Lobbying the wrong solution for structural racism

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In my Wednesday column, I tried to describe part of the current controversy over race and K-12 education, the part of whether it is possible to tell a more historical story. comprehensive discussion of slavery and segregation while maintaining a broadly patriotic understanding of the founding and development of the Americas. .

In this column, I will try to describe the part of the controversy that relates to how we teach racism today. This is probably the most intense debate, sparking both progressive zeal and conservative backlash.

Again, I want to start with what the new progressivism wants to change. A shift involves increasingly familiar terms like structural and systemic racism, and the attempt to teach race in a way that emphasizes not only explicitly racist laws and attitudes, but also how whose racist past in the Americas still influences inequalities today.

In theory, this change is supposed to allow debates that avoid using racism as a personal accusation, because the point is that a culture can maintain persistent racial inequalities even if most whites are not fanatical or biased.

Yet this kind of vision alone would meet inevitable conservative resistance for several reasons: that it exaggerates the challenges facing minorities in America today; that he seems to underestimate personal responsibility; that this implies political responses (racial quotas, reparations) that are racially discriminatory, arguably unconstitutional and definitely threatening to the white middle class.

But the fundamental claim that structural racism exists has strong evidence, and the idea that schools should teach about it somehow is probably a winning argument for progressives. (Almost half of college Republicans, in a recent poll, supported the teaching about how patterns of racism are ingrained in law and other institutions.) Especially since all of the applications of the diagnosis of structural racism do not imply left-wing political conclusions: anti-abortion and school-choice movements, for example, routinely cite the impact of past progressive racism on disproportionately high abortion rates in Afro- Americans and public schools underperform.

What really ignites today’s struggles, however, is that the structural-racist diagnosis is not offered on its own. Instead, it ties into two sweeping theories on how to tackle the problem it describes.

First, there is a new theory of moral education, according to which the best way to deal with systemic inequality is to confront its white beneficiaries with their privileges and encourage them to fight against their sins.

Second, there is a Manichean view of public policy, in which all policy making is either racist or anti-racist, all racial disparities are the result of racism, and measuring any result below perfect fairness can be a form. of structural racism per se.

The first idea is associated with Robin DiAngelo, the second with Ibram X. Kendi, and they converge in places like the work of Tema Okun, whose presentations train educators to see the culture of white supremacy at work in schools. traditional measures of academic success.

The impulses that these ideas encourage take different forms in different institutions, but they generally revolve around similar objectives: first, the attempt to use racial education programs to build a stronger sense of shared white identity, on the apparent theory that making Americans out of Europeans thought to be defined by toxic whiteness will lead to its purge; second, the deconstruction of norms that manifest racial disparities, on the apparent theory that if we stop using gifted courses or standardized tests, the inequalities they reveal will cease to matter.

These objectives, it should be emphasized, do not necessarily follow from the theory of structural racism. The first idea arguably betrays the key idea of ​​the theory, that you can have racism without racists, by deliberately trying to increase individual racial guilt. The second expands structural analysis beyond what it can reasonably handle, into territory where white supremacy supposedly explains the success of Asian Americans on the SAT.

But precisely because they do not stem from modest and defensible conceptions of systemic racism, intelligent progressives in the media often fall back on these modest conceptions when challenged by conservatives without acknowledging that questionable conceptions are a large part of it. which amplified the controversy and evoked questionable Republicans. legislation in response.

Here, one could say that figures like Kendi and DiAngelo, and the complex of foundations and bureaucracies that have embraced the new anti-racism, are increasingly playing a talk-radio-like role in the Republican coalition. They represent ideological extremism that embarrasses intelligent liberals, as Limbaugh’s mind often embarrassed right-wing intellectuals. But this embarrassment encourages them to pretend that their influence is modest, their excesses forgivable, and the real problem is always the evils on the other side.

This pretext has gone badly for the right, whose intelligentsia woke up in 2016 to discover that it no longer recognized its own coalition. It would help if liberals currently dismissing the anxiety over Kendian’s or DiAngelan’s ideas as mere moral panic experience a similar awakening before progressivism simply becomes its excesses and the path to sanity is closed. .

Ross Douthat is a columnist for the New York Times.

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