The Path Beyond Slavery and Racism
Critical race theory is a disaster. Let’s talk about a new path.
Steve Lee dropped a well-though-out and substantive reply to my earlier writing on the journalistic and historical scholarship disaster that is the 1619 Project. He challenged me to articulate a path that can bring us out of our 400 year (American) struggle against racism and prejudice, as an alternative to 1619-style thinking.
One key question, perhaps the key question, is about the impact of essentialism as a political narrative, vs universalism. Both racial essentialism and national essentialism are core to the 1619 view, but are mistakes.
Racial essentialism
Racial essentialism is related to identity politics. It is the idea that race is core to a person, whether due to their genes (kind of foolish) or the racial experience and role of each person as they grow up in the US (the CRT view). A racial essentialist thinks that being Black or white (or “BIPOC”) is a big deal, and we should “center” skin tone in how we think about a person, and even about society.
Essentialism leads people to look at racial inequality and conclude (at least subconsciously) that there is something wrong with Black people if they are not doing well as a group. Academic studies confirm this. Essentialists are more racist to start with, and showing people essentialist writings makes them more racist still.
National essentialism is similarly misguided. It is the idea that because we have a history of racism in the US, racism is core or essential to our nation and we must tear up our core beliefs, rework our institutions, and rewrite our Constitution to progress.
Universalism
If there is no “essential” difference between white and Black people (or BIPOC and non-BIPOC) then we are all really the same. That’s universalism, and it is what pretty much everybody agreed on before the rise in critical race theory, intersectionality, and other essentialist racial ideologies. In the universalist view, even a Black person growing up in America and experiencing prejudice, is fundamentally the same as a white person.
Martin Luther King was perhaps the most prominent and impactful racial universalist (vs an essentialist). He famously dreamed that “my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” If you care to read King’s speeches and writings and not fixate exclusively on “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” (which progressives recently insist on quoting to the exclusion of all else) you’ll find that his foundation was universal love, humanity and the natural bond among all people and particularly between poor whites and poor Blacks. He saw how dividing people by race, particularly in a way that would attack or humiliate whites, as an unproductive Band-Aid that would ultimately blow up in our faces. (As seems to be happening now.) Only by appealing to universal values could we move past racism and learn to love one another.
As King said in his Nobel Peace Prize lecture:
The movement does not seek to liberate Negroes at the expense of the humiliation and enslavement of whites. It seeks no victory over anyone. It seeks to liberate American society and to share in the self-liberation of all the people.
And as fellow Poor People’s Campaign organizer, William Barber, wrote:
Poor and low-wealth people are seeing the need to galvanize themselves around an agenda, not a party, not a person, but an agenda. What happens if a movement is able to help people see how they’re being played against each other? You could reset the entire political calculus.
(In contrast, Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam which he led and grew, represent the essentialist view where at least the experience and history of Black people are essential and central to a person’s identity, so should be emphasized rather than making common cause with white people.)
Progressives give some lip service to MLK (you sort of have to) but cherry pick and distort his writing in exactly this political calculus meant to divide. When they do quote King, it is often “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” For a shocking example, this video shows Evergreen State racial justice protestors rejecing King as a chump who is “also dead” and can be ignored.
Framing the arc of (United States) history
Steve, like many other progressives, points to a “through line” in which racism is always present in American history, and then concludes that a singular focus on race and racism that ignores progress and ideals of equality is the best path forward.
I suggest we instead turn again to Dr. King, who said that our history (and the moral history of the world) is “a long arc” but “bends toward justice.” He was right. Slavery was the low point, and present at the birth of our country. Emancipation was a huge step forward, hard fought and paid for with American blood, but also not adequate. Jim Crow emerged after abolition and was still terrible, and when it ended, explicit racism, violence and oppression of Black people remained. Now that explicit racism and violence are vastly reduced, systemic racism is still here.
The job is not done, so we do have a 400 year “through line” showing racism in every era. Yet we also see constant progress.
Of course the particulars of racial history in the US are important and undeniable. But the question is whether they are the overall context within all of history is presented, or the opposite: is the real founding, origin and national project of America freedom and equality, in which case the slow but steady reduction of racism is one, painful example.
The difficult arc of progress is illuminated by our ideals
Our failure to complete the work does not detract from the reality of progress. Without our ideal of equality, we would not even see the problem.
From the start, Thomas Jefferson, famously both a moral giant when it comes to freedom and equality, and a moral mouse when it came to his own enslaving of other people, saw that future progress would be remarkable and inevitable:
[L]aws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind… new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors. - Thomas Jefferson
And true to his prediction, we have built on the founding documents to reach a place free from slavery, where all people are equal in the eyes of the law, equal in the eyes of most Americans, and gaining equality in material wealth and institutional treatment over time.
Stalled racial progress post 1970: the failure of identity politics
Unfortunately, despite centuries of progress, the most recent, post-civil-rights era has shown less progress on Black income inequality in particular. The protests and riots of 1968 are often held up as a high point in our struggle against racism and inequality, but actually, 1970 was a turning point where steady progress turned into stagnation. Once King was assassinated and riots plagued many cities, political and economic winds turned at least somewhat against Black America.
Still, social standing has continued to advance, even as economic progress has stalled:
We also see that Black Lives Matter protests were the largest in the history of America, further illustrating progress in social attitudes.
Why did economic progress falter even as prejudice receded?
David Schor pointed out that violent riots in ’68 likely threw the next presidential election to Nixon, and he was fired for his trouble.
The import of this event is hard to overstate. Progressives understand, implicitly or consciously, that saying riots were unproductive is damaging to their identarian narrative and project. Harkening to Malcolm X and subtly denigrating or ignoring Martin Luther King, modern progressives don’t want to hear that the identity-based conflict harms us all, or that the universalist approach it replaced was a more successful engine of racial progress.
We stalled because of essentialism and identity. As I wrote about earlier, it coincides with a philosophy of victimhood, blame and oppression which admits neither grace nor nobility.
Critical theory is part of the problem, not the solution
Curiously, critical theory (as exemplified in the 1619 materials) uses racial and national essentialism to claim, without any evidence, that that the US is “essentially” racist, rather than on a consistent trend toward equality that constantly reduces racism, consistent with our national ideology.
They use the language of oppression and list injustices, which are all accurate, but also cleverly ignore and erase progress. Then they conclude that racism “is in the DNA” of America, that Abraham Lincoln was part of the problem rather than the solution, and that our founding ideals “were false when they were written.” (As I wrote about in an earlier story.)
The truth is that while progress is never as fast as we would like, it is far faster than the decline caused by identity politics and essentialist thinking since the 1960s.
There is ample evidence. Pre-1960s racial progress was steady and in the right direction, yet we have stumbled since the ’68 conflagration. Similarly, identity politics has been embraced by both Left and Right in recent years, and we are now in the midst of a political and ethical social shit-show beyond anything we have seen in at least 60 years, and perhaps 160. Sociology experiments show (see above) that essentialism increases racism. We see only setbacks as modern Progressives embrace Malcolm X’s (early but late rejected) path forward and subtly denigrate Martin Luther King.
It’s not going well. When find yourself in a hole, maybe stop digging?
Universalism is the way forward
So what I would put forth to supplant 1619 thinking is universalism and the language of love and unity. The narrative we must embrace — and teach our children — is that we are, and always have been, a country with a central, unifying mission, at home and in the world. Our job as Americans is to advance equality. For us and for all humanity. We started where the world was in 1776, as a barbaric young nation in a barbaric world. But as Jefferson points out, cited above, barbarism was our starting point, not our destiny. The vision has always been to grow, generation to generation, toward a deeper, freer, enlightened humanity.
So what I would put forth to supplant 1619 and related drivel is grace, love and commitment instead of blame and victimization-olympics. We must continue our national project rather than descend into essentialist thinking, identity politics, and the emerging, new flavor of racial conflict it implies.
