Don't Divide Us

USA

By Leave a Comment

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 a more active opposition, galvanized by the rise of Donald Trump, who has been eager to denounce black politicians but reluctant to denounce white racists. In many liberal circles, a movement has gathered force: a crusade against racism and other isms. It is a fierce movement, and sometimes a frivolous one, aiming the power of its outrage at excessive prison sentences, tasteless Halloween costumes, and many offenses in between.

This movement seems to have been particularly transformative among white liberals, who are now, by some measures, more concerned about racism than African-Americans are. One survey found that white people who voted for Hillary Clinton felt warmer toward black people than toward their fellow-whites.

Most white people in America are not liberals, of course, and so the campaign against racism has often taken the form of an intra-white conflict. One of the most prominent combatants is Robin DiAngelo, a white workplace-diversity trainer, available to help organizations teach their employees to be more sensitive to race. Last year, DiAngelo published “White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism,” a reflection on her career and her cause. “White identity is inherently racist,” she writes. “I strive to be ‘less white.’ ” She cites Kendi as an authority, even if she sometimes seems closer in spirit to Ibram Rogers, the undergraduate. But, then, Kendi himself is in an instructive mood: his new work presents itself as a how-to book, although, in a little more than two hundred absorbing pages, it’s also a manifesto and, from time to time, a memoir. It is titled “How to Be an Antiracist,” and in it Kendi explains how he became one, which means explaining how he used to be (as he currently sees it) a racist. Kendi is convinced that racism can be objectively identified, and therefore fought, and one day vanquished.

Read more

By Leave a Comment

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 represents a pattern in the letters, wherein it is white students who are “woker” than their Black classmates, neatly demonstrating the degree to which this new religion is more about virtue signaling than social justice. From the same well is this same professor finding that the gay men in his class had no problem with his assigning a book with a gay slur in its title, a layered, ironic title for a book taking issue with traditional concepts of masculinity—but that a group of straight white women did, and reported him to his superiors.

Overall I found it alarming how many of the letters sound as if they were written from Stalinist Russia or Maoist China. A history professor reports that at his school, the administration is seriously considering setting up an anonymous reporting system for students and professors to report “bias” that they have perceived. One professor committed the sin of “privileging the white male perspective” in giving a lecture on the philosophy of one of the Founding Fathers, even though Frederick Douglass sang that Founder’s praises. The administration tried to make him sit in a “listening circle,” in which his job was to stay silent while students explained how he had hurt them—in other words, a 21st-century-American version of a struggle session straight out of the Cultural Revolution.

Read more

By Leave a Comment

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 and economic justice that constituted the civil rights movement, or the anti-capitalist militancy of the Black Panther Party, are somehow in the same category as neoliberal elites who use the language of social justice to discourage policies that would address economic inequality. These elites, who control the supposed left wing of mainstream politics in the United States, claim that addressing economic inequality would not overcome the inequalities of race and gender. They completely obscure the reality that, for example, better wages and union representation in the workplace could help provide protection from sexual harassment by employers, and could help raise the standard of living for a great deal of people of colur. The Fight for 15 campaign, ridiculed by Democratic Party elites, is one example of such an initiative. But because these elites use the language of social justice, their rhetoric is extremely influential in establishing false oppositions between so-called “identity politics” and “class politics.”

Read more

By Leave a Comment

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 the content of their character, and if people of different races think they are getting along or even loving one another, they probably need immediate antiracism training. This is an important passage because rejection of King’s “dream” of racial harmony — not even as a description of the obviously flawed present, but as the aspirational goal of a better future — has become a central tenet of this brand of antiracist doctrine mainstream press outlets are rushing to embrace.

Read more

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

By Leave a Comment

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 suggest that the best predictor of police killings is not race but income levels – the poorer you are, the more likely you are to be killed. Other studies have shown that the startlingly high prison numbers in America are better explained by class than by race and that ‘mass incarceration is primarily about the systematic management of the lower classes, regardless of race’. African Americans, disproportionately working class and poor, are also likely to be disproportionately imprisoned and killed. There are, as one report observes, ‘two distinct criminal justice systems: one for wealthy people and another for poor people and people of color’.

Read more

Photo by Sushil Nash on Unsplash

By Leave a Comment

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 of Donald Trump, who has been eager to denounce black politicians but reluctant to denounce white racists. In many liberal circles, a movement has gathered force: a crusade against racism and other isms. It is a fierce movement, and sometimes a frivolous one, aiming the power of its outrage at excessive prison sentences, tasteless Halloween costumes, and many offenses in between. This movement seems to have been particularly transformative among white liberals, who are now, by some measures, more concerned about racism than African-Americans are. One survey found that white people who voted for Hillary Clinton felt warmer toward black people than toward their fellow-whites.

Read more

Photo by Devin Berko on Unsplash