‘Anti-racism’ widens the racial divide
Arefreshing interview this week by our news affiliate Colorado Politics challenges current wisdom about addressing racism -- and offers tonic for what ails race relations these days across the country.
“As a child, I found myself fighting a war on two fronts. I was one of the few Black kids in my neighborhood, and my grade school peers had no intention of letting me forget that,” Erec Smith, a professor of rhetoric and composition at Pennsylvania’s York College, told Colorado Politics. “On the other hand, when I attended a much more diverse regional high school (about 50% Black), I was vilified by many of the Black students for acting too white.”
Smith, who spoke at a roundtable discussion in Denver this month, also authored “A Critique of Anti-racism in Rhetoric and Composition: The Semblance of Empowerment” and is a prominent critic of the new “anti-racism” movement. He is a co-founder of the group Free Black Thought.
“I learned from my grade-school peers’ racism that they wanted me to feel like a victim with little to no power. ... My Black high school peers seemed to resent me for not embracing victimhood and an ‘underdog’ disposition,” Smith said. “Both groups wanted me disempowered, but for very different reasons. ... They wanted similar outcomes but used different rhetoric to say the same thing: ‘How dare you feel empowered? Don’t you know you’re Black?’”
It’s a safe bet Smith wasn’t, and isn’t, alone among Black Americans in feeling caught between two mindsets that are seemingly opposite yet very much alike. Both serve to push people of different races further apart. And both stand in the way of individual freedom, progress and achievement.
Smith maintains it is particularly a sense of overarching victimhood that drives the contemporary anti-racism agenda, and he finds it debilitating (his Twitter profile exhorts, “Be a victor, not a victim”). He calls the movement “a blatant attack on classical liberal values, especially individuality.”
“In fact, it is racist in that it essentializes people, based on skin color, as either oppressor (i.e., white people) or oppressed (e.g., black people),” he says. “This is the erasure of individuality that is a foundational aspect of contemporary anti-racism.” Intrinsic to that world view is the assumption that racism is always present, always the driving force behind any given problem -- and that to maintain otherwise is itself racist.
Which is what leads to the movement’s upside-down logic, he says. Maintaining, for example, that the “most qualified person” should be hired for a job opening is regarded as racist by the movement’s die-hards because such a statement is an attempt to conceal “micro-aggressions” against people of color and to rationalize job discrimination against them.
“I can honestly say things have improved since ... the 80s. However, I notice that anti-racist activists do not want to acknowledge this,” Smith says. “I agree that problems plague parts of the ‘black community,’ and many are caused by either current racism or the residual effects of past racism. However, the mainstream mode of dealing with those exigencies -- a mode that embraces victimhood, us/them logic and nihilism -- is not something I can accept or tolerate.”
Colorado Politics’ Q&A with Smith is an eye-opener. It also offers new hope for a resurgence of critical thinking in some quarters of academia. Read the full interview at: https://www.coloradopolitics.com/news/q-a-with-erec-smitha-critique-of-anti-racism/article_5aeb31ea-f235-11ec-9622fb17c8ea8dbb.html