On Anti-Racism Part Four: Fight With Solidarity

Or: Let's Slip Into Something a Bit More Meaningful

It might surprise you to learn that I have a vested interest in this whole anti-racism thing. My goal in writing this series is not to debunk Jodi Shaw or dunk on the anti cancel-culture brigade. There is utility in understanding the opposition, but if they become the main focus of the discourse around anti-racism then I fear that we may fail before we get started. Likewise I’m not here to simply complain about woke liberalism and corporate racial bias training. I myself was a woke liberal at one point. Matter of fact, the me of five years ago would have tried to cancel me today. I have some measure of empathy for the inclination to scold instead of building solidarities. There is an appeal in seeing your enemies cry. 

But we need to have loftier ambitions than that. In a context where everything material and solid has been consumed by the ephemeral spectacle of the culture war, we should remind ourselves that these things we are debating have tangible consequences for real people. The trauma that marginalized people in America experience trying to navigate hostile systems designed to exclude us (or worse) is real. The material deficit for Black and Brown Americans, violently enforced by an dogmatic institutional commitment to reproducing class through the myth of meritocracy, is real. The police are still a problem for Black life and will remain so until they are radically transformed into something less fascistic. 

And on the other hand, working class white people also experience a level of alienation and marginalization at the hands of capitalism. No it’s not the same, but it also isn’t something we can just wave away because others have it worse. It must be included in any conversation about anti-racism, because racism survives when the rank and file members of the dominant demographic are unable to see their own struggles in the plight of the oppressed. This is a primary feature of social relations under capitalism and it affects us all. It’s well established that the white working class tends to vote against their own self interests and in deference to racist attitudes. But that is an inclination fostered by a society of atomization and cultural hegemony. We can’t confuse whiteness with white people. One is an artificial construct, the other is a group of actual humans with thoughts and feelings. And they have views of the world and society informed by their material conditions, just like the rest of us marginal folks.

So to that end, I want to try to imagine what a more effective version of anti-racism might look like. 

It would be helpful to first think about how systemic racism actually works in practice. Let’s look at the legal system. The effects of systemic racism in our legal system are easily observed. Disproportionate conviction rates for crimes that Black and white people commit at similar percentages. Longer sentences for Black defendants versus white people convicted of similar crimes with similar criminal records. District attorneys who fight to empanel all-white juries. White cultural hegemony and individual prejudice play a significant role in this system of racist outcomes. We know there are racist cops, racist prosecutors, racist judges, and racist juries. But more important than the individual racist actors, what makes our legal system systematically racist is the fact that it favors people who have wealth.

With more money comes more experienced lawyers--with more time to work on your case, and better relationships with influential people. For every rich person who gets convicted in court, there are ten who get away with it. For every poor person whose case becomes a cause celebre, there are hundreds wasting away in prison unfairly. Black people were systematically denied wealth in this country. Therefore they were systematically denied the ability to navigate the legal system with the same ability as white people whose wealth was more than likely amassed at the expense of the marginalized. 

You could find and fire every racist person in every police department, judgeship, and prosecutor’s office in the country and force the rest to watch Robin DiAngelo videos for a year straight. The outcome disparities would still exist, because the system structurally advantages people who have more money. And on average, those people will not be Black. This is how structures reproduce racism in our society. Knowing that, a more meaningful anti-racism project in the legal system should be centered around things like funding public defenders. Rather than things like implicit bias training, which doesn’t work.

Oh yeah, did I mention that there is little evidence to show that implicit bias training actually improves race relations, let alone helps correct racial disparities?

That might be the most tragic part of all this. Trump and his reactionary counterparts in Europe put anti-racist training at the center of their crosshairs. Which, in turn, made anti-racist training the focal point of this culture war. The entire discourse around CRT and anti-racism became centered around whether or not you thought How To Be An Antiracist was a good book. Liberals leapt to the defense of companies and schools who were aggressively pursuing these programs, without stopping to check if these things are actually effective. And they very much are not. 

The first implicit bias training models were developed around the Implicit Associations Test (IAT). To the degree that any effectiveness of these programs has ever been demonstrated, it’s been shown that implicit bias training can lower people's bias scores on the IAT, meaning they demonstrate less implicit bias. The IAT is a decent scientific measure for something that we are just beginning to understand of the mechanics of. However, it’s far from a perfect measure. The IAT measures reaction time when prompted to associate certain words with different demographic groups. But if you can figure that out and you have learned what the correct answers are, the IAT becomes pretty easy to fool.

But beyond that, for most people biases are explicit, not implicit. They aren’t simply being guided by the invisible hand of white supremacy. They are consciously making negative associations for what they believe are good reasons. Of course those reasons are based on terrible science and disingenuous arguments, but unlike implicit bias training, there is ample evidence showing that confronting people about their bad opinions only makes them retreat into those beliefs further. Also, we really don’t know if the ability to recognize bias conceptually has any relationship to acting on bias in real world situations. 

At the end of the day, whether or not implicit bias and anti-racism training works is immaterial. People don’t perpetuate systemic racism, systems do. The problem isn’t any individual racist prosecutor, judge, or juror, but the fact we have a legal system that funnels the fates of Black people into their hands. This is an across-the-board problem. Racism has a material effect on the lives of Black America. Any change in social attitudes must come downstream from addressing that material deficit. That is meaningful anti-racism.

Meaningful anti-racism isn’t watching content from the “Black Voices” section of Amazon video. It's supporting the majority Black workers at Amazon’s Bessemer warehouse in their efforts to unionize. Meaningful anti-racism isn’t singling out employees for insufficient adherence to the superficial and mercurial aesthetics of wokeness. It’s raising the pay of workers and ensuring pay equity. It’s about forming corporate structures where low wage workers (who tend to be from marginalized classes) have more say and power over how they are compensated and treated. It’s about giving every single person the ability to see a doctor and get medical care. It’s about making college free so that more Black people can be represented in the academy. It’s about making housing a human right. It’s about repealing laws that disproportionately criminalize the behaviors of poor people and cause them to interact with police more than is advised. It’s about defunding the police and spending more on social infrastructure. Meaningful anti-racism will always attack systems and not people. 

Meaningful anti-racism work takes place within on-the-ground organizing efforts for material change. Solidarity in service to a cause does more to help privileged people abandon biases than managerial dictates. Even when it comes to recontextualizing American history and challenging the assumptions of classical liberalism, that information is much more effectively communicated in a context where people can see a direct relationship between American mythology and their own lack of material security. In order to build an anti-racist project that actually has a positive effect on the lives of marginalized people, we need to stop framing it as a fight against something (whiteness, privilege, etc.) and start framing it as a push to actually improve people’s material circumstances. 

I’m not naïve. I know that the odds of achieving transformative change are against us. But it is vitally important that we are able to distinguish between efforts to improve the material conditions of marginalized people versus PR and corporate image management schemes. It’s the difference between activism and commodifying social justice so that a few people can get rich by preaching woke aesthetics. 

Anti-racism cannot work as an exercise in technocratic fetishization. It cannot be a top-down affair where virtue is treated as the privileged domain of academics and is sprinkled upon the vulgar labor force by experts for a fee. It must be fought for from the ground up, because that's where the majority of marginalized people in this country reside. On the ground is where we can create a conception of white allyship that is based on mutual interests and shared material values instead of shame and the threat of social exclusion. Imagine if instead of paying an anti-racism “expert” to talk down to people and put them into little boxes, companies and institutions brought in Black labor organizers to help workers fight for their common interests. Given that unions have an actual track record of diminishing racist attitudes in the workplace. Of course they would never willingly do that, but that shows just how committed woke brands actually are to anti-racism.

This is important. Because instead of having serious conversations about what CRT can tell us about how systems perpetuate racial injustice, we are arguing over corporate training seminars that don’t work. We are allowing bad-faith actors to conflate the hollow liberal conception of anti-racism with the critical theory that informs it. And this is doing serious damage to the project as a whole. We are losing the plot. 

If you take one idea from this series, the events at Smith College, Jodi Shaw and her IDW-fueled racism, I would like it to be this:

As much as we want to critically examine these structures of white supremacy and racism, we need to be doing the same to any corporate-friendly consensus of what anti-racism is. Anti-racism should not be an exciting new business opportunity. It should be laser-focused on identifying and correcting the material consequences of racial injustice. Any anti-racist project that doesn’t address material need is purely aesthetic. Aesthetics aren’t real. 

People are real. And people need help. They needed help long before the pandemic and they will need help long after we are finding our old reusable masks in the sock drawer. Anti-racism should be about helping people and dismantling the systems that keep them in need. If we can do that, then we can make anti-racism a project that draws people in, and makes them invested in its success.

Or we could just write a rap about it. 

Solidarity forever.