John McWhorter at Persuasion describes America’s third-wave anti-racists as ‘millennials with lattes’. A better description still is ‘The Elect’. This appellation indicates the smugness and danger this thinking represents as its adherents come to occupy high-status institutional positions and influence educational agendas: Talking of Antiracist Baby, I am especially dismayed at the idea of this […]
Teaching ‘white fragility’ is bad for kids of color
Unless we adopt ‘a more humanistic approach, grounded in respect for the common qualities that bind us all’, argues Rav Arora, ‘we will continue to be stratified along racial lines’: One of the worst things you can tell young people of color is that they are fundamentally different from their white counterparts and they are […]
The Fight to Redefine Racism
Kelefa Sanneh writes on Ibram X’s argument for redefining racism, as he believed that we should think of “racist” not as a pejorative but as a simple, widely-encompassing term of description In modern American political discourse, racism connotes hatred, and just about everyone claims to oppose it. But many on the contemporary left have pursued […]
John McWhorter on why academics fear for their freedom
A national reckoning on race, John McWorther writes, has brought to the fore a loose but committed assemblage of people given to the idea that social justice must be pursued via attempts to banish from the public sphere, as much as possible, all opinions that they interpret as insufficiently opposed to power differentials. This episode […]
The problem with identity politics
In this Q&A interview, Asad Haider, author of Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump, reflects on the contemporary meanings of ‘identity politics’: Too many irreconcilable things have been conflated in the contemporary usage of the term “identity politics”. We are supposed to believe that, for example, the mass movements for racial […]
On ‘White Fragility’
Robin DiAngelo’s bestseller has “a simple message”, argues Matt Taibbi: “there is no such thing as a universal human experience, and we are defined not by our individual personalities or moral choices, but only by our racial category”. White Fragility is based upon the idea that human beings are incapable of judging each other by […]
Racism is a problem, white people are not
Contemporary politics is often driven by “cultural or psychological anxieties”, argues Kenan Malik. We need to consider social and structural material factors too: More than half of those killed by US police are white; and while, proportionately, police killings of African Americans have fallen in recent years, that of white people has sharply risen. Some analyses […]
The fight to redefine racism
Kelefa Sanneh unpacks the new thinking about race elaborated in Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist and Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility. In modern American political discourse, racism connotes hatred, and just about everyone claims to oppose it. But many on the contemporary left have pursued a more active opposition, galvanized by the rise […]