On Anti-Racism Part One: A Failure of Imagination

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. 

It’s important to understand how we got here. To be Black in America is to process death a bit differently than your fellow countrymen. For decades the norm for Black people was to take the violence dealt to us by a state committed to white hegemony with a stiff upper lip--especially the violence done to our revolutionary thinkers. We were allowed martyrs but not leaders. We could mourn for them. We could have a nice funeral service at the local church or mosque. But then we had to move on. We had to continue with stoic resolution and strategic silence the never ending project of proving our worth as humans to a white majority. 

Then something changed. The internet did for modern Black liberation what TV did for Civil Rights struggle in the 60’s. All of a sudden Black people had a platform with which to draw attention to the death and disenfranchisement that had continued unabated since the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the perceived end of racism. Parts of white America thought this was a new phenomena. That social media was cherry-picking particularly egregious examples of racist violence and using them to make the problem seem much bigger than it actually was. In reality, what was happening was that the rest of the country was finally getting a chance to see just why their Black friends were so angry all the time. The experiences that we had kept amongst ourselves, that we had protected our white friends and coworkers from in fear that we might ruin the good energy, were suddenly exposed to the national consciousness. 

This put liberal America in a bit of a bind. Liberals had seemingly won the culture wars. America was as inclusive as it had ever been. It was now no longer acceptable to be openly prejudiced against marginalized people. Members of the dangerous and deviant classes were represented all across pop culture, and a Black man was elected president. The fact that America was still lethal to people of color was a shock to the entrenched liberal order that believed itself an unqualified victor over the forces of bigotry and oppression. And then Donald Trump was elected president. Something had to be done.

And so something was done. The liberals leapt into action. Black voices were elevated and platformed. Hollywood demanded more Black content creators, and Black politicians found that their political currency had increased in value virtually overnight. Reparations for slavery reentered the national conversation. White allyship was moderated and policed. Most importantly, corporations and other institutions looked to academia to develop new tools for combating racism and racial bias within their walls. Thus was born anti-racist training.

At its most basic level anti-racist training tries to do two things;

1. Develop within white people a conception of systemic racism. Help them to understand all the obstacles that impede the ability of marginalized people to fully participate in society. Help them to understand the constant state of anxiety that most marginalized people experience in this country and how it takes a psychic and physical toll. 

2. Let white people know that they will never understand what it’s like to be oppressed and the only thing they can do about systemic racism is to feel like shit for being white. 

Item one is a necessary step toward dismantling white hegemony and building a social order rooted in equity and solidarity. Item two….is a bit counterproductive. 

For any anti-racist project to be materially meaningful, the foundational structures of this country must be interrogated and if necessary torn down and replaced by systems that weren’t designed by a group of ancient aristocratic colonialist sociopaths. We have to understand things like our justice system and capitalism not as completely objective social pillars to be revered and protected but as ideological projects with the chauvinistic and paternalistic inclinations of their wealthy white progenitors baked into their DNA. This interrogation is known as Critical Race Theory. 

That liberals would embrace an analytical framework like CRT in the service of anti-racism should be seen as a positive by the left. CRT is heavily influenced by Marx’s conception of historical materialism. Up until recently liberal ideas around addressing racial disparities revolved around meritocratic solutions: helping Black kids better navigate a system that their impoverished upbringing left them unprepared for. Now there is some acknowledgement that the systems themselves disadvantage Black people by design. But within the liberal acknowledgement that material conditions do indeed play a role in determining the success of Black people in this country lies a fatal contradiction. 

Critical race theory is a critique of liberalism. 

At some level I have to give credit for liberalism for trying to find synthesis with an analytical framework that is antithetical to some it's core tenets. Of course liberalism's ability to absorb dissent and channel it into capitalist expression is how the ideology became more or less hegemonic in the developed world. I shouldn’t give them too much credit. This tension between liberalism and historical materialism (itself a critique of the liberal conception of history), is resolved by accepting structural causes for the racial disparities we so plainly see, while mostly prescribing individualistic self assessment and narrowly means-tested aid programs as the solution. The latter manifests itself as “opportunity zones”, “promise academies”, and hilariously targeted loan forgiveness programs. While the former appears in the form of companies and schools paying Robin DiAngelo or some other anti-racism “expert” thousands of dollars to tell white people how much they suck. 

Critical race theory is meant to describe how society interacts with individuals based on their social demographic and status. The liberal implementation of CRT in an anti-racist project tends to describe white supremacy as how individuals interact with society based on their race. And this in it of itself isn’t a terrible way to go about anti-racism. The call to make institutional spaces more accommodating to people of different socio-economic and racial identities is the correct impulse. The problem comes when people move away from addressing systems and move into managing whiteness. These liberal anti-racist trainings have a difficult time separating the social construct of whiteness and it’s social value in our society with the actual people who have inherited this identity as well as all of the baggage that comes with it. Thus, they tend to see anti-racism for white people as a meritocratic process. White people are to be managed, given goals that they can either achieve or fail. Punishment for failure consists of the dreaded cancellation, which when applied to wealthy white entertainers and controversial public intellectuals doesn’t really mean much, but when doled out to the average white worker has the capacity to be materially damaging.  

Success is rewarded with a hearty pat on the back and not much else. 

Another problem with liberal anti-racism is that it is a product and not an exercise in critical thinking. Complex concepts contained within critical race theory are boiled down to pithy slogans that play well as social media posts but are woefully insufficient for getting people to interrogate systems. When an anti-racist training tells white people that things like oppression, arrogance, certainty, defensiveness, ignorance, humility, apathy are traits of whiteness and that to be anti-racist is to be less white, this is actually a gross oversimplification of a broad dialectic between the moral relativism of historical materialism and the enlightenment-era established liberal belief in objectivity. Instead of inspiring working and middle class white people to think about these kinds of concepts, this type of training tells them that to be white is to be bad and you are bad if you are white. 

That isn’t helpful. 

In the liberal discourse around race relations, the concept of anti-racism is fairly new. Before it was called “fighting for equality”. And as I mentioned before, it focused less on making white people less racist and more on helping Black people better navigate the existing systems. It was about managing Blackness. These liberals fighting for equality had a difficult time separating the social construct of blackness and it’s negative social value in our society with the actual people who had inherited the identity as well as all of the baggage that came with it. As such they saw equality for Black people as a meritocratic process. Black people are to be managed, given goals that they can either achieve or fail. To meet these goals additional support was to be given--but failure to reach them meant resignation to harsh realities of societal exclusion.

Success meant the opportunity to join the wealth class and cushion the trauma of racism with money.

Anti-racist training is a failure of liberal imagination. Because liberalism sees the individual as the only meaningful unit of society, it can only see solutions to social problems as a matter of individual behavior. Whether it’s thinking that Black people can’t succeed because they like to wear baggy clothes, or it’s thinking white supremacy exists because white people are too arrogant, the common denominator is that systems are mostly left unchallenged. And just as Black people eventually rejected the notion that the key to defeating racism was to demonstrate just how well we could assimilate to a white notion of success, white people are rejecting the notion that the key to defeating white supremacy is to feel really shitty about being white. 

When Black people rejected the liberal remedy of scolding Blackness, it led to us seeking validation in more radical schools of ideological theory. This is what led to the development of Critical Race Theory. As white people are rejecting the liberal remedy of scolding whiteness, they are seeking validation from other sources. Which brings us to Jodi Shaw. 

Who is Jodi Shaw? What does she tell us about both the vulnerability and the emotional capacity of white people in this never ending discourse on race? We’ll find out in part two.

Solidarity Forever.