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Stefan's avatar

The article says that the ideal anti-racism is one, "grounded in the idea that there is a single human race to which we all belong—and that all the ways of dividing us up, though they may be important to understand our present reality, should not be given moral weight."

I agree that the ideal of racial separatism is a dead-end and that a vision of our common humanity should be the ends of anti-racism. But I think the passing comment, "though they may be important to understand our present reality," underplays the degree to which fixing problems of a genuine racial character--either because of present discrimination or because of the accumulated and/or codified policy choices of the past that lead to present day racial inequities--is more difficult if we pretend that we are all just equal humans. In other words, I accept your conclusion, but I hope that readers do not also conclude that color-blindness along the way is required in order to reach it.

I further agree that simply calling out racial disparities/anecdotes (even particularly horrifying ones) does not adequately deal with the complexities at play in most situations.

As I see it, we need to be able to progress down something akin to the following analytical path to be rigorously anti-racist:

1) Is there a problem in society that is of a genuine racial character? In other words, is the problem a direct result of some insidious focus on race, either in the present or past? Rigorous causal analysis is important here. Is this correlation or causation? Are there confounding causes (e.g., is this really a class problem masquerading as a race problem?) Is it a combination of many problems at the same time, some racial some not, and if so, can we isolate the root causes of the problems and address them?

2) Assuming we could identify a problem that is genuinely caused by some form of racism (intentional or not), is the best way to solve the problem by focusing on race when prescribing a solution? Here, your mention of the neighborhoods that were red-lined is instructive. If we simply treat a past harm with a genuine racial character as analogous to the present reality, we will not end up actually remediating that harm. But there might be an actual way to remediate that past harm, and it is hard to imagine what it would be apart from focusing specifically on race. Of course, this is an incredibly complex process because we will disagree about the best ways to solve any given problem. But, if our goal is an integrated racial pluralism rooted in our common humanity in which race is not a determining factor of access to opportunity, then we must be able to have the conversations along the way.

John McWhorter's discussion about getting more children of color into magnet schools in NYC is a good example of what I am talking about here. We shouldn't just get rid of the tests. But we also shouldn't ignore the fact that students of color are under-represented in those schools. We should figure out how to teach students to do better at those tests so that they have the opportunity to get in.

This is particularly important in the legal context where the status quo Equal Protection jurisprudence usually does not allow for focus on race at all UNLESS it can be shown there was specific individual discrimination. Some call this approach, "The Color Blind Constitutionalism." In it, the harm to be avoided is focus on race at all: race is poison. So, if the government decides to use race in some public policy as a way to remediate some harm from the past of a racial nature, then this focus on race is itself the harm. Chief Justice John Roberts saying that, "the only way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race" typifies this way of thinking. Perhaps they are right that the best way to fix social problems is not to focus on race. But I disagree. I think to be anti-racist we need to engage in something akin to the above listed reasoning process. And, if we can identify a way to remediate some racial harm by focusing on race, then we should be able to do it if the political will is present.

I agree that much of the anti-racism crowd of today puts the cart before the horse in the way it seizes on anecdotes and decontextualized statistics as justification for whatever policy they want at any given time (e.g., defund the police, etc). But I think we also need to recognize that focusing on race--not as a way to divide but to diagnose and then treat--will be critical as we work in a genuinely anti-racist way to solve problems that are truly of a racial character.

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Sasha Stone's avatar

Thank you for the (as usual) thoughtful commentary. Kind of reminds me how during the Salem Witch Trials there was spectral evidence, what you can't see but is assumed and that could decide their fate. Some of the conversations around antiracism have seemed like that to me. Spectral evidence that there is a racist hiding in there and one tweet or one photo or one dumb joke 20 years ago is a smoking gun. Hopefully we can find a way back to this.

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