McWhorter: Black Students Are Being Trained to Think They Can’t Handle Discomfort

2023/12/15 Leave a comment

Of interest:

The presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been roundly condemned for arguing at a congressional hearing on antisemitism that calls for genocide against Jews are not always susceptible to sanction on their campuses. (Liz Magill of Penn has since resigned.)

Less noticed has been how starkly their expectations of Jewish students point up how low expectations are for Black students on many college campuses — expectations low enough to qualify as a kind of racism.

Yes, racism, though it’s more of the “soft bigotry of low expectations” that George W. Bush referred to.

Many leaders at elite universities seem to think that as stewards of modern antiracism, their job is to decry and to penalize, to the maximum extent possible, anything said or done that makes Black students uncomfortable.

In the congressional hearing, the presidents made clear that Jewish students should be protected when hate speech is “directed and severe, pervasive” (in the words of Ms. Magill) or when the speech “becomes conduct” (Claudine Gay of Harvard).

But the tacit idea is that when it comes to issues related to race — and, specifically, Black students — then free speech considerations become an abstraction. Where Black students are concerned, we are to forget whether the offense is directed, as even the indirect is treated as evil; we are to forget the difference between speech and conduct, as mere utterance is grounds for aggrieved condemnation.

It seems to me that, in debates over free speech, Jews are seen in some quarters as white and therefore need no protection from outright hostility. But racism is America’s original sin, and thus we are to treat all and any intimation of it on university campuses as a kind of kryptonite, even if that means treating Black students as pathological cases rather than human beings with basic resilience who understand proportion and degree.

This is certainly a double standard imposed on Jewish students, as my colleagues Bret Stephens and David French, among others, have argued. However, we must also consider the imposition of this double standard upon young Black people. To assume they can’t handle anything unpleasant infantilizes bright, serious students preparing for life in the real world.

Both expectations are offenses to human dignity, and universities must seek a middle ground. The answer is neither the crudeness of allowing all speech to pass as “free” nor the clamping down on any utterance that rubs a student the wrong way.

The contrast between how university leaders treat affronts to Blackness versus how they are currently treating affronts to Jewishness is almost chilling.

Last year, the legal scholar Ilya Shapiro, before he was to start an appointment at Georgetown’s law school, wrote a tweet implying that Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson was an affirmative action pick for the Supreme Court. “Because Biden said he’d only consider black women for SCOTUS, his nominee will always have an asterisk attached.” Shapiro also said that the Indian American judge he thought best qualified “doesn’t fit into latest intersectionality hierarchy so we’ll get a lesser black woman.”

For two tweets, his appointment was suspended pending an investigation. Two tweets, that is, and expressing his assessment of racial preferences in the selection of a Supreme Court justice. Shapiro simply — and rather gracelessly — expressed an opinion. His appointment was reinstated — but only because the tweets were written before he was on the job, with it specified that had he written such tweets while employed, it would likely have been classified as creating a hostile environment. (Shapiro ultimately resigned before assuming the position.)

The geophysicist Dorian Abbot was disinvited from giving a talk on climate at M.I.T. when it was discovered that he had spoken against identity-based preferences in the past. The head of the department that had invited Abbot announced that “words matter and have consequences.” But the question is whether the words in this case were so injurious as to constitute abusive action — hardly an open-and-shut case — and more to the point, those were words Abbot was presumably not going to speak in his presentation. This was a medieval-style banning of a heretic.

Sometimes Black students must be protected not only from words, but words that sound like other words. In 2020, Greg Patton was suspended from teaching a class in communications at the University of Southern California. The reason was that one of his lectures included noting that in Mandarin, a hesitation term is “nèi ge,” which means “that …” and has nothing to do, of course, with the N-word. Several Black students said they felt injured by experiencing this word in the class.

The offense can even be 100 years in the past. In 2021 at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, some Black students were upset when walking past a boulder on campus that was referred to as a “niggerhead” by a newspaper reporter in 1925, when that term was common for large, dark rocks. The school had the boulder removed.

In cases like those last two, it seems that Black students are being taught a performed kind of delicacy. If you can’t bear walking past a rock someone called a dirty name 100 years ago, how are you going to deal with life?

It surely feels like being on the right side of social justice these days means shielding Black students even from all but nonexistent harms while essentially telling Jewish students, who are being actually assailed verbally, to just grow up. But to train young people, or any people, to think of themselves as weak is a form of abuse.

The contrast in treatment of Jewish and Black students furnishes a teaching moment. In my view, the solution is not to decide whether to penalize all hate speech or to allow all of it regardless of whom it is addressed to. Administrators should certainly decry and penalize not just antisemitism but racism on campuses when it is severe and pervasive and constitutes conduct. However, anyone who has made the mistake of thinking that a healthy Jewish soul must endure ongoing calls for the extermination of Israel might at least consider that a healthy Black soul can endure a sour tweet, a talk by someone who has opposed racial preferences and even the Mandarin expression “nèi ge.”

Source: Black Students Are Being Trained to Think They Can’t Handle Discomfort

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

McWhorter: Don’t Call Ibram X. Kendi a Grifter and Paul: An Overdue Lesson on Antiracism

2023/10/06 Leave a comment

Starting with the more charitable take by McWhorter:

The headlines lately have been full of the news that Ibram X. Kendi of Boston University has dismissed about half of the staff of the Center for Antiracist Research, which he has headed since 2020. Meanwhile, the university has initiated an investigation into the operations of the organization, which has taken in tens of millions of dollars in funding with almost no research to show for it.

Kendi, after three years of megacelebrity as America’s antiracist guru of choice, is being widely described as having imploded or fallen. Many are evincing a painfully obvious joy in this, out of a conviction that he has finally been revealed as the grifter or hustlerhe supposedly is. But this analysis is a strained and even recreational reading of a story that’s much more mundane.

I am unaware of a charge that Kendi has been lining his pockets with money directed toward the center. Rather, the grift is supposed to be that he has profited handsomely from the dissemination of his ideas, including best-selling books, especially “How to Be an Antiracist” and its young reader versions; high speaking fees (reportedly over $30,000 for a lecture at this point); and various other media projects.

But Kendi’s proposals seek to face, trace and erase racist injustice in society to an unprecedented degree. What makes it sleazy that he be well paid for the effort? How many of us, if engaged in similar activity and offered fat speaking fees and generous book royalties, would refuse them? (As someone in the ideas business, too, I certainly wouldn’t.)

The idea that Kendi is wrong to make money from what he is doing implies that his concepts are a kind of flimflam. In this scenario, he is a version of Harold Hill out of “The Music Man,” using star power to foist shoddy product on innocent people to make a buck. The River City residents now are educated white people petrified of being called racists and susceptible to the power of books and speeches that encourage them to acknowledge and work on their racism in order to become better people.

Surely, one might think, Kendi doesn’t actually believe that one is either racist or antiracist with nothing in between or that, as he wrote, “the only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination” or that all discrepancies between white and Black people are due to racism or that the United States should establish a Department of Antiracism with “disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.”

There is no mutual admiration society between Ibram Kendi and me. He has criticized my writings in his book “Stamped From the Beginning” and in several harsh social media posts. To say that I find his ideas less than compelling would be an understatement, and I’ve publicly expressed as much.

The thing is that, whatever one makes of his beliefs, there is all evidence that Kendi is quite sincere in them. If some of us perceive duality and circularity in his thinking, that’s fine. A public intellectual is entitled to his views, and if an interested public wants to pay, in some form, to consider those views, then that should be fine, too.

He became a celebrity by chance. In the wake of the murder of George Floyd, America developed a sudden and passionate interest in racial justice, sustained by the lockdown’s affording Americans so much downtime to reflect on the issue, as well as conditioning a yearning for connection in a common purpose.

Kendi happened to write “How to Be an Antiracist” in 2019, and it stood out as a useful guide to the new imperative. It became a runaway best seller, assisted by his star power, and he became one of the most in-demand public speakers in the country, soon founding the new Center for Antiracist Research. He simply ran with what he was given, as any of us would have.

Deliberate immorality is exceptional. It should be a last resort analysis, not the first one. Accusing Kendi of being a bad man is symptomatic of how eager we tend to be to see bad faith in people who simply think differently from us. To delight in Kendi’s failure as the head of the Center for Antiracist Research is small.

Source: Don’t Call Ibram X. Kendi a Grifter

And the harsher take by Paul, both with respect to Kendi and his enablers:

The recent turmoil at Ibram X. Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, with more than half its staff laid off and half its budget cut amid questions of what it did with the nearly $55 million it raised, led to whoops of schadenfreude from Kendi’s critics and hand wringing from his loyal fans.

Kendi had become a symbol of what was right or wrong with America’s racial reckoning since the police murder of George Floyd. To some, he was a race-baiting grifter; to others, he was a social justice hero speaking harsh truths.

With little administrative experience, Kendi may simply have been ill equipped to deal with a program of that magnitude. He may have been distracted by a nonstop book tour and speaking engagements. Or maybe he just screwed up.

More interesting is that many major universities, corporations, nonprofit groups and influential donors thought buying into Kendi’s strident, simplistic formula — that racism is the cause of all racial disparities and that anyone who disagrees is a racist — could eradicate racial strife and absolve them of any role they may have played in it.

After all, this reductionist line of thinking runs squarely against the enlightened principles on which many of those institutions were founded — free inquiry, freedom of speech, a diversity of perspectives. As one Boston University professor wrote last week in The Wall Street Journal, that academia backs Kendi’s mission amounts to a “violation of scholarly ideals and liberal principles,” ones that betray “the norms necessary for intellectual life and human flourishing.”

Yet Kendi’s ideas gained prominence, often to the exclusion of all other perspectives. Kendi was a relatively unknown academic when his second book, “Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America,” was a surprise winner of a National Book Award in 2016. It helped catapult him from assistant professorships at State University of New York campuses, and the University of Florida, to a full professorship at American University, where he founded the Antiracist Research and Policy Center.

In 2017, The New York Times Book Review, which I was then editing, asked Kendi to create a reading list, “A History of Race and Racism, in 24 Chapters,” for our pages. I interviewed Kendi, who is a very charismatic speaker, about the essay on the Book Review’s podcast and again, about his reading life, on a panel, in 2019.

In “Stamped From the Beginning,” Kendi asserted that racist ideas are used to obscure the fact that racist policies create racial disparities, and that to find fault with Black people in any way for those disparities is racist. People who “subscribed to assimilationist thinking that has also served up racist beliefs about Black inferiority,” no matter how well-meaning and progressive, were themselves racist. In Kendi’s revisionist history, figures who had been previously hailed for their contribution to civil rights were repainted as racist if they did not attribute Black inequality solely to racism. Kendi accused W.E.B. Du Bois and Barack Obama of racism for entertaining the idea that Black behavior and attitudes could sometimes cause or exacerbate certain disparities, although he notes that Du Bois went on to take a what he considered a more antiracist position.

In 2019, Kendi took the ideas further, pivoting to contemporary policy with “How to Be an Antiracist.” In this book, Kendi made clear that to explore reasons other than racism for racial inequities, whether economic, social or cultural, is to promote anti-black policies.

“The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination,” Kendi wrote, in words that would be softened in a future edition after they became the subject of criticism. “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” In other words, two wrongs do make a right. As practiced, that meant curriculums that favor works by Black people over white people is one way to achieve that goal; hiring quotas are another.

Among the book’s central tenets is that everyone must choose between his approach, which he calls “antiracism,” and racism itself. It would no longer be enough for an individual or organization to simply be “not racist,” which Kendi calls a “mask for racism” — they must instead be actively “antiracist,” applying a strict lens of racism to their every thought and action, and in fields wholly unrelated to race, in order to escape deliberate or inadvertent racist thinking and behavior. “What we say about race, what we do about race, in each moment, determines what — not who — we are,” Kendi writes.

Kendi’s antiracism prescription meant that universities, corporations and nonprofits would need to remove all policies that weren’t overtly antiracist. In the Boston University English department’s playwriting M.F.A. program, for example, reading assignments had to come from “50 percent diverse-identifying and marginalized writers” and writers of “white or Eurocentric lineage” be taught through “an actively antiracist lens.” Antiracism also requires a commitment to other positions, including active opposition to sexism, homophobia, colorism, ethnocentrism, nativism, cultural prejudice and any class biases that supposedly harm Black lives. To deviate from any of this is to be racist. You’re either with us or you’re against us.

Yet, as the psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt points out, Kendi’s dichotomy is “incorrect from a social-science perspective because there are obviously many other remedies,” including ones that address social, economic and cultural disparities through a more fair distribution of resources.

When a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd in May 2020, Kendi’s book, with its propitious, here-is-what-you-must-do-now title, became the bible for anyone newly committed to the cause of racial justice. Schools and companies made it required reading. So many campuses made it their “class read” “all-school read” or “community read” that the publisher created a full set of reading and teaching guides to help foster them. (Employees at the publishing house, Penguin Random House, were told to read it as the first “true companywide read” to begin “antiracism training mandatory for all employees.”) Universities used Kendi’s antiracist framework as the basis by which applicants’ required “diversity statements” would be judged.

Kendi’s vision of antiracism had considerable influence in shaping the national conversation around race. As Tyler Austin Harper wrote in The Washington Post last week, “No longer a mere ambassador for academic antiracism, Kendi became a brand.”

Yet the same year “How to Be an Antiracist” was published, Henry Louis Gates’s “Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow,” presented a more nuanced assessment of the relationship between past and present. With its vivid examples of crude prejudice (the photos are not for the fainthearted), Gates’s historical excavation allows the reader to see a clear line between the pervasive bigotry of the past and the kind of ugly but marginal brand of white supremacy on display in 2017 Charlottesville. In contrast to Kendi’s contention that racial progress is consistently accompanied by racist progress, numerous memoirs, firsthand accounts, biographies and histories of the civil rights movement also document clear progress on race.

Contra Kendi, there are conscientious people who advocate racial neutrality over racial discrimination. It isn’t necessarily naïve or wrong to believe that most Americans aren’t racist. To believe that white supremacists exist in this country but that white supremacy is not the dominant characteristic of America in 2023 is also an acceptable position.

And while a cartoon version of colorblindness isn’t desirable or even possible, it is possible to recognize skin color but not form judgments on that basis. A person can worry that an emphasis on racial group identity can misleadingly homogenize diverse groups of people, at once underestimating intra-racial differences and overemphasizing interracial ones. The Black left-wing scholar Adolph Reed, for example, decries the emphasis on race-based policies. “An obsession with disparities of race has colonized the thinking of left and liberal types,” Professor Reed said in an interview with The New York Times. “There’s this insistence that race and racism are fundamental determinants of all Black people’s existence.”

In short, a person can oppose racism on firm ethical or philosophical or pragmatic grounds without embracing Kendi’s conception of “antiracism.” No organization can expect all employees or students to adhere to a single view on how to combat racism.

Kendi asserts that whether a policy is racist or antiracist is determined not by intent, but by outcome. But the fruits of any efforts toward addressing racial inequality may take years to materialize and assess.

In the meantime, the best that could come out of this particular reckoning would be a more nuanced and open-minded conversation around racism and a commitment to more diverse visions of how to address it.

Source: An Overdue Lesson on Antiracism

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , ,

McWhorter: On Race and Academia

2023/07/06 Leave a comment

Another advocate of class and adversity-based policies, sharing his personal experiences:

The Supreme Court last week outlawed the use of race-based affirmative action in college admissions. That practice was understandable and even necessary 60 years ago. The question I have asked for some time was precisely how long it would be required to continue. I’d personally come to believe that preferences focused on socioeconomic factors — wealth, income, even neighborhood — would accomplish more good while requiring less straightforward unfairness.

But many good-faith people believed, and continue to believe, that it is a clear boon to society for universities to explicitly take race into account. The arguments for and against have been made often, sometimes by me, so here I’d like to do something a little bit different. As an academic who is also Black, I have seen up close, over decades, what it means to take race into account. I talked about some of these experiences in interviews and in a book I wrote in 2000, but I’ve never shared them in an article like this one. The responses I’ve seen to the Supreme Court’s decision move me to venture it.

The culture that a policy helps put into place can be as important as the policy itself. And in my lifetime, racial preferences in academia — not merely when it comes to undergraduate admissions but also moving on to grad school and job applications and teaching careers — have been not only a set of formal and informal policies but also the grounds for a culture of perceptions and assumptions.

I grew up upper-middle-class in Philadelphia in the 1980s. As early as high school, I picked up — from remarks of my mother’s, who taught at a university, as well as comments in the air at my school — that Black kids didn’t have to achieve perfect grades and test scores in order to be accepted at top colleges. As a direct result, I satisfied myself with being an A- or B+ student, pursuing my nerdy hobbies instead of seeking the academic mountaintop. I was pretty sure it wouldn’t affect my future in the way that it might for my white peers.

I have no reason to think affirmative action played much of a role in the colleges I went to for undergraduate and graduate work, as neither was extremely selective at the time. In the latter case, I was told by a mentor, a Black man, that race had been the reason I wound up in the top 20 pile of applicants for graduate study in linguistics in the department where I got my Ph.D. I had minimal experience with linguistics proper, and my G.P.A. was very good but nowhere near perfect. (Those hobbies!) But I have always thought of that as racial preferences the way they should have been, merely additive around the margins. I’d done well on tests like the G.R.E., my grades in language courses were top level and I had written a senior thesis that made it clear I had a linguistics frame of mind.

But things got different later. When I was a grad student in linguistics going on the market for jobs, I was told that I needn’t worry whether I would get bids for tenure track positions because I was Black and would therefore be in great demand. Deep down, to me, it felt like I was on my way to being tokenized, which I was, especially given that my academic chops at the time did not justify my being hired for a top job at all.

I was hired straight out of my doctoral program for a tenure-track job at an Ivy League university in its august linguistics department. It became increasingly clear to me that my skin color was not just one more thing taken into account but the main reason for my hire. It surely didn’t hurt that, owing to the color of my skin, I could apparently be paid with special funds I was told the university had set aside for minority hires. But more to the point, I was vastly less qualified by any standard than the other three people who made it onto the list of finalists. Plus, I was brought on to represent a subfield within linguistics — sociolinguistics — that has never been my actual specialty. My interest then, as now, was in how languages change over time and what happens when they come together. My dissertation had made this quite clear.

At the time I was not very politicized, and I assumed that my race had merely been a background bonus to help me get hired. Only later did the reality become more apparent, when I learned just who else had been on that shortlist. (I will never forget how awkward it was when I met one of them — older than me, with more gravitas in the field — some years later. I sensed that we both knew what had happened and why.) I had been hired by white people who, quite innocently, thought they were doing the right thing by bringing a Black person onto the faculty. I bear them no malice; under the culture we were all living in, I would have done the same thing.

Around this time I gave some really good talks, and some just OK ones; I always knew the difference. But I couldn’t help noticing that I would get high praise even for the mediocre ones, by white people who were clearly gratified to acknowledge a Black academic. And in the meantime, I was hopelessly undercooked for the position I had been hired for. I was not utterly clueless, but I simply didn’t know enough yet — and especially not enough to be in a position to counsel graduate students.

 needed some years of postdoctoral study. They say you don’t really know it till you teach it, and that’s largely true: Having never actually taught a class, I needed to teach some. I needed to hang around linguistics for a longer time in general. There are formative experiences key to being a real linguist that I had not yet had, such as long-term work with speakers of my language of focus, Saramaccan.

The doctoral program I had been in had gone through a phase of allowing students perhaps too much leeway in deciding which courses to take. Many students took this as an occasion to sit at the feet of their mentors and drink in what they knew. But my natural orientation has always been autodidactic, and so I basically went off into a corner and focused like a laser on one issue that particularly interested me — how creole languages form — while developing only a passing acquaintance with linguistics beyond it. With undergrads, I could coast on stage presence, but grad students know the real thing when they see it — and when they don’t. I looked like a fool.

I didn’t like it. But because I am obsessive, I ultimately dedicated myself to boning up and then some. I read and read and read. I spoke closely with as many linguists as I could. I took up new interests within the field. I did intense study of my language of focus. I taught classes outside my comfort zone. That is, I became a normal academic.

But it all felt like a self-rescue operation, an effort to turn myself into a good hire after the fact. That backfilling of needed skills is a lot to ask of someone who also needs to do the forward-looking research necessary to get tenure.

Of course, not everyone endeavors this Sisyphean task, and the culture I refer to has a way of ensuring others don’t have to. There is a widespread cultural assumption in academia that Black people are valuable as much, if not more, for our sheer presence as for the rigor of what we actually do. Thus, it is unnecessary to subject us to top-level standards. This leads to things happening too often that are never written as explicit directives but are consonant with the general cultural agenda: people granted tenure with nothing approaching the publishing records of other candidates, or celebrated more for their sociopolitical orientations than for their research.

I had uncomfortable experiences on the other side of the process as well. In the 1990s, I was on some graduate admissions committees at the university where I then taught. It was apparent to me that, under the existing cultural directive to, as we have discussed, take race into account, Black and Latino applicants were expected to be much more readily accepted than others.

I recall two Black applicants we admitted who, in retrospect, puzzle me a bit. One had, like me, grown up middle-class rather than disadvantaged in any salient way. The other, also relatively well-off, had grown up in a different country, entirely separate from the Black American experience. Neither of them expressed interest in studying a race-related subject, and neither went on to do so. I had a hard time detecting how either of them would teach a meaningful lesson in diversity to their peers in the graduate program.

Perhaps all of this can be seen as collateral damage in view of a larger goal of Black people being included, acknowledged, given a chance — in academia and elsewhere. In the grand scheme of things, my feeling uncomfortable on a graduate admissions committee for a few years during the Clinton administration hardly qualifies as a national tragedy. But I will never shake the sentiment I felt on those committees, an unintended byproduct of what we could call academia’s racial preference culture: that it is somehow ungracious to expect as much of Black students — and future teachers — as we do of others.

That kind of assumption has been institutionalized within academic culture for a long time. It is, in my view, improper. It may have been a necessary compromise for a time, but it was never truly proper in terms of justice, stability or general social acceptance. Whatever impact the Supreme Court’s ruling has on college admissions, its effects on the academic culture of racial preference — which by its nature often depends less on formulas involving thousands of applicants than on individual decisions involving dozens — will take place far more slowly.

But the decision to stop taking race into account in admissions, assuming it is accompanied by other efforts to assist the truly disadvantaged, is, I believe, the right one to make.

Source: On Race and Academia

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

McWhorter: Reparations Should Be an End, Not a Beginning

2023/06/24 Leave a comment

Thoughtful discussion of the issues and approaches, and the need to shift the focus to class and class-based orientation to race:

For a long while, reparations for Black Americans has been more a debate topic than a reality. But of late, the reality may be catching up with the debate. Since last year, Evanston, Ill., has been granting $25,000 payments to be applied to housing to Black people and their descendants who were discriminated against during the redlining era. This year, the program has been extended to enable grantees to take simple cash payments. In San Francisco, a task force has suggested that eligible Black people receive onetime payments of $5,000,000 each; a statewide task force has proposed a somewhat more modest plan with a sliding scale of payments topping out at $1.2 million. The New York State Legislature has passed a bill that would create its own commission to consider reparations, and there will doubtless be more such proposals nationwide.

I’ve never been a fan of the idea of reparations. I know that various groups of Americans have been granted reparations in the past, such as the descendants of Japanese Americans placed in internment camps during World War II. And I certainly believe that Black Americans have deserved reparations. It’s more that I have questioned the idea of what I would regard as newreparations. I see us as having already been granted reparations on multiple occasions.

Affirmative action can be seen as an enormous reparations policy, although the term is rarely used in that context. In the late 1960s, welfare payments were made easier to receive and maintain at the behest of organizations such as the National Welfare Rights Organization, in what we would now call reparation for past injustices. The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, if we rolled the dice again, could well have been called a “Reparation Act,” linking banks’ requests for mergers and new branches to their assisting the credit eligibility of people in lower-income neighborhoods.

And there are, of course, thorny questions that prevail in any discussion of reparations: If payments are to be made to individuals, what would qualify a person as Black and discriminated against? (William Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen’s “From Here to Equality” has a proposal for this.) If payments are to organizations, which ones could we designate as best for Black people and on what basis? (The pioneer analyst of the subject, Boris Bittker, raised this question decades ago.)

But one does not wish to ossify. I’m not interested in contrarianism for its own sake; I seek what is good for Black people. And if 77 percent of Black people approve of something — as a recent Pew poll suggested — I had better have solid grounds to oppose it.

If your opinions never evolve, you’re either not paying attention or not genuinely interested. One example: School vouchers looked very promising for Black kids 20 years ago, and I used to speak up for them despite it making me seem as though I were a Republican. But they do not seem to have had much effect on achievement in the long run, and my enthusiasm has decreased. There’s a reason I haven’t devoted a newsletter to vouchers lately.

Opposition to reparations would make sense if they were actively harmful — for instance, by encouraging a sense of dependence or entitlement — but that seems unlikely of a one-time dispersal. It would also make sense to oppose reparations if the funds seemed likely to go to waste, such as those given with insufficient directives as to what they were to be used for. But the most common idea now, largely sparked by Ta-Nehisi Coates’s landmark 2014 article in The Atlantic, is to focus on housing assistance specifically to compensate for the redlining era, decades in which residents of “Black” neighborhoods were denied mortgages, insurance and other benefits that lead to homeownership.

This newer focus is different from simply sending a check in the mail for racial injustices writ large that were suffered in a distant past. Redlining was not all that long ago. It played a major role in the wealth gap that exists between white and Black people today. And being able to afford better-quality housing would be of concrete and immediate benefit to Black people, enabling them to escape many of the manifestations of inequity based on race.

So I am open to experiments with this new conception of reparations. I could imagine supporting them with articles, talks, podcast appearances and the like. But I would do so only under an impression of a general consensus that these reparations would also offer a form of closure, a signature turning of the corner in American race relations.

Brilliant work by Black intellectuals such as Barbara Fields and Adolph and Touré Reed has long argued that fixing today’s America will require a focus on class rather than race. After reparations, it would be time to stop sidelining this work. Racism and inequity would not disappear. Policies that address those issues and help Black people succeed would of course continue, but they would focus less on race than on specific economic needs, such as fostering jobs that don’t require a college degree, giving preferences in admissions and hiring based on socioeconomics, rethinking the War on Drugs and teaching reading via the phonics method that science has demonstrated to be the strongest tool.

In a scenario such as this one, reparations would serve not only as a compensation for past injustice but also as the start of a new, class-based orientation toward the nation’s progress on race. Is such a compromise possible, as opposed to a continuation of the mantra that “America doesn’t want to talk about race”? I have my doubts. But I would be happy to be proved wrong.

Source: Reparations Should Be an End, Not a Beginning

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , ,

McWhorter: Today’s Woke Excesses Were Born in the ’60s

2023/03/25 Leave a comment

McWhorter’s reflections always of interest, including these on the “performative” aspects of activism:

Various books I’ve been reading lately have me thinking about 1966. I have often said that the history of Black America could be divided between what happened before and after that year.

It was a year when the fight for Black equality shifted sharply in mood, ushering in an era in which rhetoric overtook actual game plans for action. It planted the seed for the excesses of today’s wokeness. I wouldn’t have been on board, and I’m glad I was only a baby that year and didn’t have to face it as a mature person.

The difference between Black America in 1960 and in 1970 appears vaster to me than it was between the start and end of any other decade since the 1860s, after Emancipation. And in 1966 specifically, Stokely Carmichael made his iconic speech about a separatist Black Power, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee he led expelled its white members (though Carmichael himself did not advocate this), the Black Panther Party was born, “Black” replaced “Negro” as the preferred term, the Afro went mainstream, and Malcolm X’s “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” (written with Alex Haley) became a standard text for Black readers.

I doubt most people living through that year thought of it as a particularly unique 365 days, but Mark Whitaker, a former editor of Newsweek, has justified my sense of that year as seminal with his new book, “Saying It Loud: 1966 — the Year Black Power Challenged the Civil Rights Movement.” Whitaker has a journalist’s understanding of the difference between merely documenting the facts and using them to tell a story, and his sober yet crisp prose pulls the reader along with nary a lull.

But one question keeps nagging at me: Why did the mood shift at that particular point? The conditions of Black America at the time would not have led one to imagine that a revolution in thought was imminent. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 had just happened. The economy was relatively strong, and Black men in particular were now earning twice or more what they earned before World War II. As the political scientist and historian duo Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom noted in their book “America in Black and White,” “Before World War II, Black bank tellers, bookkeepers, cashiers, secretaries, stenographers, telephone operators or mail carriers were rare. By 1970 they were very common, though far more in the north than in the south.”

And as to claims one might hear that Black America was uniquely fed up in 1966, were Black people not plenty fed up in 1876, or after World War I or World War II?

What Whitaker so deftly chronicles strikes me less as a natural development from on-the-ground circumstances than as something more elusive for the historian: the emergence and influence of that mood shift I referred to. Carmichael memorably said: “The only way we gonna stop them white men from whuppin’ us is to take over. We been saying freedom for six years and we ain’t got nothin’. What we gonna start saying now is Black Power!”

The dramatic impact was obvious. But what did Black Power mean, and how much change on the ground did this kind of rhetoric ever actually result in? What were Carmichael’s concrete plans for action in the first place?

There was always a certain performative element in the man: not for nothing was he referred to as Starmichael. Whitaker recounts Carmichael’s proposing having Harlem “send one million Black men up to invade Scarsdale” — but really?

The N.A.A.C.P. head Roy Wilkins was infuriated at a crucial summit meeting between leading Black groups where Carmichael referred to Lyndon Johnson as “that cat, the president” and recommended publicly denouncing his work. This was a key conflict between an older style seeking to work within the only reality available and a new style favoring a kind of utopian agitprop.

Figures like Carmichael and Black Panthers Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver and H. Rap Brown fascinate from a distance, with their implacable fierceness and true Black pride shocking a complacent “Leave It To Beaver” America. Plus their fashion sense — the berets, the leather jackets — was hard not to like. It all made for great photos and good television. But at the time, affirmative action and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, supported by those white “cats” responding to the suasion of people like Wilkins and Martin Luther King Jr., were making a real difference in Black lives, central to encouraging the growth of the Black middle class.

This difference between mood and action is relevant to the historian Beverly Gage’s magnificent new biography, “G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century.” The book’s 800-plus pages are so Caro-esque in detail, context and narrative energy that I have dragged the hardback across the Atlantic and back; Gage somehow makes a page turner out of the life of a man with the stage presence of a toad.

Where Hoover comes in on the 1966 issue is a common observation of his, which was that the Black-led urban riots of the Long, Hot Summer, and the general change in mood from integrationist to separatist, was not solely a response to the frustrations of poverty. Of course, Hoover couldn’t get much further than seeing Black people as having simply given in to a general anti-establishment degeneracy, egged on by Communist influence. That was one part nonsense (the Communist one) and one part racism.

Hoover was bred in a Southern city (D.C.) at the turn of the 20th century, post Plessy v. Ferguson. He came of age embraced by a fraternity steeped in post-Reconstruction “lost cause” ideology about Black people. His late-career persecution of the Panthers with F.B.I. technology and tactics was nastier — and more reckless with people’s lives — than his earlier witch hunt against white Communists had been.

Yet, his sense that the new developments were not caused by socioeconomics was not entirely mistaken. Rather, I suspect that much of why leading Black political ideology took such a menacing, and even impractical, turn in the late 1960s was that white America was by that time poised to hear it out. Not all of white America. But a critical mass had become aware, through television and the passage of bills like the Civil Rights Act, that there was a “race issue” requiring attention.

It’s a safe bet that if Black leaders had taken the tone of Carmichael and the Panthers in 1900 or even 1950, the response from whites would have been openly violent and even murderous. The theatricality of the new message was in part a response to enough whites now being interested in listening.

The problem was that so much of the message, at that point, was a kind of Kabuki, as the Black essayist Debra Dickerson memorably put it a while ago. Savory, dramatic poses were often more important than plans. This was perhaps a natural result of the fact that the remaining problems were challenging to address. With legalized segregation, disenfranchisement and residential Balkanization now illegal, the question was what to do next and how. “Black Power” did not turn out to be the real answer: It all burned out early — Whitaker identifies signs that this would happen as soon as the end of 1966.

Daniel Akst’s lucid group biography, “War By Other Means: The Pacifists of the Greatest Generation Who Revolutionized Resistance,” demonstrates people of the era engaging in action that brings about actual change. Following the lives and careers of the activists Dorothy Day, Dwight Macdonald, David Dellinger and Bayard Rustin, one senses almost none of the detour into showmanship that so infused 1966. While Carmichael made speeches that, to many, were suggestive of violence, and later moved to Africa, Rustin, for example, essentially birthed the March on Washington.

I hardly intend that Carmichael’s brand of progressivism has only been known among Black people. Today it has attained cross-racial influence, serving as a model for today’s extremes of wokeness, confusing acting out for action. One might suppose that the acting out is at least a demonstration of leftist philosophy, perhaps valuable as a teaching tool of sorts. But is it? The flinty, readable “Left is Not Woke” by Susan Neiman, the director of the Einstein Forum think tank, explores that question usefully.

Neiman limns the new wokeness as an anti-Enlightenment program, despite its humanistic Latinate vocabulary. She associates true leftism with a philosophy that asserts “a commitment to universalism over tribalism, a firm distinction between justice and power and a belief in the possibility of progress” and sees little of those elements in the essentializing, punitive and pessimistic tenets too common in modern wokeness. Woke “begins with concern for marginalized persons, and ends by reducing each to the prism of her marginalization,” she writes. “In the focus on inequalities of power, the concept of justice is often left by the wayside. Woke demands that nations and peoples face up to their criminal histories. In the process it often concludes that all history is criminal.”

Neiman critiques pioneering texts of this kind of view, such as Michel Foucault’s widely assigned book, “Discipline and Punish,” and his essay “What is Enlightenment?,” in which he scorns “introducing ‘dialectical’ nuances while seeking to determine what good and bad elements there may have been in the Enlightenment.” In this cynical and extremist kind of rhetoric, Neiman notes that “you may look for an argument; what you’ll find is contempt.” And the problem, she adds, is that “those who have learned in college to distrust every claim to truth will hesitate to acknowledge falsehood.”

All of these books relate to a general sense I have always had, that in 1966 something went seriously awry with what used to be called “The Struggle.” There is a natural human tendency in which action devolves into gesture, the concrete drifts into abstraction, the outline morphs into shorthand. It’s true in language, in the arts, and in politics, and I think its effects distracted much Black American thought — as today’s wokeness as performance also leads us astray — at a time when there was finally the opportunity to do so much more. I will explore what that more was in another column, but in the meantime, Whitaker, Neiman, Akst and — albeit more obliquely — Gage are useful in showing why 1966 was such an important turning point in the story.

Source: Today’s Woke Excesses Were Born in the ’60s

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , , , , , , ,

McWhorter: Why Racial Discussions Should Also Focus on Progress

2023/03/14 Leave a comment

Agree:

I have argued recently that a useful and inspiring history of modern Black America need not be dominated by discussions of white racism. And having done so, it seems reasonable for me to explain, to at least a limited degree, what I would envision as a potentially better approach.

Specifically, I wrote about a draft curriculum of the College Board’s Advanced Placement course in African American studies. So what other topics might it have included, to counterbalance topics — clearly worthy, yet incomplete — such as reparations, Amiri Baraka and the Black Lives Matter movement?

Let’s try, for one, the notion of Black power. The good word would seem to be that we never really have any. But that isn’t true, and any valid chronicle of the history of what’s been happening to Black Americans since the 1960s must not pretend otherwise.

We have now had a two-term Black president, two Black secretaries of state, one Black (and South Asian) vice president and a Black secretary of defense. These were all borderline unimaginable goals a generation ago.

Wilton Gregory, the archbishop of Washington, D.C., was elevated in 2020 to become the Catholic Church’s first Black cardinal. He was the first Black president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops as far back as the early 2000s — a time at which Dennis Archer was also the first Black president of the American Bar Association.

Lowe’s and Walgreens, two of the nation’s largest retailers, are run by Black chief executives. The reason you probably didn’t know that is because there are now enough Black chief executives to bypass the notion of firsts. This contrasts with 2000, when there were only two prominent Black chief executives of Fortune 500 companies — Franklin Raines at Fannie Mae and Lloyd Ward at Maytag — although that, too, was awesome progress over what had come before.

Successes of this kind should be held up front and center, not dismissed as footnotes or all but buried in equal coverage of remaining disparities — although those should of course be covered elsewhere in a curriculum. The question is how people like this achieved as much as they did despite the obstacles, largely but not exclusively racial, they all faced. We might ask why there isn’t more focus on that question.

I often sense that we are supposed to think of people like this with a certain formulaic admiration. They are what are sometimes called “Blacks in wax” (after, presumably, the museum in Baltimore): nice to know about but ultimately fluky superstars irrelevant to what some might say Blackness is really about. Is the idea that, because they have not usually dedicated themselves to political protest in deed or gesture, it somehow makes them less impressive or less important? That itself would be a radical proposition.

Something else: A modern history of Black America should include how Black English has become, to a considerable extent, a youth lingua franca since at least the 1990s. It is absolutely a fact that attitudes toward Black English can be influenced by racism. However, this is neither the most important nor even the most interesting thing about the dialect. Beyond its awesome grammatical structures, it is fascinating that such a dialect primarily confined to Black usage just 50 years ago now decorates the speech of countless Americans who are not Black at all. And that is because how Black people talk has become an integral part of how America talks.

In Black English, “I’m going to” can be rendered as the marvelously terse “Ima,” as in, “Ima go downstairs.” Thirty years ago, I overheard a white undergraduate woman use this phrase with Black male friends. Then, white people using it were generally ones especially identified with and situated within Black culture — i.e., with a substantially Black friend group. Today I hear white and Asian young people use “Ima” all the time; it is no longer interesting. A student of South Asian heritage wrote a paper for me recently chronicling how his texting with friends, most of whom are not Black, was couched considerably in Black English, as a default medium with no performance or ridicule entailed.

And dismissing this as cultural appropriation won’t do. It’d be like Jewish people complaining that non-Jewish people say “klutz,” “schmooze” and “shtick.” Black English’s transformation of mainstream English has likewise been inevitable, harmless and cool. It’s something great that has happened since the 1960s.

A true and healthy history of Black America should also cover, with the same ardor that it does the L.A. riots of 1992, the efflorescence of Black film starting in the 1980s and continuing into the 2000s. After the Blaxploitation film flame burned out rather quickly in the 1970s, Black movies came out here and there. But starting with the electrically odd, goofy, plangent and true “She’s Gotta Have It” by Spike Lee in 1986, and Lee’s titanic oeuvre of films in its wake, it started to get hard to see every Black film that was released. (I had to give up around 1999.)

The comedies were often of a kind that both taught and amused (“Barbershop”); the romances gave Black women especially equivalents to movies like “When Harry Met Sally” (“Love Jones”); the dramas gave us our forms of movies like “Terms of Endearment” (“Soul Food”); and the gangster pictures finally gave us our James Cagneys and Lee Marvins (“New Jack City”).

A line one often used to hear in response to the idea of progress in Black film was that there existed no Black producer who could greenlight a movie alone. But that’s no longer true, now that Tyler Perry rules his own filmic empire. Some think Perry does not really count because most of his films appeal more to the gut than to the intellect. But then the vast majority of films always have, and I for one have never seen a film of Perry’s without at least one immortal performance of some kind, including, frequently, his own. And they are indeed often damnably funny.

That Black movies are now ordinary is something our historiography should chart and celebrate, much as it should a two-term Black president. The prospect of a film like “Black Panther” even getting made on such a lavish budget, much less being an international sensation, would have sounded like science fiction as recently as the 1990s. The prospect of a high-budget sequel with a mostly Black cast being made even after the star of the original had died? It beggars imagination.

One last example: From the Florida A.P. draft, one might suppose that the thing most interesting about hip-hop is its usage as protest music, given that in the draft music is so dominatingly associated with social and political purposes, advocacy and empowerment. Certainly, protest is part of what the music is; its confrontational cadence is fundamental to the genre. But as to the idea of a hip-hop revolution whereby the music was always supposedly about to unite Black America into some kind of radical political consciousness: How has that panned out?

Hip-hop has been a glorious revolution, indeed — in music, period. Be it party music, protest music, political music, obscene music or Dr. Octagon, a genre that started as street fun in the Bronx has transformed the musical fabric and sensibility of America — as well as that of the whole world. (I once watched a teen rap in Indonesian in New Guinea.) No one denies this, of course. But it is this basic triumph that should center its coverage in a course and be offered as a topic of engagement to curious young people.

I suspect that the idea that a Black historiography would not just wave at but stare at positive developments will rub some the wrong way. But the idea that our history must elevate protest as the most interesting thing about us is peculiar.

It’s worth noting that not that very long ago, Black American movers and shakers were of a similar mind in celebrating the victories more than the — very real — obstacles. In 1901, an issue of the Black newspaper The Indianapolis Recorder listed all of the city’s businesses owned by Black people and crowed, “If after reading the facts and figures as succinctly presented an inspiration comes to any who may be considering embarking in some business enterprise or renews hope in those who are now struggling to attain success we shall feel gratified.”

If a Black man could write that in the era of Plessy v. Ferguson, surely today our curriculums on Black history can recognize more clearly what Black people have accomplished, continue to accomplish and accomplish more with each passing decade. Just because time moves more slowly than we wish it did doesn’t mean we should not recognize its motion. Relaxing the impulse to hold the spotlight on what white people are doing — or not doing, or should have done — can be, among other things, a way to recognize what Black people have accomplished in a nation that brought them across an ocean as slaves.

The protest-focused perspective is rooted, it seems to me, in a take on being Black that was memorably articulated by the writer Ellis Cose in the 1990s in “The Rage of a Privileged Class,” his widely discussed book about middle-class Black people’s sense of alienation: “Hurtful and seemingly trivial encounters of daily existence are in the end what most of life is,” Cose attested, in what he described as the story of what it’s like to be Black in modern America.

Cose’s Weltanschauung is one especially prevalent among academics, artists and journalists. But most people — and most Black people — are none of those three things. I have lost count of how many Black people told me back in the day that they did not share Cose’s take on what we now call “microaggressions” as the very fabric of our existence. Many do share it, to be sure, but their positions share space with those of the other millions of Black Americans who feel closer to the way I do.

The story of Black people in America is much more than the story of what’s wrong with white people. To pretend that this isn’t true, to downplay or ignore decades of progress and accomplishment and to portray political activism — however important and necessary, and it is both — as Black Americans’ main form of accomplishment, is to suggest that white people have already won.

Source: Why Racial Discussions Should Also Focus on Progress

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with ,

McWhorter: DeSantis May Have Been Right

2023/02/22 Leave a comment

Provocative title but substance regarding the diversity of views has merit:

In January, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida announced he would ban a draft curriculum proposed by the College Board for a new Advanced Placement course in African American studies, criticizing the educational merit of the course. This month the College Board released an official curriculum that revised the course by designating some of the writers and ideas in the draft curriculum as optional topics of study rather than core lessons.

The board claimed that the changes were responses to “the input of professors” and “longstanding A.P. principles.” I am unconvinced, to say the least, especially given the degree to which the counsel of these “professors” was mysteriously consonant with DeSantis’s.

I’d like to make clear that I disapprove of the vast majority of DeSantis’s culture warrior agenda, a ham-handed set of plans designed to stir up a G.O.P. base in thrall to unreflective figures such as Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. If DeSantis runs for president, he will not get my vote.

However, even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and in terms of how we tell the story of Black America, the board did the right thing, whether because of DeSantis’s threat or for more high-minded reasons. The take that I saw in the course’s original draft depicted the history of Black America over the past several decades as an unbroken stream of left protest against a seemingly unchanging racist hegemon. There is certainly drama in the procession. The Black Panthers, the Black arts movement, Black studies departments, Black Lives Matter. Incarceration, reparations and Black struggle. Amiri Baraka, Molefi Kete Asante, Manning Marable (all notably left-leaning writers). But Black history has been ever so much more than protest and professional pessimism; note how hard it is to imagine any other group of people whose history is written with this flavor so dominant.

This is not education but advocacy. And in no sense does racism mean that the difference has no meaning. The key issue is the difference between opinions that are considered and debated and opinions that are mostly uncontested and perhaps considered uncontestable — essentially opinions that are treated as if they were facts.

Of course, it is possible to teach about opinions rather than facts. When that is properly done, the opinions are presented along with intelligent counterproposals. Given that Black conservatives — or skeptics of progressive narratives often processed as mainstream after the late 1960s — were nowhere to be found in the A.P. curriculum (except for Booker T. Washington, who has been dead for over a hundred years, and Zora Neale Hurston, whose conservatism is all too often downplayed), it is reasonable to assume that opinions from the left were going to be presented with little or no meaningful challenge.

Certain takes on race are thought of by an influential portion of progressive Americans — Black, white and otherwise — as incarnations of social justice. To them, our nation remains an incomplete project that will remain mired in denial until these ways of seeing race are universally accepted and determine the bulk of public policy. These issues include ones in the earlier version of the A.P. course, such as the idea that Black people may be owed reparations and that one of the most accurate lenses through which to view America is through the lens of intersectionality.

I imagine that to people of this mind-set, incorporating these views into an A.P. course on African American studies is seen as a natural step, via which we help get America woken by appealing to its brightest young minds. But for all the emotional resonance, the savory intonation of key buzzwords and phrases and the impassioned support of people with advanced degrees and prize-awarded media status, views of this kind remain views.

To dismiss those in disagreement as either naïve or malevolent is unsophisticated, suggesting that racial enlightenment requires comfort with a take-no-prisoners approach and facile reasoning. Not even the tragedies of America’s record on race justify saying “I’m just right, dammit!” as if the matter were as settled as the operations of gravity

For example, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s article “The Case for Reparations,” which appeared in The Atlantic in 2014 and focused on the injustice of redlining policies in mortgage lending until the late 1960s, stimulated a nationwide discussion. It was initially listed as a “source for consideration” in the course. However, for all the impact of that intelligent, influential and well-written article, the idea that reparations are owed is open to wide dispute. It is a proposal and one that many Black people reject. (Useful examples of that, from long before the Coates article was published, are here).

Some think that despite the injustices of the past, people in the present should achieve via their own efforts. Others contest the causal link between past discrimination and Black America’s current problems — a key plank in today’s reparations arguments. Some observe that Blackness alone is too ambiguous a concept in our endlessly hybridized society, i.e., they acknowledge what almost all believe, which is that our concept of race is a messy, contingent fiction. I think the Great Society programs, affirmative action, the loosening of welfare programs in the late 1960s, the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 and other significant policies have already been conceived of as a form of reparations, if not under the name itself. Reparations advocates have some answersto those objections, but even they fail to establish reparations as a moral absolute. The issue remains a controversy.

Intersectionality is a similar matter, in part as it seems a stand-in for the more openly controversial critical race theory. The very definition of C.R.T. has become a shifting target, rather like the term “neoliberal” or what it means to say that two people dated. However, the implication in much discussion — that C.R.T. is a mere matter of the legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality, documenting that race, gender and other factors condition how people process life — is coy. No school of legal or academic thought could consist solely of that unexceptionable and even rather obvious observation. What worries many about C.R.T. are the conclusions its advocates draw from this intersectionality.

The original draft did not explicitly mention C.R.T., as opposed to intersectionality. However, it is reasonable to suppose that many teachers would use intersectionality as a springboard for instructing students, for example, that white people can be conceived as a single mass of domination and that racism is baked into America’s very essence in ways inescapable and unending. We must note that criticism of Crenshaw’s removal from the course — which took place in the College Board’s modified draft — often claim that detractors don’t want students to know the truth about America, something that overshoots the mere excision of the term “intersectionality” and implies a sanctioning of students being taught something broader and more judgmental.

Some C.R.T. advocates, for example, conclude that systemic oppression means that views from those oppressed via intersectionality must be accepted without question, as a kind of group narrative that renders it egregious to quibble over the details and nuances of individual experience. As the C.R.T. pioneer Richard Delgado put it, nonwhite people should protest based on a “broad story of dashed hopes and centuries-long mistreatment that afflicts an entire people and forms the historical and cultural background of your complaint.”

But this perspective, called standpoint epistemology, while intended as social justice, also questions empiricism and logic. Who really thinks that its absence from an A.P. course constitutes denying that slavery happened or that racism exists? C.R.T. advocates too often discuss white people as an undifferentiated mass, as in claims that white people resist letting go of their power, a view memorably promulgated by the legal scholar Derrick Bell. There is a rhetorical power in this sociological shorthand, but it also encourages a shallow classification of American individuals as bad white people and good everybody else. Fact this is not.

To pretend that where Blackness is concerned, certain views must be treated as truth despite intelligent and sustained critique is to give in to the illogic of standpoint epistemology: “That which rubs me the wrong way is indisputably immoral.”

And I hardly see this as applying only to people I disagree with. I have broadcast my views about race for almost a quarter century. Naturally, I consider my views correct — that’s why they are my views — and contrary to what some may suppose, conservative white people are by no means the core of people who often see things my way. I am always gladdened to find that there are quite a few Black people from all walks of life who agree with me. Yet I would protest seeing my views on race included in an A.P. course as facts or uncontested opinions.

There are certainly conservatives who think discussion of racism should be entirely barred from public life. This is, on its face, blinkered, ignorant and pathetic. But to pretend that controversial views on race from the left are truth incarnate is being dishonest about race as well. It sacrifices logic out of a quiet terror of being called racist (or, if Black, self-hating). How that is progressive or even civil in a real way is unclear to me. In being honest enough to push past the agitprop, I hate having to say that in this case, DeSantis, of all people, was probably right.

Source: McWhorter: DeSantis May Have Been Right

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , , ,

McWhorter: Police Brutality Is Not Always About Race

2023/02/11 Leave a comment

A reminder:

The brutal killing of Tyre Nichols by Memphis cops horrified and infuriated many Americans, not least because it was another in what has been an endless litany of Black men and boys killed by police officers in America: George Floyd, Eric Garner, Philando Castile, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown and literally thousands of names less well known. There is one confounding detail in Nichols’s death, however. The five policemen who mercilessly beat the life out of him were all Black.

Thus, to understand the full tragedy of Tyre Nichols, it is important to ask hard questions about the culture and behavior of police officers — including grappling with the fact that whatever role race played in Nichols’s death, it was more complicated than the racist-white-cop-kills-Black-man framework into which we typically sort such horrific episodes. One possibility that needs further exploration is the role that poverty plays in determining the victims of police killings — a characteristic that overlaps with but is obviously distinct from race.

Much of the conversation about police violence in recent years has been through a lens of systemic racism, white cops and antiracism reform goals. But a man (or a woman) who is killed by a police officer merits our attention and response, regardless of the race of either victim or killer. There has long been a theory afoot that hiring more Black cops would result in fewer shootings of Black civilians. But there is little evidence that this intuitive solution has any meaningful effect. (It’s worth noting here that there is substantially more readily available data regarding the race of victims of police violence than that of the perpetrators.)

More than one study has suggested that the difference in likelihood between white and Black cops killing Black people is much smaller than one might suppose. Expert observers on the subject regularly concur, and it is a commonplace in Black community discussions that one cannot necessarily expect any particular clemency from Black officers in tough situations. The Memphis Police Department is 58 percent Black and has a Black police chief; that did not prevent the horrific acts of violence perpetrated on Nichols.

As Duane Loynes Sr., an assistant professor of urban and Africana studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, told The Los Angeles Times’s Jaweed Kaleem, “Here’s a dirty little secret: Studies indicate that Black officers are just as brutal and at times even more brutal against Black bodies as their white counterparts.”

The point is not that we don’t have a grievous problem but rather that the problem is not exclusively racist white cops. It’s cops, period. (An important note: When it comes to nonlethal mistreatment, as opposed to police shootings, studies demonstrate the existence of outright racial bias. This is very much a problem but a very different problem from police killings.)

The way we are trained to view the situation is understandable but outdated. As recently as the 1970s and 1980s, cops killed people — Black and white alike — at much higher rates in major cities than they do now, as the criminologist Peter Moskos has shown. I grew up in the Philadelphia of that era, where Mayor Frank Rizzo openly condoned cops’ brutality against Black people. By morbid coincidence, I saw the gruesome videotaped beating of Nichols shortly after I rewatched Melvin Van Peebles’s pioneering 1971 film “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song.” In the movie, Van Peebles plays a Black man on the run from racist white cops whose shameless, bloodletting brutality roughly corresponded to what some Black people of the period actually experienced. A lot of time has passed since then, but the way we discuss police brutality against Black people today can sometimes make it sound as if there is no difference between the situation Van Peebles depicted — of marauding, openly racist cops — and the one we face today.

Yet white Americans are also killed by police officers in appalling numbers — many more, overall, than Black Americans, owing to the fact that the latter make up only about 14 percent of the U.S. population. In 2022, The Washington Post’s database on cop killings documented that of 755 victims whose race was known, 225 were Black and 389 were white.

Because casual and sometimes lethal violence against Black people by cops is part of our shameful and still recent national narrative, names like those of the victims I cited earlier sometimes become national news stories. But the media rarely even covers police killings of white people, which don’t fit so neatly into that existing narrative.

So we largely missed the story that in 2015 in Paradise, Calif., a white officer, Patrick Feaster, shot a white man, Andrew Thomas, as he was getting out of the S.U.V. he had crashed during a pursuit, even as Thomas’s wife lay gravely injured on the ground at the scene. The parallel with what happened to Nichols is ghastly, as is that between Floyd’s murder and what happened in 2016 to Tony Timpa, a white man in Dallas. Although Timpa had requested police officers’ help because he was off his medication, he was killed when they pinned him to the ground as he called out desperately. It was recorded on the officers’ body cams. Members of Timpa’s family have contacted me wondering why the media had so little interest in what happened to him; last year, the officer who had pinned him was promoted.

A common response here is to note that nevertheless, police officers kill unarmed Black people at more than three times the rate they kill unarmed white people and that this disproportionate rate of Black killings demonstrates that racism affects whether cops kill. But this assumption seems oversimplified. One reason is that poverty also helps determine whether — and in what way, with what results — one encounters the cops.

The police are called to, as well as directed to, poorer neighborhoods more often than to middle-class or affluent ones. Poverty can nudge a person into criminal activities — including intrinsically violent ones, such as the illegal drug trade — that are far more likely to lead to dangerous encounters with cops. It is also not an accident that so many of these gruesome killings by cops happen when someone flees after being stopped because he already has an outstanding warrant. Such warrants are frequently outstanding as a result of poverty.

And in a striking parallel, unarmed Black people are not only more than three times as likely as white people to be killed by a cop but also more than twice as likely to be poor. In 2021 the poverty rate for white Americans was 8.1 percent, while for Black Americans, it was 19.5 percent.

We could propose that the match between these statistics bears no relevance to the issue of police violence and racism and dismiss them as a coincidence. But this would be willfully resistant to examining the significance of patterns in a way that no one would even venture in drawing parallels between, for example, poverty rates and obesity.

Police killings of unarmed or unthreatening American citizens are a national disgrace and one that requires action. But action requires comprehension, and the simplest explanation — “racist white cops kill Black people” — is clearly often not the correct one.

Source: Police Brutality Is Not Always About Race

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , , ,

McWhorter: Harvard, Herschel Walker and ‘Tokenism’

2022/12/01 Leave a comment

Valid observations on tokenism:

We are at a moment in which tokenism is on trial. This is true both in terms of the Supreme Court’s consideration of affirmative action in higher education and in terms of the candidacy of the former running back and political airhead Herschel Walker, who will become a U.S. senator from Georgia if he wins his runoff against Senator Raphael Warnock next Tuesday.

Remember how common the term “token Black” once was? Back in the day — the phrase really took off in the 1960s — tokenism was considered a prime example of racism. The hipper television shows would offer story lines in which Black people were put into jobs for which they were transparently unqualified just so the company could show a little color.

I learned the term “token” in 1975 at the age of 9. An episode of the Black sitcom “Good Times” had the teenager Thelma recruited by an elite private school sorority solely because she was Black. A white sorority sister visited the household to chat Thelma up. But after Thelma’s father saw through the ruse, the white woman dismissively referred to Black people as “B’s.” My mother told me that Thelma was being used as a “token Black.” She liked me to know about such things.

It was normal that a Black mom would teach her kid such things back then. But you don’t hear the terms “token Black” and “tokenism” as much as you used to. (Yes, “South Park” had a character named Token — now spelled Tolkien — as late as the 1990s. But part of the joke was how antique the term had already become.) The term has a whiff of the ’70s about it, and it went out of fashion because, frankly, today’s left cherishes a form of tokenism.

Our theoretically enlightened idea these days is that using skin color as a major, and often decisive, factor in job hiring and school admissions is to be on the side of the angels. We euphemize this as being about the value of diverseness and people’s life experiences. This happened when we — by which I mean specifically but not exclusively Black people — shifted from demanding that we be allowed to show our best to demanding that the standards be changed for us.

I witnessed signs of that transition when racial preferences in admissions were banned at the University of California in the late 1990s. I was a new professor at U.C. Berkeley at the time, and at first, I opposed the ban as well, out of a sense that to be a proper Black person is to embrace affirmative action with no real questions. I’m not as reflexively contrarian as many suppose.

There was a massive attempt at pushback against the ban among faculty members and administrators, and I attended many meetings of this kind. I’ll never forget venturing during one of them that if the idea was that even middle-class Black students should be admitted despite lower grades and test scores, then we needed to explain clearly why, rather than simply making speeches about inclusiveness and openness and diversity as if the issues of grades and test scores were irrelevant.

I was naïve back then. I thought that people fighting the ban actually had such explanations. I didn’t realize that I had done the equivalent of blowing on a sousaphone in the middle of a bar mitzvah. There was an awkward silence. Then a guy of a certain age with a history of political activism said that in the 1960s and ’70s he was, make no mistake, staunchly against tokenism. And then he added … nothing. He went straight back to rhetoric about resegregation, laced with the fiction that racial preferences at Berkeley were going mostly to poor kids from inner-city neighborhoods. It was one of many demonstrations I was to see of a tacit notion that for Black kids, it’s wrong to measure excellence with just grades and scores because, well … they contribute to diversity?

When the Supreme Court outlaws affirmative action in higher education admissions, as it almost certainly will, it will eliminate a decades-long program of tokenism. I’ve written that I support socioeconomic preferences and that I understand why racial ones were necessary for a generation or so. But for those who have a hard time getting past the idea that it’s eternally unfair to subject nonwhite students to equal competition unless they are from Asia, I suggest a mental exercise: Whenever you think or talk about racial preferences, substitute “racial tokenism.”

At the same time, Republicans, despite generally deriding affirmative action and tokenism as leftist sins, are reveling in tokenism in supporting Walker’s run for Senate and are actually pretending to take him seriously. But to revile lowering standards on the basis of race requires reviling Walker’s very candidacy; to have an instinctive revulsion against tokenism requires the same.

There’s no point in my listing Walker’s copious ethical lapses. Terrible people can occasionally be good leaders. With him, the principal issue is his utter lack of qualification for the office. Walker in the Senate would be like Buddy Hackett in the United Nations. It is true that Republicans have also offered some less than admirably qualified white people for high office. But George W. Bush was one thing, with his “working hard to put food on your family.” Walker’s smilingly sheepish third-grade nonsense in response to even basic questions about the issues of the day is another.

And it matters that Walker would have been much, much less likely to be encouraged to run for senator in, say, Colorado. In Georgia, it was the clear intent that he would peel Black votes from his Black rival, Warnock. Walker’s color was central to his elevation. A swivel-tongued galoot who was white would not likely have been chosen as the Republicans’ answer to Warnock.

But if Bush, like Walker and others, implies a questioning of standards — here, the idea that a high-placed politician be decently informed — is that so very different from those on the left questioning why we concern ourselves overly with grades and test scores in determining college admissions?

Yes, there are times when one needs to question the rules regarding traditional qualifications. But the Georgia runoff isn’t one of them. The last thing Black people — who are often assumed to be less smart — need is for anyone to insist that Walker is a legitimate candidate because, say, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene isn’t the most curious or coherent sort, either.

White Republicans have elevated a Black man to a position for which he is cartoonishly unfit. They have done so in spite of, rather than because of, the content not only of his character but also of his mind. Walker is essentially being treated the way Thelma was in that “Good Times” episode almost 50 years ago.

The past was better in some ways. The prevalence of the term “token Black” from the 1960s to the ’80s was one of them. And I promise — although I shouldn’t have to — that this does not mean I think Black America was better off in 1960.

But when Black students submitting dossiers of a certain level are all but guaranteed admission to elite schools despite the fact that the same dossiers from white or Asian students would barely get them a sniff, they are being treated, in a way, like Walker. The left sings of life experience and diversity, while the right crows about authenticity and connection. I hear all of them, intentionally or not, thinking about “the B’s.”

Source: Harvard, Herschel Walker and ‘Tokenism’

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

McWhorter: What a Report of Extreme Racism Teaches Us

2022/10/19 Leave a comment

Controversial but raises valid concerns:

It’s time for a few words on what we might learn from a Black volleyball player’s claims about what happened at a match she participated in at Brigham Young University this past August. I have refrained from commenting on this for a spell, in case there were further revelations. As there have been none yet, I shall proceed.

Rachel Richardson, a Black member of Duke’s volleyball team playing in a match at Brigham Young University, claimed that she and other Black teammates were “targeted and racially heckled throughout the entirety of the match,” such that they had to face a crowd amid which slurs “grew into threats.”

But a sporting match such as this one is attended by thousands and is well recorded, both professionally and also by anyone in attendance with a cellphone. To date, no one has offered evidencethat corroborates Richardson’s claims of racist verbal abuse, either independently or as part of an investigation by B.Y.U. There is nothing comparable in the security footage or in the television feed the school took of the match. No one at the match representing either school has described hearing such a thing happening. No witnesses have been reported as coming forward.

To be clear: It is possible that some racist spectator shouted a racial slur at Richardson at some point during the match. But it seems apparent that no rising tide of slurs and threats occurred during that match — that would be clear in the recordings. And Richardson’s having possibly exaggerated what happened casts into doubt whether there were any slurs at all, given that people leveling such words tend to do so with the intention of being heard by others, and no one present has come forward and explicitly said they heard it. Richardson and her representatives have presented no explanation as to why recordings via modern technology do not reveal what she claimed.

We cannot know why Richardson made this claim. Maybe she misheard common volleyball chants, as some have suggested. Or perhaps there were members of the crowd who did in fact resort to racist slurs that others either did not hear or are not willing to corroborate. But it’s hard not to sense that all of this is discomfitingly ambiguous — the likelihood that Richardson’s basic claim of being continuously heckled with racist slurs from the stands seems rather infinitesimal.

But this is why the B.Y.U. story is important. The message from this story is not just that interpretations of events will differ, or that in some fashion racism persists in America even if the details on this case are murky. We must also engage with the unfortunate possibility that the B.Y.U. story may be a demonstration of a pattern, one that we must be aware of to have an honest debate about racism in America today.

I have long noticed, in attending to episodes of this kind in our times, that claims of especially stark and unfiltered racist abuse, of the kind that sound like something from another time, often do not turn out to have been true. Accounts of this kind, I have realized, should be received warily. Not with utter resistance, but with a grain of salt.

The people making such claims appear to be thinking of horrors of the past and claiming that what supposedly happened to them shows that those horrors persist. It is difficult not to notice, for example, the parallel between Richardson’s claim and Jackie Robinson’s being called the N-word from the stands in the 1940s.

But while we have not remotely reached a point where racism does not exist, we have reached a point where some people are able to fabricate episodes of racism out of one unfortunate facet of being not Black, but human — crying wolf and seeking attention. This kind of thing was probably less likely when actual episodes of this kind, including lethal ones, were ordinary. Who would, on top of legalized segregation and lynching, make up racist violence? It would have seemed too trivializing of what actual people regularly went through. But today? Things are, while imperfect, quite different.

The classic, and perhaps officially inauguratory, example — and this is in no way to equate Richardson’s possible exaggeration to the prior, extraordinary event — was Tawana Brawley’s claim in 1987 to have been kidnapped and raped by a group of white men and then left in the woods wrapped in a garbage bag, covered with feces and scrawled with racial slurs. The sheer luridness of that scenario was always a clue that Brawley staged the whole thing, which she was proved to have done. A U.S. Justice Department report concluded that in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014, Officer Darren Wilson did not callously shoot Michael Brown dead despite his having his hands up in surrender, despite Brown’s friend Dorian Johnson’s claim to that effect.

White lacrosse players at Duke did not rape a Black stripper at a party, despite the 88 Duke professors who published a newspaper ad implying the lacrosse players were guilty. And of course, the actor Jussie Smollett’s story that MAGA-hatted homophobic racists jumped him in the wee small hours and put a noose around his neck has not held water. Nor is it an accident that the scenario sounds less like real life than something that would have happened on the television soap opera “Empire” that Smollett was starring in.

Cases like these are not eccentric one-offs. It is painful to have to write that they are a pattern. The incidents could fill a whole book, and they have: “Hate Crime Hoax” by Wilfred Reilly, a Black political scientist, covers over 400 cases primarily in the 2010s that were either disproved or shown to be highly unlikely. It isn’t that discrimination never happens. But the more extreme and ghastly the story, the less likely I am to believe it.

It is a kind of good news. Today’s hoaxes are often based on claims of the kinds of things that actually happened to people and went unpunished in the past. That today such things are sometimes fabricated shows, oddly, that in real life, progress has taken place.

My point is not remotely to ignore claims of racism. It is to be wary of the especially bizarre, antique-sounding cases. And so: Indeed, the racially offensive trash talk by the Los Angeles City Council members that surfaced this week was egregious, but talk like that, when speakers are unaware anyone else will hear, is common, sad though that is. That story does not disprove my point, because it happened in an ordinary rather than outlandish manner. Grotesque, racist private talk certainly still persists.

While we must always be maximally aware that racism does still exist, we must also know that not all claims of racist abuse hold water and that being aware of this does not disqualify one from being an antiracist. True antiracists know that Black people exhibit the full scale of human traits and tendencies, including telling tall tales — and yes, even about matters involving racism.

Source: What a Report of Extreme Racism Teaches Us

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with ,

← Older posts

Newer posts →