If you want to make the case that racial consciousness can provide a meaningful form of identity, that's fine... but that means you have to be willing to admit that it can be so for whites as much as for mestizos or African Americans.
Are you willing to make that concession? If that's a bridge too far for you, then you might want to think about why that is, and stick with colorblindness.
I don't advocate for colorblindness. In fact, I've been a reliable skeptic of that aspiration.
And some more detailed thoughts (which I shared w/ Luis on X):
The unreality of witchcraft and blackness can be established in much the same way, despite many people identifying as practicing Wiccans—or millions more believing themselves *black.*
In the first case, prestidigitation isn’t real. You can sit on a wooden broomstick and whisper incantations until you’re blue in the face; it will never fly you to Paris.
In the second case, there is no essential or even technical similarity among all black people, nor any inherent difference between all black people and all white people.
The fundamental claims associated with these categories are fallacious.
People fear ghosts. They may even join affinity groups to protect one another from the incorporeal entities they believe lurk in the shadows. They may commend one another for their bravery in the face of imagined danger or erect towering monuments as a physical manifestation of their shared convictions.
But should you or I participate in—or casually endorse—their belief in poltergeists?
I do not doubt that many people forge intimate bonds based on racial fealty (and/or shared enmity). However, my considered opinion is that our collective commitment to race, as an idea, is actively harmful to individuals and society. Put another way, *the lies we tell ourselves have consequences.*
I am my son’s father, a biological man, and a citizen of the United States (among many other true things).
Am I black? Or perhaps a quadroon? Maybe an octoroon?
Most people would roll their eyes at two-thirds of those designations, yet they’ll thoughtlessly accept (or even forcefully defend) the other.
My position — rejecting race liberates individuals from reductive identities and fosters a more expansive (and honest) notion of personhood and human dignity. And I can contemplate the history/modern implications of injustices bound up with beliefs about race, without personally endorsing the same malignant falsehoods.
***
In Salem, they held witch trials. They managed to convict some people of witchcraft, and a few were punished severely. Importantly —despite the trials, convictions, and punishments— there were never any actual witches. That's not a minor detail; it's kinda the whole ballgame.
"Doing so will require recognizing the good in collective identities..."
Many millennia of history tell us that "collective identities" are only good when they neatly align with national borders. It ends badly when you draw borders across those identities (as colonialists did) or bolster distinct identities within borders (as this writer advocates).
This ain't rocket science: a sense of cohesion and shared identity is what makes societies work.
"Recognizing the good in collective identities" is precisely what the Ottoman Empire and the early USSR did. For example, see the history of Lenin and Stalin's "Affirmative Action Empire" (http://www.amazon.com/dp/0801486777). The Ottoman and Soviet experiments ended with multiple genocides and ethnic cleansings, e.g., of the Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks, Ukrainians, etc.
The same thing happened with Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, and many other 20th-century regimes that made the mistake of encouraging distinct identities. The result was economic failure and orgies of ethnic violence and genocide.
Beyond Robert Putnam's work, decades of economic research (including my own) show that group distinctions within a nation strongly correlate with a vast array of social pathologies (crime, corruption, political violence, oppressive government, etc.).
Have you ever looked at the UN "World Happiness Index" or the "Human Development Index?" Notice how the countries at the top of the list are among the most ethnically unified in the world, and the countries at the bottom are the most ethnically divided? As Harvard economist Alberto Alesina's research showed a few years ago, "if South Korea had Uganda’s level of ethnic fractionalization (division), its per capita income would be $21,030 instead of $40,090."
If groups are geographically concentrated, you can fix the "diversity drag" with ethnic federalism (e.g., like the Swiss cantons or Canada's Quebec). Otherwise, melting pot assimilation and fostering an overarching "supertribe" identity is the only proven way to make a diverse society work. In other words, you need the precise opposite of "Recognizing the good in collective identities."
With all respect, I think Luis Parrales is missing the point here. I don't know of anyone who is seriously arguing that a "colorblind" society means we can't notice and even discuss race. That would be an absurd expectation. What most of us who advocate "colorblindness" are actually seeking is a society is which POLICY, especially policy established by governments, ignores racial and other identarian differences.
It may be boring but it's useful to arrive at a nuanced position on race. Here are two suggestions:
1-Make government and "big corporate" policy color-blind; these institutions are not capable of nuance. But we can also accept that individuals and small businesses engage with the reality of people at the individual level, people with complex characteristics who like all of us wish to be appreciated in a unique way.
2-Acknowledge common sense: it's is simply not authentic to ignore what is sometimes the racial elephant in the room; and it is also unfair and demeaning to treat someone as with a skin-deep attitude. Let's be real, honest, and direct.
You make the needed dichotomy: The point is that the government has no productive way to implement any sort of race consciousness. That's wokeness and it's a proven disaster. The government can and must be color blind. But that doesn't mean that on a more personal level we can't know individuals for everything that makes them what they are, including race of course.
Interesting piece, though it seems to swing back a bit too far toward the valorization of "race."
Perhaps it would be best to view race merely as an aspect of ethnicity (or ethnic origin) -- as we do with those whose families are (ethnically) Jewish, Italian, or Chinese.
A liberal democracy guarantees all citizens equal protection (under the law), regardless of ethnicity. "Self-determination" remains an individual right.
Within that context, people are free -- in civil society -- both to maintain their ethnic traditions and to participate in (and contribute to) the overall culture. (Pizza, anyone? Blues?)
Ironically, the "heterodox" critics that the author cites as problematic (and certainly those touting the rumors about "cat-eating Haitians") are themselves guilty of precisely the sort of race-consciousness that (when an aspect of "wokeness") they might otherwise deplore. (OTOH, matters involving tact will always be negotiable -- interpersonal and mutually subjective.) Colorblindness is not the problem here!
I worry about another round of over-correction -- where, rather than judging someone by the content of their character, we evaluate their behavior by the color of their skin (whether they "look like me"). Two wrongs don't make a right.
"Ironically, the "heterodox" critics that the author cites as problematic (and certainly those touting the rumors about "cat-eating Haitians") are themselves guilty of precisely the sort of race-consciousness that (when an aspect of "wokeness") they might otherwise deplore. (OTOH, matters involving tact will always be negotiable -- interpersonal and mutually subjective.) Colorblindness is not the problem here!"
Another terribly superficial article from Persuasion. Perhaps engage with Hughes or Foster directly, or is the argument so weak that it cannot withstand scrutiny?
"They downplay how collective identities have often helped people form a rich sense of who people are and what they believe about the world."
Like how racial/nativistic identity helped shape GOP suspicion against Haitian immigrants? I frankly don't see how your two observations fit together at all.
A very thoughtful piece. Like the writer, I’ve been drawn to color-blindism by the excesses of the identitarian left. But it’s true that sometimes I’ve worried about some of our allies against the wokist threat. One of the keys to successful liberalism is finding a fair, just centrism, and it’s not simple. I don’t think the identitarians are defeated yet, and they may even resurrect in response to possible Trumpist extremism. So those of us who want to re-establish universalism as a proper societal goal have to continue to make our arguments against both the racist “anti-racists” of the left and the traditional racists of the extreme right. I think Coleman Hughes would agree — I’d like to hear a podcast discussion with Hughes and this writer.
You are wrong. And any perpetuation of this "thinking" that race is a differentiating factor in any social, political, economic, etc., distinction, is is fact the essence of all remaining material racism.
All institutional racism is materially vanquished except for these musings of the elite political chattering class that have a GIANT CONFLICT OF INTEREST in that they make money from the continuation of racial division to create cheap media copy.
For the rest of us living in the real world, there is only one remaining civil rights challenge... that of CLASS BIAS. And ironically it is those that demand that there is a continuation of racial bias more often demonstrating class bias.
Take a black, Hispanic, Asian or white young male and dress him in gansta garb with a hoodie and send him walking down the sidewalk in an upper class suburban neighborhood the reaction from the locals, including the local police, will be the same. It isn't racial bias, it is class bias.
And there really only one class I am biased against... the upper class luxury virtue signaling race baiting class.
Mr. Parrales posits that the critical social justice obsession with essentialized race is bad, but that color-blindness is creating problems as it rises against the backdrop of a crested or receding power of such essentialist racism on the left. Then the problems he cites with color-blindness are all backed up by examples of people who are explicitly not color-blind (such as Trump's eating cats and dogs debacle).
How does one reconcile this? What is the actual problem with color-blindness? Someone advocating color-blindness can and likely would repudiate the MAGA race-conscious discourse.
(In fairness, I think Coleman Hughes has specifically advocated institutional color-blindness, not interpersonal.)
Greetings, lots of excellent points but, as others have mentioned, you do not address white racial identity which was a powerful element in the recent GOP victories. Being white is a much a part of my wife's cultural identity as being black is part of mine. Race is a social construct and it is a powerful one in the way we get treated in the world.
It's extremely helpful of Persuasion to flag an article as unreadable with a subhead asserting that "racial animosity (is) rising on the right" when it is the right that is working against racial priorities in public policy. Truly, my thanks to the editors.
At the peak of scholarly discussion, is debated, "what does race mean?" This is of no help to us with far from scholarly intellect, to help us to understand and how best to approach this hot topic in the face of Critical Theories, upon which all this Woke ideology is founded. All that can be said for certain is, what this academic supported woke dogma that blames just about any and all ills in our society to "racism," is not the way to hasten the recognition of "racism" - if that needs to be defined yet again - within our existing capitalistic, meritocratic western societies.
If you want to make the case that racial consciousness can provide a meaningful form of identity, that's fine... but that means you have to be willing to admit that it can be so for whites as much as for mestizos or African Americans.
Are you willing to make that concession? If that's a bridge too far for you, then you might want to think about why that is, and stick with colorblindness.
Great point.
Brief but important clarification:
I don't advocate for colorblindness. In fact, I've been a reliable skeptic of that aspiration.
And some more detailed thoughts (which I shared w/ Luis on X):
The unreality of witchcraft and blackness can be established in much the same way, despite many people identifying as practicing Wiccans—or millions more believing themselves *black.*
In the first case, prestidigitation isn’t real. You can sit on a wooden broomstick and whisper incantations until you’re blue in the face; it will never fly you to Paris.
In the second case, there is no essential or even technical similarity among all black people, nor any inherent difference between all black people and all white people.
The fundamental claims associated with these categories are fallacious.
People fear ghosts. They may even join affinity groups to protect one another from the incorporeal entities they believe lurk in the shadows. They may commend one another for their bravery in the face of imagined danger or erect towering monuments as a physical manifestation of their shared convictions.
But should you or I participate in—or casually endorse—their belief in poltergeists?
I do not doubt that many people forge intimate bonds based on racial fealty (and/or shared enmity). However, my considered opinion is that our collective commitment to race, as an idea, is actively harmful to individuals and society. Put another way, *the lies we tell ourselves have consequences.*
I am my son’s father, a biological man, and a citizen of the United States (among many other true things).
Am I black? Or perhaps a quadroon? Maybe an octoroon?
Most people would roll their eyes at two-thirds of those designations, yet they’ll thoughtlessly accept (or even forcefully defend) the other.
My position — rejecting race liberates individuals from reductive identities and fosters a more expansive (and honest) notion of personhood and human dignity. And I can contemplate the history/modern implications of injustices bound up with beliefs about race, without personally endorsing the same malignant falsehoods.
***
In Salem, they held witch trials. They managed to convict some people of witchcraft, and a few were punished severely. Importantly —despite the trials, convictions, and punishments— there were never any actual witches. That's not a minor detail; it's kinda the whole ballgame.
"Doing so will require recognizing the good in collective identities..."
Many millennia of history tell us that "collective identities" are only good when they neatly align with national borders. It ends badly when you draw borders across those identities (as colonialists did) or bolster distinct identities within borders (as this writer advocates).
This ain't rocket science: a sense of cohesion and shared identity is what makes societies work.
"Recognizing the good in collective identities" is precisely what the Ottoman Empire and the early USSR did. For example, see the history of Lenin and Stalin's "Affirmative Action Empire" (http://www.amazon.com/dp/0801486777). The Ottoman and Soviet experiments ended with multiple genocides and ethnic cleansings, e.g., of the Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks, Ukrainians, etc.
The same thing happened with Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, and many other 20th-century regimes that made the mistake of encouraging distinct identities. The result was economic failure and orgies of ethnic violence and genocide.
Beyond Robert Putnam's work, decades of economic research (including my own) show that group distinctions within a nation strongly correlate with a vast array of social pathologies (crime, corruption, political violence, oppressive government, etc.).
Have you ever looked at the UN "World Happiness Index" or the "Human Development Index?" Notice how the countries at the top of the list are among the most ethnically unified in the world, and the countries at the bottom are the most ethnically divided? As Harvard economist Alberto Alesina's research showed a few years ago, "if South Korea had Uganda’s level of ethnic fractionalization (division), its per capita income would be $21,030 instead of $40,090."
If groups are geographically concentrated, you can fix the "diversity drag" with ethnic federalism (e.g., like the Swiss cantons or Canada's Quebec). Otherwise, melting pot assimilation and fostering an overarching "supertribe" identity is the only proven way to make a diverse society work. In other words, you need the precise opposite of "Recognizing the good in collective identities."
http://amazon.com/dp/1641773197
With all respect, I think Luis Parrales is missing the point here. I don't know of anyone who is seriously arguing that a "colorblind" society means we can't notice and even discuss race. That would be an absurd expectation. What most of us who advocate "colorblindness" are actually seeking is a society is which POLICY, especially policy established by governments, ignores racial and other identarian differences.
It may be boring but it's useful to arrive at a nuanced position on race. Here are two suggestions:
1-Make government and "big corporate" policy color-blind; these institutions are not capable of nuance. But we can also accept that individuals and small businesses engage with the reality of people at the individual level, people with complex characteristics who like all of us wish to be appreciated in a unique way.
2-Acknowledge common sense: it's is simply not authentic to ignore what is sometimes the racial elephant in the room; and it is also unfair and demeaning to treat someone as with a skin-deep attitude. Let's be real, honest, and direct.
You make the needed dichotomy: The point is that the government has no productive way to implement any sort of race consciousness. That's wokeness and it's a proven disaster. The government can and must be color blind. But that doesn't mean that on a more personal level we can't know individuals for everything that makes them what they are, including race of course.
Interesting piece, though it seems to swing back a bit too far toward the valorization of "race."
Perhaps it would be best to view race merely as an aspect of ethnicity (or ethnic origin) -- as we do with those whose families are (ethnically) Jewish, Italian, or Chinese.
A liberal democracy guarantees all citizens equal protection (under the law), regardless of ethnicity. "Self-determination" remains an individual right.
Within that context, people are free -- in civil society -- both to maintain their ethnic traditions and to participate in (and contribute to) the overall culture. (Pizza, anyone? Blues?)
Ironically, the "heterodox" critics that the author cites as problematic (and certainly those touting the rumors about "cat-eating Haitians") are themselves guilty of precisely the sort of race-consciousness that (when an aspect of "wokeness") they might otherwise deplore. (OTOH, matters involving tact will always be negotiable -- interpersonal and mutually subjective.) Colorblindness is not the problem here!
I worry about another round of over-correction -- where, rather than judging someone by the content of their character, we evaluate their behavior by the color of their skin (whether they "look like me"). Two wrongs don't make a right.
"Ironically, the "heterodox" critics that the author cites as problematic (and certainly those touting the rumors about "cat-eating Haitians") are themselves guilty of precisely the sort of race-consciousness that (when an aspect of "wokeness") they might otherwise deplore. (OTOH, matters involving tact will always be negotiable -- interpersonal and mutually subjective.) Colorblindness is not the problem here!"
Yes! I had this same reaction.
Another terribly superficial article from Persuasion. Perhaps engage with Hughes or Foster directly, or is the argument so weak that it cannot withstand scrutiny?
Colorblind is racist. Gravity is colorblind. Gravity is racist.
Race should only be as important as ethnicity. I have heard an nth generation American say, seriously, “I’m Italian.”
It should be a link to the family past. It should be an interesting tidbit of information about a new acquaintance.
_Nothing more._
"They downplay how collective identities have often helped people form a rich sense of who people are and what they believe about the world."
Like how racial/nativistic identity helped shape GOP suspicion against Haitian immigrants? I frankly don't see how your two observations fit together at all.
A very thoughtful piece. Like the writer, I’ve been drawn to color-blindism by the excesses of the identitarian left. But it’s true that sometimes I’ve worried about some of our allies against the wokist threat. One of the keys to successful liberalism is finding a fair, just centrism, and it’s not simple. I don’t think the identitarians are defeated yet, and they may even resurrect in response to possible Trumpist extremism. So those of us who want to re-establish universalism as a proper societal goal have to continue to make our arguments against both the racist “anti-racists” of the left and the traditional racists of the extreme right. I think Coleman Hughes would agree — I’d like to hear a podcast discussion with Hughes and this writer.
You are wrong. And any perpetuation of this "thinking" that race is a differentiating factor in any social, political, economic, etc., distinction, is is fact the essence of all remaining material racism.
All institutional racism is materially vanquished except for these musings of the elite political chattering class that have a GIANT CONFLICT OF INTEREST in that they make money from the continuation of racial division to create cheap media copy.
For the rest of us living in the real world, there is only one remaining civil rights challenge... that of CLASS BIAS. And ironically it is those that demand that there is a continuation of racial bias more often demonstrating class bias.
Take a black, Hispanic, Asian or white young male and dress him in gansta garb with a hoodie and send him walking down the sidewalk in an upper class suburban neighborhood the reaction from the locals, including the local police, will be the same. It isn't racial bias, it is class bias.
And there really only one class I am biased against... the upper class luxury virtue signaling race baiting class.
Mr. Parrales posits that the critical social justice obsession with essentialized race is bad, but that color-blindness is creating problems as it rises against the backdrop of a crested or receding power of such essentialist racism on the left. Then the problems he cites with color-blindness are all backed up by examples of people who are explicitly not color-blind (such as Trump's eating cats and dogs debacle).
How does one reconcile this? What is the actual problem with color-blindness? Someone advocating color-blindness can and likely would repudiate the MAGA race-conscious discourse.
(In fairness, I think Coleman Hughes has specifically advocated institutional color-blindness, not interpersonal.)
Greetings, lots of excellent points but, as others have mentioned, you do not address white racial identity which was a powerful element in the recent GOP victories. Being white is a much a part of my wife's cultural identity as being black is part of mine. Race is a social construct and it is a powerful one in the way we get treated in the world.
It's extremely helpful of Persuasion to flag an article as unreadable with a subhead asserting that "racial animosity (is) rising on the right" when it is the right that is working against racial priorities in public policy. Truly, my thanks to the editors.
At the peak of scholarly discussion, is debated, "what does race mean?" This is of no help to us with far from scholarly intellect, to help us to understand and how best to approach this hot topic in the face of Critical Theories, upon which all this Woke ideology is founded. All that can be said for certain is, what this academic supported woke dogma that blames just about any and all ills in our society to "racism," is not the way to hasten the recognition of "racism" - if that needs to be defined yet again - within our existing capitalistic, meritocratic western societies.