ANTIRACISTS AND PLESSY V. FERGUSON
The vast sums that have flowed from corporations, foundations and wealthy individuals into “antiracism” initiatives resemble the “indulgences” that, purchased from the medieval church, promised remission of punishment for sins: “When the coin in the coffer rings, A soul from Purgatory springs.” Many of today’s antiracists encourage donors to buy virtue, but use the donations to finance restoration of a retrograde principle.
Ibram X. Kendi attracted nearly
$55 million for his Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University. The Center’s shambolic three years — it has produced negligible research, and recently shed about 40% of its staff — reflects Kendi’s administrative shortcomings, and Boston University’s inattention after its cash-grasping opportunism.
But moral panics are regularly recurring enjoyments for the many Americans who relish crusades and (other peoples’) penances. And the simplicity of Kendi-style antiracism makes it an easily accessible, equal-opportunity ethic: Instant virtue is acquired by reciting a catechism built of these binary pronouncements:
“The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” If you are not an antiracist, you are a racist. (“There is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy.”) All disparities in social outcomes are necessarily explained by racism. (“A racist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity between racial groups.”) Etc.
Because such antiracism will be fashionable for a while, its espousers and financiers should ponder this: Their antiracism shares the premise of Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court decision that buttressed Jim Crow racial segregation by authorizing “separate but equal” treatment of the races. Consider “Permissions to Hate: Antiracism and Plessy” in the Texas Review of Law & Politics.
In the article, GianCarlo Canaparo of the Heritage Foundation argues that like Plessy, much contemporary antiracism “abandons the idea that it is worthwhile or possible to create a society in which each person is treated equally regardless of race.” The Plessy court radically truncated the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of “equal protection of the laws.” The court affirmed the states’ “large discretion” to decide that laws recognizing special rights of racial groups promote “the public good,” or “public peace and good order.”
Post-Plessy, legislatures had broad, court-approved license to embrace whatever was the day’s conventional wisdom regarding race. “Plessy meant,” Canaparo writes, “that all questions of racial equality (or lack thereof) were questions for the political arena.” By asserting, in Canaparo’s words, “the centrality of race to every American’s identity,” Plessy asserted a proposition that is enjoying a second life among many 21st-century antiracists. Plessy said, Canaparo writes, that “race, rather than citizenship or shared humanity, determined rights.”
Half a century passed before the civil rights movement began undoing Plessy’s damage. The 1950s school desegregation decisions effected what Canaparo calls “a dramatic methodological shift on race issues from a focus on group interests to a focus on individuals’ rights.” But many of today’s antiracists would, Canaparo writes, “replace the new with the old. They would once again apply the law at the group level to maximize their own vision of the public good.”
Hence today’s advocacy of racial group preferences in government programs, from business financing to medical immunizations to racial “affinity groups” in public schools. Justice John Marshall Harlan, in his magisterial dissent in Plessy, foresaw the discord that today’s antiracists are sowing by their revival of Plessy’s premise. Plessy, said Harlan, “can have no other result than to render permanent peace impossible, and to keep alive a conflict of races, the continuance of which must do harm to all concerned.”
Not to all. Harlan did not anticipate how lucrative antiracism could be for some.
As Yascha Mounk explains in “The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time,” this century’s most momentous development in political thought is progressivism’s rejection of universalism. This great repudiation sweeps away governance focused on individual rights, which can be protected only by the universalist premise that, in Mounk’s words, “for political purposes, all human beings are born equal.”
Rejection of this precedes the belief that the world should be seen “through the prism of group identities,” such as race. People who say that also say this: Universal values and neutral rules (e.g., free speech) are actually ruses concocted by the dominant group to prevent government from treating people justly, meaning according to their identity groups.
So, antiracists of Kendi’s stripe have a stake in making social peace permanently impossible. Discord is lucrative. Hence the return to 1896.