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)