In a June 19 letter, following the death of George Floyd, Father Boroughs declared Holy Cross’ intention to be an “actively anti-racist organization.” To accomplish this, the message stated, the College would abide by a new Anti-Racism Action Plan to “promote a culture of anti-racism” at the “individual, departmental, and institutional level.” The plan provides for training workshops, new curriculum, lectures, and other resources — like a new anti-racism website — for students and faculty alike. Despite an ongoing pandemic that has already cost the College more than $15 million in extra spending this year, these measures included the funding of a new — seemingly superfluous — “Associate Provost for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” and questionable programs like “Self-Care Conversations for Social Justice Activists.” Having already withdrawn at least $5 million from the endowment since March, the College could surely find more pressing uses for these funds, however modest. But the bigger issue with the College’s Anti-Racism Action Plan has nothing to do with finances, but rather, the very essence of “anti-racism” itself.
At first glance, “anti-racism” might seem benign. Opposing racism? What could be wrong with that? The problem is that — despite the name — the “anti-racist” movement in America today doesn’t actually oppose racism as it is traditionally understood. The Oxford Dictionary defines racism as “prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against a person or people” on the basis of race. Ibram X. Kendi, author of the 2019 bestseller How to Be an Antiracist, has a very different understanding. He defines racism as a “marriage” of “policies and ideas that produces and normalizes racial inequities” [emphasis added]. Individual prejudices and discrimination are irrelevant in the eyes of the new “anti-racists.” Instead, policies resulting in inequitable outcomes between different races are the problem. In other words, people aren’t racist, institutions are; discrimination isn’t the problem, disparities in outcome are.
In Kendi’s mind, different outcomes between different racial groups in any area of life can only be explained as the product of racist policy. Thus, being race-neutral is actually racist — instead, society must become actively anti-racist. The biggest issue with this ideology isn’t even that it is based on fallacy — the best-educated and most successful immigrant group in the country is actually Nigerian-Americans, suggesting that factors other than racism are responsible for some African-Americans’ lack of upward mobility. More problematic are the policy prescriptions Kendi and others propose to address America’s perceived institutional racism. Whereas normal opponents of racism might call for reducing discrimination, today’s “anti-racists” call for more — so long as it is in the service of “creating equity.” This flies in the face of the essential elements of the American experience — individual rights, equality of opportunity, impartial application of the law. At its worst, “anti-racist” ideology verges on totalitarianism — in a recent Politico op-ed, Kendi calls for constitutional amendment to establish a “Department of Antiracism” to ensure that all federal, state, and local policies result in equality of outcome (which, of course, is impossible to achieve).
Orwellian proposals like this would be terrifying if they weren’t so ludicrous. Nevertheless, such ideas are not inconsequential, not least because they distract from real, visible instances of racism that can be actionably addressed in society. Kendi, preferring to focus on broad statistical disparities and policy impacts, dismisses the significance of individual actions, despite the fact that the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights resolved nearly 5,000 discrimination complaints in the last three years alone. “Anti-racist” ideology — with its vague, unworkable solutions for broad societal disparities — appears to actually make the work of combating racism much harder. In the last three years, the Trump administration closed twice the number of racial school-discipline cases and six times as many sexual-violence cases than the “anti-racist” Obama administration did in the three years prior. And it was President Trump, not Obama, who addressed perhaps the most prominent remaining example of structural racism in the United State today — mandatory minimum sentencing — with the 2018 signing of the First Step Act. As Kenneth L. Marcus, assistant secretary of education for civil rights between 2018 and 2020, put it in the Wall Street Journal, “It turns out there is a price to be paid when we take our eyes off of racial (or sex) discrimination.” As he explained, resolving systemic failures is often accomplished by addressing many individual incidents. If you neglect individual cases, as Kendi and the “anti-racists” do, you can never solve racism at the structural level.
If individual instances of racism are inconsequential, what do the “anti-racists” propose we focus on instead? Apparently, anything and everything. In one laughable example, Kendi told Vox’s Ezra Klein in a recent interview that even a theoretical capital gains tax reduction would be racist, since black Americans own proportionally fewer stocks compared to whites. Such an all-encompassing mindset not only precludes finding workable solutions, but inevitably leads to a dangerously fatalistic worldview in which racial resentments permeate every aspect of life. Ta-Nehisi Coates’ bestselling 2015 book Between the World and Me provides a prime example of this phenomenon in action. Although Coates writes that he intends to illuminate the “racist violence that has been woven into American culture” for centuries, the book instead illustrates the bitterness, contempt — and even hatefulness — that define the fatalistic view of race relations shared by Coates, Kendi, and other “anti-racists.” In this mindset, white supremacy is written into America’s DNA, and is effectively impossible to overcome. Like Kendi, Coates provides sweeping, abstract condemnations of the current system, but balks at offering solutions. To provide just one example — the systemic denial of mortgages to black people in the past rightly infuriates Coates, but so does the granting of mortgages to them today, because they are likely to experience foreclosure, which he views as “plunder.”
So what is the solution here? Apparently, there isn’t one — but Coates might be fine with that, because more than anything else, he just wants to express his deep contempt for America. This is made clear through vivid descriptions of events that, to a normal person, would seem fairly innocuous — but to Coates are defined by noxious racial dynamics. One example Coates revisits repeatedly in the book is an incident in which his four-year-old son was pushed in a New York City escalator by a white woman who said, “Come on,” to get him to move. This surely must have been unpleasant, but it hardly seems extraordinary. I have to imagine a great deal of shoving and rudeness occurs daily in New York — presumably, much of it white-on-white as well. Was this the result of a woman late for her morning commute? Or just plain inconsideration? Preposterous! As Coates tells it, this represented a form of modern-day slavery. “Someone had invoked their right over the body of my son,” he writes. In another example, he recalls seeing a young white couple pushing strollers down the sidewalk in Harlem, their toddlers beside them. A sign of gentrification? Sure. Nevertheless, to most people this would be a fairly inoffensive sight — but think again. To Coates, this sight sends a nefarious message of racial superiority — he writes “The galaxy belonged to them, and as terror was communicated to our [black] children, I saw mastery communicated to theirs.” Ideally, such a response to the sight of children playing on the sidewalk might warrant an appointment with a psychologist. But because it is Ta-Nehisi Coates, observations like these have now earned an esteemed place in high school and college libraries across the country.
Unfortunately, this worldview is not just confined to the “benign-but-ludicrous.” At its worst, it surpasses bitterness and verges on hatred. In perhaps the most astonishing portion of his book, Coates writes that his “heart was cold” while witnessing the September 11 attacks. He explains, “I could see no difference between the officer who killed Prince Jones [a black man killed by a police officer] and the police who died, or the firefighters who died. They were not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they were the menaces of nature… which could — with no justification — shatter my body.” Hyperbole aside, Coates provides little rationale for why firefighters should be disparaged over the issue of police violence — let alone why the 98.9 percent of 9/11 victims who were not police officers deserve such callous disregard. But then, hatred is rarely rational.
Unfortunately, such vitriolic tendencies are not unique to Coates — the aforementioned Kendi, today’s most prominent “anti-racist” advocate, is another prime offender. On September 26, following the Supreme Court nomination of Amy Coney Barrett (who adopted two children from Haiti), Kendi tweeted,
“Some White colonizers ‘adopted’ Black children. They ‘civilized’ these ‘savage’ children in the ‘superior’ ways of White people, while using them as props in their lifelong pictures of denial, while cutting the biological parents of these children out of the picture of humanity.”
As Fraser Myers writes in Spiked, “The language he employs sounds anti-racist… But the conclusion one surely has to draw from his reasoning is racist.” But don’t just take it from him — the white supremacist Richard Spencer soon retweeted Kendi’s post, adding “Not wrong.”
This may be controversial (hear me out), but if your opposition to racism is bringing you into common cause with… well, racists… you’re probably doing something wrong. But maybe that shouldn’t be so unexpected. After all, racists and “anti-racists” today seem to have an awful lot in common — most importantly, an all-consuming obsession with race, and a preoccupation with racial preservation. Whereas past racists used segregation to keep blacks away from whites, today’s “anti-racists” create segregated spaces to keep whites away from people of color. This is not to denigrate the legitimate value of having groups for people of minority racial and ethnic backgrounds to find support and solidarity, but when such spaces are undergirded by premises of perpetual victimhood and oppression, they can only be harmful to race relations — and to people of color themselves, by handicapping their ability to succeed in a multiracial society. This is best exemplified (again) by Kendi himself. In How to Be an Antiracist, he describes his first, frightful night in Virginia, “worried the Ku Klux Klan would arrive any minute.” But Kendi is 38… and this was in 1997. The shackles of racial fear and victimhood are surely not conducive to mental health — and certainly not success in competitive educational and professional fields. Racism (often in muted forms) still exists, but adding fictitious racial bogeymen, and sowing seeds of racial distrust and resentment on top of that, is the last thing black Americans — and the country — need. Such a fatalistic victim mentality, if allowed to spread, will only create a self-fulfilling prophecy of degraded race relations and poor socioeconomic mobility among underprivileged people of color.
To return to our own institution, it is worth asking what Holy Cross has to gain from embracing “anti-racism.” As it turns out… very little that is not already being done. One of the major goals of the Anti-Racism Action Plan, for example, is to recruit a more diverse body of students and faculty. But according to data from this semester, the College’s student body is already 26 percent nonwhite, higher than the percentage for Massachusetts as a whole (22 percent). And of tenure-track faculty hires in the last five years (before the anti-racism plan was adopted), 36 percent were people of color, already higher than the nonwhite proportion of recent doctoral graduates (33 percent). Evidently, the College has already been able to make great strides in recent years to achieve a racially-balanced faculty and student body. Holy Cross should continue to seek out diverse talent — but it needn’t self-flagellate and kowtow to the polarizing, unsavory “anti-racist” ideology while doing so. The best alternative would be to reject peddlers of hate like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi, and embrace the visions of true anti-racist leaders like the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who famously said, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
