Anti-Racism

Typology

In The Coddling of the American Mind. Gregg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt distinguish between common-humanity identity politics and common-enemy identity politics.

Coleman Hughes makes a similar distinction, but this may gloss over some necessary distinctions: i.e. the Black Power movement, for example the Black Panthers, were for 'communal federalism' but stayed within the ideals of egalitarianism and universalism. This is emphatically not the case for many in the new 'wokist' identititarian movements who explicitely reject common humanity:

Coleman Hughes on Race-Consciousness Movements

Coleman Hughes:

"For fifty years, the American left has been torn between two different answers. The first was best encapsulated by Martin Luther King Jr. in his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. King looked forward to a day when “little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers”—a day when race would be seen as an insignificant attribute.

The competing vision—let’s call it race-consciousness—was best encapsulated by the Black Power movement. The end goal of this movement was not, as King once put it, to bring about a “new kind of togetherness between blacks and whites.” Rather, it was to demand that black people, understood as a collective, receive more recognition, more respect, and more resources. Underlying this vision was the assumption that society is a zero-sum power struggle between oppressed groups and oppressor groups—and that a win for the former requires a loss for the latter.

In the race-conscious vision, racial harmony is an afterthought. At times, it is actively shunned. Race-consciousness seeks to “problematize” relations between members of different ethnic groups in a variety of ways. In 2017, for instance, the New York Times ran an op-ed entitled “Can My Children Be Friends with White People?” written by a black father who planned on teaching his sons “to have profound doubts that friendship with white people is possible”—a near-perfect reversal of Dr. King’s message.

For black people, race-consciousness seems to promise more status and more access to opportunity. For white people, it promises a way to act on, rather than simply brood over, feelings of guilt over their complicity (real or imagined) in America’s past sins. For the nation as a whole, it seems to promise solutions to ongoing problems like mass incarceration and police brutality.

Yet race-consciousness cannot deliver on its promises because its foundational assumptions are flawed. For one thing, it does not reject the old rigid racial categories so much as it transforms them, sneaking them in through the back door. If someone said that black kids should not be encouraged to work hard a hundred years ago, it was probably because they were racist. If someone says the same thing today, it’s almost certainly because they are “anti-racist.” But any political program that insists that black people be held to a lower standard will never be able to bring black achievement up to those same rejected standards—and thus will struggle mightily to address racial disparity.

More fundamentally, race-consciousness misdiagnoses the problems facing our society and therefore prescribes the wrong cures. The preoccupation with electing black politicians (or politicians “of color” more broadly) is one example. When Freddie Gray died in police custody in 2015, nearly all of the public servants that might be held accountable—the police chief, the mayor, the state’s attorney, and the president—were black. Cities such as Atlanta and Detroit, which have had five or six consecutive black mayors, see all the same problems as cities with mostly white leadership. As Bernie Sanders pointed out not long ago, caring about the skin color of politicians, as opposed to their policy proposals and qualifications, is just as wrong-headed as it sounds.

Here’s another example of race-consciousness leading to strange and unhelpful policy proposals: during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, three different candidates—Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Pete Buttigieg — proposed housing plans that would give special resources, such as assistance on down payments, to people living in formerly redlined neighborhoods. The idea was that the people currently living in these neighborhoods must have been trapped there by a cycle of intergenerational poverty that has its roots in the racist housing policies of the mid-20th century. Yet an analysis by Brookings discovered that, of the 11 million Americans living in formerly redlined neighborhoods, more are white than black. Because race-conscious anti-racism makes a ritual out of noticing how the present is similar to the past, it can end up being blind to the many ways in which the present differs from the past."

(https://www.persuasion.community/p/a-better-anti-racism-93f)

Discussion

Thomas Chatterton Williams on Unraveling the Idea of Race

From an interview by Aspen Ideas:

"* Your most recent book, Self-Portrait in Black and White, unearths your multigenerational family story and brings readers into the evolution of your thinking on race. How did this personal history start to unravel your idea of race?

When my daughter was born in 2013, I was still clinging to the logic of the plantation that I had grown up with—that is, the all-American tradition of believing that “race” is real and that it exists most significantly as a binary: one is either black or white. I knew that the child I was about to have with my “white” French wife would be “mixed,” like me, and possibly much more “white”-presenting, but I could not yet imagine a world in which the “one-drop rule”—the notion that a drop of “black” blood makes a person “black” because they are disqualified from being “white”—did not hold sway. It was her birth that thrust the fiction of race into my consciousness for the first time. It’s not that I thought this blond-haired, blue-eyed child with very pale skin was “white;” it’s that I realized deep inside me that these categories could not contain her, and they couldn’t adequately contain any of us if we’re being honest. That’s when I started to understand that the world I was hoping for, one in which the hierarchical, color-coded language of the plantation was truly relegated to the past, would have to be one that we participated in creating. That was the exact moment my passively received understanding of race began to fall apart.

* You’ve talked about the need to transcend racial thinking, which can often get misconstrued as being “post-race” or seen as assuaging white guilt. Can you help clarify these strands of thought?

Well, it’s really a troubling misunderstanding that I’m at pains to clarify in the book. Racism and race are two separate things. Barbara and Karen Fields have argued in their extremely important 2012 book Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life, and Ta-Nehisi Coates has even echoed the point in Between the World and Me, that racism is the father of race, and not the other way around. What that means is that there are no distinct races within the species homo sapiens. But prejudice and a need to justify discrimination and the kind of brutal economic exploitation of African-descended peoples at the hands of (mostly) European-descended peoples in the supposedly free and democratic new world through chattel slavery demanded a narrative of inherent inferiority and superiority. We are still living with the repercussions of that exploitation and subsequent ones, but that does not mean the categories it imposed on us are real or worth preserving one moment longer. And I don’t think you can oppose one without opposing the other. Which is why I don’t think you can be fully anti-racist while buying into or reproducing the habits of thought racism has created and that in turn give it power.

* What does a world in which we have transcended race look like? What promise does it hold for people whose racial identity creates a sense of belonging that would be hard to want to let go of?

I think a world in which we have transcended race would be one in which we fundamentally learn to interact with other people, and think of ourselves, first and foremost as individuals. We live in extraordinarily mixed societies already. I want to live in a world where we accept that a person’s physical characteristics and ostensible color category cannot adequately tell us how they will think or act, what kind of character they possess, or to which class they belong. Many of us profess to believe this already, but we don’t really behave like we do. And part of not behaving like we do is not putting too much stock in that sense of belonging based on abstract notions of “race.” I would just caution any non-white people who find it difficult to imagine giving up the solidarity and sense of empowerment they derive from membership in their racial group that this is also how white supremacists feel. Now, most well-meaning people can immediately understand the problem with a sense of meaning and pride based in belonging to a “race” when they think about “white” people professing this. We just need to be consistent now. Too often the “anti-racists” on the left start from the same limiting premises—that the racial category is impossible to transcend and therefore real, if not biologically real then so socially constructed that it amounts to the same thing—that the genuine racists hold to be true. In so doing they actually end up reproducing the very same flawed and dehumanizing ideas they wish to counteract."

(https://www.aspenideas.org/articles/can-we-transcend-race-while-fighting-racism(