I think Matt misses some of what's going on here, or... doesn't shine a lot on it, at least.
My view is: in the latter half of the 20th Century, there was this concerted, and largely successful, effort to get people to remove ill-intent towards people of other races from their hearts. That is, to stigmatize and reduce racism in the classic sense. To judge each person by their character or so forth. Of course, it was imperfect and incomplete, but I think there was an overwhelming reduction in the number of people between say 1960 and 2000 who believed that a given person was lesser due to their race.
And so in the dawn of the 21st Century, we looked around and saw that, despite this huge reduction in the amount of racism, black and latino people were still poor and disadvantaged in various ways. And then there was this competition to explain this fact, and a few camps emerged:
1. People who thought that everyone was just as racist as ever, but were better at hiding it.
2. People who thought that essentially the 20th Century project had been successful, but there was some societal inertia where it takes time for changes in attitude to translate to material difference, and we should just stay the course.
3. People who thought that racial gaps were a result of genetic intelligence factors that were biological, not a result of social bias.
4. People who thought that there were institutional problems that were able to propagate themselves and continue inequities despite the fact that nobody anymore had any actual racism in their hearts.
And what happened is that people in group 4 found that their ideas -- though well-founded in a lot of ways -- were bloodless and technocratic compared to the ideas of people in groups 1-3, and they just didn't get a lot of attention compared to the straightforward and attention-grabbing claims of the other groups. So they evolved towards a framing of their ideas that would be more provocative, and ended up with "structural racism," getting on the bandwagon that we had established where "racism" is super bad and emotionally charged, and using that as the lede into their technocratic ideas.
And this was successful. But of course the problem is that having done this sort of rhetorical judo, nothing changed on a substantive level. It remains a boring (in both the sense of not interesting, and in the eponymous sense of this blog), bloodless, technocratic problem to filter through the many, many, many layers of institutions and try to find ways in which they reinforce unequal racial outcomes. But people who use the "structural racism" framing then find that it reduces the emotional charge of "racism" if "racism" means "let's change some not-obviously-important details of zoning ordinances in one city after another," or "how should we change how we pay for schools."
So to defend the territory that their movement has claimed, they have to now pour energy into keeping the rhetorical intensity up, to conflate "structural racism" with "racism." Hence Kendi, or the enthusiasm for Kendi.
I'm sure I'll be in the majority of your readers who agree that Kendi's framing is counterproductive on the whole (for example, you and others have the compelling argument that Defund The Police is a bad slogan and a bad strategy, not that I needed much convincing). So I'll poke the bear a little bit and say that where Kendism has been useful, for me, is thinking about suburbia (or exurbia) through a racial lens. If home ownership was a way for the middle class to build wealth in the 20th century, and that access was explicitly denied to Black people, and federal government policies were explicitly designed to support suburban home building, then yes, suburbia exists on a bedrock of racism (no matter how many BLM signs you or your neighbors have on their lawns). You start talking about equitable school funding or raising property taxes and you see how quickly supposedly woke white suburbanites will show up at town halls demanding things stay the way they are.
One reason the version of racism Kendi is trying to sell is unworkable is it treats today's racial categories as unalterable bedrock facts of society from which all other analysis and distribution of resources must flow - permanently and forever - instead of fluid and changing socially constructed ideas, that arose from discredited beliefs that there are meaningful innate difference between groups of people based on their physical appearance.
That idea was flawed at its root, and perpetuating it by making those categories the central basis of your entire social and economic program is not going to lead anywhere good.
This seems simple, and hinted at in Matt's subtitle. We just have two different concepts, both are useful, but we shouldn't try to change the definition of an existing concept.
Racism historically has meant intent-based discrimination or bigotry based on race. It's a very useful word. And its also pretty widely understood and can be very powerful.
Trying to now change the definition/usage of the word, given how well understood it is and how powerful it is just looks like it is going to create all softs of unnecessary problems. We saw the same thing happen with the idea from the 80s that "black people can't be racists, because they hold no power". The problem with this statement is that it required a change in what people thought the word racist meant. The introduction of this concept was valid, but now you no longer had a word to describe an equally important concept, which is the traditional definition of racism.
Kendi's outcome based view of race is interesting and useful. But it should be introduced as its own word/concept. We shouldn't replace the definition of an existing word, especially when the existing definition is useful and important.
The result is we'd spend a lot less time arguing about this. The arguments really aren't about the content of what Kendi is discussing, but rather can we juggle these two different definitions/concepts of "racism" in our mind at the same time (about the same word) -- and that just isn't an interesting or useful use of time.
I think that a generalized version of this criticism is perhaps applicable to a lot of ideas. An idea like Kendi's has a few issues - first is it useful? Can you make sensible decisions or better understand something due to it? I think Matt showed why you cannot here.
Second, are you losing something by conflating your idea? The conflation of hate speech with violence I can understand the intention behind, but also seems to me to cause damage to useful action by being unable to distinguish things properly.
Third do you lose people by hijacking common terms to make your point? I find the formulation of racism = prejudice plus power to be unhelpful here as most people and indeed the dictionary would just go with racism = prejudice based on race and when the above definition is pulled out it feels less like an insight and more like a gotcha. This turns people off immediately. The formulation above is useful to explain why some racism is more damaging than others, and maybe deserves a different name to correctly identify it, but by re-defining an existing term people think they understand you lose a large number of listeners, and so lose the chance to convince people.
Well this post was pretty spot on. Quite frankly the only reason I am commenting is because I'm stuck in Brazil sitting around at a power plant waiting for people.
So many discussions these days about what Racism is, but I'd like to see more discussion about what the solutions are.
With the Kendi and CRT crowd, it comes across, like nothing except quotas and reparations are acceptable, but 1. it isn't going to happen and 2. I am really skeptical about whether it would even work.
On cash reparations: By the time enough white people are convinced to support it (if ever), Hispanic voters will be a significant chunk of the voting population, and won't support it.
I myself, as a Rich person hater (rich being anyone that makes 100K more than I do), really support taxing the F out of rich people, and decreasing income inequality that way. And as Matt said, anything that decreases income equality will also decrease race income inequality.
Regardless, I suspect that the issue of racism and race inequalities is something that will be around and debated when my granddaughter is an adult.
Ok, on a personal note. I might of mentioned before, but I grew up in a racially mixed family. My bother is Asian, sister is black, both adopted as babies while we lived in New Zealand. There is only 4-years apart between us four siblings, so we grew up together. I guess as close to colorblind as you could get. I've spoken to my sister and brother about their experiences, and racism didn't play a huge part of their lives. Perhaps it was the unconditional love in our family, but even in the 80's in Los Angeles, our family was a curiosity more than any big deal (I suspect things would of been different in the South or other parts of the US). My sister said that her worst experiences were actually in High School from other black girls, because she was basically was so "white"... she listed to punk rock/ska, so didn't conform to the stereotype of what black women in LA listed to back then. But it wasn't a huge deal.
Later in life, my sister said she did have an experience with getting pulled over twice for no reason. She lived in Oak Park (upscale part of Ventura County).
Anyways, the whole issue is complex. There is literally nowhere in the world that anyone can point to that has solved the issue. I lived in Europe for 12-years, I work in South America regularly, and racial inequality and racism are present in all places.
I'm not a politician, I'm not a boss, so I guess the only thing I can do is not be an asshole, and treat everyone with respect and openness.
On a side note, the closest I have ever seen to a perfect society on this issue is my time in the USAF. Not perfect, but closer than anyplace in the civilian world.
Have a great day.
Also, unlike my usual posts, this was typed on my computer, so feel free to drag me for grammar and spelling mistakes.
Bizarre relationship with Kendi and DiAngelo. Kind of like Marx. A lot of respect. And lot of back and forth. I read them and I think…
“Wow this is a really interesting diagnosis of the problem. I think there’s value in this diagnosis. I absolutely beyond words hate your proposed solution.”
Then I go for a walk in what is… gosh (probably 98%) white/Asian/straight neighborhood and see more BLM signs than Harlem and more rainbow flags than Castro, and think “Ya know maybe Kendi-ism could actually be beneficial here. If these people are going to flaunt awareness they should take ownership of their role in it.”
Then he tweets something expressing skepticism in interracial adoptions. And… loses me once again.
At some point many people became convinced that since it is possible to mask discrimination behind facially colorblind policy, the very notion of colorblindness was discriminatory. This is a huge error, I think.
I thought the interview btw Kendi & Ezra was great. I came away thinking Kendi is mostly trying a simple sleight-of-hand to bring back affirmative action under a better branding.
1. Get everyone to define "racist" empirically, as policies that impact POC negatively
2. Get everyone to agree to be "anti-racist", because of course most people dislike racism
3. Per the first definition, anti-racist policies are ones that POSITIVELY impact POC - basically policies that were previously called affirmative action.
I haven't read Kendi's book, but from what I understand one way of putting his point would be that racism is something you do, not something you are. Whenever a person does something that leads to disparate racial outcomes, they are being racist. In his review, Sanneh states it as, "we should stop thinking of 'racist' as a pejorative, and start thinking of it as a simple description."
I think this is actually pretty useful, partly because it cuts against the current idea that a dumb tweet/tiktok/etc. should result in a lost job, rescinded college admission, or social ostracism. Since racism becomes something that anyone is capable of doing, including accidentally, it would seem to call for a measure of grace and humility.
It would also suggest that we stop considering racism the worse characteristic a human being could have. In-group/out-group dynamics are hard-wired into us, so while we should recognize them as destructive and morally wrong, it's a bit perverse to make racism the cardinal sin.
I don't want to minimize the tremendous harm that racist ideology has inflicted, especially on Black Americans, but I really wonder if we've reached a sort of Godwin's Law for racism. You especially saw this after the election of the former guy; there were all these arguments about whether or not they were racist, when to my mind the correct answer is, "Yeah, they're probably racist, but that doesn't invalidate their votes or exclude them from the polity." The whole "deplorables" thing was really counterproductive and only served to entrench everyone firmly in their own corners.
Of all the internal disagreements among Ds, I worry that Kendi's equity-based pro-discrimination ideas have the most potential to split and sink the D party. Everything I know from following politics for a long time tells me that most people will find this unappealing and that opinion could easily crystalize against it. Maybe I'm too old to get it, or maybe it's just a passing fad, but I could see left centering this issue and insisting on it, and the D party splitting after some very bad losses. Ezra asked Kendi about the potential political downside of his agenda, and Kendi said basically you have to try even if things would be worse if you fail. Well, given the direction Rs are going, I just strongly disagree.
I get kind of frustrated by all this drafting over the definitions of words. The normal definition of racism and the concept of disparate outcomes are both important. Why do Kendi and others feel the need to create a new definition of racism rather than introduce a new term?
I think what you're missing, Matt, is how much consequence there is to those "surface neutral, disproportionate negative effects on people of color" policies and institutions. That's surprising, because in addition to the Senate, another favorite topic of yours is housing/YIMBYism, which I think is a clear example of the value of using Kendi's definition of racism. The people with one "IN THIS HOUSE: SCIENCE IS REAL, BLACK LIVES MATTER, WE BELIEVE WOMEN etc." sign and one "OPPOSE THE PROPOSED HIGH RISE TOWER" sign are having a racist effect -- and it's valuable and valid to explain that to them.
You keep referring to people being "racists", in Kendi's definition; but in "How to Be an Anti-Racist", Kendi specifically dismisses that type of labeling, and instead emphasizes that racism is something that all of us engage in at times, which describes actions and policies, not people in any static way. He talks about many times in his own life when he took a racist view on something, and emphasizes that we shouldn't argue about who is and isn't "a" racist, and should instead focus on the impact of decisions and policies. Kalefah Sannah's "ban the box" example isn't a gotcha against Kendi's argument -- it's a perfect example of why Kendi's argument is valuable. Kendi wants us to stop fussing defensively about our intentions, to understand that racism is something to plan for and address, not to deny. In that sense, it's very much like the way our society stigmatizes drunk driving, rather than calling someone who drank and drive once "a drunk driver" forever.
I thought EK's interview was really great in both separating Kendi's ideas from the stuff that orbits him (Ezra points this out when he points out how little systemic change with real consequences happens with e.g. corporate "anti-racist" training) and it puts it clearly in focus as a consequentialist/outcomes based policy.
I think the fundamental problem is this:
1. We've had a long history in the US of doing racist things - on purpose.
2. We have never done anything to "undo" the long term damage this created.
3. Human beings have outcomes based on their circumstances - their communities, their parents, it's inter-generational.
I think Kendi's ideas about weighing current policy based on its affect on the current levels of racial disparity is the inevitable outgrowth of this. To grossly over-simplify, it's sort of a "reparations via policy-bias" approach. For as long as the US hasn't fixed the problems we have made, we have to intentionally bias every policy's outcomes to do that fixing for us.
From that point, there's almost no limit to how much you can warp a policy. If an anti-racist tax code is one that decreases the racial wealth gap, and a racist one is one that increases (or I guess preserves it) then we end up either having to have a tax code that intentionally taxes differently by race, or one that de facto does that while being "race blind" via "statistical discrimination."
(And since that policy would _clearly_ be motivated by trying to engineer an outcome, since that is the way you get an anti-racist policy, everyone would consider its being race blind to be a total fig leaf, like the twenties zoning code.)
I don't have any good ideas about what we should do. When I argue with conservative friends about reparations I say things like "it would be weird if the right amount of reparations for slavery and all of the institutionalized racism that followed it was zero" and even they can't argue with that. There is clearly a moral wrong that has never been repaired.
MY never defines racism. He seems to associate it with stereotyping, but stereotyping is very, very difficult to avoid because it is basically a heuristic for surviving with limited information. Defining racism as racism as “assuming things about people because of their race” is just as problematic as the Kendi definition.
Stereotyping is often quite sensible. If there’s a 99% chance a stranger wants to trade with me, a 1% chance he wants to murder me and a 1% chance he has smallpox, I had better stay away. Sure there’s a 98% chance he’s harmless, but that 2% packs a sting.
Were Aztecs being silly if they saw Spaniards as vectors of disease? Most Spaniards did not have smallpox, yet the few who did wiped out entire cities. Were Sioux Indians prejudiced for fearing white men? Most pioneers never killed an Indian, yet a brain that routinely accepted small chances of death (without some reproductive jackpot to justify it) would not sire many viable offspring.
Racialized fear is literally in our DNA. The amygdala is the brain region most associated with fear. It activates more sharply when it sees faces of other races. People can be taught that members of races are very unlikely to kill them. This type of indoctrination is much easier in peaceful times and places and it can be wiped out by a single negative interaction.
Why is MY worried about anti semitic hate crimes? His odds of being murdered are very low, at least an order of magnitude lower than those of a young black man in Southeast DC. It’s not that MY is prejudiced against non-Jews, it’s that his brain is highly evolved to avoid threats of death and, historically, out group interactions have been much more dangerous than in group interactions.
Insofar as Kendi stands for something like "don't self-flagellate -- DO something about racial inequities" he stands head and shoulder above most people who write these anti-racism tracts. Sure, he can be a little woo-woo - we live in a somewhat woo-woo society. But DO something, don't wallow.
I think Matt misses some of what's going on here, or... doesn't shine a lot on it, at least.
My view is: in the latter half of the 20th Century, there was this concerted, and largely successful, effort to get people to remove ill-intent towards people of other races from their hearts. That is, to stigmatize and reduce racism in the classic sense. To judge each person by their character or so forth. Of course, it was imperfect and incomplete, but I think there was an overwhelming reduction in the number of people between say 1960 and 2000 who believed that a given person was lesser due to their race.
And so in the dawn of the 21st Century, we looked around and saw that, despite this huge reduction in the amount of racism, black and latino people were still poor and disadvantaged in various ways. And then there was this competition to explain this fact, and a few camps emerged:
1. People who thought that everyone was just as racist as ever, but were better at hiding it.
2. People who thought that essentially the 20th Century project had been successful, but there was some societal inertia where it takes time for changes in attitude to translate to material difference, and we should just stay the course.
3. People who thought that racial gaps were a result of genetic intelligence factors that were biological, not a result of social bias.
4. People who thought that there were institutional problems that were able to propagate themselves and continue inequities despite the fact that nobody anymore had any actual racism in their hearts.
And what happened is that people in group 4 found that their ideas -- though well-founded in a lot of ways -- were bloodless and technocratic compared to the ideas of people in groups 1-3, and they just didn't get a lot of attention compared to the straightforward and attention-grabbing claims of the other groups. So they evolved towards a framing of their ideas that would be more provocative, and ended up with "structural racism," getting on the bandwagon that we had established where "racism" is super bad and emotionally charged, and using that as the lede into their technocratic ideas.
And this was successful. But of course the problem is that having done this sort of rhetorical judo, nothing changed on a substantive level. It remains a boring (in both the sense of not interesting, and in the eponymous sense of this blog), bloodless, technocratic problem to filter through the many, many, many layers of institutions and try to find ways in which they reinforce unequal racial outcomes. But people who use the "structural racism" framing then find that it reduces the emotional charge of "racism" if "racism" means "let's change some not-obviously-important details of zoning ordinances in one city after another," or "how should we change how we pay for schools."
So to defend the territory that their movement has claimed, they have to now pour energy into keeping the rhetorical intensity up, to conflate "structural racism" with "racism." Hence Kendi, or the enthusiasm for Kendi.
I'm sure I'll be in the majority of your readers who agree that Kendi's framing is counterproductive on the whole (for example, you and others have the compelling argument that Defund The Police is a bad slogan and a bad strategy, not that I needed much convincing). So I'll poke the bear a little bit and say that where Kendism has been useful, for me, is thinking about suburbia (or exurbia) through a racial lens. If home ownership was a way for the middle class to build wealth in the 20th century, and that access was explicitly denied to Black people, and federal government policies were explicitly designed to support suburban home building, then yes, suburbia exists on a bedrock of racism (no matter how many BLM signs you or your neighbors have on their lawns). You start talking about equitable school funding or raising property taxes and you see how quickly supposedly woke white suburbanites will show up at town halls demanding things stay the way they are.
One reason the version of racism Kendi is trying to sell is unworkable is it treats today's racial categories as unalterable bedrock facts of society from which all other analysis and distribution of resources must flow - permanently and forever - instead of fluid and changing socially constructed ideas, that arose from discredited beliefs that there are meaningful innate difference between groups of people based on their physical appearance.
That idea was flawed at its root, and perpetuating it by making those categories the central basis of your entire social and economic program is not going to lead anywhere good.
This seems simple, and hinted at in Matt's subtitle. We just have two different concepts, both are useful, but we shouldn't try to change the definition of an existing concept.
Racism historically has meant intent-based discrimination or bigotry based on race. It's a very useful word. And its also pretty widely understood and can be very powerful.
Trying to now change the definition/usage of the word, given how well understood it is and how powerful it is just looks like it is going to create all softs of unnecessary problems. We saw the same thing happen with the idea from the 80s that "black people can't be racists, because they hold no power". The problem with this statement is that it required a change in what people thought the word racist meant. The introduction of this concept was valid, but now you no longer had a word to describe an equally important concept, which is the traditional definition of racism.
Kendi's outcome based view of race is interesting and useful. But it should be introduced as its own word/concept. We shouldn't replace the definition of an existing word, especially when the existing definition is useful and important.
The result is we'd spend a lot less time arguing about this. The arguments really aren't about the content of what Kendi is discussing, but rather can we juggle these two different definitions/concepts of "racism" in our mind at the same time (about the same word) -- and that just isn't an interesting or useful use of time.
I think that a generalized version of this criticism is perhaps applicable to a lot of ideas. An idea like Kendi's has a few issues - first is it useful? Can you make sensible decisions or better understand something due to it? I think Matt showed why you cannot here.
Second, are you losing something by conflating your idea? The conflation of hate speech with violence I can understand the intention behind, but also seems to me to cause damage to useful action by being unable to distinguish things properly.
Third do you lose people by hijacking common terms to make your point? I find the formulation of racism = prejudice plus power to be unhelpful here as most people and indeed the dictionary would just go with racism = prejudice based on race and when the above definition is pulled out it feels less like an insight and more like a gotcha. This turns people off immediately. The formulation above is useful to explain why some racism is more damaging than others, and maybe deserves a different name to correctly identify it, but by re-defining an existing term people think they understand you lose a large number of listeners, and so lose the chance to convince people.
Well this post was pretty spot on. Quite frankly the only reason I am commenting is because I'm stuck in Brazil sitting around at a power plant waiting for people.
So many discussions these days about what Racism is, but I'd like to see more discussion about what the solutions are.
With the Kendi and CRT crowd, it comes across, like nothing except quotas and reparations are acceptable, but 1. it isn't going to happen and 2. I am really skeptical about whether it would even work.
On cash reparations: By the time enough white people are convinced to support it (if ever), Hispanic voters will be a significant chunk of the voting population, and won't support it.
I myself, as a Rich person hater (rich being anyone that makes 100K more than I do), really support taxing the F out of rich people, and decreasing income inequality that way. And as Matt said, anything that decreases income equality will also decrease race income inequality.
Regardless, I suspect that the issue of racism and race inequalities is something that will be around and debated when my granddaughter is an adult.
Ok, on a personal note. I might of mentioned before, but I grew up in a racially mixed family. My bother is Asian, sister is black, both adopted as babies while we lived in New Zealand. There is only 4-years apart between us four siblings, so we grew up together. I guess as close to colorblind as you could get. I've spoken to my sister and brother about their experiences, and racism didn't play a huge part of their lives. Perhaps it was the unconditional love in our family, but even in the 80's in Los Angeles, our family was a curiosity more than any big deal (I suspect things would of been different in the South or other parts of the US). My sister said that her worst experiences were actually in High School from other black girls, because she was basically was so "white"... she listed to punk rock/ska, so didn't conform to the stereotype of what black women in LA listed to back then. But it wasn't a huge deal.
Later in life, my sister said she did have an experience with getting pulled over twice for no reason. She lived in Oak Park (upscale part of Ventura County).
Anyways, the whole issue is complex. There is literally nowhere in the world that anyone can point to that has solved the issue. I lived in Europe for 12-years, I work in South America regularly, and racial inequality and racism are present in all places.
I'm not a politician, I'm not a boss, so I guess the only thing I can do is not be an asshole, and treat everyone with respect and openness.
On a side note, the closest I have ever seen to a perfect society on this issue is my time in the USAF. Not perfect, but closer than anyplace in the civilian world.
Have a great day.
Also, unlike my usual posts, this was typed on my computer, so feel free to drag me for grammar and spelling mistakes.
Bizarre relationship with Kendi and DiAngelo. Kind of like Marx. A lot of respect. And lot of back and forth. I read them and I think…
“Wow this is a really interesting diagnosis of the problem. I think there’s value in this diagnosis. I absolutely beyond words hate your proposed solution.”
Then I go for a walk in what is… gosh (probably 98%) white/Asian/straight neighborhood and see more BLM signs than Harlem and more rainbow flags than Castro, and think “Ya know maybe Kendi-ism could actually be beneficial here. If these people are going to flaunt awareness they should take ownership of their role in it.”
Then he tweets something expressing skepticism in interracial adoptions. And… loses me once again.
"Race-neutral discrimination is a thing"
At some point many people became convinced that since it is possible to mask discrimination behind facially colorblind policy, the very notion of colorblindness was discriminatory. This is a huge error, I think.
I thought the interview btw Kendi & Ezra was great. I came away thinking Kendi is mostly trying a simple sleight-of-hand to bring back affirmative action under a better branding.
1. Get everyone to define "racist" empirically, as policies that impact POC negatively
2. Get everyone to agree to be "anti-racist", because of course most people dislike racism
3. Per the first definition, anti-racist policies are ones that POSITIVELY impact POC - basically policies that were previously called affirmative action.
I haven't read Kendi's book, but from what I understand one way of putting his point would be that racism is something you do, not something you are. Whenever a person does something that leads to disparate racial outcomes, they are being racist. In his review, Sanneh states it as, "we should stop thinking of 'racist' as a pejorative, and start thinking of it as a simple description."
I think this is actually pretty useful, partly because it cuts against the current idea that a dumb tweet/tiktok/etc. should result in a lost job, rescinded college admission, or social ostracism. Since racism becomes something that anyone is capable of doing, including accidentally, it would seem to call for a measure of grace and humility.
It would also suggest that we stop considering racism the worse characteristic a human being could have. In-group/out-group dynamics are hard-wired into us, so while we should recognize them as destructive and morally wrong, it's a bit perverse to make racism the cardinal sin.
I don't want to minimize the tremendous harm that racist ideology has inflicted, especially on Black Americans, but I really wonder if we've reached a sort of Godwin's Law for racism. You especially saw this after the election of the former guy; there were all these arguments about whether or not they were racist, when to my mind the correct answer is, "Yeah, they're probably racist, but that doesn't invalidate their votes or exclude them from the polity." The whole "deplorables" thing was really counterproductive and only served to entrench everyone firmly in their own corners.
Of all the internal disagreements among Ds, I worry that Kendi's equity-based pro-discrimination ideas have the most potential to split and sink the D party. Everything I know from following politics for a long time tells me that most people will find this unappealing and that opinion could easily crystalize against it. Maybe I'm too old to get it, or maybe it's just a passing fad, but I could see left centering this issue and insisting on it, and the D party splitting after some very bad losses. Ezra asked Kendi about the potential political downside of his agenda, and Kendi said basically you have to try even if things would be worse if you fail. Well, given the direction Rs are going, I just strongly disagree.
I get kind of frustrated by all this drafting over the definitions of words. The normal definition of racism and the concept of disparate outcomes are both important. Why do Kendi and others feel the need to create a new definition of racism rather than introduce a new term?
I think what you're missing, Matt, is how much consequence there is to those "surface neutral, disproportionate negative effects on people of color" policies and institutions. That's surprising, because in addition to the Senate, another favorite topic of yours is housing/YIMBYism, which I think is a clear example of the value of using Kendi's definition of racism. The people with one "IN THIS HOUSE: SCIENCE IS REAL, BLACK LIVES MATTER, WE BELIEVE WOMEN etc." sign and one "OPPOSE THE PROPOSED HIGH RISE TOWER" sign are having a racist effect -- and it's valuable and valid to explain that to them.
You keep referring to people being "racists", in Kendi's definition; but in "How to Be an Anti-Racist", Kendi specifically dismisses that type of labeling, and instead emphasizes that racism is something that all of us engage in at times, which describes actions and policies, not people in any static way. He talks about many times in his own life when he took a racist view on something, and emphasizes that we shouldn't argue about who is and isn't "a" racist, and should instead focus on the impact of decisions and policies. Kalefah Sannah's "ban the box" example isn't a gotcha against Kendi's argument -- it's a perfect example of why Kendi's argument is valuable. Kendi wants us to stop fussing defensively about our intentions, to understand that racism is something to plan for and address, not to deny. In that sense, it's very much like the way our society stigmatizes drunk driving, rather than calling someone who drank and drive once "a drunk driver" forever.
I thought EK's interview was really great in both separating Kendi's ideas from the stuff that orbits him (Ezra points this out when he points out how little systemic change with real consequences happens with e.g. corporate "anti-racist" training) and it puts it clearly in focus as a consequentialist/outcomes based policy.
I think the fundamental problem is this:
1. We've had a long history in the US of doing racist things - on purpose.
2. We have never done anything to "undo" the long term damage this created.
3. Human beings have outcomes based on their circumstances - their communities, their parents, it's inter-generational.
I think Kendi's ideas about weighing current policy based on its affect on the current levels of racial disparity is the inevitable outgrowth of this. To grossly over-simplify, it's sort of a "reparations via policy-bias" approach. For as long as the US hasn't fixed the problems we have made, we have to intentionally bias every policy's outcomes to do that fixing for us.
From that point, there's almost no limit to how much you can warp a policy. If an anti-racist tax code is one that decreases the racial wealth gap, and a racist one is one that increases (or I guess preserves it) then we end up either having to have a tax code that intentionally taxes differently by race, or one that de facto does that while being "race blind" via "statistical discrimination."
(And since that policy would _clearly_ be motivated by trying to engineer an outcome, since that is the way you get an anti-racist policy, everyone would consider its being race blind to be a total fig leaf, like the twenties zoning code.)
I don't have any good ideas about what we should do. When I argue with conservative friends about reparations I say things like "it would be weird if the right amount of reparations for slavery and all of the institutionalized racism that followed it was zero" and even they can't argue with that. There is clearly a moral wrong that has never been repaired.
MY never defines racism. He seems to associate it with stereotyping, but stereotyping is very, very difficult to avoid because it is basically a heuristic for surviving with limited information. Defining racism as racism as “assuming things about people because of their race” is just as problematic as the Kendi definition.
Stereotyping is often quite sensible. If there’s a 99% chance a stranger wants to trade with me, a 1% chance he wants to murder me and a 1% chance he has smallpox, I had better stay away. Sure there’s a 98% chance he’s harmless, but that 2% packs a sting.
Were Aztecs being silly if they saw Spaniards as vectors of disease? Most Spaniards did not have smallpox, yet the few who did wiped out entire cities. Were Sioux Indians prejudiced for fearing white men? Most pioneers never killed an Indian, yet a brain that routinely accepted small chances of death (without some reproductive jackpot to justify it) would not sire many viable offspring.
Racialized fear is literally in our DNA. The amygdala is the brain region most associated with fear. It activates more sharply when it sees faces of other races. People can be taught that members of races are very unlikely to kill them. This type of indoctrination is much easier in peaceful times and places and it can be wiped out by a single negative interaction.
Why is MY worried about anti semitic hate crimes? His odds of being murdered are very low, at least an order of magnitude lower than those of a young black man in Southeast DC. It’s not that MY is prejudiced against non-Jews, it’s that his brain is highly evolved to avoid threats of death and, historically, out group interactions have been much more dangerous than in group interactions.
Insofar as Kendi stands for something like "don't self-flagellate -- DO something about racial inequities" he stands head and shoulder above most people who write these anti-racism tracts. Sure, he can be a little woo-woo - we live in a somewhat woo-woo society. But DO something, don't wallow.