All Hands on Deck: Eliminating the New Racism and Anti-Intellectualism

I am an American citizen living and working in Germany, concerned about anti-racism programs in the United States and their effect on the rest of the world. "Anti-Racism" is a misnomer: it's not what it sounds like. The vast majority of those forced into these programs were never racists to begin with. There's a difference between a dumb mistake (the still-cringing guy who thought Obama was the butler) and malice: the racist telling an American of Japanese descent  to "go home: you don't speak our language." The harassed person--just trying to buy a baguette--doesn't even speak Japanese; he was born in the USA.

"Structural" racism is a perspective, useful in law, but it's not the original sin of "whiteness."  Changing hearts and minds is still the way--not the perfect way, but like democracy, the better method. We are not victims and oppressors: we are people who can tell each other our stories. I just listened to a white teacher married to a black teacher discussing how unhappy they both felt when required by their employer to complete an "anti-racism" workshop. The white husband was made to join the white group of oppressors, the black wife the black group of victims. Both find this contrived notion of identity based on race is a new, terrible form of racism.

Incidents at Smith College, the Juilliard School, The New School, The Brearley School, The Dwight-Englewood school, and many others, indicate the following problems:

(1) These programs preach to the choir, stirring up misguided guilt. They also seem inadvertently designed to inflame racism in persons already inclined to be racist. Some studies suggest such programs actually create racist feeling where none existed before.

(2) They create a new form of racism. Participants are asked to define themselves by their ethnicity rather than their humanity or their interests. 

(3) They are anti-intellectual. Two of the most popular versions of "Anti-Racism," Ibram X. Kendi's bestselling How to Be an Anti-Racist and Robin di Angelo's White Fragility are methodologically flawed, creating a false impression of the extent of racism, defining the term in misleading ways. (John McWhorter remarked that diAngelo's book is good for one thing: keeping table legs from wobbling.)

(4) The effects of anti-racism programs have been to inspire fear and to spawn hysterical reactions. Young people who are used to identifying by ethnicity and sorting ethnicities into victim and oppressor fall all too easily into the victim role.

(5) They foster censorship and self-censorship; they restrict freedom of speech. Poets have been censored both for using a race-related word (Matthew Dickman, writing about his grandmother, used the word "negress") and for writing about attitudes toward race. Reading aloud Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" to my class the other day, I wondered whether I'd get nailed for having spoken his line "through the negro streets." I worry more when I'm teaching Maya Angelou, Faulkner, Mark Twain, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison or Harper Lee.

(6) The only thing I ever agreed with President Trump about was his ban on teaching anti-racism and critical race theory. In this single instance, he was all too correct. I am in favor of dissolving current anti-racism programs and returning to the liberal ideal of shared humanity. 

For a recent summary of the dangers of critical race theory, see Christopher Rufo's film: 

Also very useful is Helen Pluckrose's and Ilana Redstone's critique of power, knowledge and language in postmodern thought:

And for the light touch: