The Coretta Scott King Book Awards for children's books has celebrated its 50th anniversary. Black authors & illustrators. Buy these books for children you know. Steady, steady over 50 years. Quiet but powerful. https://olos.ala.org/csk/
I agree, deeply, with this post. And yet, I want to challenge you on one thing that I keep seeing you repeat: "many have been sprinting towards an affective vision of racism in recent years out of fear and out of social and professional ambition"
Let's pick that apart for a moment: I think this vision short-changes the fact that a lot of people are acting not out of fear or ambition but out of a desire to do right by people of color. I'll speak for myself for a moment: I've been caught up in identity politics at times, not out of fear or ambition but because 50-70% of my friends at any given time have been people of color who espouse such ideas to some degree or another, and I've genuinely wanted to understand their point of view. And whatever my feelings about their POV is, the fact is that I've never experienced the kind of discrimination or hatred that most of them have.
Anyway, all I'm saying is I find your analysis a bit dismissive—and particularly so to people of color who might be reading this and have very different motivations for the politics they've arrived at then simply "fear" or "ambition." Unpacking why people land at a certain set of identity politics seems, to me, important work for moving toward actual change.
Good essay. However, it needs to focus more on one important point: there are a huge number of technocrats whose employment is based on racism as mysticism and feelings. It’s not just film directors and Times columnists and Joy Reid. If we changed to a materialist framework that sought more redistribution (which I agree the Left is much healthier focusing on) there is a huge swath of entrenched ersatz elites who are out of jobs. Also a lot the enthusiasm for Kendi and DiAngelo never felt real - it felt astroturfed, coming out of zombie media outlets, foundations, and corporate HR departments. No one likes this stuff and few people think it’s a good idea, so we should give more thought to why it is so prevalent.
I love that paragraph about representation and the Oscars especially. It makes sense to me. And yet there are so many in Film Twitter world who have similar far-left economic views as Freddie, yet they get hopping mad when the "wrong" movies do well at the Oscars.
And if you point out that there's way bigger problems to focus on, oh boy that makes them even madder. They seem to think that if we fix all this linguistic and emotional stuff in elite, white-collar settings, it'll "trickle down" toward better antiracist policy for the average person.
I agree with this post so much, but I also feel like there’s no space for anything but politics. It worked okay when there was broad elite consensus that politics is about a debate over economics, but there doesn’t seem to be any space for I want to change the culture to be more polite that isn’t a democratic aligned interest group.
When I read conservative media links through Real Clear politics it doesn’t feel to me like any kind of live and let live deal would be on the table even if the Democratic Party took a hard materialist turn.
Thank you for this post, and thank you for making it free so I can share it when I’m trying to explain my frustration with the current politics. I was on my way to ask when I got the second email with the shareable post.
My one quibble is that I think it does matter if Black authors are on bestseller lists (especially when broadly defined to include longer lists and smaller genres, not just the Top 10 Books per year), because this means money for the authors. Also, publishers will be more likely to pay future Black authors.
Instead, publishing Twitter obsesses over things like “own voices” (for example, who has the right to tell stories that include Black characters) which novels are problematic, and so on. In a perfect world, it wouldn’t matter if a naive white person writes an inauthentic but well-meaning novel featuring a Black protagonist… because there would be plenty of Black authors writing books with authentic representation and getting paid enough to live & to keep writing those stories.
You referenced Kwame Ture who has one of the best lines on this:
"If a white man wants to lynch me, that's his problem. If he's got the power to lynch me, that's my problem. Racism is not a question of attitude; it's a question of power. Racism gets its power from capitalism. Thus, if you're anti-racist, whether you know it or not, you must be anti-capitalist. The power for racism, the power for sexism, comes from capitalism, not an attitude.”
Let's unpack Kendi's view of your lunch. Alone in your apartment? Housing is set up to favor individualism - a White construct. If the ham in your sandwich is an expensive type, it speaks to economic inequality. And if you so rakishly choose to add lettuce or tomato, well, what a poke in the eye for those in food deserts. And that's before we get to your choice of pure, 'white' bread, mister...
This is why I reject the entire premise of antiracism. There is virtually no actual racism in this country and hasn't been for decades, ergo the above isn't even that unimaginable. The Discourse doesn't move the needle, it makes nobody's life better and makes a lot of peoples' lives worse. it is as vast distraction from class. I simply don't care anymore and if someone starts on with racism with me, the conversation is over. (You might say that I am completely and absolutely unwilling to 'do the work.' The high priestess herself would doubtless hold this as evidence of my unabashed racism. I am fine with her believing this.)
If we as a society want to talk about, for example, the risk of suicide among White people (particularly White males), the poverty of Native Americans, the incarceration rates of Black men - or the related-but-not-that-much rates of broken homes among Black families - or whatever, that is fine, as these are all material things that have societal impact and are experienced by the common person.
But the microsecond this devolves into a 'racism!!1' lament at the expense of any other explanation, I personally disengage from the conversation. It is absolutely not worth having because antiracism is a vast Saturn eating his son. The racism-industrial complex needs, aches for, yearns for white hoods and burning crosses to be behind every societal issue, and won't rest until they find Bubba lurking in the woods with a can of gasoline and a bedsheet. And if they can't find him, they'll turn on the weakest in the room and she will receive her inquisition until her microaggressions are blessed out of her.
It's the most pointless discussion imaginable, it never goes anywhere, and I believe that it is *necessarily* at the expense of the material because the material has gotten worse while the symbolism has increased. So I reject it, and I don't work with organizations that become captive to racial issues.
If nothing else, given that the entire culture is supposed to be hysterial about this stuff 24/7, I think they've got it handled without me.
Another absolute banger, but I would encourage everyone here in the comments to go check out Adolph Reed's article on the black-white wealth gap and what is represents and what it doesn't.
I agree deeply, both intellectually and emotionally, with almost all of your article. One probable exception, however, concerns whether subtle emotional cues have major material consequences. If you look at the data, e.g as summarized in Robert Sapolsky's excellent "Behave", it looks like subtle sense of status does have an enormous effect on lifespan, even after controlling for more obviously material factors. This does not negate your point that those subtle cues are not accessible to the types of actions that can change bigger material conditions, and that crude attempts to address them may backfire.
Regarding practical access to appropriate medical care specifically:
That feelings can't be the *metric* makes sense, but practical access to appropriate medical care requires a genuine medical problem not be dismissed as "just feelings" — and whose complaints do or don't get dismissed does seem to depend on patients' feelings, healthcare workers' feelings, healthcare workers' feelings about patients' feelings... even, arguably, on who is "centered".
I'm not confident phrases like "medical racism" or "medical sexism" can add more light than heat. As you say, even people fluent in the language of structural racism have hard time letting go of the insinuation that individuals' racial sinfulness is at least partly to blame, if only to shame the "wrong sort" of people. Worse, bureaucratic attempts to "center" patients and whatnot could lead to worse actual care, such as patronizing incorporation of placebo woo like reiki that could further sidetrack everyone (patient included) from taking a real problem seriously.
That said, I've gotten to know several people with a cheap-to-test-for (and yet hardly anyone does!) tissue disorder often dismissed for decades as "just feelings" — especially if they're women. (And, perhaps, especially *especially* if they're black.) Their "feelings" *are* evidence that something isn't right, and the (fairly easy to make) physical measurements to confirm the isn't-right-ness won't happen if those feelings are dismissed as unimportant to reality.
Of course, your saying feelings shouldn't be the metric *isn't* saying, "Ignore all feelings," or "Feelings are unimportant to reality." Still, I have more sympathy than I used to (which isn't hard, since several years ago it was practically zero) for "woke" arguments that feelings and microaggressions matter. Each discrete decision to avoid running a cheap test because the patient doesn't seem credible (a "whiny" woman, a "hysterical" minority) is arguably just a microaggression. And yet they can add up to a collective decision to not even measure something that is, in fact, measurable.
Does my particular knowledge of "medical ______-ism" regarding one niche condition generalize? Maybe not. But I'm not confident it doesn't. There's a certain self-styled hard-nose mindset that seems to delight in turning "feelings shouldn't be a metric" into "actually, yes, let's ignore feelings altogether — at least if they're not mine!" That's not you, Freddie. But I wonder if that is the mindset the "woke" (however counterproductively) think they're fighting.
When you talk about Ibram Kendi I wonder if we read the same book. I took his argument as materialist, that a policy is racist if the outcome has unequal outcomes by race. The wikipedia page for his book seems to say the same: "Kendi comes to define racism as any policy that creates inequitable outcomes between people of different skin colors."
Why do you think Kendi who is worried about your ham sandwich? I'm genuinely confused. (And I will say that it could me my limited reading on the topic, so you could also genuinely educate me on this.)
While I agree with most of what you wrote, I don't think that structural racism can be so readily divorced from individual attitudes. The regulations establishing redlining were written by people whose ideas on the creditworthiness of black people (or lack of same) were affected by prejudice. Black people tending to get longer prison sentences than white people, even for the same crimes, is a product of judges making sentencing decisions, which again, are probably colored by prejudice. At some point, the various aspects of the structural racism that black people face are due to various individual decisions that some person made.
I generally see three main problems that stem from this incoherent, spiritual version of anti-racism.
1) Ending racism is an idiotic programmatic goal. It's a great aspiration, like building for the Kingdom of God here on Earth. It's a wonderful way to live one's life. But, because it's disconnected from a goal achievable by humans, it does a really bad job if you're substituting it for tangible demands to improve society.
2) Bigotry (including racism) is a spectrum, not a binary. We have a helpful example in the astounding advancement of gay and lesbian rights in one generation. Few seem to have learned from this. There's no line which one crosses that turns them from non-bigot to bigot, like a believer to a heretic. All people have some level of bigotry, and generally it's a good idea to bring those levels down. All the things Freddie talks about can be achieved even with people still having levels of racial animus. It's not necessary for them to repent, just to sin less. In fact, almost all developments in race relations have involved people becoming less racist, not anti-racist.
3) In part because of two, there's no clear plan for how to end racism. Banning it seems fruitless considering banning things has a lifetime 0% success rate and is at best ameliorative. If people are either racist or anti-racist is the plan merely to convert the heathens? If so, what strategy are you taking for that? Most mass conversions involve excessive violence. If these people aren't converted, is the plan to completely isolate them? Seems difficult in a liberal democracy. Is the plan to let them die out? Seems like the question of how racism is born would need to be analyzed if we're discussing intergenerational transfer but I never see that discussion beyond "it just is." At a certain point you're left with burning the heretics and I'd at least respect people more if they were open about this.
If anyone could advance a legitimate plan for "ending racism" that I'd listen. Until then, Freddie's materialist based version seems like it would improve a lot more Black lives so I would like to do that.
The Coretta Scott King Book Awards for children's books has celebrated its 50th anniversary. Black authors & illustrators. Buy these books for children you know. Steady, steady over 50 years. Quiet but powerful. https://olos.ala.org/csk/
I agree, deeply, with this post. And yet, I want to challenge you on one thing that I keep seeing you repeat: "many have been sprinting towards an affective vision of racism in recent years out of fear and out of social and professional ambition"
Let's pick that apart for a moment: I think this vision short-changes the fact that a lot of people are acting not out of fear or ambition but out of a desire to do right by people of color. I'll speak for myself for a moment: I've been caught up in identity politics at times, not out of fear or ambition but because 50-70% of my friends at any given time have been people of color who espouse such ideas to some degree or another, and I've genuinely wanted to understand their point of view. And whatever my feelings about their POV is, the fact is that I've never experienced the kind of discrimination or hatred that most of them have.
Anyway, all I'm saying is I find your analysis a bit dismissive—and particularly so to people of color who might be reading this and have very different motivations for the politics they've arrived at then simply "fear" or "ambition." Unpacking why people land at a certain set of identity politics seems, to me, important work for moving toward actual change.
More [materialist] power to you, Freddie.
Good essay. However, it needs to focus more on one important point: there are a huge number of technocrats whose employment is based on racism as mysticism and feelings. It’s not just film directors and Times columnists and Joy Reid. If we changed to a materialist framework that sought more redistribution (which I agree the Left is much healthier focusing on) there is a huge swath of entrenched ersatz elites who are out of jobs. Also a lot the enthusiasm for Kendi and DiAngelo never felt real - it felt astroturfed, coming out of zombie media outlets, foundations, and corporate HR departments. No one likes this stuff and few people think it’s a good idea, so we should give more thought to why it is so prevalent.
I love that paragraph about representation and the Oscars especially. It makes sense to me. And yet there are so many in Film Twitter world who have similar far-left economic views as Freddie, yet they get hopping mad when the "wrong" movies do well at the Oscars.
And if you point out that there's way bigger problems to focus on, oh boy that makes them even madder. They seem to think that if we fix all this linguistic and emotional stuff in elite, white-collar settings, it'll "trickle down" toward better antiracist policy for the average person.
Heh, trickle down. When has that ever worked?
I agree with this post so much, but I also feel like there’s no space for anything but politics. It worked okay when there was broad elite consensus that politics is about a debate over economics, but there doesn’t seem to be any space for I want to change the culture to be more polite that isn’t a democratic aligned interest group.
When I read conservative media links through Real Clear politics it doesn’t feel to me like any kind of live and let live deal would be on the table even if the Democratic Party took a hard materialist turn.
Thank you for this post, and thank you for making it free so I can share it when I’m trying to explain my frustration with the current politics. I was on my way to ask when I got the second email with the shareable post.
My one quibble is that I think it does matter if Black authors are on bestseller lists (especially when broadly defined to include longer lists and smaller genres, not just the Top 10 Books per year), because this means money for the authors. Also, publishers will be more likely to pay future Black authors.
Instead, publishing Twitter obsesses over things like “own voices” (for example, who has the right to tell stories that include Black characters) which novels are problematic, and so on. In a perfect world, it wouldn’t matter if a naive white person writes an inauthentic but well-meaning novel featuring a Black protagonist… because there would be plenty of Black authors writing books with authentic representation and getting paid enough to live & to keep writing those stories.
You referenced Kwame Ture who has one of the best lines on this:
"If a white man wants to lynch me, that's his problem. If he's got the power to lynch me, that's my problem. Racism is not a question of attitude; it's a question of power. Racism gets its power from capitalism. Thus, if you're anti-racist, whether you know it or not, you must be anti-capitalist. The power for racism, the power for sexism, comes from capitalism, not an attitude.”
Let's unpack Kendi's view of your lunch. Alone in your apartment? Housing is set up to favor individualism - a White construct. If the ham in your sandwich is an expensive type, it speaks to economic inequality. And if you so rakishly choose to add lettuce or tomato, well, what a poke in the eye for those in food deserts. And that's before we get to your choice of pure, 'white' bread, mister...
This is why I reject the entire premise of antiracism. There is virtually no actual racism in this country and hasn't been for decades, ergo the above isn't even that unimaginable. The Discourse doesn't move the needle, it makes nobody's life better and makes a lot of peoples' lives worse. it is as vast distraction from class. I simply don't care anymore and if someone starts on with racism with me, the conversation is over. (You might say that I am completely and absolutely unwilling to 'do the work.' The high priestess herself would doubtless hold this as evidence of my unabashed racism. I am fine with her believing this.)
If we as a society want to talk about, for example, the risk of suicide among White people (particularly White males), the poverty of Native Americans, the incarceration rates of Black men - or the related-but-not-that-much rates of broken homes among Black families - or whatever, that is fine, as these are all material things that have societal impact and are experienced by the common person.
But the microsecond this devolves into a 'racism!!1' lament at the expense of any other explanation, I personally disengage from the conversation. It is absolutely not worth having because antiracism is a vast Saturn eating his son. The racism-industrial complex needs, aches for, yearns for white hoods and burning crosses to be behind every societal issue, and won't rest until they find Bubba lurking in the woods with a can of gasoline and a bedsheet. And if they can't find him, they'll turn on the weakest in the room and she will receive her inquisition until her microaggressions are blessed out of her.
It's the most pointless discussion imaginable, it never goes anywhere, and I believe that it is *necessarily* at the expense of the material because the material has gotten worse while the symbolism has increased. So I reject it, and I don't work with organizations that become captive to racial issues.
If nothing else, given that the entire culture is supposed to be hysterial about this stuff 24/7, I think they've got it handled without me.
Another absolute banger, but I would encourage everyone here in the comments to go check out Adolph Reed's article on the black-white wealth gap and what is represents and what it doesn't.
https://newrepublic.com/article/158059/racial-wealth-gap-vs-racial-income-gap-modern-economic-inequality
excellent.
I agree deeply, both intellectually and emotionally, with almost all of your article. One probable exception, however, concerns whether subtle emotional cues have major material consequences. If you look at the data, e.g as summarized in Robert Sapolsky's excellent "Behave", it looks like subtle sense of status does have an enormous effect on lifespan, even after controlling for more obviously material factors. This does not negate your point that those subtle cues are not accessible to the types of actions that can change bigger material conditions, and that crude attempts to address them may backfire.
Regarding practical access to appropriate medical care specifically:
That feelings can't be the *metric* makes sense, but practical access to appropriate medical care requires a genuine medical problem not be dismissed as "just feelings" — and whose complaints do or don't get dismissed does seem to depend on patients' feelings, healthcare workers' feelings, healthcare workers' feelings about patients' feelings... even, arguably, on who is "centered".
I'm not confident phrases like "medical racism" or "medical sexism" can add more light than heat. As you say, even people fluent in the language of structural racism have hard time letting go of the insinuation that individuals' racial sinfulness is at least partly to blame, if only to shame the "wrong sort" of people. Worse, bureaucratic attempts to "center" patients and whatnot could lead to worse actual care, such as patronizing incorporation of placebo woo like reiki that could further sidetrack everyone (patient included) from taking a real problem seriously.
That said, I've gotten to know several people with a cheap-to-test-for (and yet hardly anyone does!) tissue disorder often dismissed for decades as "just feelings" — especially if they're women. (And, perhaps, especially *especially* if they're black.) Their "feelings" *are* evidence that something isn't right, and the (fairly easy to make) physical measurements to confirm the isn't-right-ness won't happen if those feelings are dismissed as unimportant to reality.
Of course, your saying feelings shouldn't be the metric *isn't* saying, "Ignore all feelings," or "Feelings are unimportant to reality." Still, I have more sympathy than I used to (which isn't hard, since several years ago it was practically zero) for "woke" arguments that feelings and microaggressions matter. Each discrete decision to avoid running a cheap test because the patient doesn't seem credible (a "whiny" woman, a "hysterical" minority) is arguably just a microaggression. And yet they can add up to a collective decision to not even measure something that is, in fact, measurable.
Does my particular knowledge of "medical ______-ism" regarding one niche condition generalize? Maybe not. But I'm not confident it doesn't. There's a certain self-styled hard-nose mindset that seems to delight in turning "feelings shouldn't be a metric" into "actually, yes, let's ignore feelings altogether — at least if they're not mine!" That's not you, Freddie. But I wonder if that is the mindset the "woke" (however counterproductively) think they're fighting.
When you talk about Ibram Kendi I wonder if we read the same book. I took his argument as materialist, that a policy is racist if the outcome has unequal outcomes by race. The wikipedia page for his book seems to say the same: "Kendi comes to define racism as any policy that creates inequitable outcomes between people of different skin colors."
Why do you think Kendi who is worried about your ham sandwich? I'm genuinely confused. (And I will say that it could me my limited reading on the topic, so you could also genuinely educate me on this.)
While I agree with most of what you wrote, I don't think that structural racism can be so readily divorced from individual attitudes. The regulations establishing redlining were written by people whose ideas on the creditworthiness of black people (or lack of same) were affected by prejudice. Black people tending to get longer prison sentences than white people, even for the same crimes, is a product of judges making sentencing decisions, which again, are probably colored by prejudice. At some point, the various aspects of the structural racism that black people face are due to various individual decisions that some person made.
This is just a beautiful, brilliant article.
I generally see three main problems that stem from this incoherent, spiritual version of anti-racism.
1) Ending racism is an idiotic programmatic goal. It's a great aspiration, like building for the Kingdom of God here on Earth. It's a wonderful way to live one's life. But, because it's disconnected from a goal achievable by humans, it does a really bad job if you're substituting it for tangible demands to improve society.
2) Bigotry (including racism) is a spectrum, not a binary. We have a helpful example in the astounding advancement of gay and lesbian rights in one generation. Few seem to have learned from this. There's no line which one crosses that turns them from non-bigot to bigot, like a believer to a heretic. All people have some level of bigotry, and generally it's a good idea to bring those levels down. All the things Freddie talks about can be achieved even with people still having levels of racial animus. It's not necessary for them to repent, just to sin less. In fact, almost all developments in race relations have involved people becoming less racist, not anti-racist.
3) In part because of two, there's no clear plan for how to end racism. Banning it seems fruitless considering banning things has a lifetime 0% success rate and is at best ameliorative. If people are either racist or anti-racist is the plan merely to convert the heathens? If so, what strategy are you taking for that? Most mass conversions involve excessive violence. If these people aren't converted, is the plan to completely isolate them? Seems difficult in a liberal democracy. Is the plan to let them die out? Seems like the question of how racism is born would need to be analyzed if we're discussing intergenerational transfer but I never see that discussion beyond "it just is." At a certain point you're left with burning the heretics and I'd at least respect people more if they were open about this.
If anyone could advance a legitimate plan for "ending racism" that I'd listen. Until then, Freddie's materialist based version seems like it would improve a lot more Black lives so I would like to do that.