Treating Every Meaningless Cultural Issue as a Racial Proxy War Helps No One

I’m leaving comments off on today’s post because I’m traveling to MIT for a speaking event tonight (and trying to avoid crippling eclipse traffic) and won’t be able to monitor comments on this post, which is about a contentious topic.

Yesterday, the South Carolina Gamecocks women’s basketball team completed a magical undefeated season to win the NCAA tournament, beating the Iowa Hawkeyes and avenging their only loss of last season in doing so. South Carolina coach Dawn Staley solidified her position as the best in the business, while Iowa breakout superstar Caitlin Clark was again denied a championship to cement her record-breaking career. Two worthy adversaries went up against each other on the largest stage, traded blow for blow, and drew record ratings in doing so. What a game, what a season, what a wonderful outcome for women’s basketball and women’s sports.

Except, no. Because we live in culture war hell.

You see, somewhere along the way, Clark became a target of scorn for left-leaning people, in a transitive kind of way, and of praise for right-leaning. Despite all of her accomplishments - this season she became the highest-scoring player in college basketball history, regardless of sex - many liberals have decided that Clark’s awards and acclaim are a result of racism. Basketball is the quintessentially Black sport, after all, and because liberals are most powerful in media and messaging and image and culture, they took to the ramparts to police that boundary, wondering why Black athletes haven’t received the same acclaim in a just-asking-questions kind of way. In particular, Clark has been unfavorably compared to LSU forward Angel Reese, who bested Clark in last year’s title game but who lost to the Hawkeyes in the Elite Eight this year. Reese has, for whatever weird habit of the white liberal mind, become a totem to use as the anti-Clark. Meanwhile, because conservatism essentially only exists now as a concerted crowdsourced attempt to exist as the negation of what liberals like, some MAGA lunatics have represented Clark as a symbol of the volk, though as always with them it’s hard to know how ironic they’re being. It’s not basketball, it’s race war! Everybody start recording your TikToks!

What we’re left with is not a celebration of a remarkable year for women’s basketball, competitively and in terms of attention, but just another grimy episode in the forever war that takes place on Twitter and TikTok and Facebook and on podcasts and talk radio and in the comments section of your local paper’s website. Can’t enjoy anything! A fun moment was rendered ugly because of our obsession with seeing absolutely every dynamic in American life that could possibly be expressed in racial terms as a ripple effect of the transatlantic slave trade or whatever. As Ethan Sherwood Strauss put it in an excellent (paywalled) piece, referencing the bizarre level of anger that has been directed at sports commentator Emmanuel Acho for voicing entirely mundane criticisms of Reese:

Reese herself is fairly provocative, which was entirely the point of Acho’s commentary. You can look around the Internet to see the crazy scale and anger at Acho in what’s mostly an intraracial conversation (Most media White guys saw the landmines here and stuck to making Clark-Curry comparisons). Acho, a second generation Nigerian-American who rejects the idea that he carries racial trauma, is already a figure of controversy in some Internet quarters, and the Reese Issue appears to be explosive….

Seemingly everyone else in media was under this pressure to launder unlikable behavior as similar to something the men do absent criticism. If you took any issue with Reese’s antics, then the immediate rejoinder was an interrogation about why you were OK with men taunting, or Clark taunting, but not this particular woman.

In this way, Reese became less an individual to be objectively analyzed and more a symbol to be irrationally defended.

The Angel Reese-Caitlin Clark fracas was particularly weird because what some people clearly wanted to say - that Reese is simply better than Clark but is not recognized as such because of racism - is simply untenable. Reese is an excellent player who will certainly be a top-ten WNBA pick, a tough forward who’s an excellent defender and will be the best rebounder in her class. But Clark led the country in both points and assists, generating vastly more offense than any other player. She scored 31.6 points per game this past season. That would be a very impressive figure for a player in the NBA, where teams score something like 115 points on an average night. In NCAA women’s play the best offensive teams score around 85 points a night! There’s simply no comparing what Reese did to what Clark did this season. Clark won all the big awards because she richly deserved them and took an Iowa team with considerably less overall talent than LSU or South Carolina to the brink of a championship. And yet the notion that a white person is receiving undue acclaim thanks to their race is so exactly up the alley of our (dominantly white) liberal media class, they’ve been nibbling around the edges of making the Reese>Clark argument for weeks. It would seem to have very little to do with basketball, to me!

Here’s what’s crazy: I feel kind of nervous just saying this, that my overall thoughts on race and racial inequality will be extrapolated from the fact that I’m suggesting that a transcendently-talented basketball player is getting attention because of her remarkable play. And that’s fucking nuts. It is fucking nuts where we’ve gotten to. I believe in comprehensive criminal justice reform, support a very expensive but necessary national environmental cleanup of urban spaces to remove lead and other toxins, defend affirmative action with qualifications, believe we need a major reinvigoration and refunding of anti-racial discrimination efforts, want to expand the Child Tax Credit in a way that would be heavily racially progressive, and would absolutely vote for reparations for slavery if I could. When it comes to stuff that would actually matter for the average Black person, I could hardly hold more progressive racial opinions than I do. But of course, saying that presumes that what actually matters in racial politics is actual, you know, politics, material progress, the distribution of power, policy. And that’s a very quaint reading of what we’re up to in “political” debate in 2024. Almost everyone seems to have mutually agreed that nothing of substance is ever going to change, and with race in particular it’s widely considered wicked to suggest that progress is possible. So people just find stupid ephemeral cultural bullshit to use as their badges, badges which say (on the liberal side) “I’m Not Racist!” Meanwhile, poor Black kids in crumbling neighborhoods suffer, and none of this stuff changes anything.

(You can say that this is all just online stuff, doesn’t matter, blah blah blah… no. Online discussion can never tell us about the overall prevalence of an opinion in the offline world. But online cultural debates drive policy. Ron Desantis’s entire policy platform has been driven by too-online politics. Our culture industry just exists online now. I don’t know why people continue to try to defend this stance.)

Yes, it’s true, some MAGA types have taken the bait and embraced Clark as a symbol of white pride. But so what? Why are you joining them in framing this conversation this way? Of course there are racial valences to women’s college basketball, as there are in all things. Of course Reese and other Black players on LSU and elsewhere absorb anonymous racial abuse online, as is true of all Black public figures. No one is saying that you shouldn’t engage in thoughtful racial commentary about the relative standing of various Black and white public figures. But the constant headlong sprint towards the most inflammatory racialized reading of every issue has no possible value when it comes to actually reducing racial inequality. What are you accomplishing? Turning as many meaningless cultural tensions into symbols of racial strife does… what? For who?

Because it’s all over the place, man. Before the Super Bowl some excitable types decided that to support the 49ers was MAGA, because Nick Bosa is a Republican or something. Awards shows have become constant expressions of contrived racial conflict - La La Land, a sweet and sad story about artists trying to make it in Los Angeles, was represented as if it were a sympathetic David Duke biopic because it had the gall to come out the same year as Moonlight. To arrive at this conclusion, people pretended that La La Land is about a white guy explaining jazz to Black people, when in fact the John Legend character exists exactly to underline the movie’s clear stance that his perspective on the artform is sclerotic and self-defeating. But nevermind! Moonlight, a lovely movie that’s become a bit overrated, was perceived to have sterling marks when it came to social justicey stuff, and La La Land was unfortunate enough to be frontrunner, and it was the dawn of the Trump madness, and so suddenly your opinion on two movies almost no one had seen was an avatar of your racial politics. Tons of white movie critics deliberately misrepresented La La Land because they wanted everyone to know that they were a White Person Who Gets It. And when Beck won Best Album over Beyoncé it was like Bernie Goetz was running the Grammys, or something. Hillary keeps hot sauce in her purse! Everything is a symbol of racial politics, except for actual racial politics, which amounts to about a tenth of our collective national conversation on race. Bullshit pop culture ephemera takes up the rest. I would think the bad consequences of that would be obvious.

Why did this happen? It comes from two directions at once, one half the desire to invest empty cultural objects with racial valence, the other to downplay actual policy and power that influence the lives of people of color. The first part is something I’ve talked about many times, this habit of white liberals nominating their cultural tastes as totalizing indicators of their racial purity. Certainly Black people and people of color generally contribute to the pointless discourse I’m talking about, but as a matter of simply demographics these constant proxy wars are largely the doing of highly educated urbanite white liberals. And as I’ve spent a career pointing out, these are people who are deeply invested in appearing to have the right attitudes towards race, for both noble and selfish reasons. But you don’t actually get an opportunity in life to hop in a time machine and rescue Emmett Till, so they feel forced to grasp for convenient placeholders. Hence “I can’t be racist, I love The Wire, I can’t be racist, look at my Spotify Wrapped, Kendrick Lamar is my top artist.” And then, from the other direction, you have a desire to avoid the world of actual policy, of law, of power - because people have given up. They feel that there’s no hope and so they’d prefer to avoid it. Unfortunately, the people who labor under racial inequality can’t avoid it.

When I was doing the press tour for my recent book (makes a great gift!) I was ready for all kinds of backlash. I was, after all, criticizing a protest movement that had been, in 2020, rendered totally ineligible for criticism by decent people. Unfortunately, I ended up being caught in the middle between my deep sympathy for their goals and my profound skepticism towards their methods, which left the book too critical for one side and too kind for the other. But in all of that I was surprised by a fairly common reaction: some who supported the BlackLivesMatter protests of 2020 kept telling me that I should never have taken their demands seriously. Or, perhaps, that I was supposed to have taken them seriously but not literally - yes, they were noble and in the right, but everyone knew that we were never going to get real racial reform. Everyone knew that their demands for systemic change were quixotic. When I criticize the demand to defund the police, I’m sometimes told, I’m taking seriously that which was always only meant to be seen symbolically, as a kind of art. Everybody knows that racial justice isn’t coming, so why do I insist on pointing out that the current approach simply isn’t working?

Well, I come from the radical fringe, and I’ve been an activist most of my adult life, and I take the demand for revolution seriously. And for the record the people in the streets in 2020 was demanding these reforms literally, not symbolically, not as art, not simply for provocation. But I acknowledge that that’s where we’re at, broadly: the average liberal has looked at the past decade of American life and concluded, perhaps wisely, that there is no hope for real change. So why not treat the music you like or the sports stars you support or the movies you root for at the Oscars as the only racial politics that matter? Why not treat it all as bullshit when bullshit is the only thing the system will give you? Better to shout into the wind by writing thinkpieces about how Abbott Elementary is in and of itself a work of Black revolutionary force, rather than appreciating it as a funny and perceptive show that sometimes comments meaningfully on race. Because what else do we have? What other arenas for debating racial justice do we have, other than shows where people yell at each other about sports? Change is not coming, and I, apparently, was the fool for thinking that anyone ever really thought that it might.

My whole political identity amounts to a denial of that thinking. But I have conclusively lost this argument, and it seems certain that we will live in this hell of a racial proxy war for a long, long time.