Aubry Kaplan was titled Is My Little Library Contributing to the Gentrification of My Black Neighborhood? In that piece, she describes becoming angry that a white couple was perusing some books she’d placed in a “little library” in her yard:
Then one morning, glancing out my front window, I saw a young white couple stopped at the library. Instantly, I was flooded with emotions—astonishment, and then resentment, and then astonishment at my resentment. It all converged into a silent scream in my head of, Get off my lawn!
The moment jolted me into realizing some things I’m not especially proud of. I had set out this library for all who lived here, and even for those who didn’t, in theory. I would not want to restrict anyone from looking at it or taking books, based on race or anything else. But while I had seen white newcomers to the neighborhood here and there, the truth was, I hadn’t set it out to appeal to white residents. [...]
What I resented was not this specific couple. It was their whiteness, and my feelings of helplessness at not knowing how to maintain the integrity of a Black space that I had created. I was seeing up close how fragile that space can be, how its meaning can be changed in my mind, even by people who have no conscious intention to change it. That library was on my lawn, but for that moment it became theirs. I built it and drove it into the ground because I love books and always have. But I suddenly felt that I could not own even this, something that was clearly and intimately mine. [...]
Ultimately, the moment with the couple I saw through my window raised for me a serious moral question about how I should act. Screaming at them to get off my lawn would be adopting the values of the oppressor, as my racial-justice activist father used to say.
We can see why some people would perceive this person’s thoughts as strange and divisive—as the thoughts of someone who seems upset at the idea of living in a racially integrated society.
Many people have written about antiracism endeavors being a divisive force within organizations and companies. A 2022 Intercept article by Ryan Grim was titled Elephant in the Room: Meltdowns Have Brought Progressive Advocacy Groups to a Standstill at a Critical Moment in World History. That piece described how social justice fervor in the wake of George Floyd’s death had resulted in extreme division and chaos at many progressive non-profit organizations. It included some people’s views that progressive causes were being hurt by unreasonable and divisive social justice framings, and that standard workplace grievances and drives for power were now being framed in terms of social justice and antiracism. Here’s an excerpt from that piece:
In fact, it’s hard to find a Washington-based progressive organization that hasn’t been in tumult, or isn’t currently in tumult. It even reached the National Audubon Society, as Politico reported in August 2021:
Following a botched diversity meeting, a highly critical employee survey and the resignations of two top diversity and inclusion officials, the 600,000-member National Audubon Society is confronting allegations that it maintains a culture of retaliation, fear and antagonism toward women and people of color, according to interviews with 13 current and former staff members.
Twitter, as the saying goes, may not be real life, but in a world of remote work, Slack very much is. And Twitter, Slack, Zoom, and the office space, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former executive directors of advocacy organizations, are now mixing in a way that is no longer able to be ignored by a progressive movement that wants organizations to be able to function. The executive directors largely spoke on the condition of anonymity, for fear of angering staff or donors.
“To be honest with you, this is the biggest problem on the left over the last six years,” one concluded. “This is so big. And it’s like abuse in the family—it’s the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about.”
That piece also talked about people’s fears of speaking up against these things, for fear of being considered on the “other side”:
The silence stems partly, one senior leader in an organization said, from a fear of feeding right-wing trolls who are working to undermine the left. Adopting their language and framing feels like surrendering to malign forces, but ignoring it has only allowed the issues to fester. “The right has labeled it ‘cancel culture’ or ‘callout culture,’” he said, “so when we talk about our own movement, it’s hard because we’re using the frame of the right. It’s very hard because there’s all these associations and analysis that we disagree with, when we’re using their frame. So it’s like, ‘How do we talk about it?’”
And this gets back to some of the basic drivers of polarization: We’re afraid of helping the other side and hurting our side, so we keep quiet even when we think people on our side are behaving badly and divisively. And that instinct in turn gives more power to the most polarized people on our side, which in turn provides more fuel for the most polarized people on the other side, and so on.
This also relates to how polarization makes it harder for even politically similar people to get along. Coalitions are more at risk of falling apart: that is what polarization does to us.
These trends exist not only in liberal and non-profit spaces, but in many organizations. A 2022 Gartner report on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs reported:
Organizations’ commitments to DEI have grown, but so has the pushback to DEI efforts. Forty-four percent of employees agree a growing number of their colleagues feel alienated by their organization’s DEI efforts, 42% of employees report their peers view their organizations’ DEI efforts as divisive, and another 42% say their peers resent DEI efforts.
From the examples I’ve used above, hopefully it’s easy to see why people can find some of these ideas and efforts divisive. Thinking these ideas are bad, or even dangerous, doesn’t require bigotry: it only requires finding some of the ideas and approaches common in these endeavors as unreasonable and heavy-handed.
Antiracism, equity, racism, and systemic racism
Some of the liberal-side ideas on race and racism that have gained popularity in the last 20 years or so are grouped under a category of antiracism. It helps to know that “antiracism” refers to some specific and debatable ideas, some of which we’ve already examined.
Some people who aren’t familiar with the nuance in this area can assume that being “antiracist” simply refers to “being against racism.” The thinking can go something like, “being against racism is good, and if people are objecting to these ideas, they must support racism.” This is one reason liberals can have a hard time even wanting to question antiracism approaches, just because of the language and perceptions involved; they don’t want to be perceived by their allies as “pro-racism.”
This gets back to how polarization can make us use and perceive language in simplistic, binary ways. It can be seen as similar to how some people would deflect from criticisms of some antifa people with the defense that antifa people are, by definition, “against fascism,” so therefore there can’t be much to criticize about them. But of course, regardless of the name a group uses, the approaches used by people in a group may sometimes be unhelpful or bad, and should never be beyond criticism.
One important antiracism concept is equity. In antiracism thinking, equity refers to the idea that racial minority groups should have proportional outcomes in society. In other words, if black people are roughly 14% of the population, we should have roughly that same percentage of black people who are CEOs, or of college students, or of people shot by police.
In the antiracism framing, anything less than proportional equity is evidence of racism being present in the system. In other words, regardless of whether you can find any evidence of a system or the people in it being explicitly racist, the mere fact that there are differences in outcomes of different racial groups means that the system is racist.
This concept of equity is the one advanced by Ibram X. Kendi in his book How To Be Antiracist. That book is one of the influential routes through which this concept have entered the mainstream and become popular.
It’s worth dwelling on this concept a bit, as it’s a driving force behind a lot of antiracism arguments. The concept of equity is what drives a lot of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts, which involve trying to increase the “equity” of black people and other minorities that aren’t doing well in comparison to other groups.
This idea of equity is one reason there’s been a change in how antiracism activists use terms like racism and systemic racism. In the antiracism context, “racist” no longer has to refer to explicitly racist, prejudiced behaviors or rules. Previously, the technical definition of systemic racism was a system that had explicitly racist, unfair policies, but now the term is often used to describe any system where a racial minority group is having results disproportionately lower than their percentage of the population.
Similarly, for the term racist: in the antiracism context, this doesn’t need to refer to explicitly racist behavior or beliefs or policies. It’s now often used to describe any behavior or policy that doesn’t work towards equity. In other words, if you don’t agree with the antiracism philosophy and if you aren’t actively working towards equity, you’re being racist. It’s not enough to try to make the system as fair and color-blind as you can: doing that is just another form of racism.
And once someone believes these ideas, this can create moral outrage and a drive to combat racism—even as that person’s definition of racism differs from many other people’s definition.
It’s important to understand this major shift in language, because it helps explain the rather subjective, loose way the words are used by many people. It helps explain why people will often say something is racist, or is systemically racist, despite not being able to point to anything actually prejudiced or unfair about it. (If you’re liberal and would like to learn more about this, you might enjoy the 2019 New Yorker article The Fight to Redefine Racism.)
Let’s look at a specific example of where these changing definitions can create a disagreement. In a 2020 Vox article titled The Systemic Racism Black Americans Face, Explained in 9 Charts, it points to several things it says are due to systemic racism. But these things are not clearly caused by systemic racism, not as that term has been traditionally defined. A couple examples:
The Vox piece pointed out that, “49% of black Americans say they had a great or fair amount of confidence in police, compared to 78% of white Americans.” This discrepancy was presented as if it were evidence of systemic racism, but clearly there are many reasons why people might answer differently on such a survey, even in a completely fair system. Quite simply, people’s perceptions can be wrong, and are not evidence.
When talking about covid, the Vox article said, “black Americans face a disproportionately higher rate of hospitalizations, as well as a disproportionately higher rate of death.” But even if America had zero racist people or policies, we can imagine other reasons for such outcomes. For example, black people are more likely to be poor than are white people, and poorer people can have worse health outcomes, and can have bad nutritional habits. And black Americans are known to have lower vitamin D levels than white Americans, which has been tied to worse health outcomes for covid.
This broadening of how racism-related language is used helps explain why we’re so often misunderstanding each other. It helps explain a lot of people’s confusion at seeing so many things being called racist that wouldn’t have previously been called racist. It can also help explain some liberal anger at conservatives for their not seeming to care about things that the new framing have deemed racist.
Because the idea of equity is such a core antiracism concept, it’s good to understand why some people find it such a bad and divisive concept, so let’s dig into these ideas a bit more.
In Ibram X. Kendi’s book How To Be Antiracist, he talks about how people view the bad outcomes of black people in America. He describes people as believing either one of two things:
That black people’s bad outcomes are due to black people being inherently inferior (the traditional definition of “racist”).
That black people’s bad outcomes are caused by a racist society.
In other words, you have two choices: you either see that the explanation for imbalances in racial group outcomes is a result of racism, or you’re a racist.
And we can see how this binary view of things can drive the demand for equity. If those are the only choices, then it’s clear that good, non-racist people must choose the “society is racist” explanation.
But that binary can be criticized as being a false choice. There can be many reasons for why black people (or any group) do poorly that in no way means they’re inferior.
We can see this, just as we might see our own family members or friends or neighbors having bad outcomes and see various factors for those outcomes and know there’s nothing inherently inferior about those people. People are complex, and can have various patterns.
And to be clear: we can see things this way while also believing that racism currently exists and that America has had a horribly racist past. Objecting to Kendi’s framing isn’t an objection to the idea that racism exists or has existed. It’s an objection to what can be seen as a very simplistic binary framing—a framing that, once absorbed, can prompt people to perceive racism around them that may not exist.
Let’s imagine an America where every vestige of racism, every bigoted thought and every unfair and prejudiced policy, was removed overnight. If that happened, do you think there would continue to be some negative and positive patterns present in various populations? Do you think that poor and high crime regions might continue to be poor and high crime for some time into the future?
To see this another way: When looking at the high poverty, crime, and drug use problems of the Appalachian region of America, do you think some of those problems are due to complex cultural problems? Do you think some of those problems are present simply because it can be hard for people, for families, to escape tough, hard situations? Do you think some of those problems might also be due to lack of opportunity in those regions?
Or let’s say that we took the most poor, struggling white Appalachian people and somehow altered their DNA to make them and their offspring the color orange. Decades from now, the orange people still would probably, as a group, not be doing so well. And it’d be possible to say: why aren’t the orange people doing better? People might wonder: should we pass laws helping the orange people? Should we force companies to hire a certain number of orange people?
Some people would say the focus on the orange people is misguided, that the orange skin is not a meaningful or helpful aspect to focus on, and that it would make more sense to create other groupings of people—for example, maybe focusing on communities with the worst job opportunities, or focusing on people who are doing the worst economically, no matter their color.
This thought experiment isn’t meant to say that the struggle of black people is in any way similar to that of the fictional orange Appalachians: that was just to help us understand how some people can perceive a strategy of helping a specific racial group as being misguided and unhelpful.
People are complex, and can get into patterns. They can get stuck in ruts. And this shouldn’t be insulting to anyone to talk about. In John McWhorter’s book Woke Racism, he talks about these ideas:
Perhaps the star message received by whites “doing the work” of mastering Elect ideology in 2020 was that if black people lag behind whites in some way, the only reason must be racism, even if it’s hard to perceive its role. [“Elect” is the term McWhorter uses to refer to today’s more fervent antiracism activists.]
Since the 1960s, that idea has been central in debates over race, and it is much of why they are considered “complex.” With racism no longer as overt as it was in the old days, it is considered a mark of sophistication to understand that the black guy having problems in 2020 is shackled by racism just as his great-grandfather was under Jim Crow, or his great-great-great-great-grandfather was under slavery. The nut of the issue has always been that if we don’t trace the problems to racism, then the only other possibility must be that black people are inherently deficient somehow. Given how vastly unlikely that seems, we must point to racism.
That, for example, is a fair summation of the philosophy of Ibram Kendi. When the Elect hold up his work as essential, the thumbnail-sketch reason is this point of his, which parallels Ta-Nehesi Coates’s famously eloquent tweet that “There’s nothing wrong with black people that the complete and total elimination of white supremacy won’t fix.” Anyone reading this book must internalize this basic idea as a principal sticking point in why race debates get so fruitlessly heated. The implication is that if you don’t think racism was the culprit, you are a racist.
Indicative of the sea change is that in 2020 in Washington State, a conference of science teachers were treated to this assertion, emblazoned in PowerPoint: “If you conclude that outcome differences by demographic subgroup are a result of anything other than a broken system, that is, by definition, bigotry.”
[...] The reason we should [question this] is because the assertion is an oversimplication (as almost all of us know good and well). Much of the reason we warily refer to race discussions as “the race thing” is because anybody knows, if only deep down, that “racism” does not explain everything that ails the black community—and not even “systemic” racism. Much discussion of “the race thing” is a compact that educated Americans make to perform exchanges that step around logic in favor of placation and virtue signaling.
Organization goals of increasing diversity
Another criticism of antiracism ideas comes from people who worry about the impacts of these ideas on racial minority groups that have better-than-average success.
For example, Jewish people perform very highly. As a group, in proportional terms, they’re over-represented as business owners and millionaires. Their academic achievements get them accepted to colleges more. They win more Nobel prizes as a group.
Asian Americans also do very well as a group compared to other groups.
We can see how the idea of equity can seem strange and ominous from the point of view of these high-performing racial groups. Does a program aimed at achieving equity require that those groups be discriminated against? In the early 1900s, there were quotas at American colleges that limited the number of Jewish people who could attend. Now the drive towards equity seems to pressure companies and colleges to do something similar: to attempt to limit some groups’ representation based on their proportion in the population.
So we can see why these things bother a wide range of people—not only some conservatives, but also some racial minorities, and also some committed progressives who see these ideas as being divisive and as not actually helping with the more fundamental causes of inequality.
David Bernstein is a longtime activist and leader in the Jewish community. He describes himself as being politically center-left. He wrote a book titled Woke Antisemitism: How a Progressive Ideology Harms Jews. That book is similar to John McWhorter’s book Woke Racism, but from a Jewish perspective. He explains how he sees some common antiracism ideas as harming and threatening Jewish people. This includes not only the equity concept, but also the antiracism framing that Jewish people benefit from “whiteness” and that Jewish success can be seen as a manifestation of white supremacy.
(For my podcast, I interviewed journalist James Kirchick about American antisemitism. One of the things we talked about was the idea that Jewish people not believing in an afterlife might be a reason they work so hard. Without a belief in an afterlife, they may be more focused on getting their rewards in this life. I mention this just to highlight how it’s possible to examine cultural traits that influence group behaviors, and see how group outcomes don’t have to be related to race or racism.)
In Vivek Ramaswamy’s book Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence, he criticizes liberal-side stances for anti-Asian discrimination:
I raised the issue of anti-Asian discrimination in college admissions in [my book] Woke, Inc. and was greeted with resounding silence. It was the single least-discussed aspect of that book, and it will likely be ignored again in coverage of this one. For liberals, the anti-Asian discrimination they allow and encourage in college admissions is the ultimate inconvenient truth. Some of you will accuse me of raising this as a conservative talking point meant to advance white supremacy, even as I’m objecting to discrimination against my own race. What a tangled web we weave…
The goals of equity and diversity, as often implemented by colleges and businesses, can also be criticized for relying on ambiguous and illusory group categories. For example, for a college that is attempting to increase the percentage of black students, how is black defined? What precisely makes one black? Can very light-skinned black people count as black for those purposes? Can one have a very distant black ancestor and be counted as black? If not, why not? If two people had the same exact ancestry, and one is capable of claiming a black identity and the other a white identity, how meaningful are these categories?
Also, if America is more racist towards more dark-skinned people, as antiracists argue, how is it meaningful for diversity programs to have a racial category that encompasses such a wide range of skin tones? Also, presumably black Americans whose families have lived here a long time are more likely to have suffered from America’s racist past: with that in mind, does it make sense to group together new black immigrants from other countries, who actually do very well for themselves as a group, in that same “black” category? There can be the question of: what does a racial group label tell us for such a hugely varied group?
The liberal-side reliance on racial categories can be critiqued using liberal-side ideas. A 2014 Vox article was titled 11 Ways Race Isn’t Real. It goes into detail about how hard it is to say what race is, and how mutable and movable the boundaries seem to be. That article was written to combat racist ideas, as the author saw them, but it could just as easily be used as a critique of liberal-side diversity programs.
Racial group categories can also be criticized for grouping people together who have massively different levels of wealth and societal privilege. There can be a critique that a focus on racial diversity will primarily help the people who were already the most privileged people in that racial group and likely to do okay for themselves without help. For example, if Harvard makes an effort to increase the numbers of black people, and if that effort has no socioeconomic focus, they’ll often be pulling from the ranks of people already set to do well in society. For this reason, a focus merely on increasing diversity and achieving equity can seem to some people largely performative and trivial, and as lacking the focus on socioeconomic class that would benefit the people who are truly struggling.
It’s possible some of these criticisms I’ve listed here may be why the concept of affirmative action seems so unpopular today. A 2022 Pew Research survey found 74% of Americans thought that race and ethnicity should not be considered as a factor in college admissions decisions, and that included 59% of black Americans, and 62% of Democrats.
Zero sum games
There’s often a framing by liberals that it’s conservatives who view equality and social justice as a “zero sum” game. There’s often a framing that many white conservatives believe that if black people and other minority groups gain power, then white people will lose power. In this framing, fear of losing power and zero-sum thinking drive Trump support and other conservative-side anger.
But there can be the view that it is liberals who, in their equity-related endeavors, are creating a zero sum game. If the government or colleges or companies enact rules that say, “We should have this percentage of black people and this percentage of white people and this percentage of Asian people,” that can be seen as precisely the definition of a zero sum game at a racial level: it can be seen as creating a competition between racial groups.
For these reasons, conservatives can think that liberals are projecting their own beliefs onto them. Conservatives can think something like, “Liberals are the ones who are overly team-based in their racial thinking; liberals are the ones trying to pit racial groups against each other.”
It’s also possible to see how perceptions of liberal-side identity politics are what provoke some white conservatives into being focused on their own racial identity. As one white Trump voter put it in a 2016 article in the Atlantic: “If you want identity politics, identity politics is what you get.”
Pessimistic academic theories
Some of the antiracism language and concepts popular on the left originate in academic theories that have been criticized as being overly cynical, pessimistic, and divisive.
A 2020 book by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay was titled Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody. In that book, they examine some academic concepts—like critical race theory, deconstructionism, and whiteness studies—and make the case that these theories have deranged and divided us. They show how these theories can be even more pessimistic and divisive once they’re outside the walls of the university and people begin using them in less nuanced and more aggressive ways. In the introduction of that book, they say that the reason they wrote that book was that they thought that these ideas were obstructing progressive aims of achieving equality and respect for all.
(A short aside: the co-author of that book, James Lindsay, has become, in my opinion, the very definition of an extremely polarized mind. You can find him frequently making the most extreme statements about the left, speaking in terms of being in a good-versus-evil war. I personally believe Lindsay, who is a very online person, has been deranged by fighting with people online. He has come to see himself as surrounded by evil villains, instead of seeing how most people around us are normal people with understandable reasons for the things they believe. Even some of his former colleagues and friends have made public pronouncements about how paranoid Lindsay has become. I mention this because I think many people have gone through similar polarizations due to their use of social media, and I think with time we’ll better understand just how deranging it is to be constantly fighting with people online.)
Richard Rorty, a dedicated progressive, wrote about liberal academic pessimism in his 1998 book Achieving Our Country. He thought that too many academic theories were focused on criticizing things in pessimistic, biased ways. He also thought that these ideas often relied on simplistic, ambiguous concepts of “power,” and that this ambiguity helped practitioners use “power” as a social boogeyman. With the right framing and context, one can rile up anger about any social aspect and the unfair power dynamics involved. He wrote that:
…the Left should put a moratorium on theory. It should try to kick its philosophy habit. [...]
The contemporary academic Left seems to think that the higher your level of abstraction, the more subversive of the established order you can be. The more sweeping and novel your conceptual apparatus, the more radical your critique. [...]
Recent attempts to subvert social institutions by problematizing concepts have produced a few very good books. They have also produced many thousands of books which represent scholastic philosophizing at its worst. The authors of these purportedly “subversive” books honestly believe they are serving human liberty. But it is almost impossible to clamber back down from their books to a level of abstraction on which one might discuss the merits of a law, or treaty, a candidate, or a political strategy. Even though what these authors “theorize” is often something very concrete and near at hand—a current TV show, a media celebrity, a recent scandal—they offer the most abstract and barren explanations imaginable. [...]
The cultural Left is haunted by ubiquitous specters, the most frightening of which is called “power.” This is the name of what [Mark] Edmunson calls [Michel] Foucault’s “haunting agency, which is everywhere and nowhere, as evanescent and insistent as a resourceful spook.”
In its Foucaldian usage, the term “power” denotes an agency which has left an indelible stain on every word in our language and on every institution in our society. It is always already there, and cannot be spotted coming or going. [...] Power is as much inside one as outside one. It is nearer than hands and feet. As Edmunson says: one cannot “confront power; one can only encounter its temporary and generally unwitting agents… [it] has capacities of motion and transformation that make it a preternatural force.”
The points made here by Rorty can help us understand why antiracism writing, and other progressive academic work, can so often seem ambiguous and capable of being used to make any argument one wishes to make. Progressive academics focus much of their attention on the idea of power. But the nature of power is elusive and hard to define. We all are part of the network of society, and we all have various forms of power, and we can have different types and degrees of power in different situations.
For example, in a situation where a police officer pulls over a motorist, we might say that the police officer is the one with more power. But if that citizen is wronged by that officer, they can complain or sue to remedy that injustice. If it’s found that that officer wrongly harmed that citizen, that officer may pay a steep penalty: they might be reprimanded, or might lose their job. If the police officer did something very bad, they might go to jail, or their reputation may be ruined. The more recourse people have in a society for ensuring police officers pay a price for bad behavior, the less total power a police officer can be seen to have, regardless of the power they have in the moment of direct interaction with a citizen.
This is all to say that, in a complex and modern society, it can be hard to say which person or group truly has more power. A lot will depend on the context of a situation. A lot can depend on how much an individual wants to work on wielding the power they have, or that they theoretically might have.
Media scholar Elizaveta Friesem wrote the book Media Is Us: Understanding Communication and Moving Beyond Blame, in which she examined these ideas in the context of media (and I talked to her for my podcast). We tend to think that media owners and personalities have lots of power, and that regular citizens don’t have that much power. But she examines how it can be seen that the opposite argument can also be made: the media owners are often bending to the demands of the people, and if they don’t give them what they want, the people will go elsewhere. This is not to say that media owners don’t have power, but it’s to see that these dynamics are much more complex than they can seem at first. (It also gets back to the idea I made earlier in this book: that us citizens have much more power than we tend to think.)
The ambiguous, elusive nature of power is what helps it easily be retrofitted to support any argument one wishes to make. For a single interaction between two people, it can be easy to describe one person or the other as the more powerful person, depending on what framing and language is used.
Robert Boyers is a politically progressive college professor. In his book The Tyranny of Virtue, he examines some unreasonable and aggressive aspects of liberal-side social justice activism. He describes what he calls “the will doing the work of the imagination,” by which he means that some people let their their will—their passionate desire for the world to be a certain way—supplant their curiosity about how the world actually works. This will to see the world a certain way can help explain the subjective language used in some antiracism writing and other progressive academic writing.
It can help explain, for example, the frequent focus in academia on people’s experience, and why that experience is sometimes given more emphasis than statistics and facts. What someone feels can never be argued with. And because liberals’ primary political analogy is the civil rights movement, we can see how it might be that liberals may be afraid to push back on any grievance having to do with race, no matter how subjective or debatable they may be.
Anti-whiteness
“Whiteness” is a liberal-side academic idea that’s made its way into mainstream antiracism discourse: for example, as seen in phrases like “the problematic nature of whiteness” or “the spiritual stain of whiteness.”
Such language can sound to some people like insults directed at white people. For the academics and activists who use these terms, they would say they’re not meant to refer to white people but to something more abstract and conceptual. As a way to understand that, here’s what Portland Community College in Oregon says about “whiteness”:
Whiteness refers to the construction of the white race, white culture, and the system of privileges and advantages afforded to white people in the U.S. (and across the globe) through government policies, media portrayal, decision-making power within our corporations, schools, judicial systems, etc.
So the argument in defense of “whiteness is bad” language is that it’s not actually referring to white people, but to a much more abstract concept about how white culture and racism manifest in society.
But it’s possible to disagree with the argument that, just because a term is meant to be about a more abstract concept, that the term is therefore not a problem. It’s possible to see how that language, when taken into the real world, the very polarized real world, can be seen as divisive and alienating.
Imagine that some academics had used blackness as a term to refer to some aspects of black culture that they found problematic. And then later, that body of work was embraced by conservative activists, who’d use those concepts in even more extreme ways, saying things like, “blackness is bad,” or “blackness is a spiritual disease.” And when they were criticized for being divisive, they’d point to some obscure academic papers and say “you’re overreacting; you’re just not understanding the true academic meaning of these terms.”
Liberals would likely not be forgiving of that usage, and they’d be right not to. Language has power: the power to heal and the power to divide. Just because academics use a term, that doesn’t mean we’re absolved from responsibility from how that language is widely perceived.
We should also recognize that some far-left academic work is driven by a self-proclaimed desire to “problematize” common societal concepts. Some of that work can be criticized for being too cynical, and as being more like activism than academic work, and as being problematic in its own right. We should see it’s possible these terms were purposefully chosen for their provocative and emotion-arousing nature.
We should feel a responsibility to see how the language we use can anger and polarize. It’s easy to see what’s divisive about “whiteness is bad” language, just as it’s easy to see what’s divisive about “jewishness is bad” or “blackness is bad” or “Islam is bad” types of language.
We should feel a responsibility to form persuasive arguments and arguments that are unlikely to divide. It’s possible to criticize society and racism without using a term like “whiteness,” just as it’s possible to work towards any political goal while trying to avoid unnecessarily polarizing and offensive language.
Another problematic aspect of the “whiteness” term is that it’s often used to describe any racial group that is doing well. For example, Jewish people and Asian Americans are sometimes described as “benefiting from whiteness” or “embracing the values of whiteness.” In this framing, any racial group that does well, or that has done something that can be seen as oppressive to other groups, is seen as embracing “whiteness” or white supremacy. And that obviously can be a framing that people in those groups find strange and offensive.
The role of this “whiteness” language and other liberal-side academic language becomes even more important when it escapes the academy and starts being used in the mainstream. In our polarized environment, many people won’t be using those terms carefully or academically. They’ll be using them in more aggressive and belligerent ways.
It’s understandable that some people hear these kinds of things and think “this is incredibly divisive.”
Also, some people have a perception that white people have become acceptable targets of disdain. It’s perceived that it’s become quite standard and accepted for people, both white and black, to mock and insult white people.
Sarah Jeong, when the New York Times hired her in 2018, got attention for her “white people”-insulting social media posts. Many conservatives see the ubiquity of “white people” criticisms as evidence of liberal-side divisiveness, while liberals tend to see it as a non-issue.
Some liberals will defend this kind of language. Here’s an excerpt from a Vox piece by Ezra Klein defending Sarah Jeong’s controversial tweets:
Are Jeong’s tweets [...] an actual expression of animus towards real people? Or are the critics making that argument engaged in an absurd form of literalism, refusing to recognize ironic discourse even though it’s been repeatedly pointed out to them? [...]
To much of the right, it’s obvious that Jeong’s tweets represented anti-white racism in its purest form; to much of the left, it’s obvious they were jokes that anyone with an iota of self-awareness could parse, and the affront taken at them is pure bad faith.
Jeong’s statement seemed, to me, to offer a much more persuasive middle road: These were satirical tweets framed in a way that could reasonably offend people who didn’t understand the context for what they were reading.
It’s possible to see Ezra Klein’s defense of Jeong as biased. It’s possible to see him as extending generosity in a way that he likely wouldn’t for similar conservative language. It’s possible to see Klein’s stance that these were “obvious” jokes that “anyone with an iota of self-awareness could parse” as being at least partly a result of our instincts to not examine divisive behaviors of people in our political group.
As someone who tries to avoid worst-case interpretations and give people the benefit of the doubt, it’s not obvious to me that Jeong’s statements are jokes. There seems to be a lot of anger there. That might be genuine anger at white people, or maybe it’s only white conservatives, or maybe it’s something else. Regardless of her intent, I think it was wrong of her to say such things, if only because those things will understandably be interpreted by many people as genuine anger and hatred, and as such are divisive and unhelpful.
If you can see how there might be some group psychology at work here in Klein’s defense of Jeong and his insistence that there’s nothing at all to be bothered by there, you might be able to better understand how conservatives can have similar instincts to defend offensive things said by other conservatives. They’ll take similar approaches in explaining that liberals are just missing the context and over-reacting to what are obvious jokes, or trivial transgressions. And they’ll often sincerely mean it, just as I believe Ezra Klein meant what he said.
Let’s imagine a conservative saw a tweet from an influential liberal that said “white people suck,” and saw that as both racist and as an indicator of the left’s divisiveness and hypocrisy. On the surface, a “white people suck” statement is no different in form than a statement like “black people suck.” It is, from a purely semantic perspective, a racist statement.
If you’re someone who believes that the “white people suck” tweet is not racist, and that the conservative is wrong for perceiving racism in that statement, why exactly do you think that? In order to consider such a statement as not racist and therefore not a problem, one must do some calculus involving the race of the speaker and the historical context and maybe the context of the tweet. But some people won’t see all that behind-the-scenes calculus you’ve done to arrive at your determination that the statement isn’t racist. They’ll just see the surface-level equivalence between the statements “black people suck” and “white people suck,” and be perplexed why someone would make excuses for such things.
To take the example of Ezra Klein again: he states that Jeong’s tweets are obviously non-offensive, but it’s likely he would take great moral offense if any racial minority was substituted for “white.” Is it possible to see such a defense as hypocritical? As a bit gaslighting-esque? At the very least, it’s possible to perceive the defense as being arrogant in the way it assumes that other people are expected to have the same set of calculations and value judgements that Klein has.
It’s common these days to see messages mocking white people in many places. For one example, Dave Chappelle had a covid-era joke that went: “If white people can wear masks to Klan rallies, they can wear one to Wal-Mart.”
Here’s another joke of Chappelle’s: “You guys remember what life was like before COVID? The mass shootings every week? Everyone remember that? Thank god for COVID. Something had to lock these murderous whites up and keep them in the house.”
A tweet from 2022 read, “White people can identify 500 breeds of dogs but will mix up two black coworkers.”
There are many examples of this kind of language, including from well known, influential people.
There are also more disturbing and violent examples. A tweet from 2022 read, “Let’s just start killing white ppl I’m tired of em.” Another tweet from 2022 read, “We gotta start killing white people, they killing us so what’s the problem?”
I could give many examples of this kind of language. My point isn’t to make the case that this phenomenon is that meaningful on its own, but just to show how much of a pass seems to be given to insults and mockery of white people, compared to other racial groups. And it’s possible to see how people are bothered by this and how it contributes to our divides.
We see some liberals make excuses for this language. “Such language isn’t racist,” the argument will go, “because white people are the oppressing group, and racism can only affect marginalized groups.” One example of this can be found in the Anti-Defamation League’s change to their definition of racism. In 2020, a more traditional definition of racism was changed to “the marginalization and/or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges White people.” (In 2020, after complaints, this was changed back to a more neutral, non-white-focused framing.)
Similar to defenses of “whiteness is bad” language, these defenses can seem obtuse and gaslighting-esque to some people. To take a stance that it’s not possible to be racist against white people defies some people’s common sense.
Another reason conservatives can think that anti-white biases are widespread these days is because white people are often the ones chosen to play the fools in various media. For example, if a commercial is going to show someone acting stupidly, it will almost always be a person person, and usually a white man. Conservatives can perceive this as part of a pervasive liberal bias or a purposeful agenda, but in this case it has an easy-to-understand cause: in today’s sensitive environment, anyone making a commercial or other media has an incentive to avoid depicting minorities in a negative light, for fear of a backlash. Using white people for such things is understandably perceived as a safer, less risky choice. (As a former commercial video producer, it’s the choice I’d personally make.) White men are perceived as the least risky choice of all. While we can see the causes of this trend, we can also see how it is through such things that conservatives build their perspectives about anti-white bias.
All these things could help explain some of the findings that are often interpreted as evidence of “white grievance” and prejudice on the part of white people. A 2016 PRRI.org survey found the following:
Approximately six in ten (57%) white Americans and roughly two-thirds (66%) of white working-class Americans agree that discrimination against whites is as big a problem today as discrimination against blacks and other minorities, an opinion shared by fewer than four in ten (38%) Hispanic Americans and fewer than three in ten (29%) black Americans.
Conservative media echoes these perceptions. For example, Tucker Carlson said the following: “After spending two centuries overcoming our country’s painful history of racial discrimination and hatred, why is it once again acceptable, even encouraged, to attack people on the basis of their skin?”
Some liberals are quick to interpret such things as simply being bigotry. But maybe that’s mistaken. Maybe it’s much simpler. Maybe the main reason conservatives perceive significant discrimination against white people is because insults to white people are common and accepted. We may be overcomplicating a situation that has some pretty simple dynamics—dynamics as simple as anything found on a grade school playground. And we may be motivated to overcomplicate these things and look for hidden, underhanded reasons because we feel a pull to simultaneously create excuses for the people on our side, and to denigrate the other side.
Micro-aggressions
The term micro-aggression refers to indirect, subtle, or unintentional forms of disrespect or abuse aimed at members of a racial minority or another marginalized group. Antiracism training at schools and businesses often focuses on spotting and avoiding micro-aggressions. But many of the examples of micro-aggressions used in these resources could have other explanations besides prejudice or bigotry. The frequent focus on micro-aggressions can be perceived as resulting from a pressure to find widespread racism in a society where racism is not actually widespread. The focus can be perceived as a bit witch-hunt-like in parsing many trivial and understandable behaviors as being evidence of grand injustices and oppression.
A 2007 paper by Derald Wing Sue and others titled Racial Microaggressions in Everyday Life features an alleged micro-aggression. It describes an incident where Sue, who is Asian, and his colleague, who is black, have boarded a plane. Some time later, three white men sit down in front of them. Later, the flight attendant asks Sue and his companion if they’d mind moving to the back of the plane to balance the plane weight. In their telling, the two people of color perceived this as likely due to racism, whether conscious racism or unconscious racism. But clearly there can be other factors here. It’s possible to imagine the flight attendant asking them to move because they were a smaller group—two people and not three—and because they were closer to the back of the plane. It’s possible to imagine her not thinking much about it at all. It’s possible she was very tired. In short, it’s possible to imagine her doing the same thing regardless of anyone’s race.
In that paper, Sue writes about trying to talk to the flight attendant about this:
While I kept telling myself to drop the matter, I could feel my blood pressure rising, heart beating faster, and face flush with anger. When the attendant walked back to make sure our seat belts were fastened, I could not contain my anger any longer. Struggling to control myself, I said to her in a forced calm voice: “Did you know that you asked two passengers of color to step to the rear of the ‘bus’”? For a few seconds she said nothing but looked at me with a horrified expression. Then she said in a righteously indignant tone, “Well, I have never been accused of that! How dare you? I don’t see color! I only asked you to move to balance the plane. Anyway, I was only trying to give you more space and greater privacy.”
Attempts to explain my perceptions and feelings only generated greater defensiveness from her. For every allegation I made, she seemed to have a rational reason for her actions. Finally, she broke off the conversation and refused to talk about the incident any longer. Were it not for my colleague who validated my experiential reality, I would have left that encounter wondering whether I was correct or incorrect in my perceptions. Nevertheless, for the rest of the flight, I stewed over the incident and it left a sour taste in my mouth.
The power of racial microaggressions lies in their invisibility to the perpetrator and, oftentimes, the recipient.
With the focus on “my experiential reality” here, we can see a high value being placed on the subjective and the perceived, instead of what’s actually known. And a lot of liberal academic work these days can be criticized for valuing the “experiential” over facts and data. But clearly, we are all capable of being wrong. And the more we look for evidence of insults, the more we’ll find them. And being wrong about all these things we experience on a daily basis can have real costs: distorted framings can divide us.
In the area of microaggressions, we can see a microcosm of what bothers people about a lot of liberal-side social justice endeavors. The thinking about microaggressions can be seen as being almost directly opposite of logical and emotionally healthy ways of interacting with other people. Instead of considering the many normal and understandable reasons for why someone might have done or said something that bothers you, there can be a focus on filtering for all the negative and disrespectful meanings someone’s behavior might have. Instead of focusing on what people’s well meaning or neutral intent was or might have been, there’s a focus on the resultant hurt feelings—and clearly people’s feelings can be wrong.
In Ibram X. Kendi’s book How To Be Antiracist, he says he prefers to call microaggressions “racist abuse,” because he views them as being so harmful and not as “micro” things. But clearly there can be a lot of ambiguity and unknowns in these anecdotes. It can be seen as simplistic and divisive to attempt to so confidently categorize such ambiguous and often complex incidents as racism, or as abuse.
White privilege
White privilege is another term that is often used in antiracism activism. Peggy McIntosh, Associate Director of the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, describes white privilege as “an invisible package of unearned assets, which I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was meant to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, code books, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks.”
Here are some things cited as examples of white privilege by Peggy McIntosh:
I can arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.
I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented.
I can go into a music shop and count on finding the music of my race represented, into a supermarket and find the food I grew up with, into a hairdresser’s shop and find someone who can deal with my hair.
I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk with the “person in charge,” I will be facing a person of my race.
I can easily buy posters, postcards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys, and children’s magazines featuring people of my race.
I can choose blemish cover or bandages in “flesh” color and have them more or less match my skin.
But many of these things can be seen as rather standard and trivial, as simply things that would apply in any country to members of the majority racial group. For example, many of these indicators would also be true of Chinese people in China, or of black people in most African countries. They can be seen to be mainly the result of a racial or ethnic group being more numerous, and a result of companies and other organizations focusing more on that group as their main audience. If I, a white person, lived in China, would it make sense to use these kinds of examples as reasons to criticize Chinese people there for having “Chinese privilege”? Or would it instead make sense to see the rather banal reasons for why things are the way they are?
To be clear, one can criticize these various antiracism ideas while still acknowledging they have some truth. For example, there are conservative writers who have written that they agree white people do have it easier in various regards in the U.S., and that microaggressions do exist. The criticisms are often not about whether the ideas have some merit, but about the degree to which such things are a problem, and about the highly pessimistic and righteous framings that some people have.
Antiracism activists, from what I’ve seen, tend to avoid acknowledging that such criticisms might have merit. There is little acknowledgement, for example, that wrongly calling many things and people “racist” can be a problem and can have bad effects. There’s little acknowledgement that it’s possible to critique antiracism ideas for intellectual reasons: instead, disagreement is often portrayed as due to ignorance or bigotry.
If we want to heal our divides, we should see it as important to have these conversations, and acknowledge that there can be well meaning disagreements.
Critical race theory
The concept of critical race theory (CRT) can be a hard thing to talk about, because how people use the term can vary so much. The term was originally a specific academic framework about exploring the systemic nature of racism and how racism can be found in many institutions and practices across society. More broadly now, it’s come to be associated with liberal-side antiracism ideas in general.
Regardless of how one person or another exactly defines critical race theory, we can understand how conservatives are able to group a wide variety of antiracism ideas under the critical race theory label. This is sometimes seen as underhanded, as a purposeful attempt by conservatives to smear all antiracism ideas. But it can also be easy to understand why they use that shorthand: it’s no different than various forms of shorthand that people on the left and right use to easily describe things they object to.
Some liberals are capable of seeing what people object to about antiracism ideas while also thinking the right’s anger about critical race theory is overblown and manufactured. For example, some liberals will say, “They’re not teaching these ideas in schools; they’re not that common.”
If we want to reduce animosity, we should attempt to see why there is a widespread conservative concern about critical race theory. We should attempt to see why it seems like a powerful and bad force.
Chris Rufo is one person who has worked on drawing attention to this. And to be completely clear: I think Rufo is an extremely polarized and unhelpful person who, like many people these days on the left and right, perceives himself to be in a good-versus-evil war and speaks in unnecessary hostile ways. That said, his work has drawn attention to how prevalent some of these CRT-associated, “whiteness is bad” concepts are in some prominent businesses and schools.
Books like John McWhorter’s Woke Racism and Robert Boyers’ The Tyranny of Virtue also showcase how prevalent these ideas have become in mainstream culture and institutions.
In a January 2022 survey, teachers, principals, and district leaders answered questions about whether teaching critical race theory in school made sense. 18% said they strongly supported teaching students in their district CRT and 27% said they somewhat supported it. This is just to show that there are people who are proponents of teaching CRT to young people, however those people define it.
To share one example of how mainstream these ideas have become, let’s examine the children’s book Not My Idea, which contains ideas associated with critical race theory and antiracism. This book is now being used in public-school curricula for young children. The promotional material for this book says that it is “one of Huffpost’s recommended ‘anti-racist books for kids and teens’” and “a White Raven 2019 Selection” (White Raven is a catalog with recommends for youth-focused books) and “named one of School Library Journal’s Best Books of 2018.” Again, this is just to show why people perceive these ideas as being commonplace and as being aimed at children.
In 2021, the depolarization group Braver Angels held an online virtual town hall meeting on the topic of “Should critical race theory be taught in schools?” At the event, citizens with opposing views on the subject took turns speaking. People from each side of the debate gave their thoughts on whether it should be taught in school. But one problem I noticed was that critical race theory was never actually defined. And the people arguing their cases were all speaking with their own polarized interpretations of what the question meant.
The liberal citizens at the event spoke as if conservatives were attempting to prevent teachers from talking about some basic historical facts, like slavery and the civil rights movement and such, but that is not what the large majority of conservatives seem to be trying to do. Some of the liberals seemed to be under the impression that the question was just about whether teachers would have the freedom to teach about America’s racial history and conflicts. Most of the liberal speakers didn’t seem to understand what was driving the conservative-side anger.
The conservative attendees had their own narrative about what the question meant. They were afraid liberals wanted to teach the most unreasonable and divisive iterations of anti-racism. The conservatives weren’t objecting to teaching history; they weren’t objecting to teaching about slavery, the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow, or the Civil Rights Movement. They were afraid that teaching CRT in the school would make white children feel bad about their “whiteness,” and make kids see racism in society where it wasn’t present, and make white kids and black kids less able to get along.
And clearly, as we can see from the liberal speakers at this event and what they focused on, there’s a range of beliefs on the liberal side. The fact that many liberals think that “CRT being taught in schools” is mainly about teaching accurate history, and not about the more subjective and controversial aspects of anti-racism, helps us understand the liberal side range of beliefs, and helps us see how that perception might explain some liberals stating their support for “CRT in schools.”
As with many issues we fight over these days, we are often simply failing to define what we’re arguing about. We will tend to perceive our side as fighting for “the good things,” however we define that. We’ll often be frightened of boogeymen that either don’t exist, or that are much less big and scary than we think they are. As much research shows, we often have a lot more in common than we think we do.
Considering the criticisms already discussed about liberal-side framings about race and racism, hopefully it’s possible to see how well meaning people can disagree on these topics. For example, I personally would object to my child being told that racism is a big factor in killings by police, because I think that is far from being clearly obvious and accurate, and also because it’s such a divisive and emotion-producing topic.
Interpretations about the nature and degree of racism in America are not like teaching the facts of history, or of math. They’re much more subjective and debatable ideas. If we can see that, we can see why some people are angered by the idea of young kids being taught controversial ideas that are directly tied to the deep divisions in our society. If you’re liberal, imagine how you’d feel if teachers were teaching conservative framings about race and racism that you disagreed with, ideas that were similarly subjective and debatable.
Views that Americans are largely racist
It’s a common belief that it’s been demonstrated that Americans, and specifically conservatives, are largely racist. But when you dig into this area, you’ll find that this can be criticized as being a pessimistic framing. For more on this, see this excerpt on my website.