Back in 2015, my employer invested quite a bit of money to expose staff and students to the anti-racist work of author Debby Irving. They handed out copies of her book, Waking up White, and set up a book group for faculty and staff, which I joined. They also invited her to campus and she delivered an assembly address to the student body. I was invited to join her for dinner that evening at a nice restaurant.
It turns out, I learned over dinner, that Ms. Irving and I had lived parallel lives. We were born and raised in neighboring Massachusetts towns, our fathers were both World War II vets who got married at the end of the war and benefited from the GI Bill of Rights. We were both the youngest of five children (my younger sister, number 6, was born much later), and we were born in the same year, 1960. And we were both white people who wrote books about race in the United States.
Unlike me, though, Debby had not given much thought to race until relatively late in life, and in the process of “waking up white," she came to see how she was a product of a system of racial oppression and "white privilege."
I had been studying Black history for most of my adult life, but had been exposed to the concept of "white privilege” only recently.
As a student of history, I understood the advantages of a white skin in America, but for me, Debby was not the best messenger to explain the concept.
That's because of some important differences in our parallel lives. The two Massachusetts towns we grew up in were close in geography but quite different in socioeconomic makeup. Her World-War-Two-veteran dad was a top administrator of one of the most prestigious hospitals in the world, Massachusetts General; my father was a janitor in the public schools. Her father used the GI bill to put himself through medical school and buy a 6-bedroom house in Winchester, where a "typical home" currently goes for $1.2 million according to Zillow; my dad use it to buy a 900-square-foot 3-bedroom (1 bath) ranch in Burlington. Given these contrasts, as I read the book it became perhaps more obvious than to most readers that many of the blessings and advantages she enjoyed—like the country club membership and the vacation home on the lake Maine—had more to do with class than race privilege.
Even the photos on the front (see above) and back book covers scream “class privilege,” and say nothing discernible about race, aside from the color of young Debby’s skin.
Early in her book, Irving wrote that she understood class to be an important factor to consider when talking about inequality in America, and that the reader should expect her to “often conflate classism and racism.” Still, she hoped that white people with less class privilege would not assume they did not enjoy similar kinds of white privilege.
Fair enough. She was writing about her own experience and I do recognize that I have enjoyed blessings that come with a white complexion—or rather, that were not denied to me because of my race.
I am grateful to have grown up in a cozy home, next to a park, owned by my parents, in a safe suburban neighborhood. Most Black World War II vets didn't manage to use their GI benefits to get home mortgages. That injustice had been driven home to me when I read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s influential Atlantic article on reparations, which explained the practice of redlining that made it near impossible for Black people to qualify for VA-subsidized mortgages.
But Debby seemed to think that acknowledging her conflation of class and race in chapter 3 would allow her to do it for the next 43 chapters without distorting reality or alienating any white readers. Imagine a white, single, working class mother with a full-time job reading that Debby's ability to shuttle her children from “one after-school activity after another had a lot to do with the time and money that whiteness afforded me” (209).
Irving didn’t invent the concept of white privilege. Getting white Americans to “check their privilege” is one of the more common strategies of diversity trainers. There is even an annual “White Privilege Conference,” which I once attended. But from what I’ve seen, it seems like the strategy is more effective with people who have a healthy amount of class privilege, like Debby and most of the people associated with elite educational institutions like the one I teach at, which spent a couple of thousand dollars to send me to the WPC in Kansas City.*
Debby’s work—which is largely focused on getting white folks to use the right words and avoid micro-aggressions, like mixing up the names of two black kids—is helpful in those spaces, where the usually small number of Black folks also have a fair amount of class privilege compared to the general population. But it doesn’t do much for the people of color who disproportionately suffer from the deprivations and indignities of the lower classes—or the whites who account for twice as many of the American poor as Blacks.
White privilege workshops and Debby’s book ask us to change our thinking—to get woke, as they say. Acknowledgment of class privilege might require the better off to give up some wealth or income through, say, higher taxes and redistribution of income. Maybe that’s why the concept of “white privilege” is so much more popular than “class privilege” at places like Exeter.
Toward the end of her book, Irving calls for “solidarity” between Black and white people, which she frames as “sharing the burden of race.” As an example, she tells a story of a grade-school class where all the children shaved their heads in solidarity with a classmate undergoing chemotherapy. Debby describes her own efforts at racial solidarity: she has stopped snacking on food in her shopping cart before paying for it, because Black friends get into trouble when they do that; she doesn’t try to “sweet talk” her way out of speeding tickets (223). I’m not sure what she does with the royalties from her book or her speaking fees from places like Exeter.
Debby’s notion of solidarity echoes the calls by many contemporary advocates of racial justice for people to become “white allies.”
When she reaches beyond race relations on the personal level to talk about systems, Debby cites an example of a county in Maryland that sought to lower the achievement gap among school children by redistributing funding from affluent to less affluent districts. Her reflection on the solution is revealing:
Could I have been convinced to have my county's resources shifted from my child's school to a Red Zone school if I didn't understand the achievement gap’s historical roots? I can't know for sure, but I think it may have been a hard concept for me to embrace (209).
I don’t know many parents—especially not among the upper classes that I mingle with—who are willing to sacrifice their own kids’ best interests for the advancement of other peoples’ children. That’s true of wealthy people, as the so-called varsity blues scandal illustrates all-too clearly.
And as J. Anthony Lukas shows in his vivid account of the Boston busing fiasco of the 1970s, Common Ground, it’s also true of working-class people like the white parents of Charlestown, who resisted having their children transferred to what they assumed were worse schools across town in Black neighborhoods they perceived as unsafe. They resisted ferociously, but in the end they had no choice. Lukas’s account does not conflate race and class and if you read it you will understand why you can’t fully understand one without the other.
And of course the better suburban schools of Boston, like Winchester, were excluded from Judge Garrity’s integration order.
If we want to promote interracial solidarity and support for racial justice among white people we should not frame racial equity as a zero-sum game in which parents must sacrifice their children.
One way is to stop using the term “privilege.”
Debby’s father and mine both put their lives on the line to fight the Nazis. I consider the pay they got for their military service—like the pay any wage-worker gets after doing the job—not as a privilege, but as an earned right. Once Congress passed the GI Bill of Rights, getting those benefits also became a right.
My father's use of his GI Bill of Rights to subsidize a mortgage was an earned right. It was not a “perk” that comes with a white skin (13). Calling it a privilege makes it sound like he didn't earn it or that there was something wrong with him getting it.
There was something wrong with Black veterans not getting it.
When we refer to the exercising of a right as a privilege, we are assisting those who call welfare programs like Social Security and Medicare “entitlements” to undermine support for them. Like “privilege,” it carries negative connotations. It means “the belief that one is inherently deserving of privileges or special treatment” and “privilege” seems to implicitly include the adjective “unearned.” It conjures up the spoiled child.
“Rights,” puts the onus back where it belongs, on the policies and systems denying them, not on people exercising them appropriately. The problem isn't the granting of privileges, it's the denial of rights. It’s not a privilege to be able to walk around the store without being harassed or to drive down the street without being pulled over for no reason. It’s a right of due process—a right that should never be denied to anyone. It’s deserved if not earned.
Irving makes a reference in her book to “the long history of white people mistaking one black person for another” (225). Over dinner after her assembly, I suggested that she read more history, especially Edmund Morgan's book, American Slavery and American Freedom. As I've written elsewhere on this blog it’s an essential book for understanding the origins of slavery and racism in America, one that critics and defenders of the 1619 project cited as a model work of history that is helpful for understanding how race works in America today.
Morgan and other historians have shown how white people came to enjoy rights that Black people were denied. In short, Virginia planters propped up slavery and encouraged racism by establishing a government that gave certain privileges to white workers while denying them to Black ones. But no one today should call them privileges. They are basic rights: to vote, to not be whipped by your boss, to own land. The tragedy of Morgan’s story is not that white people got those rights, but that their Black fellow workers were denied them at the same time—and that the enjoyment of those rights were framed as a zero-sum game—a framing we've never been able to escape and that contemporary anti-racism sometimes seems to reinforce.
It’s important to point out that this happened not primarily because white laborers asked for it, any more than Debby’s father asked for Black veterans to be denied GI benefits so he could go to medical school.
Virginia planters were the ones who enacted these labor laws over the course of several decades in the 17th century to serve their economic interests—their need for a cheap, cooperative labor force to tend the tobacco crop.
This tried and true method of dividing and conquering workers by granting rights unequally has been repeated again and again. In a new book I happened to crack open recently, labor historian Joe William Trotter notes how it worked in the development of the urban labor force in early America:
Both free black and white laborers lived "a hand-to-mouth existence characterized by minimal control” over the fruits of their own labor. But early white wage earners enjoyed gradually increasing access to the vote, state power, and their own political, social, and labor organizations, while the vast majority of their African-American counterparts remained linked to their enslaved brothers and sisters through systems of legal and extralegal disfranchisement, economic exploitation, and racial inequality.
Replacing “rights” with “white privilege” suggests that racism is good for white people–that our rights depend on others being denied them. In fact, when white and black people with similar interests unite, when they achieve solidarity on the basis of common interests rather than the shaky foundations of white guilt implied in “white privilege” and altruism implied in “white allies,” they create a powerful coalition. Such a coalition might not only prevent the erosion of benefits like Social Security, but might also lead to an expansion of such "rights," perhaps reviving President Roosevelt’s 1944 plan for a “second bill of rights” that would include a right to economic security, including “the right of every family to a decent home,” and every American to a living wage, "adequate medical care," and "a good education."
The GI Bill of Rights “was the most concrete result of the second bill of rights,” but it “fell far short of what Roosevelt sought to provide” (15-16). Although his successor tried to enact universal access to health care—and government-supported health benefits have been expanded to a widening circle of citizens ever since—it still does not exist as a right of citizenship. “Roosevelt’s second bill of rights speech captured the extraordinary 20th century revolution in the conception of rights in America and elsewhere. It marked the utter collapse of the (ludicrous) idea that freedom comes from an absence of government. …[While many Americans then and now accepted the conception of rights embedded in Roosevelt’s speech,] it has come under pressure from powerful private groups with an intense interest in burying or delegitimating the second bill—and in recovering the kind of confused, self-serving, and even incoherent thinking that immediately preceded Roosevelt's New Deal” (16). See Cass Sunstein, The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why we need it More than Ever (2004).
Debby Irving, Waking Up White: And Finding Myself in the Story of Race (2014).
*Peggy MacIntosh, who popularized the “White Privilege” concept, also seems to have been the recipient of a great deal of class privilege. As a student, she attended private schools whose current tuition ranges from $43,000 to $66,000 per year and went on to earn degrees from elite colleges, including Harvard. She taught for a time at the Brearley School in Manhattan, which was ranked by one survey, as the second-best girls' school in the country and the fifth-best private K-12 school. Current tuition is $56,000, which 80 percent of students pay for without financial aid. MacIntosh certainly had the chance to observe plenty of class privilege in action.
I understated the case when I said that affluent parents aren’t willing to sacrifice their own kids’ advancement for those of others. Consider the “varsity blues scandal.” Matthew Stewart has written in more detail about the efforts of Americans in the upper classes to maintain their class privilege here. and here. Others have coined the term “opportunity hoarders.”
Joe William Trotter, Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America (2019), xvi.
Morgan’s thesis is often pitted against that of Winthrop Jordan, whose book White Over Black, suggests that racism pre-dated the origin of slavery in Virginia.
The book version of the 1619 project, scheduled for publication Nov. 16.
"I can understand pessimism, but I don’t believe in it. It’s not simply a matter of faith, but of historical evidence. Not overwhelming evidence, just enough to give hope, because for hope we don’t need certainty, only possibility." Howard Zinn
On August 14th, 2019, a stark black-and-white photograph of an ominous gray sky above a choppy, even more ominous and darker-gray ocean appeared on the front cover of the New York Times Magazine behind these words:
In August of 1619, a ship appeared on this horizon, near Point Comfort,
a coastal port in the British colony of Virginia. It carried more than
20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists. America was
not yet America, but this was the moment it began. No aspect of
the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the 250
years of slavery that followed. On the 400th anniversary of this fateful
moment, it is finally time to tell our story truthfully. (For links to this and all other sources in this essay, see this post)
Thus opened another front in the Great American Culture War.
On 100 pages inside appeared 10 major essays along with photographs, poems and works of fiction. As promised in the introductory paragraph, the essays connected everything about America—including the Revolution, the character of American capitalism, the lack of Universal Health Care, and even "the reactionary politics of 2019"—to race, or slavery or African-Americans.
Later, the Times launched a "1619 project curriculum," an ambitious effort to distribute extra copies of the magazine to public schools, libraries, and museums. In collaboration with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting it created a massive free website filled with resources for educators at all levels, from elementary school to college. By the summer of 2020, the center announced that more than 3,500 classrooms were making use of the materials.
The Columbia Journalism Review commended the Times for pointing readers “toward a richer understanding of today's racial dilemmas.” The Washington Post described the Project as “a collection of smart, provocative magazine articles about the ways slavery shaped our nation.” Celebrated filmmaker Ava DuVernay, called the project "a staggering, transformative endeavor” by a “dazzling array of thinkers.” And the National Catholic Reporter called on readers to "demand that your school—public, private, Catholic or other religious institution, charter or home—include the curriculum as a required course of study."
In May of 2020 Nikole Hannah-Jones won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary for her introductory essay, "America Wasn't a Democracy Until Black Americans Made It One."
The award committee praised her “sweeping, provocative and personal essay” and the project as a whole as a “ground-breaking” effort “to place the enslavement of Africans at the center of America’s story, prompting public conversation about the nation’s founding and evolution.”
And public conversation ensued.
Beginning in October of 1619, prominent and well respected American historians, led by Sean Wilenz, began to weigh in with criticisms of the project, first in interviews on the World Socialist Website, then in essays in the New York Review of Books, the Atlantic, Politico and even on the New York Times op-ed page. While most of the critics were white, a few prominent Black academics, including Claiborne Carson, editor of the Martin Luther King papers, Leslie Harris, an expert on American slavery at Northwestern, and the Marxist political scientist Adolph Reed Jr., also weighed in. Black women seemed less inclined than the men to come out against the project. Harris’s piece in Politico was more critical of the critics than the Project itself.
Nell Irving Painter questioned the key fact that forms the premise of the project—that the 20 African arrivals in 1619 were enslaved—but declined to sign a letter with other critical historians. Barbara Fields, the only historian with a doctorate who appeared in Ken Burns’ 1980s Civil War documentary, declined to do an interview with the World Socialist Website. In an apparently private email, though, she called the project “tendentious and ignorant history” that failed to incorporate the works of key scholarship on slavery, especially Edmund Morgan’s, American Slavery, American Freedom. The project was a product of “neo-liberal politics,” she wrote, echoing Reed, who said it supported a “neoliberal” vision of social justice, in which “a society qualifies as being just if 1 percent of the population controls 90 percent of the wealth,” as long as the ethnic makeup of the 1 percent matches the ethnic makeup of the general population. The politics of these critics ranged from Marxist left to the mainstream of the Democratic Party.
Battle lines in the Great American Culture War do not break down along neat partisan lines. All the critics mentioned so far almost certainly vote the straight Democratic ticket as do the supporters of the project. But even within the broad left, those folks don’t line up into the categories you’d expect: center-left-moderate-Clinton Democrats versus far-left-socialist-Sanders Democrats. Marxist scholars like Reed and Fields, staunch supports of Bernie Sanders in the last two presidential primaries, joined the chorus of 1619 critics with people like Sean Wilentz, an outspoken anti-Sanders supporter of Hillary Clinton.
The Times resisted every effort from this group to correct or retract any part of the Project until it heard from Danielle Allen, a Black Harvard Classics Scholar and self-proclaimed lover of democracy who has recently announced her candidacy for Governor of Massachusetts. According to the Post, in February of 2020, she emailed Jones and project editor, Jake Silverstein, threatening to publicly denounce the project unless the Times corrected one of its most contentious claims about the Revolution, that a “primary” motive was to protect slavery against British abolitionists. The Times printed a clarification (labeled as an "editors' note”) saying that only “some” colonists rebelled for that reason. Jones has said she stands by the original wording.
(Another publication attributes the change to a forum made up of historians who were supporters of the Project.)
Of course the fight over 1619 also got tangled up in partisan politics. In July of 2020 Republican Senator Tom Cotton called the project “a radical work of historical revisionism aiming to indoctrinate our kids to hate America” and introduced the "Saving American History Act," which would have made schools that use the 1619 Project in their curriculum ineligible for federal professional development funds. In September of that year President Trump threatened to withhold federal education funds from California if its Department of Education used 1619 materials in public school curricula and in November he launched the 1776 Commission to develop a "patriotic curriculum."
Joe Biden abolished the ’76 Commission on Inauguration Day and in April his Department of Education announced that its number-one priority for American History and Civics K-12 Education Programs would be to advance “the ongoing national reckoning with systemic racism" by funding grants to teachers and students that incorporate “diverse perspectives into teaching and learning in public schools" and singled out two such perspectives: Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist, and the 1619 Project.
A day after the new history and civics priorities were announced, Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell condemned them as "politicized and divisive" and singled out the 1619 Project, which he said was filled with "divisive, radical, and historically dubious buzzwords and propaganda," teaching "that our country is inherently evil."
Controversies involving the teaching of race-related issues in the schools have continued to get plenty of attention, but battles over “critical race theory” have overshadowed 1619 recently. Still, Jones has continued to be something of a lightning rod, via her high-profile Twitter presence, the University of North Carolina’s decision to deny her tenure, and more recently the decision of a private school in Massachusetts to revoke an invitation for her to speak. And you can be sure that the battle over 1619 will heat up again next month when an expanded version of the project comes out in book form, with the subtitle—“A New Origin Story.”
As I’ve followed this controversy over the past year or so, I’ve been asking myself: What does any of this have to do with the actual teaching of American history in actual classrooms with actual students, which is what I do at work every day? I am committed to the principle that a proper education must be non-partisan, that we teach students how to think, but not what to think, that education is not indoctrination, and I would prefer to ignore partisan—or even academic, partisan-adjacent—debates over the content of my courses. I don’t start my yearly survey of US history in 1619 or 1776, and I’m hoping no one tries to make me.
But the daily newspapers are full of stories about local school board meetings broken up over mask and vaccine mandates, gender policies, and critical race theory. Clearly, education is a battleground and we history teachers are on the front lines. And though private school teachers don’t have public school boards and contentious public meetings to contend with, or state boards of education banning “divisive concepts,” we are not immune from non-history teachers taking an interest in what we teach.
The battle lines seem to be different in private than in public schools. The anti-1619 and CRT forces that are inspired by Fox News may get the upper hand in public schools, at least in the red states. But here, most of the pressure is coming from the other side. The Board of Trustees where I teach has declared us to be an “antiracist school,” and social justice oriented alumni groups, donors, student activists, and a growing body of “diversity equity and inclusion” administrators direct their attention from time-to-time at the history curriculum.
I can imagine that our Trustees would agree with the Biden administration in seeing the 1619 Project as a model for anti-racist history and might write off critics as defenders of a whitewashed version of American history.
Ibram X. Kendi, who has spoken at our school, preaches that every policy is either racist or antiracist and you always have to pick a side.
Some 1619 defenders have dismissed critical historians as being too white (AHA) or as “turf-guarding academics" (WAPost) acting in bad faith. The attack on critics of the project was joined by no less an authority than Alex Lichtenstein, the editor of the leading journal of American historians, the American Historical Review, who said the “motley crew” of historian-critics were seeking to discredit a valuable contribution to the discussion of slavery by blowing a small number of “disputable errors” and overstatements out of proportion, perhaps because they were offended that “journalists are practicing history without a license.”
But Lichtenstein concedes the validity of some of their points, citing the following flaws:
The Times’ claim to be making a “radical reorientation” by putting African Americans at the center of American history, which has been a long-term trend in the academy. (For example).
“Substituting dramatic overstatement for historical analysis.”
Treating “American slavery in isolation from” slavery in the “larger Atlantic World.”
“Emphasis on continuity (especially in economic history), rather than change.”
The substitution of “race” for class.
Such imperfections, Lichtenstein writes, should “not suffice to dismiss the project in its entirety,” and most criticism seems to have focused on just two essays, Jones’ long opening essay, and Matthew Desmond’s piece on economics, while essays on sugar, Wall Street, urban sprawl, music, public health, and mass incarceration have received little scrutiny and criticism.
Historians will argue over facts and how to interpret them. Politicians will politicize anything and everything. I’m more interested in how the Project is likely to affect the teaching of US history in the schools. There’s plenty of reason to expect a positive impact. The writing is eloquent, it makes valuable documents accessible, and its arguments are often compelling. And if the Times’ claims about the poor quality of teaching about slavery in the nation’s schools are true, then that influence is sorely needed.
And that influence is likely to be immense, whether it is positive or otherwise, given the Times’ status as the nation’s newspaper of record, the endorsement of the project by the Pulitzer committee, and Jones’ tireless promotion of it (on Twitter and in speaking engagements so numerous that she had to hire an assistant to manage her schedule), along with the well-publicized proliferation of companion materials for educators and the soon-to-be released book version. So, what will history education look like in schools that not only adopt 1619 materials but embrace the larger assumptions embedded in the project—assumptions about the nature of progress, human agency, and cause-and-effect?
Connected to these assumptions is a tension between inevitability and contingency. In my experience, students are predisposed to see history as a sequence of events that people had little control over. The Anti-federalist must have been wrong because they lost the debate over the Constitution; the Civil War was inevitable as soon as the ink was dry on the Declaration of Independence; neither Roosevelt nor Truman could have avoided a Cold War with the Soviet Union. I try to poke holes in their fatalism by asking them whether they think their own destinies are inevitable, that their fate is immune to their efforts, which at my school are prodigious. “Do you not have power to shape your chances of getting into the college of your choice?” I ask them. This leads at least a few to concede that people living in the past might also have had some influence over how things turned out.
The 1619 Project strikes a blow against inevitability bias when it pokes holes in the view that progress toward ever greater democracy and freedom in the US has followed an undeniable “arc of justice” set in motion by the American Revolution. Defenders of the Times’ project accuse its critics of a facile faith in that arc, and of overestimating racial progress.
But in its zeal to tear down that narrative, the Project falls into its own, even more corrosive inevitability bias. To her credit, Jones refers to the story of African-American activism as one of “astounding progress,” but overall, the Project, like much of the recent discourse on race in America, leaves a different impression. It focuses more on culture and society than politics, does not have much to say about moments of progress—like the ending of slavery in Northern states after the revolution, the anti-slavery movement, the Civil War, and the Civil Rights Movement—and largely avoids mention of those who fought courageously and sometimes successfully to advance justice and equality. Inspirational models of citizenship like Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King are barely mentioned; Harriet Tubman, A. Philip Randolph, Ella Baker, Rosa Parks, and Bayard Rustin are not mentioned at all.*
This gloomier view has become increasingly popular on the American left. It is expressed most conspicuously by a group of writers who control the discourse on race in the current moment. They include Ta-Nehesi Coates, whose analysis of the 2016 election results and best-selling book Between the World and Me, are studies in pessimism about American race relations; Isabella Wilkerson, who compares America’s racial “caste system” to a clever software program that continually “adjusts to the updated needs of the operating system” and holds us, apparently helpless, in the grip of racism; Robin DiAngelo, who tells white people at her workshops not to speak because even their well-intentioned comments are likely to harm black people; and Kendi, whose book on the history of racism, Stamped from the Beginning, finds racism lurking in the hearts of just about everyone, including William Lloyd Garrison, Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, W.E.B. Du Bois, Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Hope Franklin, Earl Warren, Barack Obama, and even Kendi himself. In these authors’ “grim view”
of history, every effort to purge racism from our operating system seems destined to nullification by Wilkerson’s diabolical software program and no good deed is untainted by racism, which is an essential element of our hardware.
Jones makes the same point with a DNA analogy, and Times editor Jake Silverstein reaches back to an older biological metaphor. The arrival of those 20 Africans, he writes in his introduction to the 1619 essays, planted a seed that grew into “nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional.” But if it is inaccurate to assume that the words “all men are created equal” led in a straight line to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it seems equally unlikely that 1619 led in a straight line to America’s “economic might, its industrial power, its electoral system, its diet and popular music, the inequities of its public health and education, its astonishing penchant for violence, its income inequality, the example it sets for the world as a land of freedom and equality, its slang, its legal system and the endemic racial fears and hatreds that continue to plague it to this day.”
Metaphors can clarify at the same time that they distort. Seed, software and DNA metaphors obscure the role of contingency and human agency and how choices matter—not just at one point in time, but at every moment. The arrival of Africans in Virginia in 1619 would not be worth noting if the supply of unfree labor from England hadn’t dried up in the later 17th century. “All men are created equal” might have been an ideological dead end if it weren’t for Frederick Douglass’s agitation, John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, Lincoln’s proclamation of Emancipation, the Radical Republicans’ Reconstruction Amendments, A. Philip Randolph’s fight for labor rights, Bayard Rustin’s schooling of Martin Luther King Jr. in non-violent strategy, and President Johnson’s masterful legislative wrangling. Thousands of seeds are planted. Only ones we nurture will grow. You can always find an antecedent for some contemporary phenomenon. But giving too much attention to one origin-story needle in the haystack of human experience to explain a contemporary problem—or every problem—is to fall prey to presentism fallacy.
Even at Phillips Exeter, where virtually every student will go on to college, I know that high school will likely be the only time they take a full-year survey of American history. And with the decline of civics education, the 11th grade US history course may be the best chance that American educators have to impress upon their students a sense of what it means to be a democratic citizen of this country. I fear that presenting students with the deterministic sense of fatalism that would seem to flow from essentialist notions of society like the seed metaphor, while deemphasizing the good that past victories have achieved will foster nihilism and hopelessness about the possibility that citizens can have an impact on the course of future events.
History does not have one determinative starting point. It has many key moments and progress is neither inevitable nor impossible. It is always shaped by human action or inaction. Students don’t need a new origin story, or more seed metaphors or theoretical frameworks. They need to study what happened in the past over the long sweep of time, in as much detail as possible, to develop an appreciation of contingency and the role that actual humans can play in the story. Only immersion in the details of history will show them what sort of efforts succeeded or failed, what sort of factors were out of human control, and the degree to which people like them can actually have an impact. Sometimes society seems to resist the most heroic efforts to improve things or it responds to them so slowly as to be imperceptible, and usually in ways no one anticipated. Methods that work in one situation fail miserably under different circumstances. And perhaps most maddeningly of all, any positive advance can be undone by reactionary backlash. Too often, it seems, a step forward is followed by two back.
Some of us will look at this messy story and decide that collective action and political engagement in such causes as anti-racism just aren’t worth the sacrifice and retreat into private life where they have more direct control. Booker T. Washington made a career of advocating that course for Black Americans during the Jim Crow era. And let’s face it: most of us do that most of the time. But a history class should not encourage that outcome by relentlessly focusing too-insistently on the bad outcomes and shining a light into the dark corners of the souls of mostly well-intentioned reformers. Within the bounds of truth, we should give our students ample evidence to suggest that cynicism about human nature, democracy and citizenship may not be warranted.
Everyone will see the arc of history bending in a different direction. I want my students to be able to come up with their own metaphors to describe it, whichever way they see it bending. But as I assemble my syllabi, I want to make sure they have plenty of fodder to support the conclusion that engagement in public life is worth their time and effort, though there will be plenty that points in the other direction. I don’t want to give them false hope or unwarranted optimism, but they should at least come away with a sense of possibility.
Note: *I haven’t conducted my own content analysis of the 1619 Project, so I’m relying on reviews by others. Those sources will be listed in a forthcoming post on this blog.
Sometime back in the 90s, I was hired to teach a course on African American history in a university evening school program to mostly black students. At first I was somewhat intimidated and thought: “Don’t they know more about this than I do?” Of course it didn’t take long to find out that they knew as much about “Black history” as any white college student or any other typical white American would know about anything we might call “white history”—which is to say, practically nothing.
I was guilty, like the Exonians mentioned in the Black@Exeter Instagram post, of a kind of magical thinking—supposing that somehow, black skin comes with a brain full of certain ideas and understandings, including a detailed history of the people who have the same color of skin.
As white people sign up to be “white allies” in the fight for racial justice and equality, it is important for them to beware of this tendency toward racialist thinking. The American citizens they want to form an alliance with do not all agree with each other about the history of race in America, the problems we face today, or strategies to bring about a better world.
Should you march in the streets? Should you throw a bomb? Should you read a book? Which book? Should you post of Facebook? Should you carry a sign? What should it say? How should you engage with Black people you encounter in your daily life? Should you go to Black people for answers to these and other questions that come up? If so, which ones? And what do you do when they disagree with each other?
Any white person seeking to get involved with Back politics will be, in the phrase of Henry Louis Gates Jr., “running the gauntlet of blackness.” “There’s always been ideological diversity in the African American community,” he said. “There are 42 million African Americans, which means there are 42 million ways to be Black.” In that case, there may be 42 million ways to be a white ally.
The historic search for “race spokesmen”
Throughout American history, the presumption of Black unity and the existence of one collective “Black mind” has led white people to look for representative spokesmen—individuals or organizations that could serve as the “Voice of the Black Nation” or leaders of the “Black Freedom Movement,” or “Race Representatives.” This summer, it seems that Black Lives Matter is the place to look for “Black opinion.”
Unfortunately, it’s impossible to know which spokesman, or movement or organization, at any given time, best reflects the views of a majority of African Americans and efforts to chose one voice have always papered over significant differences. There is never an election in which African Americans get to choose, and it has often been white people, and wealthy or influential ones at that, who have done the choosing. Booker T. Washington was elevated to a national leadership position by white philanthropic industrialists at the end of the late 19th century. All-Black groups, like the Niagara Movement and William Monroe Trotter’s National Independent Political League were organizing around opposition to Washington in 1910 when a group of wealthy white progressives spearheaded the formation of the NAACP, which ended up overshadowing those Black-led organizations. Notable African Americans, including W.E.B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson, served in important roles in the NAACP during the First World War, but the white funders generally called the shots in the early years. The NAACP organized a conference of Black newspaper editors in Washington during the war to represent Black Americans and advance a list of demands to the federal government. My book tells the story of that conference and the role of the Black press in seeking to represent the Black voice. After the war, Marcus Garvey’s organization attracted a much larger following than the NAACP or any other Black advocacy group up to that time because it appealed more to working class than to the small minority of middle class Blacks who made up the bulk of NAACP membership.
A. Philip Randolph and Martin Luther King Jr. led two of the more effective grass roots movements fighting for racial justice in the 40s, 50s, and 60s. During World War II, President Roosevelt assumed that Randolph
could mobilize Black America for a confrontational march on Washington,
so he gave in to demands for equal employment in defense industries. But even King, perhaps the most universally admired Black American in our history was never really chosen by his people to lead them. He faced strong opposition from rival black groups, including the NAACP, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the amorphous “Black Power” movement of the later 60s.
King was 26 years old when he was first put into the role of national leader during the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-56. It was a matter of being in the right place at the right time, in a situation that grabbed the attention of the national press. He appeared regularly on the nightly news during the boycott and Time put him on its cover after its successful conclusion and made him “Man of the Year” in 1963. Such media attention—not to mention a Nobel Prize—rather than any kind of a democratic process was the key to King’s elevation to the role of Number One Black Leader that presidents felt compelled to consult.
He probably lived up to that billing more than any other Black leader before or since. Jill Lepore recently made a compelling case that John F. Kennedy’s phone call to Coretta King expressing support for her jailed husband got him enough Black votes (at a time when a lot of black voters were voting Republican) to put him over the top in the close 1960 presidential election.
Of course, King also earned his position as Black spokesman through brilliant oratory and incredible acts of courage and sacrifice, submitting himself to arrest and jail time again and again and persisting in his role in spite of constant death threats, financial hardship, and an unrelenting campaign by the most powerful law-enforcement officer in the country (FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover) to destroy him. Bearing the Cross is the apt name of the definitive biography of King.
But all African Americans did not agree with the non-violent approach or choose to follow King. Black opposition came from both the right and the left and from rival groups, including the NAACP and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Black militants said King was “too moderate and bourgeois.” And in a widely read Readers’ Digest
article, Black columnist Carl Rowan said King was too radical, that he
was under the influence of Communists, and had an inflated view of his
own self-importance (Garrow, 576-577).
In his recent essay on King’s political philosophy, Cornel West
notes that after mid-decade “his nonviolent message was accepted by
fewer people.”
Nearly
all of his close confidants strongly objected to his Poor People’s
Campaign and his strident opposition to the Vietnam War, not to mention
his commitment to the garbage workers’ strike in Memphis, Tennessee.
They not only “were failing to stand by him in his hour of greatest
need,” but they also were loud and adamant in, according to Andrew
Young, “telling him he was failing.”… Young revolutionaries dismissed
and tried to humiliate King—subjecting him to a walkout during his
address at the historic New Politics convention in Chicago in 1967 or
loud booing and heckling (by Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
members) at King’s address at Liberty Baptist College in Chicago in 1966
(Shelby and Terry, 327).
After King's assassination in 1968, Black Power militants became the most visible race advocates, thanks more to press coverage than mass support from the African-American population. Groups like the Black Panthers were particularly good at attracting mainstream press coverage by posing with assault rifles in black berets and leather jackets, conducting armed patrols of Black neighborhoods to prevent police brutality, and sometimes engaging in violent encounters with law enforcement, including the FBI.
Neither the Panthers nor the Black Power idea, generally, were ever more popular among African Americans than King, but they represented a divide among the African American leadership class that grew deeper in the wake of King’s assassination and they seem to have had an out-sized influence on Black leadership strategies in the 1970s and beyond as the focus switched from the streets to the universities, from law and economics to culture, and from national to local (urban) politics. (Holt, 344-347).
Black America's Growing Class Divide
Since the 1960s, however, it has only become less likely that any one voice can represents all of Black America, as social, economic, and demographic trends have exacerbated divisions among African Americans. In his book Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America, Eugene Robinson shows that in the decades from 1970 to 2010, desegregation, affirmative action, urban decay, interracial marriage, globalization, a wave of immigration from Africa and the Caribbean, and trickle-down economics had the unintended effect of “tearing black America to pieces.”
Ever wonder why black elected officials spend so much time talking about purely symbolic “issues” like an official apology for slavery? Or why they never miss the chance to renounce a racist outburst from a rehab-bound celebrity? It’s because symbolism, history and old fashioned racism are about the only things they can be sure their African American constituents still have in common (4).
Robinson argues that the Americans we refer to as Black have become increasingly divided into four or five groups with distinct, often conflicting, interests. The largest group is a Black middle class the he calls "The Mainstream," "with a full ownership stake in American society." This would include those who belong to the professional-managerial class. Ten percent of Black households earned over $100,000 (adjusted for inflation) per year in the Aughts, compared with only 2 percent in the Sixties, according to Robinson (7).
His second-largest group (25 percent), “The Abandoned,” has “less hope of escaping poverty and dysfunction than at any time since Reconstruction’s crushing end.” Other groups include, “a small “Transcendent” elite with such enormous wealth, power, and influence that even white folks have to genuflect” (e.g., Gates, Oprah); “individuals of mixed heritage”; and recent black immigrants (8.7 percent of the black population).
These groups may have more economic interests in common with similarly situated white people than with other Black groups. Robinson, for example, argues that Affirmative Action should be "narrowed and intensified to be used as a tool to uplift the Abandoned. That means eliminating its benefits for African Americans above some specified income level" (211-213).
In his essay on Martin Luther King’s approach to political economy, Tommie Shelby also suggests that since the 60s, the interests of middle class Blacks have diverged significantly from those of the “ghetto poor” and “in some ways may be opposed.” “Black solidarity is much more fragile” and any campaign today, like King’s in 1966-68 to "abolish the ghetto" would have to be based on more of an interracial alliance of the poor, while black elites would have to “play a smaller leadership role” (Shelby and Terry, 202). Adolph Reed Jr. takes it a step further and argues that today's black leaders thwart such an interracial working class alliance with a "race reductionist" political rhetoric that obscures the common interests among working class people regardless of identity (more on Reed and race reductionism later).
Black minds in the Obama-Trump era
Yet the persistence of white racism as reflected in repeated instances of police killings of Black men and women surely represents a powerful common interest out side of economics. Robinson was writing at the dawn of the Obama administration, before the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and others led to the rise of Black Lives Matter. Around the same time, Michelle Alexander raised awareness of the problem of mass incarceration of Black men with her book, The New Jim Crow. That book and BLM may have unified the various groups of Black Americans to some extent around the issues of policing and incarceration. While problems related to criminal justice have a greater impact on Robinson’s Abandoned, members of the Black middle class also rightly consider themselves more vulnerable to police harassment than white middle class folks. Ta-Nehisi Coates has written compellingly about the police killing of his acquaintance, Prince Carmen Jones, a solid member of Robinson’s Mainstream (Coates, 77-78).
Coates has emerged as one of the Black voices that white people think might represent the hive, thanks to his compelling writing in the Atlantic Magazine. And he’s not the only one. As I write this in early August of 2020, seven of the top 10 books on the New York Times paperback nonfiction best seller list deal with racial themes. Ibram Kendi’s book, How to be an Anti-Racist has been on the hardcover list for 22 weeks and stood at number 2 on Aug. 8. Isabel Wilkerson's new book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, promises to have a similarly wide readership. Such books and Coates' 2014 Atlantic piece on reparations, has awakened many Americans to the ways that discrimination on the basis of race continued after emancipation and did not entirely end with the Civil Rights Movement.
But as before, there is diversity among the current crop of Black leaders and intellectuals. And neither Alexander, Coates, Kendi nor Black Lives Matter represent the voice of all Black people in 2020—because there is no Black “hive mind,” as Coates himself learned when he began to read Black intellectual history expecting to find a “coherent tradition marching in lockstep” but instead found a “herd of dissenters” (Coates, 47-48).
Parts of the herd came after Coates in 2017.
In a New York Times essay that year, the Black author and memoirist, Thomas Chatterton Williams, who has recently gained notoriety for authoring the Harper’s letter defending free speech, accused Coates of treating race as “an essence” that imparts “identity epistemology”—that is, a hive mind—to both Blacks and whites. “Accordingly,” Williams writes, “whiteness and wrongness have become interchangeable—the high ground is now accessible only by way of ‘allyship,’ which is to say silence and total repentance.”
Williams seems to be coming at Coates from his right—the Times critique was heartily embraced by the Black conservative economist Glenn Loury on his Podcast along with his sort-of conservative guest John McWhorter.
But the most scathing critique of Coates came from his left. In a blistering essay in 2017, Cornel West said Coates was guilty of “apolitical pessimism” and representing a faux-radical approach to racial justice that fails to connect racial issues to other fundamental problems of the neoliberal economic order—economic inequality, imperialism, militarism—and for being insufficiently critical of the Obama administration’s failure to address those problems. Coates was so unnerved by the essay and the nasty tweets it generated, that he deleted his Twitter account.
that black intellectual traditions …have always been fraught, contested and hotly debated in public and private. … Serious and engaged thinkers, writers and intellectuals can respectfully and publicly disagree on critically important issues… In a nation with roughly 42 million black people, it is worth remembering they have at least that many opinions about the contours of the black freedom struggle.… The strength of black intellectual traditions rests not on their ideological uniformity, but on their diverse resiliency that allows the panoramic expression of black thought to be utilized by new generations.
Asked to comment on the dispute, Robin D.G. Kelley, a historian of African American labor activism, refused to takes sides, but instead focused on the valuable contributions of both Coates and West while gently outlining his differences with them.
Kelley, Joseph, West, Coates, and Gates are all coming from the political left, a broad category ranging from the establishment wing of the Democratic Party to a Marxian-socialist or anti-capitalist left that often seems to be at war with itself.
In a blurb on the back cover of Racecraft, Coates calls the book "a challenge to people like me ..., African Americans who have accepted the fact of race and define themselves by the concept of race."
Gates is another black intellectual who insists on bringing class into the equation. “I’m not going to demonize the people who voted for Donald Trump,” he said.
The white working class has been baited to identify economically with people with whom they have nothing in common—wealthier white people—instead of just looking across the tracks, across the river and seeing their Black working-class counterpart. That is the union that should have been affected so often in the history of America…. Slavery itself was race and class fused…. MLK realized this. After the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 64 and the Voting Rights Act of 65, he began to move towards an economic analysis… Race is not the most important thing that divides us, it is class. It is always about the money…. It’s about class, justified in the name of racial difference.
The Gates interview:
Elsewhere in the interview, Gates sounds a lot less like Reed or any kind of Marxist, and a lot more like the Black conservatives and Republicans that Exonians wanted to exclude from the hive mind. "I have no tolerance for anybody who won't work if they can work," he said, extolling the value of "individual responsibility," traditional values, and speaking "standard English."
Black Conservatives
The author of the Black@Exeter Instagram post is correct—there actually are “black conservatives.” Though a minority among black intellectuals, this group may reflect the views of the Black American population better than anyone on the left.
Something like 90 percent of African Americans vote Democratic, so we assume that virtually all Black people are liberal. However, only 29 percent of Black Democrats (as opposed to 55 percent of white Dems) call themselves liberal. More consider themselves to be either moderate (39 percent) or conservative (25 percent) and 75 percent have a negative view of liberals’ efforts to impose norms of political correctness.
When it comes to religion, Black Democrats resemble white Republicans more than white Democrats. Only 55 percent of all Democrats say they are absolutely certain that God exists compared to 73 percent of Republicans and 83 percent of Blacks. Blacks' rates of church attendance also look more like Republicans' than Democrats'. Black child-rearing practices (which tend to correlate with political beliefs) also look more Republican than Democratic, for example in their willingness to use corporal punishment—80 percent of both Blacks and Republicans compared to just 65 percent of all Democrats.
There doesn’t seem to be much Black support for abolition or defunding of police according to a Gallup poll taken in June and July—81 percent of Black respondents said they want police to spend as much or more time in their neighborhoods as they do now.
A journalist who toured cities in the aftermath of the rioting, arson, and vandalism that accompanied the George Floyd protests, claims that Black residents of the affected areas were appalled by the violence and “almost uniformly supportive of the deployment of National Guard to quell the chaos.”
These conservative attitudes may help to explain Bernie Sanders’ dismal performances with Black voters in presidential primaries. In both 2016 and 2020 Black voters provided a conservative firewall against a socialist takeover of the Democratic Party.
But even Black conservatives don't have a "hive mind." Seven relatively conservative Black pundits--including Loury, McWhorter, and Williams, in a recent Zoom-like session on YouTube this summer expressed a diversity of viewpoints on race relations that did not always fit predictably into the mainstream of American Conservatism and at times they disagreed with each other, for example on the issue of reparations. They also brought class into the discussion in ways that echoed leftists like Reed, Gates, Fields and Bernie Sanders. Williams said “we’re not having enough of a conversation about how bad Americans in general are doing.” Unlike the Marxian leftists, who blame capitalism for problems associated with poverty, however, Williams and the others pointed to “self-defeating culture.” But, Williams added, “Let’s not pretend these are uniquely Black problems. America looks crazy from the standpoint of many other wealthy societies.”
Loury added this left-populist note:
There are a lot of poor whites. There are a lot of white drug addicts. There are a lot of white people struggling. There are a lot of broken white families. There are a lot of white kids who have lost their way. Why can’t we black people lend our weight to the real justice problem which is constructing a decent society? Why do we have to carve out a separate settlement?
Antiracism and the Gauntlet of Blackness
Given the reigning discourse on anti-racism, it is not surprising that Exeter students would consign all conservatives to the dustbin of racism. This past winter the school's MLK Day keynote speaker was Ibram Kendi who defines racism in binary terms. Everyone is either a racist or an antiracist and there is no in-between; you can't just be "not-racist" (Kendi, 9). In How to be an Antiracist, Kendi expresses absolute certainty about what kind of thinking and behavior gets you into which category. The Exeter students mentioned in the Instagram post were simply applying Kendi's binary schematic.
But as prominent as black writers like Kendi and Coates have become, neither is currently the most influential race educator in America today. That distinction belongs to a white woman.
Robin DiAngelo is the author of America’s current favorite book on how to be a white ally. Since its publication in 2018, White Fragility, has spent 33 weeks on the Times best seller list,
and it surged to number one during the George Floyd protests. At the end of July it was still the most popular book on anti-racism, though Kendi’s was not far behind. Sales of the book have likely been driven in part by corporate employers who have distributed copies their employees, as Exeter did with Kendi's book.
In her book DiAngelo argues that the greatest obstacle to racial progress is white people's unwillingness to engage in conversations about race and to admit their own racism. They are fragile and when you try to broach the subject of how "their race affords them systemic advantages, or that they can’t help being racist or benefiting from racism, or that their behavior is racially 'problematic,' white people respond with anger, denial, guilt or tears—with white fragility" (quoted from Washington Post review).
Even before the book came out, DiAngelo was a popular speaker at conferences and a sought-after leader of workplace seminars. She has led workshops at schools (though not Exeter yet), government agencies, universities, and companies like Microsoft, Google, Levi, and W.L. Gore & Associates—the maker of Gore-Tex—just to name a few. Last year she gave eight to 10 of these presentations a month, charging as much as $15,000 per session, according to a lengthy portrait in the Times.
As more people outside of the captive employee audience began to read DiAngelo’s book this spring and summer, criticism has mounted, most spectacularly by white Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi, but also by plenty of Black reviewers.
Kelefa Sanneh, in the New Yorker, accuses DiAngelo of buying into an exaggerated version of the Black hive mind theory: “If there is scripture in DiAngelo’s world, it is the testimony of “people of color,” a term that usefully reduces all of humanity to two categories: white and other… DiAngelo is endlessly deferential—for her, racism is basically whatever any person of color thinks it is.”
In the Times,Jamelle Bouie laments the influence of anti-racism and White Fragility on Black activism. He points out that BLM has a program that goes well beyond police killings and what Reed refers to as anti-racial-disparitarianism, to address “working-class, egalitarian politics” and demands such things as “universal health care, affordable housing, living wage employment and access to education and public transportation.” But anti-racism has overshadowed those issues, which address the interests of working class people of all races and could form the basis of a strong, unified working class movement. In BLM, he concludes, there is “too much concern with ‘white fragility’ and not enough with wealth inequality.”
Reed and the Fields sisters would take Bouie's gentle criticism of anti-racism, diversity consulting, and BLM a step further. Their exclusive focus on race, they say, helps the ruling capitalist class perform a “rope-a-dope” on the American working class, distracting them from the fundamental problems of inequality and worker exploitation under post-industrial capitalism. In an interview with Jacobin, Barbara Fields put it this way:
Agricultural workers working for the big growers … are subjected to pesticides as well as all kinds of substandard conditions. If you turn that into an issue having to do with the identities of people of color, then you have let the agribusiness farmers off the hook. We know why they take advantage of the workforce that has to approach the pesticides and work without proper sanitary conditions. It is not because they have anything in their hearts about so-called people of color. It is because they are getting their work done in the cheapest way they can. They don’t care about which people they are exploiting to do that.
Corporations are so eager to pay DiAngelo such high fees because it gets their employees to focus on conflict among themselves rather than the problems—like unsanitary conditions—that they face together as workers.
The most vociferous critics of DiAngelo, however, are the Black conservatives. Their objections to her approach was reflected in a recent fiery confrontation at a New York City school board meeting over diversity training. An affluent white constituent accused a board member of racist behavior and when he asked her to explain, she told him to "read a book. Read Ibram Kendi. Read How to Talk to White People. It is not my job to educate you." Latino Board member Edward Irizarry reflected the views of black conservatives when he reacted to this by saying that DiAngelo-style diversity training the schools had sponsored promoted “cosmetic diversity,” disempowered underprivileged students of color, and undermined their achievement.
Critics like Irizarry and the conservatives have pointed to DiAngelo’s discussion of baseball great Jackie Robinson—the only major leaguer whose number is retired on every team. In her workshops, DiAngelo asks participants to think of Robinson, not as an inspiring example of Black achievement but as “the first Black man whites allowed to play major-league baseball.”
Perhaps unintentionally, DiAngelo and other anti-racist educators send the message that white racism and white supremacy are so powerful, ubiquitous and implacable, that efforts by individual black people can’t hope to overcome it. Why even try?
McWhorter has written the most scathing review of White Fragility from this perspective. He concluded: “I cannot imagine that any Black readers could willingly submit themselves to DiAngelo’s ideas while considering themselves adults of ordinary self-regard and strength. Few books about race have more openly infantilized Black people than this supposedly authoritative tome.”
Conservatives have leveled similar criticisms at Coates, whose 2015 memoir, Between the World and Me, was written in the form of a letter to his son; its principle message was one of despair and hopelessness about the future of Blacks in America. Coates wrote: “You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels” (Coates, 107). In an online discussion about Coates, Loury and McWhorter agreed that Coates’ pessimism was ahistorical, ignoring significant progress on race. Loury went so far as to say that sending such a message to his son amounted to “child abuse.”
Commentators on the left have leveled similar criticisms of the dominant anti-racist discourse as disempowering Black people. Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy (also a former Exeter MLK keynoter) has been critical of Kendi for suggesting that African Americans can improve their situation by fighting “racism, misogyny and economic inequality” but not by “maintaining the communal conditions—safety, solidarity, habits of civic participation—essential to better defending and advancing their interests in the hurly-burly of American politics.”
The ways in which anti-racism discourse could have a disempowering effect on African Americans was vividly laid bare in a Smithsonian post, removed in response to widespread criticism but posted below. It suggested that self-reliance, objective thinking, hard work and delayed gratification, among other things, are traits unique to white people and that it would be racist to force such values on Blacks.
Here, the Smithsonian seems to be calling for a fundamental and radical transformation of society—a revolutionary rejection of western culture and economic relations. It implies that Black people are outside of that culture and their only hope is to change it. Ron Ferguson, a Black economist at Harvard who describes himself as a liberal objected to that approach, and said: “You can try to be competitive by equipping yourself to run the race that’s already scheduled, or you can try to change the race. There may be some things about the race I’d like to change, but my priority is to get people prepared to run the race that’s already scheduled” (this would seem to be the role that elite private high schools like Exeter are well-equipped to play).
If diversity training (an $8 billion dollar industry according to McKinsey) had the desired effect on white racism, we could ignore the objections of critics from both the right and the left. But studies have failed to show that anti-racism and diversity workshops significantly increase workplace diversity or reduce bias. Some of the studies that have been done so far even found that trainings could backfire. That’s not surprising given the setting of most diversity workshops—captive audiences in the workplace—and the methods of workshop leaders like DiAngelo. “I will not coddle your comfort,” DiAngelo warns participants as she tells them that all their privileges and accomplishments were made possible by racism. (See the links to articles on studies of the effects of anti-bias training in the notes below.) Some critics have labeled DiAngelo’s approach, in which denials of racism or objections to being labeled as such are taken as a sign of white fragility or of proof that you are a racist, a “Kafka Trap.” Then there’s the problem that these mandated workshops seem to be requiring that employees embrace a particular partisan political agenda. Anyone with a conservative bent is likely to feel coerced (as my conservative colleagues have told me).
White allies and the gauntlet of blackness
Clearly there is no black hive mind and thus no consensus about how to be a white ally, though there is no shortage of people who are eager to offer detailed guidelines.
DiAngelo requires that white people engage in uncomfortable conversations about race. "White silence = violence," many protest signs tell us. On the other hand, Damon Young, the black author of a well-received book of essays on race, gender, class, and Black identity, pleads with white people to stop talking to him about race.
Showing up at a BLM demonstration on top of a New Hampshire mountain or planting a BLM sign on your lawn might get you into the white ally club or it might be dismissed as “performative activism”—a pathetic attempt “to feel safe from white guilt.”
During the Ferguson crisis, I delivered a speech to the Exeter student body placing the BLM movement into the context of the history of black protest in America and was criticized for failing to express a sense of outrage about police brutality.
On the other hand expressing outrage could be seen as “centering yourself and your feelings,” something you should have learned not to do in “White Allying 101.”
Mild rebuke is not the only consequence for getting white ally-hood wrong. David Shor was apparently fired from a “progressive” analytics firm for posting this tweet:
Post-MLK-assasination race riots reduced Democratic vote share in surrounding counties by 2%, which was enough to tip the 1968 election to Nixon. Non-violent protests *increase* Dem vote, mainly by encouraging warm elite discourse and media coverage. https://t.co/S8VZSuaz3G. pic.twitter.com/VRUwnRFuVW
The Black Philadelphia pundit Ernest Owens questions the whole notion of “Allyship” as “a vapid solution to racism that lacks true accountability…. [And] perpetuates the culture of pointlessly glorifying white people who appear to give a damn.” But whites should still “do the work” of anti-racism, he says.
Dispensers of advice to would-be white allies like Owens seem to hold two opposing views about the goodness of white people. On the one hand, they are irredeemably racist—“forever stained with the guilt and shame of racism.” On the other, they can be expected to “do the work” of anti-racism just “because it’s the right thing to do… because you owe it to humanity.”
I tend to think that white people are not irredeemably or essentially anything except creatures of necessity. They are unlikely to attend to strangers' interests at the expense of their own.
During planning for King’s Poor People’s March on Washington in 1963, his aide Andrew Young said “people don’t respond [to protest] until their own self-interest is threatened” (Garrow, 583-584). The non-violent strategy worked, he said, because it created a "crisis-packed" situation in which "the powers that be ... will see that a change is necessary" to end the crisis and restore order. King’s rivals in the Black Power movement agreed that allies must have their own self-interest at stake in any meaningful political alliance. “No group should go into an alliance or a coalition relying on the ‘good will’ of the ally,” wrote Charles Hamilton and Stokely Carmichael in the seminal text on Black Power.
Not only do anti-racist activists hope to get white people to act politically in the absence of anything to gain for themselves, they take it a step further. They suggest that anti-racism is bad for them.
In her 1989 essay, "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack," Peggy McIntosh describes whiteness as “an intangible gift of unearned entitlement, unearned advantage, and unearned dominance” that gives “white people easier access to political and societal benefits that people of color are denied.”
The implication is that racism is good for all white people, that race relations are a “zero-sum game" and that white people will have to give up these privileges to allow previously oppressed people to thrive. That's an argument that is not incompatible with the view of white nationalists, who say that non-white peoples must be subordinated so that whites can thrive.
This is a switch from class-conscious advocates of racial justice like King, who argued that racism is bad for both black and white people and that it was perpetuated by economic elites as a way to maintain an exploitable laboring class.
It was part of a “divide-and-conquer strategy pursued by those in power,” W.E.B. Du Bois wrote. White laborers tolerated low wages because they “were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage.” (Arneson, 9-10).
Like many labor-oriented American historians on the left, Du Bois thought that all American workers could get better actual wages if they relinquished the psychological wage that came with white supremacy and joined with fellow workers of whatever skin color in a unified labor movement. This theory offers an explanation of why American workers are less likely to have health insurance, belong to a union, get paid sick days, or take vacation time, than workers in other advanced industrial economies.
That was the fundamental premise underlying Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign, illustrated in this campaign ad:
The apparent ongoing success of the divide-and-conquer strategy is vividly illustrated in Dr. Johnathan M. Metzl’s 2019 book, Dying of Whiteness. Metzl tells the story of Trevor, a white 41-year old Tennessean dying of a treatable liver disease because, lacking adequate health insurance, he couldn’t afford the medication that would have saved him. Yet his support for his state’s elected officials who refused the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid was unwavering. “Ain’t no way I would ever support Obamacare or sign up for it,” he said. “No way I want my tax dollars paying off Mexicans or welfare queens.”
Of course all white people are not in Trevor’s boat. Whites like me who are the truly privileged winners in the 21st century economy—college educated, professional, managerial, and cosmopolitan—seem to be more willing to embrace the diversity/anti-racism agenda. I haven’t seen any indication that any significant number of us are willing to give up whatever material benefits might have come to us through the subtle, mostly hidden operation of “systemic” racism. No one is asking us to forgo family wealth we have built since the early sixties, a period in which the wealth gap between the typical white family and the typical black family has grown from about $50,000 to about $135,000 (in inflation-adjusted 2016 dollars).
But while the brand of anti-racism that DiAngelo is pushing does nothing for white people like Trevor, embracing it can be good for certain other whites. DiAngelo is the most spectacular example of personal gain, with her $2 million in book royalties and hefty consulting fees.
But the rest of us in the academic-professional-managerial class have plenty to gain and nothing to lose by proclaiming ourselves white allies. At the very least we will stay in the good graces of our employers who mandate diversity or cultural competency or anti-racist training. At most we advance our careers by doing it enthusiastically, by, say, joining an optional White Allies Book Group, speaking up in meetings on behalf of racial justice—or maybe even taking the nuclear option, calling out “problematic” behavior of colleagues.
The greatest, truest gain for my class would come from the social and cultural richness of working with an ethnically diverse group of colleagues. Unfortunately, contemporary anti-racism and diversity training, according to the studies, has not led to greater diversity in elite spaces. Meanwhile, consequences of failing to toe the anti-racism line range from facing a Titter mob to losing your job, as the case of David Shor illustrates.
But such excesses of what one writer has called the Great Awokening, are beginning to generate resistance on the left to anti-racism. You can see this in the phenomenal success of a new podcast, “Blocked and Reported,” which includes a running critique of Robin DiAngelo in between conversations about people who have been unfairly cancelled, fired, or mobbed on Twitter over violations of "woke" etiquette. Such news is trending all over YouTube, “the intellectual dark web,” and increasingly in the mainstream press, and the writings of mainstream journalists like Conor Friedersdorf and lefties like Matt Taibbi.
And while the effort to destroy racism one white mind at a time is having mixed results, we seem to be forgetting about the problems of the Black people that Robinson categorized as Abandoned, whose deprivations are shared by an increasing number of working class whites.
While it is true that as a whole, whites have more wealth than Blacks, in both groups wealth is concentrated at the top. The most affluent 40 percent of white families have 95.6 percent of white wealth and the top 40 percent of Black families have an even greater share of Black-held assets. Apparently the American economy allows only about half of American families, Black or white, to accumulate any reserves at all. And even among that relatively lucky fifty percent the wealth is unevenly distributed. Among both Black and white families, just 10 percent own about 75 percent of assets. Meanwhile, 30 percent of Black and 20 percent of white families are either in debt or have no wealth accumulated at all. (This link shows the distribution in various categories in a series of bar graphs).
Peggy McIntosh and other racial justice consultants don't bother much with the complicating factor of class differences within racial groups when they talk about white privilege. Debby Irving, who delivered an assembly talk at Exeter a few years ago, disposed of class in a three-page chapter of her 250-page discussion of her racial awakening. She acknowledged that "I often conflate racism and classism" and that "it may sound as if I think all white people are loaded and all black people are downtrodden" (Irving, 15). It was an insightful observation at the start of a book in which she frequently confused the privilege of her upper-upper middle-class background with privileges based on skin color that many whites do not share. McIntosh has also been accused of making that same category error.
But trying to inject class into a discussion of white privilege is likely to be taken as evidence of white privilege and white fragility. Robin DiAngelo’s list of things that fragile white people say includes “the real oppression is class.” You might have devoted your life to the Marxist class struggle, but this just reveals your racism.
Even if you happen to have black skin. On May 29 when a planned talk by Adolph Reed, a founding member of the US Labor Party and a lifetime left-wing activist, was cancelled after members of the New York and Philadelphia Democratic Socialists accused him of “class reductionism.”
Of course Reed, a Black man, was not called out for his white fragility or white privilege. We’ve had to find other labels for Blacks who dissent from the dominant anti-racist theories. We might call them sell-outs or say they aren’t authentically black. Rep. Ayanna Pressley recently said in frustration over colleagues of color in Congress who disagree with her on important policy issues: “We don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice… We don’t need any more Black faces that don’t want to be a Black voice.”
Like Gates and the Fields sisters, Reed does not argue that race is irrelevant, but that class and race cannot be separated, that you can’t understand race in America without considering class. As Barbara Fields says, it would be like trying to understand a fraction by looking at only the numerator or only the denominator (Fields and Fields, 119, n. 13).
King understood this. He knew that racism harmed some blacks economically more than others and that not all white people were thriving under the heel of industrial capitalism. Rather than reparations for slavery, he spoke of economic policies that would be applied universally, regardless of race. He had a view of white privilege very different from Peggy McIntosh's.
“The moral justification for special measures for Negroes is rooted in the robberies inherent in the institution of slavery,” he said. “Many poor whites, however, were the derivative victims of slavery. As long as labor was cheapened by the involuntary servitude of the black man, the freedom of white labor, especially in the South, was little more than a myth.” (King, Why We Can’t Wait, 138)
To that end, King was a passionate advocate of labor unions, a critic of concentrated wealth and low wages, and a supporter of a universal basic income fifty years before Exeter alum Andrew Yang ran for president (King, All Labor has Dignity, 157-158).
Since King’s death in 1968, union membership has declined from 25 to 10 percent of workers, the real value of the minimum wage is down 17 percent, and we have entered a new Gilded Age of inequality.
Sometimes, Anti-racists like Coates and Kendi seem to agree with King's critique of inequality and would support radical universal economic policies. After all, though he criticized Sanders for not backing reparations, Coates chose him over Clinton in the 2016 primaries.
Even DiAngelo, who is raking in big fees from corporations sounds like a Sanders voter. In her interview with the Times, she said she believed that capitalism was the root cause of racism: "If the
model is profit over everything else, you’re not going to look at your
policies to see what is most racially equitable.' But then she added "I avoid
critiquing capitalism—I don’t need to give people reasons to dismiss
me." Or to stop paying her those big consulting fees.
The brand of anti-racism that corporations are buying from DiAngelo and others does not include a critique of capitalism or the profit motive, of course. They are buying a center-left ideology that speaks vaguely of "structural or institutional racism" but does not embrace the sorts of radical reform, wealth redistribution, or labor unionism that King advocated (nor does it promote black individual achievement and self-help as conservatives would like).
Presumably, this means that Amazon programming Alexa to say “I stand in solidarity with the black community in the fight against systemic racism and injustice” is a more substantial move against racism than what Bernie Sanders did to shame Amazon into raising its minimum wage to $15 an hour—even though 26 percent of Amazon employees are Black, twice their representation in the US population.
A final note to my students, and fellow Sandernistas
I began this post by recalling my realization that black college students are no less ignorant of their history than white college students. The same holds for black high school students, even the brilliant ones who attend Phillips Exeter Academy. And I have 23 years of experience to support that claim, not just one semester.
They also may not be so good at devising effective political strategies. While I agree whole-hardheartedly with the post about hive minds, I doubt that the creation of the Black@Exeter Instagram account will do much to win over white allies or advance the cause of social justice. It will certainly make people more wary of each other.
I admire the militancy of progressive young people, like the ones who canvassed with me for the Sanders campaign this winter, who are outraged at injustices that are indeed outrageous. But I would caution them against too much certainty about the best way to eliminate those injustices. Go ahead and keep showing up at protest rallies and knocking on doors for political candidates like Bernie, but don’t try to silence your opponents. On the contrary, seek out views that you disagree with and keep thinking for yourself and evaluating whether or not your political strategies are having the desired effect.
As I tell my students, you should welcome, not avoid, the feeling of cognitive dissonance that you get when new information contradicts your world view. When you get that feeling, one of two things will happen. You will strengthen your position or better yet, you will change your views and get closer to the truth.
To that end, I say, read the currently-popular anti-racist writers, like Coates and Kendi, but also read their opposition on the left, like West, Gates, Reed and Fields, and don't treat any of their writings like some kind of scripture. There's nothing wrong with reading white writers like DiAngelo and McIntosh, but also look at white authors who take a different view, like Walter BennMichaels or Judith Stein. By all means, read conservative thinkers like Loury and McWhorter. But above all, read and study the deeper history of American protest and the great African American political leaders and theoriests, from Du Bois to Randoph to King and especially Bayard Rustin, whose insightful 1970 essay "The Failure of Black Separatism" offers a warning to racial justice advocates that is still relevant fifty years later:
The world of Black Americans is full of divisions. Only the most supine of optimists would dream of building a political movement without reference to them (Rustin, 221).
That goes double for those who would be a white ally of that cause.
“For the discovery of truth it is necessary to argue against all things and for all things.” —Cicero.
The forgoing essay was written in the context of a spring term sabbatical and a summer during the Coronavirus Pandemic and the social distancing that went with it. I spent most of that time isolated at my home in Bethlehem, New Hampshire, reading history books and the news and listening to a fair number of podcasts. Toward the end of my six months of concentrated reading and reflection I increasingly became focused on readings related to the BLM protests, conflicts among progressives and others over identity politics, and the history of race and the Civil Rights Movement, including Taylor Branch’s 1,000-page history of the first decade of the movement and David Garrow’s more narrowly focused Time on the Cross. Sources related to current events are mostly linked in the essay above where they were relevant. Books and some other sources that didn’t make it into the links are listed below.
I originally posed this on Aug. 18, 2020, but then revised more later, and added references to events and publications after that date, up to Sept. 6.
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by (New York: The New Press, 2010).
Eric Arnesen, “Whiteness and the Historian’s Imagination,” International Labor and Working Class History, Fall 2001, 3-32.
Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988).
Ta-Nahisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2015).
Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (London: Verso, 2014). Barbara Fields and a different collaborator discussed police shootings in the wake of George Floyd's death in this Dissent article.
David Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: William Morrow, 1986).
Thomas Geoghegan, Only One Thing Can Save Us: Why America Needs a New Kind of Labor Movement (New York: New Press, 2014).
Diana Hess and Paula McAvoy, The Political Classroom: Evidence and Ethics in Democratic Education (New York: Routledge, 2015).
Thomas Holt, Children of Fire: A History of African Americans (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010).
Debby Irving, Waking Up White and Finding Myself in the Story of Race (Cambridge, MA: Elephan Room Press, 2014).
Martin Luther King, Jr., All Labor Has Dignity, Michael K. Honey, ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986).
Martin Luther King, Jr., Why We Can’t Wait (New York: Mentor, 1963).
Ibram Kendi, How to be an Anti-Racist (New York: One World, 2019).
Eugene Robinson, Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America (New York: Anchor Books, 2011).
Bayard Rustin, Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin, Devon W. Carbado and Donald Weise eds. (New York: Cleis Press, 2003).
Tommie Shelby and Brandon M. Terry, eds., To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2018).
David Weber, "Political Teaching in a Contentious Time," Independent School. Winter 2007, Vol. 66 Issue 2, pp. 50-56.
William Julius Wilson More than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City (New York: WW Norton and Co., 2009).
In case anyone is interested, I’ve published two things on the diversity among the black leadership class early in the 20th century:
Black Newspapers and America’s War for Democracy, 1914-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
“’The Damnable Dilemma’: African-American Accommodation and Protest during World War I,” Journal of American History, Vol. 81, March 4, 1995, 1562–1583. Here, I argued that to understand Du Bois’s World War I editorials you had to understand subtle differences among black leaders at the time.
Effectiveness of Diversity and Anti-bias Training
The New York Times Magazine article on DiAngelo has a paragraph or two that suggests that on-the-job diversity or anti-bias training doesn’t work and can actually backfire. Here are links to articles on the question of whether or not it works. I confess that I haven’t read all of these myself and I am not qualified to judge the effectiveness of anti-bias training. It seems pretty clear, though, that corporate diversity training, like what Starbucks did, often seems to be inspired more by their PR value than the actual impact on employees:
Blocked and Reported. In this interview, a white woman describes her year-long experience of workplace diversity training with DiAngelo and a black co-consultant, illustrating how such experience can have unintended effects.
The Good Fight. Harvard Sociologist Frank Dobbins said that about 1,000 studies have not shown diversity training to be effective. Toward the end of the interview, he suggested that "inter-group contact theory" shows more promise. This involves setting up interracial working groups under the following three conditions: First, divergent identities are minimized rather than emphasized. Second, the group must be working together toward a cooperative goal. Third, the institution they are working for must make it clear that the members of the group have equal standing. Such a context was "proven" to reduce racial animosity when Black and white soldiers fought side-by-side in integrated units during World War II, Dobbins said. Historian Judith Stein claims, similarly, that the same has been true when Black and white workers formed unions together. That dynamic is depicted in movies like Matewan, Norma Rae, and Sorry to Bother You. Another film that depicts class solidarity across identity categories in a wholly different context: Pride. Pride and the first two are based on actual historical events. And there are other examples. Reed lists several examples from Reconstruction to the 60s here.
Psychology Today suggests that anti-racism training doesn't work simply because people don't like to be told what to think. So instead of the desired effect, some people become more hostile to people of different races after the training. That article advocates a similar approach to the one advocated by Dobbins on the Good Fight:
In
short, when people perceive one another as members of the same in-group, racial
bias—and possibly other forms of bias against groups of people—tends to melt
away. Thus, the way to increase inclusion in the workplace is to make everyone
feel like they’re part of the same team. Many studies support this idea,
at least implicitly, and one way to create an in-group feeling among people is
to establish shared goals. Inclusion programs can make a start by creating
teams whose members matter to one another because they’re part of the same
in-group, pursuing the same interests. Focusing on common goals and a common
identity will be critically important for eliminating bias—both within the
enterprise and in leading the way for society at large.
New York Magazine. A foundation of anti-racist efforts is the concept of unconscious racial bias. You can take an test on the web, sponsored by Harvard University, that purports to measure your racial bias. This article explores the science behind that test and measures of its reliability.
The Linguistic Minefield
One of the obstacles to being a white ally is knowing what to say and how to say it. Anti-bias training places a great deal of emphasis on language, seen as the source of many “microagressions,” the cumulative effect of which are said to cause pain and suffering among Blacks and other marginalized people. The linguistic turn in movements for social justice has caused much controversy and along with other cultural issues is connected to the divisive and somewhat ill-defined category of “political correctness.” One of Trump’s more resonant appeals in 2016 was his critique of “political correctness.” The study I referenced earlier, which found that 75 percent of even African Americans have a negative view of the effort to impose these norms, found similar sentiments among all types of Americans, including people in their early (79 percent) and later (74 percent) 20s. And whites (79 percent) were not the ethnic groups who were most opposed to political correctness: Hispanics (87 percent) and American Indians (88 percent) disliked it even more. A Pew study
found that only 23 percent of Latino or Hispanic Americans have heard
of the gender-neutral term "Latinx" and only 3 percent
choose to use it. A 40-year-old American Indian summed up his discomfort with the emphasis on language: “It seems like every day you wake up something has changed … Do you say Jew? Or Jewish? Is it a black guy? African-American? … You are on your toes because you never know what to say. So political correctness in that sense is scary.” So who is promoting this seemingly powerful movement to impose new norms of discourse? According to the survey, only a relatively small political tribe of “progressive activists”—the people that Robin DiAngelo says “cause the most daily damage to people of color”—are in favor of the enforcement of PC norms.
The more education you have and the more money you make, the more likely you are to belong to that group. Only 3 percent of the progressive-activist PC lovers are African Americans, according to the survey. Within this group it seems that white allies are more aggressive promoters of the new orthodoxy than their black comrades. In his piece, the Great Awokening, Matt Yglesias cites polling that shows 46 percent of white liberals and only 33 percent of Blacks disagree with the statement that Black people in America should be able to overcome prejudice and work their way up, as other ethnic minorities have done. The BLM protesters who harassed a Washington DC diner for not raising her fist when asked are mostly white.
This author theorizes that signing onto the anti-racism cause has become a way for elite whites to signal their superior status. John McWhorter agrees in this article about freedom of speech on campus and gives an example of white students calling out a Black professor:
Being nonwhite leaves one protected in this environment only to the
extent that one toes the ideological line. An assistant professor of
color who cannot quite get with the program writes, “At the moment, I’m
more anxious about this problem than anything else in my career,” noting
that “the truth is that over the last few years, this new norm of
intolerance and cult of social justice has marginalized me more than all
racism I have ever faced in my life.”
The survey of attitudes about political correctness concludes that most Americans are safe from the patrols of the “PC police” (though many of them hear about it on Fox News), but if you happen to travel in a circle with lots of progressive activists, the Times and other mainstream publications are there to help you navigate the terrain. This article includes a list of “words that make black people cringe.”
A couple of surprising examples:
“The one I have recently begun to hate is ‘African-American.’”
“I dislike the term, “white trash.” … If ‘white trash’ is a thing, it suggests that trashiness is not unexpected among people whose skin is of other colors.”
Update: A history-teacher colleague sent me this piece, arguing that it is "important" to use "enslaved person" rather than "slave."
A note on style: While I was working on this essay, the Associated Press made a change to its style guide, mandating capitalization of "Black" when referring to the group of people. I have mixed feelings about the decision and no obligation to follow the AP or the New York Times, which has it's own style guide and has made a similar decision, as has the Chicago Manual of Style. The decision seems to be taking a side on debates about identity, against people like Reed (he doesn't capitalize it on his website) and with more "identity-focused" advocates. It also creates an apparent contradiction between capitalizing Black and using the lower case white and brown, that might end up being used by white supremacists to support their "reverse racism" arguments. On the other hand, I decided to use AP style to spare myself from having to spend my time worrying about style issues. So I went through the draft and changed all (hopefully) the lower class "blacks" to upper case. I'm sure I missed some. Also, by the way, AP has an extensive section on writing and style issues connected to race. I've used the term "African American" pretty much interchangeably with "Black," but the two terms are actually not quite the same.
On Reparations
Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” The Atlantic, June 2014, is well worth reading for background on redlining, and has single-handedly made reparations a seriously-considered public policy option. A town in NC actually has approved a reparations policy.
Of course, the devil is in the details. This piece in Jacobinargues that doing reparations the wrong way could end up making the distribution of wealth in America even more unequal. Although Jacobin comes from a Marxian left perspective there is no unanimity on the question, but rather a vigorous debate.
More on Gates and the Conservatism of African Americans.
In the video interview I posted, Henry Louis Gates articulates what I think is probably a very common cultural conservatism among the majority of African Americans who also reliably vote Democratic.
My father had two jobs for 37 years. I don’t have any tolerance for anybody who won’t work if they can work. I don’t think there’s any excuse for not doing your homework. I don’t think there’s any excuse for not learning your ABCs and learning to speak standard English and learning your multiplication tables. As corny as that sounds, those values are the hallmark of African American culture and they have been our values. Anyone who says not, they are the people betraying the traditional values of the culture. Somehow … things got turned on their head. The people who are not calling for individual responsibility, who are not saying you must show up, you gotta suck it up man you gotta go to school, you gotta learn. You’ve got to have deferred gratification. They are the people who are out of synch with the black tradition. … They have failed to understand our traditional values. I’m as Democrat as you can get, but I spend every day studying the people and the tradition that I love. I know what’s Black about black America and those values are as traditionally black as any values that you can get. But somehow it got perverted and people go, “Well they’re white values.” … If anybody had said anything like that when your father and I were growing up in the 50s they’d have smacked you upside your head.”
Although Gates’s view on this “operates as common sense in most quarters of black America,” he might be called inauthentic or an Uncle Tom by some black intellectuals, whose ideas about Black and white culture are reflected in the controversial Smithsonian post. For critiques of “Racial uplift ideology,” or what has come to be called “respectability politics,” which Gates seems to be promoting here see Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century. From the publisher’s blurb: “Gaines argues that, in its emphasis on class distinctions and patriarchal authority, racial uplift ideology was tied to pejorative notions of racial pathology and thus was limited as a force against white prejudice…. Ultimately, elite conceptions of the ideology retreated from more democratic visions of uplift as social advancement, leaving a legacy that narrows our conceptions of rights, citizenship, and social justice.” See also, Frederick C. Harris, “The Rise of Respectability Politics,” Dissent, Winter 2014, who argues that “the politics of respectability has been portrayed as an emancipatory strategy to the neglect of discussions about structural forces that hinder the mobility of the black poor and working class.” It also smacks of victim-blaming, some would argue.
This is connected to what those who are interested in the causes of poverty think of as the “structure-versus-culture dispute” (which applies to poor white people too; see, for example Jill Lepore, “Richer and Poorer: Accounting for inequality,” New Yorker, March 16, 2015). As the black Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson put in his 2009 book More than Just Race, “This book will likely generate controversy because I dare to take culture seriously as one of the explanatory variables in the study of race and urban poverty—a topic that is typically considered off-limits in academic discourse because of a fear that such analysis scan be construed as ‘blaming the victim’” (Wilson, 4). According to the conservative authors of The Rise of Victimhood Culture, anything that smacks of “blaming the victim” is considered off limits in the field of sociology, which they say has “abandon[ed] scientific work entirely” and become “just another moral project.” (Campbell and Manning, 203). Maryland sociologist Philip N. Cohen, author of The Family: Diversity, Inequality, and Social Change, defends recent trends in sociology and suggests some readings that address the relationship between Black culture and Black poverty.
Update: I didn't include the conservative celebrity Candace Owens in my discussion of Black conservatism because she strikes me as more of a conservative performance artist/provocateur in the mold of Ann Coulter that a serious thinker. But then a colleague sent me this profile in the Washington Post. It describes her Blexit campaign, urging black voters to exit the Democratic Party, which she refers to as a "plantation." When Joe Biden said "If you have a problem figuring out if you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black,” he seemed to confirm Owens' point, that the Party takes the Black vote for granted in a way it could not in 1960. Owens sounds like a modern day Booker T. Washington.
To Owens, the left’s espousal of permanent victimhood is one of its most insidious lies: “It’s because of racism, because of some imaginary white boogeyman, that you’re never gonna be successful.” That mentality, she says, leads to excuses rather than action. “We call it the Oppression Olympics,” she says. “ ‘I’m black, you’re white, so I’m more oppressed than you.’ ‘Well, I’m a woman and you’re a man, okay, so I’m more oppressed than you.’ ‘I’m a lesbian black woman and so I’m more oppressed than you.’ ‘I’m a disabled black woman’ — that’s really, if you want to get to the top of the hierarchy of oppression, you’ve got to be a disabled, black, lesbian woman, and then you win.”
Race relations and majority rule
Behind the debates about race relations and strategies to advance social justice are debates about the nature of government and democracy, especially this question: to what extent should the people rule? According to Derrick Bell’s version of critical race theory, as vividly illustrated in his science fiction story, “The Space Traders,” white Americans can be counted on to sacrifice the rights of black people to their own interests and what they perceived as the greater good. Thus, Bell would seem to be in agreement with James Madison, who designed the Constitution so as to prevent “majority factions” from being able “carry into effect schemes of oppression” against minorities (Madison, Federalist 10). You have to wonder whether Madison was blind to the "scheme of oppression" he was carrying out against the 100-plus slaves he owned. He wrote that he was worried about a majority of voters who might go for the printing of “paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property,” but apparently he was unconcerned about the minority of voters who owned slaves. Thus, he designed an anti-majoritarian republican government, and our history is full of examples of the sentiments of the majority being thwarted by minority factions that have managed to get control through various mechanisms built into the Constitution, not to mention the unanswerable power of money in modern politics. Somehow this check on majority rule has not usually protected the minority of blacks from the negative effects of white racism in legislation. Even so, Coates said the root cause of police killings of black people is “that our country is ruled by majoritarian pigs” (Coates, Between the World and Me, 79).
Is it possible that black people might have fared better under a system of majority rule rather than the Madisonian system that has given disproportionate power over the years to slave owners, agricultural economic interests, voters in small-population states, wealthy industrialists, and segregationists?
This summer, Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Robin Givhan reflected on the white protesters in Portland, particularly the “Wall of Moms.” “The Black protesters need allies. But it’s also possible to hate that need, the pitying sound of it, the way it overshadows Black achievement and agency, courage and eloquence.”
She also acknowledged the difficulty of being a white ally and asks:
Why would anyone want to take on that mantle [of white ally] anyway? There are so many ground rules for allyship that the list reads like a series of impossible tasks. Do not make yourself the center of the conversation, but embark on deep personal analysis to understand how you’ve benefited from systemic racism. Make it your goal to understand the issues important to members of marginalized communities, but do not badger folks in those communities with your questions. Recognize that you will make mistakes on the road to self-awareness, and own those mistakes, but also know that some mistakes will be unforgivable.
This African American dispenser of advice to white allies also acknowledged that “the confusing, perhaps contradictory advice on what white people should do probably feels maddening.”
Maddening indeed. Some of the reader comments on Givhan’s article offer insights into how the contemporary discourse on racial justice might do more to drive white people away from Black politics rather than make allies of them. I’ve been struck this summer while reading books about the history of the Civil Right Movement how worried black leaders back then were about a white backlash against their protests and the legislation it had inspired. King warned of the rise of a conservative movement on the wings of this backlash in a landmark speech to the AFL-CIO in 1961 and he included a chapter with the title "White Backlash" in his last book, Where do we Go from Here. Barry Goldwater’s capture of the Republican Party presidential nomination in 1964 was seen as an early sign of the backlash. Their worries, of course, turned out to be well-placed.
Cornel West and others raised similar concerns following the George Floyd protests. And in an interview with Thomas Chatterton Williams, white supremacist Richard Spencer said that the racial essentialism of Coates and contemporary leaders of the movement for racial justice was “the photographic negative” of white supremacist thinking on race and that “maybe those leftists will be the easiest ones to flip.” Williams concluded: “However far-fetched that may sound, what identitarians like Mr. Spencer have grasped, and what ostensibly anti-racist thinkers like Mr. Coates have lost sight of, is the fact that so long as we fetishize race, we ensure that we will never be rid of the hierarchies it imposes. We will all be doomed to stalk our separate paths.”
Another author addresses white allies in a way that seems more likely to advance the cause while avoiding backlash. Among other things, he recounts the history of white allies, some of whom died in the course of protesting for Black Americans' rights, and argues that they played an essential role in that cause. When I read this piece it had generated only 9 comments mostly dealing with the question of whether or not violence is justified. Givhan’s, damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t approach to white allies, meanwhile, generated over 900 comments.
Backlash is a problem related to political strategy—how can we win the fight?—but anti-racist educators are waging a moral crusade in which strategy seems to be irrelevant.
Teaching in the BLM era.
In a conversation with Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden a teacher describes herself as a “social justice teacher” who is engaged in “abolitionist teaching” or “teaching in the resistance.” She says: “We need our kids to know that they are absolutely a part of this movement to smash white supremacy,” and how to “fight police brutality while staying safe.”
A book I have cited often on this blog and that I view as the essential guide to teaching politics would seem to question this approach. The political teacher’s job is to provide students with a “nonpartisan political education,” and “develop their ability to deliberate” with fellow citizens that they disagree with. “Part of the ethical challenge of teaching about politics is determining where political education ends and partisan proselytizing begins” (Hess and McAvoy, 4). It is not always an easy line to draw when dealing with the history of race relations.
Hess and McAvoy get their philosophy of Democratic citizenship from the African-American classics scholar Daniel Allen, whose book, Talking to Strangers, is also a great inspiration for my teaching of history and politics at Exeter, and the book that every teacher in the country should read. In an article on demands for policing reform in her Washington Post column in June, Allen wrote:
We need not only the specific reforms to
policing but also a bold and comprehensive project to constitute a
healthy social contract. We need a project not so much of renewal but of
reinvention so that we might at last build a full, inclusive social
compact that empowers all and delivers effective and responsive
governance to an empowered citizenry. We need a new social contract
worthy of our recommitment to U.S. constitutional democracy and one
another.
She pointed to the recommendations of a report by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences which included the following items:
Build civic media to counteract the challenges introduced by social media.
Find
ways to tell our nation’s story that are honest about the past without
falling into cynicism and appreciative of the country’s accomplishments
without spinning into deification.
Increase
resources and resolve for community leadership, civic education and an
American culture of shared commitment to constitutional democracy and
one another.
Allen's approach is quite different from teaching students that they are "absolutely" part of any particular movement, but that they are citizens of a Democracy whose interests—material and ethical—are bound up with the interests of ALL of their fellow citizens.
A now retired Exeter English teacher expounded on this teaching ethos eloquently in a published piece 13 years ago, that has also been an inspiration for me. The whole piece is worth reading. But here is a key paragraph.
The most important change since my first days in the classroom, then, is that I am less concerned with whether our students are headed toward being liberals or conservatives; my stronger interest is in whether they are headed toward being engaged but open-minded citizens, as opposed to ideologically frozen partisans of any stripe. I hope their overall experience at the school will help them see, among other things, the deficiencies of so many national political arguments, where ideology and derision, reflexive political loyalties and transparent self-interest so often dominate campaign (and other) speeches, just as these anti-intellectual qualities also define many of the television programs that claim to offer analysis of public issue (David Weber, see notes, above for full reference.)
(Another former Phillips Exeter Academy teacher makes a similar case in a more recently published piece here.)
After Brown University administrators released a statement of support for the George Floyd protests, economics professor Glenn Loury wrote a response, saying the letter betrayed the university’s fundamental role by taking a partisan position on issues that are up for debate. “What I found most alarming, though, is that no voice was given to what one might have thought would be a university’s principal intellectual contribution to the national debate at this critical moment: namely, to affirm the primacy of reason over violence in calibrating our reactions to the supposed ‘oppression.’”
