Can black people be racist?
.. and what that means about what my book should be called, plus some necessary corrections.
I consider myself responsible for accuracy here, and in that vein I must make three corrections re things I have shared with you.
Number One. We are all aware of how the Elect woke tend to truck in an exaggerated vision of how oppression works, such that you’d often suppose they were writing about an America a hundred years before ours.
If that must be called out, it won’t do for those opposed to it to indulge in similar exaggerations.
I’m afraid that happened regarding the sad note from the promising undergraduate I called attention to, who decided to move abroad rather than deal with the punitive, anti-intellectual climate of today’s academia.
The version of his missive that I reproduced turns out to have been significantly altered from what he actually wrote. What he wrote to his professor was, for one, less focused on the race issue. To be sure, his perspective and decision are a tragic sign of our times regardless. However, I owe my readers reality rather than what John Ford would have treated as “the legend,” upon which here is what our young man actually wrote:
“I am similarly frustrated by ideology masquerading as objective science. There is such strong moralization in the academy that is so certain that it has Science on its side in all of its proclamations. Frankly, the academy’s ideological dogmatism is one of my major hesitancies for entering it (and the fact that like (sic) tenured professorships are among the most competitive jobs to acquire). I fear any work I do, especially in developmental or evolutionary psychology, would be evaluated not on its merit but instead on what is perceived as my politics based on how politically convenient my findings are.”
He tells me that he did not graduate from an Ivy League school as I was informed he had; I was also misled as to his undergraduate majors.
Apologies, folks. The weight of feedback I receive daily from students and professors makes the bigger picture on what has happened to academia clear. However, I owe you reality, and I will be more vigilant in the future. I am an academic and editorialist, not a journalist – but I realize that with the role I am taking on here and elsewhere lately, I need to up my wariness. I will.
Number Two -- on music theory, I am grateful to Nathan Pell for setting me straight on aspects of one of Professor Ewell’s arguments that Heinrich Schenker’s music theory “is racist.” The second one, about foregrounding and backgrounding, is tough to grasp for someone not right inside of the subject, and I am not. I revised my post according to his counsel, and I appreciate his feedback, as well as his understanding that I sincerely want to get at the heart of the controversy in question and was not seeking hitjob journalism.
Although – I must say based on a little of what I have seen out of the corner of my eye … I am not a musicologist, at all. But I have taught a music history course at Columbia for many years, and classical music is one of my places, passions, obsessions, historical experiences. So, I do bring a little to my address of Professor Ewell, in case anyone thinks I am really nosing in somewhere where I have no business. Ewell is a cellist – so was I, for years as a kid. And for ten years recently I played cabaret piano (if I may, I was playing by ear in that clip) in a Greenwich Village venue as producer and emcee and accompanist for a company of singers – we did obscure musical theatre work; about 250 songs by the time we ended. None of this makes me a musicologist. But still, as they say.
Number Three, I’m realizing I can’t use the term neoracism in the subtitle of my The Elect book.
From assorted social media posts, I am realizing that if I say Neoracists Posing as Antiracists and Their Threat to a Progressive America, many understandably think I am referring to black people being racist against whites.
I need to specify – despite that it may dampen the enthusiasm for my book among some – that I do not think of black people being racist against whites and white people being racist against blacks as equally reprehensible.
Many whites are deeply aggrieved that they are assailed for being racists, but that no one seems to mind black people not liking white people. They want us to assail black racism as vociferously as we do white racism.
I must disappoint. I am fully on board with the idea that racism is about who is up versus down. Black racism against whites is, at least at its foundation, about resentment at being abused. To apply the same judgment to this as to blacks being racist against whites is facile, uninsightful – frankly, almost a debate team trick.
“But where does it lead if you hate me and I hate you and you hate me …?” – okay. But we live in our own limited time slices. There are two layers here.
One: just a few inches past about 1964, is it so unpardonable, so incomprehensible, that black people might be mad at white people?
Two: if you object that 1964 was a while ago now, then is it so unpardonable, so incomprehensible, that lots of black people might be mad at white people now when so many intellectuals and artists and community leaders have taught them to be that mad for decades?
Note – I didn’t ask whether it was right that they have been taught that. The issue is that they were. And they harbor what they were taught at a time – today -- when no one can deny that racism does exist. Anyone who thinks I don’t know that hasn’t read me much.
So. In this vein, I am seeing that “neoracism” sounds to many like I am decrying racism against whites. I get why they think that – and I know that quite a few will think that’s what I mean without subscribing to the white nationalist groups who have used the word that way.
Some in my position would try to reclaim the word and make it mean what they want it to mean. I, for example, meant “new racism against black people.” But my comfort zone cannot fashion community meaning. I am not interested in standing athwart common human understanding and hollering “Stop!,” watching it continue despite me, and then self-gratifyingly grumbling that nobody listens to me.
My strategy will be to eschew the word “neoracism.” If people are going to read it to mean that my book is about arguing against racism against white people, they will be massively disappointed by my book.
This is because my book is about how the modern conception of antiracism is racist against BLACK people.
Social media and Substack allow one to fashion a book according to public feedback in a way never possible before. My book will no longer be titled The Elect: Neoracists Posing as Antiracists and Their Threat to a Progressive America,” because I can see that this leads some whites to see me as defending them against black racism. My book will not do that, and I frankly suggest the whites in question learn to understand it. Racism punches down. Yes, I believe that, even though The Elect do too. I always have.
Instead I will try something new. The Elect: The Threat to a Progressive America from Anti-Black Antiracists.
This is a work in progress. Book titles have always been hard for me. Word on the Street came on a deadline when I drank a big glass of red wine and just tipped my head back and dreamed. Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue just came to me walking down the street as if dictated; I could never have “fashioned” it. I know – what about the race books. Losing the Race was from an editor who hated the book; I wanted to call it Walking Against the Wind but there was already a book about John Lewis at the time with that title. All About the Beat was from how Michael Eric Dyson put it about, well, everything in a debate we did at Emory in 2005.
So we shall see what The Elect is ultimately called. But no more “neoracism.” I do not think of George Jefferson and Fred Sanford as “racists” in the same way as Archie Bunker was. Those references are now dated, but they track with that if a black person today says “I don’t like white people,” I think it’s a little easy to object “How dare you be a racist?!?”
"I must disappoint. I am fully on board with the idea that racism is about who is up versus down. "
You have definitely disappointed me. While, it would be obvious that a racist with more power could cause more damage than a racist with less power, it is no less a moral vice for someone with less power to be racist than someone with more power; albeit a greater moral crime may be committed by someone with more power. As was grotesquely demonstrated with regard to the Rwandan genocide, if people with less power but with deep racist sentiments acquire power, there can be horrific consequences. And when we aren't talking about political power, even individual racists who belong to a racial group with less power as a whole can inflict substantial harm on innocent people due to their racist sensibilities. A racist with a gun, albeit not capable of redlining swaths of people, can still kill. It doesn't matter if a white person is "up" in some abstract estimation of generalized racial power of their group -- the concrete power of any particular white person probably won't be protective against a bullet nor are they any more deserving of that bullet. Or -- just a racist with a twitter account can still potentially destroy an innocent person's livelihood -- whether or not they belong to the racial group with more overall aggregate political power (assuming the racial group is even conspiring together to use that power, which in the U.S. today is not occurring with regard to most white people).
While it is true that in some sense "Black racism against whites is, at least at its foundation, about resentment at being abused" -- it doesn't apply to all individual black people(it simply is not the case that today all racist black people have experienced substantial racist abuse themselves), nor does historical causation somehow absolve black people from the moral duty to develop themselves and overcome the bigotry they may have inherited from history. I am surprised you would express this sentiment when one of your biggest gripes with the "Elect" is that they portray black people as desperately fragile. It seems you still feel you must protect black people from the moral responsibility of not being racist by using the same strategy of the "The Elect" that you resent--verbal legerdemain.
"Racism punches down." Pff, it punches every direction. Down may cause more damage at times, but it is no more or less racist. There is simply more momentum when punching down. With enough force though, one can resist gravity.
It is just bizarre that you seem to be trying to separate the neoracists or the elect, or whatever we wish to call them, by racial lines. Robin Diangelo and Ibram Kendi are equally neoracists. Robin Diangelo doesn't deserve more moral admonishment than Ibram Kendi because she is white. That is exactly the ideology that they are pushing. Are you sure you aren't a member of The Elect yourself? Just forgot about your membership or are you envious of their stature in The Church?
And why would you compare George Jefferson and Archie Bunker? This isn't the 50s; isn't that a refrain you have been making? Yes, they are dated references. How about comparing Louis Farrakhan and Richard Spencer? The former is still an honored character by many neoracists and many powerful Democrats; the latter is a pariah by both political parties. You do not think black people being racist against white people can be as equally reprehensible? It must mean that you are generalizing history rather than judging individual cases. There are some clearly reprehensible instances of black people being racist against white people; one must be blind to not acknowledge that. One needn't therefore conclude that the historical scales of racism from black people to white people is therefore equal. But any individual white person isn't responsible for that scale, nor is any individual black person morally entitled to demand personal reparations for that imbalance.
I think it makes sense that your book is intended to look at how neoracists are racist toward black people, but it is ridiculous not to acknowledge that neoracists are racist against white people too. The ideology that is being pushed by those such as Diangelo and Kendi is universally racist, insofar as it contributes to the continued tribalism of people based on race, rejects moral individualism, embraces moral collectivism, and reinforces psychological barriers that people have when it comes to developing emotional bonds, trust, and respect with people who don't share their own perceived race. Unfortunately, it seems that some of that ideology still appeals to you.
Yes it is unpardonable for black people to be racist; albeit not all racism is equal. George Jefferson is not Jefferson Davis. But yet, the sin of racism requires repentance. It is not incomprehensible of course that some black people are racist. We have a history of racial hatred directed toward our ancestors, and it makes sense that our ancestors have passed down racial resentment and hatred due to that. But black people are no less morally bound to transcend irrational generational hatred than all people. That is a supremely virtuous path, and it is indeed *racist* to discourage black people from taking that path by making them agentless pawns of "community leaders" and "intellectuals". Do you take black people to be so fragile that such a a path would destroy us?
"Can black people be racist?"
Yes. Deplorably so. Suggesting they cannot is racist. Neoracist, particularly. That black people cannot be racist is the first tenet of the New Church of the Woke. And it is no doubt morally seductive to many black people just as the notion of the substitutional redemption of sins is to many humans in general. Yet, both are decadent. It seems you may just be a reformer in the church and not a true heretic.
I grew up in a rough part of queens with my poor white mother. Then part of suburban Long Island with my wealth Colombian immigrant father, I live in Brooklyn now. I have a perspective shaped by a unique experience. I have to say, I really “get it” despite most people really disliking that sentiment. I used to make fun of whites for everything as recently as 4 or 5 years ago. Literally all the time. Most times not in such good spirits lol. But then I saw things that clearly crossed the line. I have maybe made 3 white jokes since then. I feel like making them now pushes conversations down a dark road literally on a dime. I saw groups of color during the riots talking about “let’s go fuck up and burn down the white neighborhood LOL”.. an attempt to organize destroying a lower middle class mixed neighborhood where my mother now currently lives and rents out 4/5ths of her own house and lives in a garage because she can’t afford it since her 3rd husband died from lung cancer. The attempt was thwarted with many police and several helicopters, Im sure you can find it if you searched for it online - or maybe not because the media is the media. My mother texting me screenshots of the attempted effort in terrified tears was certainly an experience I would never have thought I would live to see.
Even before that I felt a growing sense that my mother and my little sister were in danger when I saw anti-white rhetoric all over social media, in private amongst friends. Something is deeply off. None of my family were alive and shouldn’t have to answer for inherited guilt they do not deserve.
When I came across you, a fellow liberal and brilliant respectable human being willing to stand up against this, I like many have felt a sense of relief, brotherhood, understanding.. kindred spirits? I would go so far as to call you a hero on several occasions. You and Glen for your amazing conversations which I still enjoy. I generally still agree with everything you are saying, and I understand proportionality, but in the 21st century, seeing the kinds of horrendous things being aimed at white people (I can’t believe I’m defending white people, and I certainly don’t feel white, and I’m not even sure what the hell that would feel like), I truly feel a little stupid for getting my hopes up that someone such as yourself took this issue seriously from all directions. And no, it’s not just because you’re a black man. I don’t tend to think of things in that way. You’re just clearly brilliant and craft amazing arguments. You represent precisely the kind of values and mode of being that runs counter to the narrative that tries to destroy civil society. I’m not ignorant to your early work, I think your position makes sense. Still an awesome ally to have, and perhaps this take is the take that we need because THAT is what’s missing and it’s completely true. It is anti black in every way. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t fearful and upset by yet another prominent person not seeing the dark shit happening. It would have been great for someone to see what’s coming out of of people and directed at people like my poor lonely mother. It makes me legitimately sad.