Free Your Mind, Your Ass Will Not Follow

Anti-racism, not as anti- as you think.

The civil rights movement has devolved since its apotheosis under Martin Luther King and the 1963 March on Washington For Jobs and Freedom. “Devolved” is not quite the right word, since assorted forces have industriously promoted that devolution. The shift to which I’m referring is from a social-democratic focus on jobs and freedom demands, the money stuff, to the contemporary confusions about woke, white privilege, and DEI (diversity-equity-inclusion).

The earlier pole referred to above is well explicated here by Patrick Mason and Larry Mishel. (Full disclosure: Mason is a friend and Mishel is a friend and former boss.) The shift from concrete demands aimed at structural or institutional racism to preoccupations with inter-personal relations and consciousness is ruthlessly criticized by Adolph Reed and Walter Benn Michaels. I am not quite all the way to Reed and Michaels, but I am not far away either.

Criticism of the consciousness side, exemplified by figures such as Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi, is founded on their lack of public policy criticism and neglect of political remedies. Reed has referred to the DiAngelo approach as “the new yoga.” Mason and Mishel are less acerbic and their take could command broad agreement. Naturally, I have a few quibbles that I will save for the end.

Based on what I’ve heard, second-hand, I wouldn’t touch DiAngelo with a ten foot pole. I did read Kendi’s “How To Be Anti-Racist” and found it unexceptionable, if short of revelatory.

The consciousness focus does create tangible, regrettable political impacts, including in my own neck of the woods, Loudoun County VA. Three years ago, the rage was “critical race theory,” which aroused widespread fury among many who had not a clue what it is. One of the flashpoints was an incident in a local public school where a teacher organized a class activity simulating the racism of ages gone by. This caused our local NAACP chapter to erupt. Ironically, such exercises have been devised with the best intentions by African-American teachers.

Just this month, a new kerfuffle jumped off. A teacher sought to teach about the Civil War and slavery, and brought in a handful of raw cotton. The class sesssion degenerated into racist heckling from white students. I could note that Loudoun County is among the richest in the U.S., so public school classes can include students of radically different backgrounds. Again the local NAACP responded, likening cotton to a swastika. Oh dear. No doubt, the teacher fell down in classroom management, but not in ideology.

Public schools are not very adept in negotiating this problem. Our county has a racist history that is not all that distant in time. School authorities need to show they are on the case, so they feel obliged to hire outside contractors who claim to be experts. The DEI consultants can always talk a good game, but to the better-informed, among whom I would include myself, they are not impressive. In fact, some of their training material appears to be positively idiotic. Inevitably, the MAGA media has a field day with this sort of thing, cherry-picking the dumbest bits, taking them out of any context.

Zooming out to national politics, the heights of retrograde DEI discourse were scaled during the Bernie-Hillary wars of 2016. Bernie was criticized for purported insensitivity about race. What he was in fact guilty of was an unwavering focus on class which, as Mason and Mishel argue, can be a powerful way of addressing racism. Doubtless he could have smoothed over his messaging. But the unfavorable comparisons to Hillary were ridiculous and usually dishonest. Clinton had little in the way of policy or accomplishments to match up with Bernie on anti-racism. And don’t get me started on Bill Clinton and welfare reform. Her supposed superiority to Sanders on race matters was a gross fabrication. I would concede she scored some points on gender, another issue not adeptly treated by Sanders.

Getting a bit further into the economist weeds of the Mason-Mishel essay, they point approvingly to the newish field of “stratification economics,” which is devoted to studying racism with economic theory. I can’t claim any familiarity with this literature, so I should just shut up about it, right now. But you know I won’t.

Point one is given the state of mainstream economic theory, applying it to race is nice to see in light of the profession’s general ignorance and neglect of the subject, but it fails to arouse enthusiasm in me given the nature of such theory. Better people than I have written books on this, so that’s as far as I care to go. You could infer that I just don’t like economic theory.

Point two, I was stopped short by this bit, attributed to stratification economics:

“[G]roup identities are social norms, and the formation of social groups is based on differential access to resources, not individual and family differences in “culture”—that is, market-functional values and behavior such as deferred gratification and future orientation, achievement orientation, personal control and responsibility, aspiration-ambition, economizing behavior, social trust, attitude toward hard work, and prudent behavior.”

This reminds me of the “respectability politics” thing, the old Bill Cosby (or Booker T. Washington) spiel, long before he was exposed as a dirtbag. My previous wife, may she R.I.P., was very taken by these concerns. She grew up poor in a single-parent family and powered her way to a law degree and license.

Another M&M theme is so-called “targeted universalism.” I am gung-ho for the full range of these sorts of programs, but I’m sorry, the term is just an oxymoron. Generating more beneficiaries of social welfare programs is usually a good thing, but if targeting benefits is the best you can do, for god’s sake do it! Bite the bullet!

The terminology of “universalism” is worked way too hard by liberals and socialists. They like to compare means-tested programs, which can have serious limitations, to “universal” Social Security and the like. Sorry again, SOCIAL SECURITY IS NOT UNIVERSAL. You need an earnings record, and the benefit amounts vary inversely with wages. Only Universal Basic Income is universal, and it exists nowhere in the whole wide world.

A panoply of lapses on the Left have conceded ground regarding racism to the right and, god help us, to documented bigot Donald Trump. Evidence can be found in voter surveys. This encourages elite Democratic voices and their minions among consultants and media figures to endorse an abject rejection of all things anti-racist. This will not do.

Anti-racism needs to be jump-started, but it also needs social-democracy. Until it gets it, racism will flourish.