RACISM HOLDS BACK ALL OF US
WASHINGTON — Racism is bad for all of us, white people included.
Racism is immoral and has, again and again, led to deadly violence toward our fellow human beings. It is also a dysfunctional force in our polity. It has been used to divide those who should be allies. It casts politics as a zero-sum struggle.
In response to the killing of 10 Black Americans in Buffalo by a gunman committed to the madness of the “great replacement” theory, President Biden rightly condemned “white supremacy” as “a poison … running through our body politic.” He offered the bracing, old-fashioned argument that racism is wrong because “we’re all children of God.” Advocates of the replacement conspiracy have ignored this truth in the past when they invoked the theory against not only Black Americans but also white immigrants — Irish, Italian, Jewish, Greek and so many others — out of fear that they would undermine the country’s “Anglo-Saxon” majority.
“The people who today think of themselves as regular Americans, people with surnames like Stefanik, Gaetz or Anton,” conservative writer Bret Stephens argued in a powerful New York Times column, “would, on account of their faith or ethnicity, have been seen by previous generations of nativists as uncouth and unassimilable, dirty and disloyal.”
Perhaps because the term is thrown around so freely, I’d insist that those who condemn racism should not be accused of “virtue signaling.” I’m not fond of the phrase because, in principle, advancing virtue is an absolute necessity in a democratic republic.
Nonetheless, the popular meaning of the term speaks to an understandable impatience with those who appear to be casting themselves as morally superior and flaunting a more elevated consciousness.
Those who would defeat racism need to promote the urgency of solidarity across racial lines without conveying self-satisfied arrogance. In particular, othering white working-class Americans as an undifferentiated mass of unenlightened souls is about the worst strategy imaginable for promoting greater harmony.
Perhaps because of where I was raised — as a middle-class kid in a white working-class town who had the good fortune to get a great education — I am especially bothered when educated elites look down their noses at the people I grew up with.
White working-class racism exists and needs to be confronted. But as a moral matter, white working-class grievances created by economic injustice deserve a response. As a practical matter, the imperatives of coalition politics in a diverse nation require advocates of equal rights and social justice to build alliances across the lines of race that include all Americans facing forms of marginalization.
As Heather McGhee, author of “The Sum of Us,” wrote that zerosum thinking “has always optimally benefited only the few while limiting the potential of the rest of us, and therefore the whole.” She told Vox’s Sean Illing, “The zero-sum story is the idea that there’s this massive dividing line between Black people and white people, that they’re on opposite teams, and that progress for people of color has to come at white people’s expense.”
Fighting this idea is central to overcoming racism.
In his 2015 eulogy in Charleston, S.C., for nine people slain in another racist massacre, President Barack Obama urged us to view history as “a manual for how to avoid the mistakes of the past — how to break the cycle.” As McGhee demonstrates, one lesson from our past is that racism has always been an impediment to the nation’s progress. Breaking its hold is in the interest of every American.