“The opposite of racist isn't 'not racist.' It is 'anti-racist.' What's the difference? One endorses either the idea of a racial hierarchy as a racist, or racial equality as an anti-racist. One either believes problems are rooted in groups of people, as a racist, or locates the roots of problems in power and policies, as an anti-racist. One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an anti-racist. There is no in-between safe space of 'not racist.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist
Before expanding on the title of this post, I should make clear for the purposes of this post I am entertaining a definition of 'racism' as not 'anti-racist' as articulated by Ibram X. Kendi which I believe is the quote that also serves as a blurb on the back of the cover of his book; which I will disclose I haven't read because frankly nothing I have read or heard from Ibram X. Kendi inspires me to read on. This includes struggling through 3 or 4 pages of quotations on his Goodreads profile, which I will concede could be a case of structural/systemic/institutional racism promoting his least interesting and least inspiring quotes to the early pages.
That said, in composing this post, I am so indebted to the generosity of so many Black American thinkers for articulating in clearer prose and greater details so many thoughts, and often having pre-emptively trouble shot my own thinking. Though my own writing is disordered, I would not dream of stealing their thunder, and have made my every effort to credit them, link to their message and every effort not to strawman their arguments.
By contrast to Kendi, looking to a legal system, (in this instance as analogy, not to scrutinize for institutional racism) we can see charges like 'obstruction of justice' 'accessory...' 'accessory after the fact' 'conspiracy to...' 'criminal negligence' (which requires establishment of a duty of care) 'involuntary manslaughter' etc. a slew of distinct discrete charges which carry distinct discrete penalties that are neither mutually exclusive nor peripheral to a core or attempted crime.
I'll just say here now, that I reject the dichotomy, I don't believe that 'One endorses either the idea of a racial hierarchy as a racist, or racial equality as an anti-racist.' One doesn't have to endorse shit. One might be complicit, inadvertently or even an accessory after the fact, I read 'endorse' however as an affirmative act, in a society where legally, silence does not constitute consent.
As a non believer I really love these words attributed to Jesus (a POC) in his Sermon on the Mount:
"Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thorns, or figs from thistles? So, every sound tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears evil fruit. A sound tree cannot bear evil fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus you will know them by their fruits."
The Atheist-Agnostic perspective could use this passage and apply it to Jesus himself, or any other prophet (in other words: 'prophet' and 'false prophet' have thus far, proved synonyms). In this sense, by Kendi's own definitions, his works may be complicit, inadvertently in widening racial inequality, and therefore racist.
Anyway, my inference from the opening quotation (as at writing his first quotation listed on goodreads.com) sets up a classic 'you are either with us, or against us.' and it should be noted on the subject of racism, there's a 1. general problem of racism and 2. a specific school of thought, one among many that here is being asserted as an orthodoxy becoming 'you are either with us, or against them.' which I adapted from my favorite piece of fiction Catch-22:
"You're either for us or against your country. It's as simple as that." ~ spoken by Colonel Korn in text.
A tactic I perceived working (note the passive tense) for the Chinese Communist Party in response to protests during the lead up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. 'You are either with (the CCP) or against (the Chinese People)' [please note, this is not a quote but an illustration of principle.]
This dichotomy's work like a market monopoly, providing a single provider of absolution for an 'original sin' there are no alternatives to choose from, and hence it is the seller's market, not the buyer's.
“Critiquing racism is not activism. Changing minds is not activism. An activist produces power and policy change, not mental change. If a person has no record of power or policy change, then that person is not an activist.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist
“the only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it—and then dismantle it. The attempt to turn this usefully descriptive term into an almost unusable slur is, of course, designed to do the opposite: to freeze us into inaction.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist
Herein lies the expensiveness part of anti-racism, albeit the first quotation defines 'activism'. In the second I feel it is a reasonable inference that to be an anti-racist requires one to think constantly about race, talk constantly about it and dismantle it - presumably by producing power and policy changes.
You can watch Late Show Host Stephen Colbert, in the aftermath of George Floyd's Killing (Murder trial outcome pending) interviewing Ibram and see if you infer like I do in the early stages of the interview Stephen's careful and hesitant wording to avoid identifying himself as a racist.
“I believe that white progressives cause the most daily damage to people of color. I define a white progressive as any white person who thinks he or she is not racist, or is less racist, or in the “choir,” or already “gets it.” White progressives can be the most difficult for people of color because, to the degree that we think we have arrived, we will put our energy into making sure that others see us as having arrived. None of our energy will go into what we need to be doing for the rest of our lives: engaging in ongoing self-awareness, continuing education, relationship building, and actual antiracist practice. White progressives do indeed uphold and perpetrate racism, but our defensiveness and certitude make it virtually impossible to explain to us how we do so.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism (emphasis mine)
It is tempting to start delving into the process of making anti-racism coherent, or determine that it isn't. Or even get DiAngelo's take to cohere with Kendi's. But DiAngelo sets up an all-or-nothing dichotomy as well. By my limited understanding of DiAngelo's message, she would in fact welcome the feedback from Kendi that changing minds isn't activism. Unless policy and power change are contingent on changing minds, and squaring that with his book Antiracist Baby which distills and outlines the 9 steps required, the 9th of which seems to contradict the 1st and 2nd steps in the least.
I'm agnostic-skeptical towards the antiracist school, which means I am not convinced but I am open to convincing on this point. When I title this post 'it's never been cheaper to be racist' I am wearing two metaphorical hats.
The first is the metaphorical hat of my vestigial financial advisor/cost accountant. Most of the post that's the hat I'm wearing' but the other which deserves less time is the armchair military strategist hat, which deserves less time because I have less formal training in martial philosophy. So let's get it out of the way:
1. "You're either with us or against us." I understand to be a general recruitment strategy to force the neutral or undecided to join a cause. Generally translating into an escalation of commitment (time, energy, money etc.)
There is a strong correlation between this utterance and historical losers, and if not losers people we would now judge to be on the wrong side of history - Sarah Palin, George W Bush, Hillary Clinton, Benito Mussolini or conversely historical dictators like Julias Caeser (attributed by Cicero), Vladamir Lennin and Janos Kadar. It probably is a strategy that better serves incumbents, but it is so polarizing it has to be regarded as having a high risk of backfire.
And I do not have the scholarship of history to figure out how many times a history of military conflicts has turned on someone indifferent allowing an army to cross their lands, or failed to send reinforcements, or stood and watched on the top of the hill. There is some truth to this kind of binary, in logic for example you have the excluded middle and for example I am persuaded that a non-vote or 'protest vote' in an election is a de-facto vote for your least preferred outcome, but the binary/dichotomy has to be true, as it isn't in electoral systems like Australia has. Looking at the proverb 'for want of a nail' this proverb would hold true, provided it is the only inefficiency in an otherwise even contest.
I suspect in practice, there are many variables, multiple nails go missing, or a situation where a messenger for want of a horse could not deliver misinformation to a general enabling the battle to be won. Other concepts like 'with friends like these, who needs enemies?' can apply, or Pyrrhic victories - one can hurt one's own cause. Strategically an escalation statement like 'you're either with us, or against us.' may work, but it is least likely to work on some of the most valuable actors a cause can attract - the non-fanatical, thinking, skeptical, critical, self-controlled, independent and patient actors.
2. Social loafing is a documented thing, as is presenteeism, I would refer strategically though, that from a humanist/individualist approach sometimes what you need a specific person to do, to help a cause - is nothing at all.
You may have heard at some point the quotation 'The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.' (oft attributed to Edmund Burke) but by symmetry I feel it can equally be said that 'The only thing necessary for the triumph of good is that evil men do nothing.' and I make the basic observation (and I am by no means the first to do so) that a large part of what makes society safe (in those that are, but even those that aren't) is how often people pass up the opportunity to be horrible to each other.
3. There is of course another spanner to throw in the works, when considering strategy: intersectionality fortunately I have written about this one concept before, which though a few years old, still stands for me. (and somewhat anticipated the necessity of the term 'BIPOC') in brief, the incumbant power just needs to do the minimum to retain power, where those best positioned to revolt have to be perfect, rather than better.* And revolutions seem to go light on the details, I would encourage** every would be radical to make a pilgrimage to Trotsky's residence in Mexico City, also a museum and testimony to the tragedy of not thinking a revolution through.
(*To some extent, that is always mathematically going to be true. An oversimplification but there are less ways to be conservative than there are to be revolutionary, and particularly if conservatives value loyalty above other core values, we can expect that the left-wing will have more internal conflicts than the right. However, if we want progress those internal conflicts need to be fought and resolved - elsewise we tend to get a more conservative government and a shorter leash.)
(**On account of climate change, I would encourage people NOT to make a pilgramage to Trotsky's house. One should only do so in case of leading a revolution.)
So now I will don my vestigial financial advisor hat; Ibram's article for Washington Post's politico recommended to me by Coleman Hughes demonstrates one of my favorite objective manifestations of expensiveness: tampering. The article is incredibly short and were I to have written it after the age of 16... I would find it embarrassing (and you can judge my threshold by the quality of my blog). Embarrassing but illustrative.
"To fix the original sin of racism,[1] Americans should pass an anti-racist amendment to the U.S. Constitution that enshrines two guiding anti-racist principals: Racial inequity is evidence of racist policy[2] and the different racial groups are equals. The amendment would make unconstitutional racial inequity over a certain[3] threshold, as well as racist ideas by public officials (with “racist ideas” and “public official” clearly defined). It would establish and permanently fund the Department of Anti-racism (DOA) comprised of formally trained experts on racism and no political appointees.[4] The DOA would be responsible for preclearing[5] all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas.[6] The DOA would be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.[7]" ~ bracketed numbers added by me for reference.
1. 'Original sin' is expensive, think Greta Thunberg and her generation having to pick up the climate change tab accrued by the consumption decisions and voting priorities, of generations alive right now. When Greta emotes 'How dare you!' how many non-climate-change-denying people are thinking - no Greta, it's perfectly moral and ethical for you to foot the debt for the entire industrial revolution.
2. This mode of thinking appears very much in vogue right now. Racial inequity as evidence of racist policy is the open door to tampering. Having not read the pre-eminent Antiracist texts cover-to-cover, my limited understanding reads this as a fallacious affirming the consequent. Coleman Hughes provides examples in his open letter to Ibram X. Kendi and review of 'How to Be An Anti-racist'. Racism is a serious charge, and this is an incredibly low burden of proof.
3. 'certain' here needs defining, the smaller the threshold the more expensive this fix is. For example, to lower a high murder rate per 100,000 say 100, down to 20 might cost x where x is a lot of money. To go from 20 to 10 might cost another 2x which is to say it costs double to eradicate the next 10 per 100,000 people as it did to prevent the first 80, and to go from 10 to 0 might cost 5x. And again and always with this post, costs aren't just money. It could be costs in terms of expanding police powers, higher incarceration rates, less parole granted, less privacy, less civil rights etc.
4. Monopolies are expensive for the consumer, they are 'price maker' Again, what constitutes 'expertise' on racism needs defining. Presumably the author feels himself one. So this would be some certifying body that would be immune from political appointment or civilian oversight. Almost an explicit version of having the Chairman of the Federal Reserve be a former executive of Goldman Sachs, or whatever, but constitutional rather than some maladaptive tradition.
5. This is straight up tampering. You may have experienced it in a workplace when a particularly unimaginative manager's solution to every error is to 'ensure in the future procedure x is signed off by me.' or 'nothing happens without my approval!' which is kind of heroic, but generally results in a gradual accumulation of red-tape $10 solutions to $5 problems that gums up the smooth operation of the company until they pay through the nose for a consulting group to audit their processes and cut out all the tampering. The triumph of this suggestion is to insert itself into all policy decisions at every level of government and even branch into the private sector.
6. At which the scope and reach of the proposed DOA is so large that it emphasizes the monopoly power of the certified trainer of experts in racism for a permanently funded new department. It may as well have a 1:1 ratio of DOA staff to all public officials. At the point where basically no public official or government body can function without being pre-cleared by the DOA, I would like to compare the cost of running such a monopoly versus say, just writing every non-white citizen a cheque for USD$900,000.
7. The 'freedom to agree' keeping in mind Kendi's definition of racism, as reported by Ezra Klein of Vox who interviewed him:
"He defines the idea [racism] simply: support for policies that widen racial inequality."
Which means that somebody debating tariffs on imported Silicone Sex Toys needs to be thinking constantly about race if they hope to have their policy implemented. What would be really interesting is to see Kendi's evaluation of conservative professors Carol M. Swain's suggestion that legalized abortion widened/preserved racial inequality.
Of course there is much I would actually agree with Kendi on. Like that the problems he observes are structural in nature, and that we shouldn't focus on people but policy. I just don't see any necessity to think constantly about race.
Kendi's definitions in fact, appear almost wholly retrospective, almost articulating a post hoc ergo proctor hoc though I still suspect affirming the consequent is the fallacy at play. There's also seemingly an unworkable issue of scope, like how one, under Kendi's definitions, would characterise the Brown v Board of Education. (More thorough discussion of this very point here.)Simultaneous to my writing this post, the British Government released its Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities Report which found no evidence of structural/systemic racism in the UK (as opposed to finding no racism, or that there were no problems). Under Kendi's definition, such a report would be unnecessary as the "guiding anti-racist principals: Racial inequity is evidence of racist policy." (In this regard at least, anti-racism is inexpensive, but it's kind of like how DIY home surgery is inexpensive, or Witch trials are inexpensive.)
It appears possible to me that Kendi talks about a definition of racism that nobody actually cares about, in much the same way as compatabalists, I suspect, defend a definition of free will that nobody much cares about, and many Theist apologists via the ontological argument, teleogical argument, Kalam cosmological argument etc. defend a very abstract concept of God that believers don't actually care about. In my experience the function of these definitions is to allow a believer in A-Fully-Human,-Fully Sky-Daddy Trinity that telepathically hears their prayers and answers them, or a believer in a homunculus in their head that authors their thoughts and will, or a believer in racism being the air we breath permission to believe what they already do; without understanding or scrutiny.
I would simply suggest on the expense front, that if it is possible to be racist without ever: thinking about race, subscribing to the notion of race, having anything against any particular races or being consciously racist; it would follow that it is possible to be anti-racist without having to put any conscious effort into being anti-racist.
Pulling out that crucial but subtle point 'subscribing to the notion of race.' 'Racism' now has multiple definitions but one of the oldest I believe is:
the belief that different races possess distinct characteristics, abilities, or qualities, especially so as to distinguish them as inferior or superior to one another.
This is a point raised by Jacobin journalist Ariella Thornhill in her and Jen Pan's interview of Touré Reed, specifically 'how are you going to prove that you're black though?' (30 minute mark) because if race is a construct, addressing it through antiracist action requires a recognition of 'race' and in a Tarantino/Nolan style non-linearity Toure's earlier discussion of definitions (18 minute mark) I find insightful on the matter:
"Structural [/systemic] racism would be a construct that I think is not very helpful. And I think that the construct is not very helpful even though racism is real right because I have to stress that and there's no doubt about the fact that racism is real. I think the construct structural racism is not helpful because it is essentially wed to a kind of Patricia Bidol understanding of what racism is, and Patricia Bidol is the organizational psychologist that around 1970 or so came up with the power + prejudice definition of what racism is...that framework is a take on social constructiveness of race, and social constructiveness of race is right, right race isn't a biological category, it is a social category it is a social category that functions essentially to designate where people are in the political economy or the social heirarchy... but the power plus privilege [sic: prejudice] take on what racism is (that is an offshoot of social constructiveness of race) is problematic first because it takes race for granted, it sidesteps what race is; which is an ideological framework or set of ideological attachments. Racism would be, I would argue, the belief in biological races. Well power + prejudice doesn't even touch what that is. So you have that problem which sets the stage for essentializing race, but the other thing is that power + prejudice thing is that practically, where the rubber meets the road the power plus prejudice definition of what racism is really is an individualist framework..." ~ Toure Reed, transcribed by me, emphasis mine.
And the work, or at least quotations, of Robin DiAngelo, appear to concur with Reed's description:
“People of color may also hold prejudices and discriminate against white people, but they lack the social and institutional power that transforms their prejudice and discrimination into racism; the impact of their prejudice on whites is temporary and contextual. Whites hold the social and institutional positions in society to infuse their racial prejudice into the laws, policies, practices, and norms of society in a way that people of color do not. A person of color may refuse to wait on me if I enter a shop, but people of color cannot pass legislation that prohibits me and everyone like me from buying a home in a certain neighborhood.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism
Though near as I can discern, Robin DiAngelo appears to be dedicating all her time to an individualist framework/approach, for example:
"...But because of our society’s emphasis on individuality, many of us are unskilled at reflecting on our group memberships. To understand race relations today, we must push against our conditioning and grapple with how and why racial group memberships matter.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism
“I believe that white progressives cause the most daily damage to people of color. I define a white progressive as any white person who thinks he or she is not racist, or is less racist, or in the “choir,” or already “gets it.” White progressives can be the most difficult for people of color because, to the degree that we think we have arrived, we will put our energy into making sure that others see us as having arrived. None of our energy will go into what we need to be doing for the rest of our lives: engaging in ongoing self-awareness, continuing education, relationship building, and actual antiracist practice. White progressives do indeed uphold and perpetrate racism, but our defensiveness and certitude make it virtually impossible to explain to us how we do so.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism
“I was co-leading a workshop with an African American man. A white participant said to him, "I don't see race; I don't see you as black." My co-trainer's response was, "Then how will you see racism?" He then explained to her that he was black, he was confident that she could see this, and that his race meant that he had a very different experience in life than she did. If she were ever going to understand or challenge racism, she would need to acknowledge this difference. Pretending that she did not noticed that he was black was not helpful to him in any way, as it denied his reality - indeed, it refused his reality - and kept hers insular and unchallenged. This pretense that she did not notice his race assumed that he was "just like her," and in so doing, she projected her reality onto him. For example, I feel welcome at work so you must too; I have never felt that my race mattered, so you must feel that yours doesn't either. But of course, we do see the race of other people, and race holds deep social meaning for us.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism
and perhaps as an articulated justification for making 'structural/systemic' redundant prefixes to racism, i.e. 'systemic racism' is a synonym for 'racism':
“The simplistic idea that racism is limited to individual intentional acts committed by unkind people is at the root of virtually all white defensiveness on this topic.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism
One of my problems with Robin DiAngelo is that she appears to be a white person, and self described racist and white supremacist (she is a rare example of someone who's content is targeted at a market based on race) who has leveraged a history of racism and suffering, and present day racism (by Kendi's definition) to (reportedly) personally enrich herself; though the absence of evidence that she translates her financial success into closing any financial race-gaps is not evidence of absence. She may be modest. I'll assume since in the quotations I've read she has referred to co-leading diversity training with people of color that she still does this and they receive equal compensation to her.
Wearing my vestigial financial advisor hat, I do wish to draw attention to:
"None of our energy will go into what we need to be doing for the rest of our lives: engaging in ongoing self-awareness, continuing education, relationship building, and actual antiracist practice. White progressives do indeed uphold and perpetrate racism..."
and compare it to this gem from the little-understood-in-the-anglosphere-Islamic-thought passage from 13th Century Imam Dhahabi's interpretation of Islam in his work 'Major Sins' brought to my awareness by youtuber theramintrees:
"...one of you behaves like the people of paradise until there is but an arm's length between him and it, and that which has been written overtakes him."
The language may be esoteric/antiquated and I recommend watching the theramintrees video for context and a clear explanation of the principle (I've found it beyond the limits of my Googlefu to find a credible free English translation from Arabic from which to quote) the principle is the same as in the Christian doctrine of original sin and even closer to DiAngelo's take on white progressives - the work is never done, can never be done, to believe so is to relapse, just as according to Imam Dhahabi, to feel as though you have secured Allah's forgiveness in this life, is to invite Allah to make you sin.
One thing she has definitely done (though responsibility is widely misunderstood as something bad, rather than its literal meaning 'the ability to respond' as Gabor Mate points out in his works on addiction and trauma) is empower whites to the exclusion of people of color:
“It is white people’s responsibility to be less fragile; people of color don’t need to twist themselves into knots trying to navigate us as painlessly as possible.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism
and:
“In my workshops, I often ask people of color, “How often have you given white people feedback on our unaware yet inevitable racism? How often has that gone well for you?” Eye-rolling, head-shaking, and outright laughter follow, along with the consensus of rarely, if ever. I then ask, “What would it be like if you could simply give us feedback, have us graciously receive it, reflect, and work to change that behavior?” Recently a man of color sighed and said, “It would be revolutionary.” I ask my fellow whites to consider the profundity of that response. It would be revolutionary if we could receive, reflect, and work to change the behavior. On the one hand, the man’s response points to how difficult and fragile we are. But on the other hand, it indicates how simple it can be to take responsibility for our racism. However, we aren’t likely to get there if we are operating from the dominant worldview that only intentionally mean people can participate in racism.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism
As well as the aforementioned subscription to the 'prejudice + power' definition. This can lucidly be read as 'only the whites can save everyone else from racism.' and has by John McWhorter in his review for the Atlantic:
"I am not convinced. Rather, I have learned that one of America’s favorite advice books of the moment is actually a racist tract. Despite the sincere intentions of its author, the book diminishes Black people in the name of dignifying us. This is unintentional, of course, like the racism DiAngelo sees in all whites. Still, the book is pernicious because of the authority that its author has been granted over the way innocent readers think."
and:
We must consider what is required to pass muster as a non-fragile white person. Refer to a “bad neighborhood,” and you’re using code for Black; call it a “Black neighborhood,” and you’re a racist; by DiAngelo’s logic, you are not to describe such neighborhoods at all, even in your own head. You must not ask Black people about their experiences and feelings, because it isn’t their responsibility to educate you. Instead, you must consult books and websites. Never mind that upon doing this you will be accused of holding actual Black people at a remove, reading the wrong sources, or drawing the wrong lessons from them. You must never cry in Black people’s presence as you explore racism, not even in sympathy, because then all the attention goes to you instead of Black people. If you object to any of the “feedback” that DiAngelo offers you about your racism, you are engaging in a type of bullying “whose function is to obscure racism, protect white dominance, and regain white equilibrium.”
That is a pretty strong charge to make against people who, according to DiAngelo, don’t even conceive of their own whiteness. But if you are white, make no mistake: You will never succeed in the “work” she demands of you. It is lifelong, and you will die a racist just as you will die a sinner.
and:
DiAngelo does not see fit to address why all of this agonizing soul-searching is necessary to forging change in society. One might ask just how a people can be poised for making change when they have been taught that pretty much anything they say or think is racist and thus antithetical to the good. What end does all this self-mortification serve? Impatient with such questions, DiAngelo insists that “wanting to jump over the hard, personal work and get to ‘solutions’” is a “foundation of white fragility.” In other words, for DiAngelo, the whole point is the suffering. And note the scare quotes around solutions, as if wanting such a thing were somehow ridiculous.
A corollary question is why Black people need to be treated the way DiAngelo assumes we do. The very assumption is deeply condescending to all proud Black people. In my life, racism has affected me now and then at the margins, in very occasional social ways, but has had no effect on my access to societal resources; if anything, it has made them more available to me than they would have been otherwise. Nor should anyone dismiss me as a rara avis. Being middle class, upwardly mobile, and Black has been quite common during my existence since the mid-1960s, and to deny this is to assert that affirmative action for Black people did not work.
In 2020—as opposed to 1920—I neither need nor want anyone to muse on how whiteness privileges them over me. Nor do I need wider society to undergo teachings in how to be exquisitely sensitive about my feelings. I see no connection between DiAngelo’s brand of reeducation and vigorous, constructive activism in the real world on issues of import to the Black community. And 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.
So rest assured DiAngelo is criticized by her fellow whites, UK comedian Andrew Doyle comes to mind, as well as critical theory critic James Lindsay-Taylor and Helen Pluckrose. And what of it? So a white woman is racist and pocketing fistfulls of cash obtained from a structure that has that cash because it is structurally racist?
On that last thought, my vestigial financial advisor or perhaps armchair martial philosopher or both or cynicism are naturally suspicious as to why Identity politics has been embraced by Neoliberal politicians like Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden (but notably, not Barack Obama) I suspect but cannot prove, the appeal to large mainstream political parties, is because it is cheap. Particularly DiAngelo's take, is cheap in the same way as for conservatives having a voter that is a single issue voter, is cheap to maintain. If one cannot vote one way because that would make them a racist, or the other way because it would make them complicit in baby-murder, then they can be neglected in every other dimension they should care about. Because what you gonna do? Throw your vote away?
As a progressive 'racist' it is much more expensive for a left wing party to secure your vote. They may have to have an adequate response to climate change, or policy that increases job security, or policy that makes housing affordable etc.
Let me refocus on how expensive it is to be anti-racist, even if between DiAngelo and Kendi, it is ambiguous as to what that is. It involves acknowledging yourself as a racist (DiAngelo), and then if your 'activism' results in a widening racial-inequity (Kendi) then you are a racist. Presumably somewhere within 'How to be an anti-racist' (or 'Antiracist Baby') Kendi explains a bulletproof way to be antiracist; but the kind of diversity training DiAngelo practices tends to be counter-productive (or in Kendi's definition, 'racist'):
Despite purported and intended benefits, systematic studies have not shown benefits to diversity training and instead show that they backfire and lead to reductions in diversity and to discrimination complaints being taken less seriously.[7][8][9]
Compounding with Torre Reed's earlier point that this is an individualistic framework, converting one person at a time, with a very labor intensive approach to attempt to address unconscious bias that is put upon the attendees. Let us assume that even best case scenario, the process is not efficient - which is to say that if DiAngelo represents the top of the Diversity Training Game, I imagine DiAngelo 'converts' less than 100% of her audience, (straight up rejections, not accounting for false positives through social proof, pluralistic ignorance, spiral of silence, reaction formation, preference falsification or that reframing identifying as 'racist' as per White Fragility reframes the social desirability bias)
Compounding the conversion rate would be the maintainence rate, consider by analogy if your company shelled out for a 'Staff Health and Wellness' retreat and over the course of a day or two, various experts explained that what staff needed to do was acknowledge their own unhealthiness and then eat right and exercise, every day, for the rest of their lives (and raise their children to maintain this discipline also) and then disappeared off to the next staff retreat at the next corporation. What in your estimation would be the % of staff you expect to, having acknowledged their bad habits and their own poor health, then go on to maintain disciplines of good health?
Which is a generous analogy, because health and nutrition is on much more solid footing than 'unconscious bias' again something that meta-analysis of the implicit association test is of questionable validity and value. Coleman Hughes provides a good run down if you can't be bothered reading.
I am a fan of youtuber Theramintrees whom in his video about pseudoscience provides a simplifying heuristic:
"Pseudoscience seems irresistibly drawn to the concept of 'the unconscious'. I'm not a fan of the term. I prefer to use 'things we do outside of our awareness' this puts the focus on things we do, which anchors the discussion in observable material. When we start talking about 'the unconscious', and speculating on 'what it's trying to tell us' we're already starting with a dubious, assumption-laden metaphor."
He also addresses directly the IAT here.
Again, 'epistemic exclusion' is its whole own (and for me-morbidly fascinating) post, however this post is about the historically low price-point of racism and the historically high-price of anti-racism. Hopefully my vestigial financial advisor has impressed upon the naive clients in my vestigial office thus far that it is a time and energy intensive investment that demands of individuals society wide results through a transformative constant maintenance of their unconscious, that guarantees no results - whether you are talking DiAngelo's (founding assumption), or Kendi's (practical matter).
There's more costs though, being an anti-racist is incredibly expensive, and not in the sense that paying one's debts is expensive, but as in - luxury item expensive. We are all a google away from finding resources and how-to-guides, of the practical approach to being an anti-racist (Kendi's activist definition aside) Here is one, and here is another. This in my travels is an oft cited resource '103 things White People can do for racial justice' from which I have, no doubt cherry picked some highlights, I will also exercise the principle of charity and assume that the expectation is that people do as much as they can, and that something is better than nothing, rather than having a moral obligation to do all 103 items (pending next update):
Stand outside of the stores from #17 with a sign that reads “[Company] uses prison labor” even if for 30 mins a few times a month.
Find and join a local “white space” to learn more about and talk out the conscious and unconscious biases us white folks have. If there’s not a group in your area, start one.
Join your local Showing up for Racial Justice (SURJ) group. There is a lot of awesome work going on locally — Get involved in the projects that speak to you.
Do deep canvassing about race and racial justice. Many SURJ groups are organizing them, so many people can do it through your local SURJ group. If they’re not already doing it, start it.
Research your local prosecutors. Prosecutors have a lot of power to give fair sentences or Draconian ones, influence a judge’s decision to set bail or not, etc. In the past election, a slew of fair-minded prosecutors were elected. We need more.
Understand and share what “defund the police” really means. It’s about a new, smarter approach to public safety, wherein we demilitarize the police and allocate resources into education, social services, and other root causes of crimes. What we’re doing now isn’t working — There are so many innocent people who have been harassed or killed by the police unjustly, and nearly every Black American has experienced some form of harassment by the police. Some good resources for this are this video by BLM , this Washington Post article and this Facebook post.
Don’t be silent about that racist joke. Silence is support.
(Which ties back to Kendi's surrendering of neutrality or passivity to racism in the quote that opened this post. I feel it worth noting that silence does not constitute consent in a legal sense and silence being consent, tacit support etc. runs contrary to movements addressing positive consent/affirmative consent in the domain of sexual abuse/assault etc.)
Returning though to the flawed-as-all-analogies-are analogy of being told you need to exercise and eat right for the rest of your life (and also raise healthy children, and potentially intervene in the health of other peoples children) we might expect (as in probability) that the most successful members of the audience at attaining health might be the ones that go on to recruit a personal trainer, a personal nutritionist a private chef etc. coming to the mindfield of 'which voices' we need to listen and learn from:
Listen without ego and defensiveness to people of color. Truly listen. Don’t scroll past articles written by people of color — Read them.
Follow Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi, Alicia Garzia, bell hooks, Luvvie Ajayi, Melissa Harris-Perry, Van Jones, Ava DuVernay, thenewjimcrow, Laverne Cox, DeRay Mckesson, Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, Ibram X. Kendi, and Killer Mike. Follow them with the intention of listening and learning only.
Seek out a diverse group of friends for your kids.
Seek out a diverse group of friends for you. Practice real friendship and intimacy by listening when POC talk about their experiences and their perspectives. They’re speaking about their pain.
Watch these videos to hear first hand accounts of what our Black brothers and sisters live. Then read everyday people’s experiences through the hashtag #realizediwasblack. Watch the rules Tik Tok user @skoodupcam’s mother makes him follow just so he comes home each night. Share with others.
Which again the temptation to deal with the juicy subject of epistemic exclusion arises in me, but to focus on expense I am going to presume this is a curated list, and thus subject to confirmation bias. One of the suggestions of the (45 of 103) 'Decolonize your bookshelf' unfortunately appears to be a link to a defunct facebook post but I assume it is along the lines of the suggestions immediately above.
One of the most expensive things returns to the question posed (but not the first to pose it) of 'how are you going to prove that you're black though?' which initially was on the question of reparations (Ta Nahesi Coates' case for reparations refers to a bill HR 40 that is to research the practical questions of reparations, rather than implement reparations) but can also apply to what lived experiences count and which don't.
If one listens to a POC that happen to be: Thomas Sowell, Glenn Loury, John McWhorter, Ayishat Akanbi, Trevor Phillips, Coleman Hughes, Amy Chua, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Desi-Rae, John Wood, Calvin Robinson, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Inaya Folarin Iman, Katherine Birbalsingh, Erec Smith... (this list is by no means exhaustive) one might discover a heterodox, suggesting that we cannot accept the notion that there is a 'group experience'. Or having to fall back on 'well these exceptions prove the rule.'
Taking the example of Killer Mike, I do not know exhaustively his no doubt various political stands, but one of the most ubiquitous points of access for white people to listen to the black experience is music. Rap is a music genre laden with political content, among other content. I single out Killer Mike because he is a rapper, and rap illustrates the expense of curating the POC experience: Why Killer Mike and not Ice Cube? NWA? Dr Dre? Nelly? Snoop Dog? Salt N Pepa? En Vogue? Nicki Minaj? Cardi B? Run DMC? TLC? 2 Live Crew? Black Sheep? Notorious BIG? Missy Elliot? DMX? Eve? Tupak Shakur? A Tribe Called Quest? De La Soul? The Pharcyde? Kool Keith? Soulja Boy? Kriss Kross? Tyler the Creator? KRS One? Biz Markee? Lil' Kim? Lil' Wayne? Common? Mos Def? Del Tha Funkee Homosapien? Lauryn Hill? The Fugees? Pharell Monche? The Fatboys? LL Cool J? Nas? Lil Nas? Lil Bow Wow? Young MC? Rage Against the Machine? Cypress Hill? Public Enemy? Jay Z? Kanye West?
One can compound this problem by moving from the level of artist to the level of tracks. Part of white privilege is to have a long history of recognizing the worlds of difference between Biden and Trump, JFK and Nixon, Mitch McConnel and Nancy Pelosi, Joseph Stalin and Hitler, Elizabeth and Mary Tudor, Vlad Tepes and Mehmed II, Marcus-Aurelius and Commodus, Julius Caesar and Cato the Younger, Athens and Sparta, the Greeks and Troy etc.
This blog post by Randall Kennedy demonstrates as a 'colorblind' person might assume, that Black Americans also have viewpoint diversity, and a long history of it. Also Brittney Talissa King's essay on Tablet whose conclusion I find quite moving:
Four hundred years ago, everyone mentioned on the above list would’ve been murdered, because books and pens were criminalized in our ancestor’s hands. These laws weren’t only used to take hostage their ability to read and write, but to keep independent thinking captive. Literacy was a fatal crime, because once a slave could critically think they became dangerous, and therefore were better off dead. A literate slave could easily construct an argument justly opposing their captivity even against a manipulated doctrine proclaiming they weren’t human. And this is why I make a case for Black freedom of thought—an unconditional stance no matter if the next idea challenges mine.
President Joe Biden said during his Presidential run "If you have a problem figuring out whether you're for me or Trump, then you ain't black." which caused a minor controversy and attracted criticism.
This conditional validity of a group identity is something Douglas Murray articulates in his book Madness of Crowds:
“you are only a member of a recognized minority group so long as you accept the specific grievances, political grievances and resulting electoral platforms that other people have worked out for you. Step outside of these lines and you are not a person with the same characteristics you had before but who happens to think differently from some prescribed norm. You have the characteristics taken away from you.”
― Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity
I have seen Douglas in interviews cite the specific examples of Peter Thiel having his homosexual/queer identity revoked by some actors for supporting Trump over Hillary, and Kanye West for his vocal support of Trump reflected upon by Ta Nahesi Coates here: (Nahesi is a beautiful writer, perhaps to the detriment of many of his readers, like Freud, or Christopher Hitchens...)
"West calls his struggle the right to be a “free thinker,” and he is, indeed, championing a kind of freedom—a white freedom, freedom without consequence, freedom without criticism, freedom to be proud and ignorant; freedom to profit off a people in one moment and abandon them in the next; a Stand Your Ground freedom, freedom without responsibility, without hard memory; a Monticello without slavery, a Confederate freedom, the freedom of John C. Calhoun, not the freedom of Harriet Tubman, which calls you to risk your own; not the freedom of Nat Turner, which calls you to give even more, but a conqueror’s freedom, freedom of the strong built on antipathy or indifference to the weak, the freedom of rape buttons, pussy grabbers, and fuck you anyway, bitch; freedom of oil and invisible wars, the freedom of suburbs drawn with red lines, the white freedom of Calabasas."
So anybody hoping to exploit the loophole of Robin DiAngelo and other self-identified anti-racists' need to listen to POCs by coddling up to Coleman Hughes or Glenn Loury or John McWhorter and numerous others; who like the doctors of the 60s and 70s that invented medical conditions for draft dodgers, can write an exemption from the considerable costs of anti-racism. And here for your interest is a video I stumbled upon explaining why Coleman Hughes is not to be trusted, also Coleman Hughes has released videos responding to his most common criticisms, where he addresses his lack of the true 'lived experience'. Presumably also this can be applied to the diverse composition of the UK's commission on racial inequality (bar one, who is a white man) or the historically diverse make up of Boris Johnson's conservative cabinet.
This opens up two paths to which being racist is incredibly cheap by the pricing of anti-racist ideology, there is the restrictions on the market place of ideas and the cost of curating it - one must suspend one's own critical faculties, including one's own lived experience and only purchase ideas from pre-approved vendors. You may as an anti-racist find yourself even as a white person having to attack people of color, straining your mind reading abilities to attack their 'internalized white supremacy', or 'their enacting whiteness.' (that linked article I find an amazing example of the cognitive distortion 'always being right' but also demonstrates the cost of keeping up with the jargon necessary to maintain membership, eg. the 103 things white people can do has #26 find and join a "white space" where, the NYT article cites Yale sociologist Elijah Anderson using a term "the white space" the former presumably is good - a safe whites only space for whites to be open about their racism without fear of reprisal? - the latter bad.)
Personally this argument for the censure of certain black voices reminds me of Ben Franklin's reflection on Theists handing him anti-Deist literature:
My Parents had early given me religious Impressions, and brought me through my Childhood piously in the Dissenting Way. But I was scarce 15 when, after doubting by turns of several Points as I found them disputed in the different Books I read, I began to doubt of Revelation itself. Some Books against Deism fell into my Hands; they were said to be the Substance of Sermons preached at Boyle's Lectures. It happened that they wrought an Effect on me quite contrary to what was intended by them: For the Arguments of the Deists which were quoted to be refuted, appeared to me much Stronger than the Refutations. In short I soon became a thorough Deist.
Or Nietzsche:
“The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.”
Albeit, I have seen no evidence that arguments are deliberately bad. But the religious sentiment of 'if your heart is pure then you can do no wrong', doesn't hold up in practice. Own-goals exist.
In that from a skeptical standpoint, 'I don't know' the claims made by anti-racists are often made so poorly they have the opposite of the intended effect. They do not make me want to grab a tiki-torch and chant against Jews, but more-so that they serve to convince me of the Humanist/MLK approach where racism doesn't need to be countered, it needs to be arrested.
And though I cannot find it quoted, my memory of Jung Chang's Wild Swans recalls the embattled and failing Manchuoko government urged the civilians to resist the communist invasion but that it was very hard to feel antipathy to the much better behaved/impeccably mannered communist soldiers. (My memory can fail, it may have been a completely different book).
In the list of 103 suggestions, I will assume that of the numerous pre-approved books to read and discuss with friends, and pre-approved movies and tv-shows (many of which I have seen) to watch and discuss with friends - one is free to come to one's own conclusions about the materials - for example offer an opinion like 'I see they have identified a real problem, the author has interesting ideas but I cannot accept the diagnosis and feel there are better remedies.' without being excised from the group for heresy.
One's status as an anti-racist is fluid, yesterday's Guru may be burned as today's heretic.
“One line of King's speech in particular - that one day he might be judged by the content of his character and not the color of his skin - was seized upon by the white public because the words were seen to provide a simple and immediate solution to racial tensions: pretend that we don't see race, and racism will end. Color blindness was now promoted as the remedy for racism, with white people insisting that they didn't see race or, if they did, that it had no meaning to them.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism
I am possibly projecting a lifetime of experience of being presented with arguments for some theistic belief that were assumed to be impressive and persuasive, and that stunned the apologist when they failed neither to impress nor persuade.
Bringing me to the other expensive factor in antiracism - risk. There is for sure, much of value, much that I have found of value reading through excerpts, quotations, articles on anti-racism. So often with disagreements there are shared values, perhaps even shared diagnostics but differing prescriptions.
But the censure of heretical, or heterodox opinions - even covert censorship through curation, or simply a refusal to engage with one's critics so much as dismiss them, carries risks for the people that believe in you. (Ta Nahesi Coates is a notable exception, I have watched his conversation with John McWhorter)
"It has become a sarcastic proverb that a thing must be true if you saw it in a newspaper. That is the opinion intelligent people have of that lying vehicle in a nutshell. But the trouble is that the stupid people–who constitute the grand overwhelming majority of this and all other nations–do believe and are moulded and convinced by what they get out of a newspaper, and there is where the harm lies."... "That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditching and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism on their way to the poorhouse."
– Mark Twain "License of the Press" speech, 1873
And mark Twain is pro-revolutionaries, but the risk that is posed to anti-racists in the limits of my imagination are exactly those of the subprime mortgage crisis in 2008 (or contemporarily Bitcoin, again):
The money came raining down, and for the first time, the banker went from the country club to the strip club. Pretty soon, stocks and savings were almost inconsequential. They were doing $50, $100, $200 billion in mortgage bonds and dozens of other securities a year, and America barely noticed as its number one industry became boring old banking. And then, one day, almost 30 years later, in 2008, it all came crashing down. In the end, Lewis Ranieri's mortgage-backed security mutated into a monstrosity that collapsed the whole world economy, and none of the experts or leaders or talking heads had a clue it was coming. I'm guessing most of you still don't really know what happened. Yeah, you got a soundbite you repeat so you don't sound dumb, but come on. But, there were some who saw it coming. While the whole world was having a big old party, a few outsiders and weirdos saw what no one else could. Not me. I'm not a weirdo, I'm pretty fucking cool, but we'll meet again later. These outsiders saw the giant lie at the heart of the economy, and they saw it by doing something the rest of the suckers never thought to do: They looked.
This is the risk posed by presenting false dichotomies of 'you're either with us or against us', or more likely movements (in financial markets, or social movements on social media) that are based on esteem, FOMO, belonging etc.
Dangle a choice between 'racist' and 'anti-racist' and the choice seems obvious, what need is there of scrutiny? fact checking? critical thinking? Marketing and advertising legends Al Ries and Jack Trout wrote ad nauseum in 'Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind' that you cannot go against 'what everybody knows' and in this sense anti-racism is brilliant marketing, because everybody knows racism is bad.
I suspect that 'anti-racism' carries the risk of proving to be 'just-more-racism' but it may take 30 years to find out, in some watershed moment. Because anti can mean 'opposed to/against' like 'anti-fascist' 'anti-theist' 'anti-freeze' 'anti-defamation' but it can also read as 'opposite' as in 'antithesis' 'anticlockwise' 'antigravity' 'antivenom' and 'reverse racism'.
Even the names of the four Ministries by which we are governed exhibit a sort of impudence in their deliberate reversal of the facts. The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy; they are deliberate exercises in DOUBLETHINK. For it is only by reconciling contradictions that power can be retained indefinitely. In no other way could the ancient cycle be broken. ~ George Orwell, 1984
The core question glossed over by Kendi's definition, is that of whether racism needs to stop -"an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind", or needs to achieve an equilibrium - "an eye for an eye". That's a debate. but the debate would permit of a position for 'Colorblindness' and not in Robin DiAngelo's understanding/misunderstanding, but more as Coleman Hughes understands and explains it to white people who have failed to listen to Martin Luther King Jr.
Where Twain can explain how the risk arises, John Stuart Mill probably explains best why this risk is posed:
He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion.
Ch. II: Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion (emphasis mine)
Most commonly, this is how banal, ordinary people wind up losing their retirement savings, or buying into a market at its peak just in time for the crash, or having their house collapse into the ocean, or burned down in a wildfire, or sign over their estate to a cult, because a position seems so obvious (or the contrary view has been marginalized, 'outsiders and weirdos') they fail to understand what position they are actually taking. But with lesser historical frequency, this is likely how ordinary, banal people can wind up participating in Jewish Pogroms, Dekulakization, the Terror, the Third Reich and Final Solution, the Cultural Revolution and struggle sessions, lynch mobs, Witch Trials, McCarthyism, and the Satanic Panic etc.
A trope of anti-racism or at least the present times is the 'Racist Uncle at Thanksgiving' or Christmas outside of North America, that I will presume most people fear in some part, becoming one day. But this I feel is the risk posed by signing up to anti-racism without scrutiny. You may discover that your kids or grandkids describe you as 'just plain racist'.
The risk though, is possibly greater, not on a 30 year horizon, but following a different historical trend: The Spanish inquisition was a greater threat to Catholic Converts than it was to non-Catholics, Stalinism was more like to effect the citizens of the USSR than those outside it, The Chinese Communist Party is more threatening to citizens of China than non-citizens, Islamic Fundamentalism and ISIS is more dangerous for Middle-East Muslims than it is for Europeans or Americans. The US and Commonwealth nations, uniquely are institutions that pose more threat to other nations than its own citizens. Which leads me to speculate that everything a person may fear from being labelled a 'racist' - ostracism, public shaming/humiliation etc. is more likely to occur if you attempt to be an antiracist and join antiracist circles than if you abstain and make no effort at all.
The costly risks of 'narcissism of small differences' or that the group you join may resemble a dominance hierarchy - where there's an incentive to tear down the leader by denouncing them as a racist, and simultaneously an incentive for the leader to pre-emptively denounce others as racist as a purge.
Which is the thing behind this 'with us or against us' set up by Kendi, the expense of being 'anti-racist' defacto renders Kendi's definition of 'racism' incredibly cheap. From movies like 'O Brother Where Art Thou' I can picture situations where it might be dangerous to be denounced by racists as 'integrated' but that's the historical price of being a racist, not the current price; The current price can label me or anyone a racist, and it carries no obligations to behave as a racist, where antiracism does.
I should at some point switch to expounding just how cheap it is to be racist at current market prices: this poem by James Fitzpatrick that made the rounds a while ago on social media that I like, helps illustrate the point. here's an excerpt:
I Woke Up
and it was political.
I made coffee and the coffee was political.
I took a shower and the water was.
I walked down the street in short shorts and a Bob Mizer tank top
and they were political, the walking and the shorts and the beefcake
silkscreen of the man posing in a G-string. I forgot my sunglasses
and later, on the train, that was political,
when I studied every handsome man in the car.
Who I thought was handsome was political.
Though the author by my inference is referring to the politics of sexuality; one could substitute into James Fitzpatrick's poem 'oppressive' for 'political' and with a substituted identity and lacking the eloquence of a poet, it helps me at least appreciate the efficiency of oppressing in this all-or-nothing-with-us-or-against-us attitude.
I woke up and it was oppressive. I had breakfast and that was oppressive. I watched cartoons and that was oppressive. I walked to work and that was oppressive. At lunch I ate alone and that was oppressive. I answered the phone and that was oppressive...
And so forth and so on. My interpretation of the original 'I Woke Up' poem was a commentary on the politicization of someone's very identity. I do not know if it is in support of, or satirizes, identity politics in general. Personally for me I view any politicization of any aspect of a person they have no control over unacceptable.
Times were however, that being racist required some positive act. It probably also required intent. In the current climate, or perhaps more accurately, by the adopted definition of a group of activists, one can be racist without actually subscribing to a belief in races or essentializing race. One can be racist living a life where race/ethnicity etc. are simply irrelevant to every single decision you make. One can be a racist and have a diverse group of friends, marry and have children across race lines. Most importantly one can be racist and stay at home and mind their own business.
No longer is there a requirement for racists to actually persecute or discriminate against people on the basis of race, to even think about race. Where by contrast to be antiracist requires that one think almost exclusively about race, to see racism everywhere and act to disrupt and dismantle it and as per Coleman Hughes' review of 'How to be an Antiracist', and open letter to Ibram X. Kendi participate actively in discrimination based on race:
What Kendi lacks in empirical rigor he makes up for in candor. Whereas many antiracists dance awkwardly around the fact that affirmative action is a racially discriminatory policy, Kendi says what they probably believe but are too afraid to say: namely, that “racial discrimination is not inherently racist.” He continues:
"The defining question is whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity. If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist. If discrimination is creating inequity, then it is racist. . . . The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination."
Insofar as Kendi’s book speaks for modern antiracism, then it should be praised for clarifying what the “anti” really means. Fundamentally, the modern antiracist movement is not against discrimination. It is against inequity, which in many cases makes it pro-discrimination.
The term 'racist' in other words now includes people who do not believe in a biological race, do not subscribe to the concept of race, do not believe white people are superior, judge people by the content of their character and deplore and oppose people whose behavior conforms to the historical definition of racist. A 'racist' furthermore, can be someone who engages in dialogue, and treats both themselves and others with equal respect, contrary to an antiracist who must remedy past discrimination with present discrimination.
In my orientation week at International House, we were subjected to a lecture by a consultant whose credentials I cannot recall and whom I never saw again. One of the topics he covered was about discrimination, including definitions I have not revised to this day. With the understanding that these reflect the jurisdiction of Victoria, Australia, discrimination is limited to anything a person either cannot change (race) or cannot change easily (weight), with some exceptions like tattoos.
I recall him pointing out an aspect of discrimination that I found insightful. The scenario was going to a bar with a friend who was not white, where we were white, and being told by the bouncer that I (the white) could gain entry but my friend was not welcome. He pointed out that both people were being discriminated against, not just my friend, but also me, because I was not able to drink and enjoy a pleasant evening with my friend. Now there's ample opportunity to miss the point, which is that it is not that the white person's discrimination is greater, but that the discrimination is against more than just the explicit target.
The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it.
If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth:
if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier
impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. ~John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
And so a 'racist' can actually permit all points of view, all arguments, all speakers to be heard. But say I am attending an antiracist diversity training seminar, along with a friend and colleague that happens to be a BIPOC, and the moderator/leader of the seminar makes some point that I question. I am encouraged to limit my participation to listening and learning, keep my questions to myself by the moderator. But my BIPOC friend and colleague would like to hear my point of view, and see where it takes the session. In this scenario, not only am I the recipient of discriminatory behavior, justified as a present remedy to past discrimination, but my BIPOC friend is discriminated against because they are robbed of my contribution that would likely either result in either a) exchanging error for truth, or b) a clearer perception and livelier impression of the truth.
To be fair, DiAngelo speaks of a continuum, rather than a binary, and she may revise and update 'White Fragility' in light of treating Kendi's later publication 'How To Be An Antiracist' as feedback, a listening and learning opportunity. (She is slated to release a new book 'Nice Racism: How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm' in coming months, which could be her self reflection on how after reading Kendi's book she realized White Fragility, her book, is how progressive white people perpetuate racial harm.) And Kendi, may have submitted a manuscript titled 'How To Be Antiracist' and the publisher demanded it be changed to 'How To Be An Antiracist' insisting it be pitched as an identity, not a behavior against Kendi's wishes.
"I wanted to talk to Kendi because he is a thought leader in the modern anti-racist movement, and because his work is often pointed to as the solution to America's ongoing race problem. The CEO of twitter donated $10 million dollars to Kendi's center for anti-racist research., so many important and influential people seem to think that Kendi's work is enormously valuable and that his ideas should be spread as widely as possible. Yet Kendi has never engaged with his critics and that's why I wanted to talk to him; if he was in the habit of engaging with alternative viewpoints with folks like: John McWhorter, Glenn Loury or Thomas Chatterton Williams... really anybody, then I wouldn't have made such a big deal of this. But he doesn't engage with any criticism of his views, which is a cardinal sin if you're claiming to be a serious thinker. And this is a wider problem among so-called anti-racist intellectuals, it's difficult to find a single prominent anti-racist that will talk to the people I've mentioned.There are exceptions of course; Ta Nahesi Coates for example would frequently get into back-and-fourth with people like Andrew Sullivan, back in their blogging days and he had a conversation with John McWhorter at bloggingheads as well, and that gave the public an opportunity to see his ideas in competition with alternatives, but he's the exception that proves the rule here. Can you imagine any great intellectuals, left, right or center, never engaging with their most prominent critics? Can you picture Baldwin or Buckley or Chomsky or Hitchens going their entire careers without ever engaging their critics? Well, Kendi is being praised on that level by our culture right now so it's time that someone holds him to account for his ideas." ~transcribed excerpt from Coleman Hughes' update
This phenomena, of not engaging critics, (which Glenn Loury and John McWhorter discuss here, though they can only present hearsay) I regard counterintuitively as expensive - for the aforementioned risk factors ^^^ of discovering down the road, that you are 'just a racist' but on the surface this may appear cheap. The asymmetry, that I have experienced first hand is not 'I will read your book, but you won't read mine.' (Which does happen, typically because you don't need to, because you already "know" what it says.) and this does happen, regularly, to me, where I will not be presented with an answer to my query, nor an argument to substantiate an assertion, but a requirement that I read some tome, article or essay, and I have the leisure time to oblige. The asymmetry in my experience is greater though when I discover that the required reading is uncompelling or even contradicts a position, it becomes 'I will read your book, and you won't even read your own.'*
(*The Atheist Experience on Youtube has an extensive backlog of examples of this, as Theist after Theist discovers that the Bible does not endorse the moral positions they assume it did.)
In this sense, being 'antiracist' is cheap, but it requires redefining, now 'antiracist' doesn't mean what Kendi or DiAngelo mean, as in requiring actual work, but more in the sense of self-identification. This is to take DiAngelo's definition of White Progressive - not a racist, someone who 'get's it', 'the choir' - and rebranding that 'antiracist'.
Cheap, like getting a drug on the market with no clinical trials, or like getting an article published with no pear review. Of all the things I hope becomes dated in this post after publishing, it would be that the Youtube challenge of trying to find a single example of Ibram X. Kendi engaging a critic, or Robin DiAngelo engaging a critic, becomes a turkey shoot. As at writing it holds true.
I will concede, there is an asymmetry, martially speaking, when somebody with everything to lose engages someone with everything to gain, it's a stupid risk. Like Apollo Creed fighting Rocky Balboa for example. It could be said that both Kendi, DiAngelo and particularly Coates has a bigger profile than Hughes, Loury, McWhorter etc. But I would point to the 'Five Horsemen' of the New Athiests: Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, Harris and Hirsi Ali engaging apologists like Frank Turek, Dinesh D'Souza, William Lane Craig, Majid Nawaz, John Lennox etc. who may be big fish in apologetics but have much lower profiles than the atheists. Or Jordan Peterson's willingness to sit down with BBC4 News, Vice media, GQ and most recently the Times.
To a lesser extent, I hope the 103 things White people can do list also updates and leaves this post outdated. Expanded to include some heterodox reading material in the curated lists, rather than aiding and abetting thought leaders in avoiding all scrutiny and stress testing.
If you've come this far, take a moment to think of historical examples, where the people on the correct side of history refused to/declined to answer their critics.
My feeling is that it is very cheap for the thought leaders, to skip the defence of their ideas, and subsequently this is expensive for the consumers.
This is speculation, and I can't find good stats on book sales, but in the wake of George Floyd's killing books that had been in print for two years, shot to the top 5 bestseller list. And I can corroborate that during the 2020 lockdown my local bookstores 'bestseller' list reflected this list in Victoria, Australia, I'll offer just two potential explanations for this sales phenomena.
The first is that the killing of George Floyd was so graphically shocking that they declared 'enough is enough' and sought to read deeply and widely on the issue so they could make an informed and meaningful difference, and end racism once and for all.
The second scenario is that a bunch of people sought an indulgence, a quick absolution of the very kind, ironically, Robin DiAngelo describes and criticizes in White Fragility, or Ta Nahesi Coates 'white freedom' that Kanye West is accused of seeking.
Antiracism is expensive, if done 'right', on account of it being a monopoly, of being demanding, of being high risk with almost no returns beyond a believing in a cure if just everyone got on board. It may be cheap in terms of the demands on critical faculties, or even having to do anything beyond pledge allegiance, but that might be where many have found that they've been doing it wrong, and served to do nothing but censure valuable allies and cultivate in them antipathy for institutions.
It is likely very cheap for governments and corporations, as an indulgence. Where Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey can write a cheque for $10 million (0.07% of his net worth, the equivalent of the median Black household in the US donating $25 or less) and Late Show Hosts can book a credible guest to discuss how 'this has to stop' after the latest race-relations tragedy makes headlines, and resume business as usual in the next news cycle. Compared to the expensive business of providing news rather than entertainment, building quality control into your platform to prevent the spread of misinformation and putting in place economic policies that prevent the hording of opportunities.
Their saving is our expense. Presented with solutions we are promised will work, if we can just get everyone to commit, if we can just get everyone on the same page. It will work if we can purge all the non-believers while simultaneously growing our ranks.
I suspect I remain agnostic towards antiracism and antiracist practice because I feel I recognize it, and that it's critics are so much more thoughtful, transparent, rigourous and honest than its proponents. I do not so much mind that something is expensive, if it is an investment, if there is a return.
That's the burden of proof that accompanies the claim that antiracism is the answer. Given the aversion to scrutiny by the foremost experts on the subject, and the rhetoric employed by them and their proselytizers, I suspect they will prove remarkably incurious as to tracking their results. Indulgences are big business, something Gutenberg put into his pitch for the printing press.
As Akerlof and Schiller, I think, wrote in their book 'Animal Spirits' the market is efficient, the problem is that if the market demands Snake Oil, or Indulgences for the original sin of race, the market will efficiently produce it. Eating healthy and exercising are expensive disciplines, diet shakes and laxatives are cheap.
I worry though, in a calm and comfortable way, about how cheap it is to be racist, to be antiracist is already out of the reach of most citizens in terms of their disposable time and energy, and I suspect it's the kind of ideology that will follow the 'if it doesn't work, double it' approach; and the consequences of actually encouraging the oppressor population to think constantly and endlessly about race... it feels like having a small, disorganized and unimposing army demanding surrender from would be allies or they will attack their supporters.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is however what really keeps me up at night, and in any disagreement between me and another where we both feel assured of our positions, the possibilities are 1) I haven't considered something the other has. 2) They haven't considered something I have. and most likely it will be both. Thus I would stress that I am open to persuasion of what I am missing, where the foundation of my skepticism is easily toppled, I hope if someone is struggling with this issue, the numerous quotations and linked articles and videos can help shore up the foundation of your position.
