In the US, a small group of African American thinkers is pushing back against progressive orthodoxy on the race issue. Glenn Loury — a Professor of Economics at Brown University — has long argued that while historical discrimination against African Americans is undeniable, it is not the sole explanation for racial disparities in income or education. And Thomas Sowell, the conservative African American Stanford University economist, has taken on what he sees as progressives’ faulty answers in a new book, Social Justice Fallacies.

“At the heart of the social justice vision”, Sowell writes, “is the assumption that, because economic and other disparities among human beings greatly exceed any differences in their innate capacities”, they must be the result of “such human vices as exploitation and discrimination”. In his 2019 book, How to be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi stated this case plainly: “Antiracist ideas argue that racist policies are the cause of racial inequities.” Here in Britain, leading progressive think-tanks such as the Runnymede Trust also often link racial disparities — in spheres such as health, housing, education and employment — to “systemic racism”.

Debates over the causes of group disparities are fierce precisely because they shape the answers to the practical questions of what is to be done and who is responsible for doing it. If racial disparities are caused by racism, the responsibility for redressing them lies with those perpetuating it, hence today’s progressive focus on the ideology of white supremacy.

But Sowell has other ideas about why some groups are doing much better. While he acknowledges that exploitation and discrimination do “prevent different groups of people — whether classes, races or nations — from having equal, or even comparable, outcomes in economic terms”, he maintains that this is only part of the story. Some groups, he suggests, may be better off because they have, over a period of time, collectively mastered endeavours that have turned out to be profitable, teachable to younger generations and conducive to group progress. He cites people of German ancestry having created leading beer brands in countries as varied as the US, Argentina, Brazil, Australia and China — not by coincidence, but because the ancestors of today’s Germans were producing beer as far back as the days of the Roman Empire. “When a particular people have been doing a particular thing for more than a thousand years,” he writes, “is it surprising if they tend to be more successful in that particular endeavour than others who have had no such history?”

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All groups excel at something. Those statistically worse off educationally, for whatever reason, may be underrepresented in jobs where a degree is essential but over-perform in endeavours where personal talent determines success. Sowell cites sports and entertainment as spheres in which “American groups rising out of poverty” have excelled. But most people would find it odd if someone argued that the fact that 72% of NBA players are black implies that other groups are being discriminated against in US basketball. Likewise, the fact that the median per capita income of Americans of Chinese, Japanese, Indian and Korean ancestry is higher than that of white Americans is not interpreted as a sign that the US system is designed to advantage those minorities.

To “honestly admit the reality of vast differences in specific capabilities of different peoples, at different times and in different places, is no capitulation to genetic determinism”, Sowell insists. It is an assertion that will likely make more than a few people uneasy, depending on the groups being compared (although I would argue that we should always be wary of making generalisations about groups). Because China is now one of the world’s two economic superpowers, few object to comments about how the Chinese may do such-and-such better than the Americans, but the Americans are better at such-and-such than the Chinese. But most of us feel uncomfortable if similar comparisons are made between, say, Africans and Europeans. Disparities between these two groups are so wide that there exist strong fears that drawing parallels could be interpreted as arguing that the richer group is simply superior to the poorer. Which was, of course, the explicit justification for enslaving and colonising Africans — something people haven’t forgotten.

Partly because of this, if certain behavioural patterns among some groups of African ancestry — here in the West or in Africa — are pointed to as detrimental to wider black progress, Western progressives will often describe this as ‘victim-blaming’. If an African country is corruptly and ineffectively governed, the argument goes, it is because its leaders inherited exploitative colonial structures. The question of why such structures have not been dismantled or at least significantly reformed in the decades since independence will usually be answered with reference to structural constraints, imposed by the West. Africa’s ruling elites are ultimately victims — in the Western progressive worldview, anyway. No African progressive living in Africa thinks this way.

The phrase ‘victim-blaming’ was coined by psychologist William Ryan in his 1971 book, Blaming the Victim — which was a response to discussions about the role of African American family structures, which were described as perpetuating black poverty in the infamous Moynihan Report of 1965. But I believe the concept of ‘victim-blaming’ gained the power it wields today mostly thanks to feminist activists, who used it to describe how female rape victims may be questioned about what clothes they were wearing when attacked or how late they had been out. Their rhetoric was then adopted by anti-colonialists. Explaining his reasons for rejecting an MBE in 2019, British spoken word artist, George the Poet, who is of Ugandan descent, said: “Your forefathers grabbed my motherland, pinned her down and took turns. They did that every day for a couple hundred years and then left her to treat her own burns.” In many a Western progressive mind, the West violates other nations via neoliberal economic exploitation, then has the gall to tell those it has exploited that their poverty is their fault — because they didn’t work hard enough, were not well-organised enough, or allowed corruption to flourish. All in order to convince the world that the system they have built is a just one, when it obviously isn’t.

But dismissing, as ‘victim-blaming’, any arguments citing a weaker group’s actions as obstacles to that group’s progress is not helpful to anyone, least of all the weaker groups themselves. It is especially unfortunate when people do this not because they genuinely believe the argument is baseless, but because they want to signal empathy by demonstrating that they always side with the underdog — which is the sine qua non to being accepted by the progressive elite. This self-serving approach is deeply hypocritical, given that progressivism’s stated aim is to uplift groups in a weaker position, and to do that we need to have frank conversations about what may be going wrong within a group. Scholars such as Sowell and Loury, for instance, argue that the questions raised in the Moynihan Report remain valid points of discussion.

In my recent book, It’s Not About Whiteness, It’s about Wealth, I argue that the future status of blackness depends not on what happens in Britain and America — where just 3% of the world’s black population live — but on what happens in Africa, where 90% of black people live. If we are ever to speak of any kind of meaningful global racial equality, Africa must succeed. If it is to succeed, we must talk about its failures.

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Does anyone genuinely believe that the mind-boggling corruption of Africa’s ruling elites is not a major factor contributing to the continent being the poorest and least economically developed? To there being close to 500 million Africans — more than the EU’s population — living on less than $2 a day? To there being 600 million people lacking access to electricity in the year 2023? Can anyone maintain that all this poverty can be blamed on legacies of colonialism and slavery?

Even if we can blame all Africa’s problems on the past, shouldn’t the focus be on what can be done to change things today? Merely identifying the root cause of a problem does not give you a solution to the problem. That is another task entirely. Without radically improving the way most African countries are run, prosperity will continue to elude the continent. Africa has been dealt a terrible hand by history, but none of us can change the past. All we can do is play the cards we have today as best we can, so that our hand may be stronger in the future.

Of course, today’s Western progressives often appear to believe that only Westerners have the power to change anything fundamental about society, including in countries thousands of kilometres away. It is the modern-day manifestation of Eurocentrism: the idea that the world revolves around what white Westerners think and do. Development outcomes elsewhere are thus always traceable to some Western action, past or present.

In his book, Sowell emphasises that the onus of changing the fortunes of worse-off groups rests primarily on them. But the debate over the factors driving group disparities — between those who emphasise individual agency and those who emphasise external factors — does not have to be a zero-sum game in which one side must ultimately triumph. Both can play their part in taking practical steps to improve things for the worse-off in this world — which would involve looking at big-picture structural changes as well as honest analysis of potentially damaging group dynamics. Ideologies like products are subject to the laws of demand and supply, and there is clearly a strong demand for the social justice vision today — signalling a genuine mass craving for a fairer world in which there is less poverty, inequality and needless human suffering. We’d surely rather this craving existed than not. The key is to apply it usefully: to always be open to evidence about what is working and what isn’t, about who needs to do what, when and how.

These good times may be coming to an end. Faced with a real rival like China, Americans will have to make some tough choices if their country is to maintain its pre-eminence. They will have to decide what they value, and for what values they want their institutions to be optimised.

They have four options for deciding how to share power in their country, all in relative competition with each other: loyalty, equity, legitimacy, and ability. How these values are weighted can have serious consequences, as the experience of other societies shows.

During his first decade of rule, the Turkish president, Tayyip Erdogan, relied on competent technocrats, who helped engineer a period of economic growth not seen in decades. Things have changed a lot since those heady days. Turkey’s ruling party has recently ditched its emphasis on ability, prioritising fidelity to Turkish nationalist Islamism and personal loyalty to Erdogan.

Erdogan and those connected to him have come out fine in this bargain, but Turkey has suffered tremendously. The Turkish Lira is in total collapse, continuing a long slide that hasn’t been helped by Erdogan’s recent decision to appoint as finance minister an associate of his son-in-law, a loyal supporter of the ruling party who lacks an educational background in economics. While Erdogan has ceased to deliver economically, he has waged the culture war with a vengeance, turning historic churches into mosques and polarising the public sphere in a manner aimed at distracting conversation from the increasing difficulty of everyday life.

This focus on loyalty and ideology as the most important factors in appointments to powerful positions is common in systems experiencing decline. One can also see it in the United States today, both from the Right and Left.

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Americans received a brief taste of what a country optimised for loyalty to its leader might look like during the Trump presidency. Despite the panicked rhetoric of his opponents, Trump did not, indeed, could not, govern the United States as a dictator. He did, however, make an obvious point of basing his political appointments on factors such as family ties and sycophancy, rather than a hard-nosed appreciation of who would be best at running U.S. institutions. His appointment of unqualified sons and son-in-laws to powerful offices gave a taste of what a Right-wing monarchy might look like if it grew on American soil.

The Left, by contrast, is advocating for a system that optimises for ideology. The ideology in question could be called “equity,” and its most influential proponent is the anti-racist author Ibram X Kendi. To remedy the long history of racially-based exclusion in America, Kendi advocates staffing U.S. institutions using reverse discrimination. “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,” as Kendi puts it, characterising racial disparities in institutions as ipso facto proof of racism and calling for instituting a demographic rebalancing of power in American society.

Kendi’s proposal for a regime of sectarian power-sharing makes sense on its own terms as a response to centuries of racist exclusion that deeply harmed African-Americans. But there is also a certain myopia here. It rests on the assumption that time is unlimited and that there are no peer competitors beyond our borders waiting to eat America’s lunch as it prioritises ideologically correcting the sins of the past for a generation or two. It’s not even clear if giving more positions to African-Americans or other minorities would satisfy these demands, unless the people being appointed also align politically with the rest of the progressive project.

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Kendi’s view is also based on a decidedly optimistic view of human nature, in which white Americans will accept overt discrimination on moral grounds over the long-term even if it proves adverse to their real-world interests. The heightening of racial consciousness and doling out of power on those grounds seldom looks good in other countries. The end result of proposals such as Kendi’s seems less likely to look like the Civil Rights Movement, which championed a religiously-influenced, colourblind view of society against racial tribalism, and more like Lebanon, where various sectarian groups fight for their share of the system while society as a whole grinds towards collapse.

What Kendi and Trump have in common is a desire to see power allocated in society on some basis other than ability. This is usually a sign of decadence setting in. The Soviet Union experienced a similar sclerosis after going through waves of purges focused on getting rid of politically inconvenient individuals. The Islamic Republic of Iran today forces many of its brightest minds out of power, or out of the country entirely, for being insufficiently zealous about the country’s post-revolutionary ideology or loyal to its ruling clerics. An expert on water affairs described to me how he was forced to flee Iran after being accused of purposely engineering droughts by political rivals suspicious of his lack of Islamist zeal. Water shortages today are ravaging major Iranian cities while experts like him work at universities abroad.

The United States is not immune to similarly perverse outcomes.

An unsettling truth is that the American democratic system no longer functions as a reliable mechanism for elevating the most competent people to political responsibility. The legitimate, democratic election of a wildly inexperienced and unfit candidate such as Donald Trump, partisan considerations aside, raised uncomfortable questions about whether the their system for choosing leaders by popular acclaim is indeed better for society than the Chinese Communist Party’s consensus-based appointments of capable technocrats. Given the American veneration of their own country’s institutions, it is unlikely that an explicitly anti-democratic tendency is going to take hold anytime soon. But a prolonged failure of democracy to raise the country’s best and brightest to positions of power underlines the shortcomings in prioritising democratic legitimacy as the highest value, even if the trade-off is deemed worthwhile.

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What if we did optimise for ability above all else? The people who would stand to benefit the most in the short-term are Asians and other immigrants, who tend to excel academically in U.S. schools and have ironically been among the most harmed by programs seeking to redress historic imbalances between black and white Americans. An America geared for results above all else might actually look less white in the halls of power, particularly if forms of elite affirmative action like legacy enrolment at Ivy League schools were done away with. The problem that arises in a diverse society, however, is the issue of trust. If different groups perceive themselves primarily as racial or ethnic categories rather than as Americans sharing one destiny, they will care less about whether their national leaders are capable than about whether they look like them.

A credible external rival might help smooth over the differences between people at home in the service of a higher calling. During the mid-20^th century, faced with enemies such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, the U.S. government was able to carry out incredible achievements like the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Program. Its accomplishments not only meant real improvements in how Americans lived but also served as advertisements for the success of the American system. The government was justly shamed at the time for its shortcomings in fairness and egalitarianism. But that shaming often took place on the grounds that institutionalised prejudice was excluding competent people from the system, particularly African-Americans and members of religious minorities. No one at the time would have argued that society should accept less competence while trying to fight World War II or win the space race against the Soviet Union. It would make as little sense to argue that ability should be demoted in importance as the U.S. prepares to compete with Chinese Communism.

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If the United States is to succeed in the 21^st century, and prove that a multiracial, multicultural liberal democracy is capable of delivering a better standard of life than China’s authoritarian one-party state, Americans will need to find a reasonable balance between their desires for equity, political loyalty, and ability. There can be measures other than abolishing testing at top schools to redress historic inequalities, including expanding trade school education as a leg out of the working class and emphasising the social prestige of such jobs. The stakes in the culture wars, though, will have to be reduced to something less than absolute, which is where they are trending at present. People who fall short of constantly shifting ideological standards, but who, crucially, know how to build things, cannot simply be shunned in favour of those who are practically incapable but who know how to chant ideological mantras and root out heretics.

The long period of fantasising and navel gazing enabled by America’s time as the world’s sole superpower is coming to an end, and for that we may have China to thank. George Orwell articulated well how jarring the move from fantasy back to reality can be for a nation faced with an external threat. His words suit Americans in the present day well. “We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right,” he wrote. “Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”

But rather than convince anyone about the non-existence of CRT, his comments merely confirmed something else: namely, CRT’s remarkable ability to shape-shift into whatever form its advocates choose. For Northam, CRT might not exist — but that’s only because it has undergone a rebranding.

Indeed, while many on the Right have obsessed over the rise of CRT in the past year, a different abbreviation has quickly become entrenched in America’s schools and colleges: “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI).

Part of its purpose appears to be to sow confusion among opponents of CRT. It has certainly riled the conservative Heritage Foundation. In its recent guide on “How to identify Critical Race Theory”, it warns of a “new tactic” deployed by the movement’s defenders: they “now deny that the curricula and training programs in question form part of CRT, insisting that the ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)’ programs of trainers such as Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo are distinct from the academic work of professors such as Derrick Bell, Kimberle Crenshaw, and other CRT architects”.

Certainly, regardless of which trendy three-letter term you prefer to describe the latest iteration of America’s obsession with race, the goal in each case is the same: to shift away from meritocracy in favour of an equality of outcome system.

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But implementing a grievance model into our youth education curriculum will not fix the problems it purports to solve. There is, after all, a dearth of evidence suggesting that DEI programmes advance diversity, equity or inclusion. In fact, if DEI programmes in schools have similar results as DEI corporate training, they might be not only ineffective, but potentially harmful.

This shift is due to the clear failure of affirmative action policies. First introduced more than 50 years ago, they were intended to create equal opportunities for a black community said to be held back by the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow laws. Suffice it to say that they failed. Today, only 26% of black American’s have a Bachelor’s degree, 10% lower than the national average. More than half of black households earn less than $50,000 annually, and the labour force participation rate for black men is 3.3% lower than for white men; it has actually shrunk by 11.6% since the early 1970’s. Only four CEOs from Fortune 500 companies are black.

Instead of providing opportunities for black students, affirmative action threw many students into the deep-end of schools where they lacked the educational foundation to succeed. Frequently, as Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr have observed, they were mismatched: “Large racial preferences backfire[d] against many, and perhaps, most recipients, to the point that they learn less… usually get much lower grades, rank toward the bottom of the class, and far more often drop out.”

But rather than recognise the failure of this approach, its proponents have chosen to double down. Without analysing why affirmative action failed to produce equal opportunity for black students, and without trying to identify solutions that would be more impactful, those interested in CRT and DEI only wish to manipulate the system further.

Instead of focusing on ways to lift black students up as individuals with agency, ability and choice, they believe the system must reorient itself to produce the desired outcome, starting with kindergarten. It is dependent on the magnification of barriers and tension between racial groups — something which I suspect is psychologically damaging to both white and black students.

For white students, the blame of slavery and Jim Crow laws are laid at their feet. Bari Weiss recently revealed a number of shocking cases of how this manifests itself in schools, but one in particular caught my eye: “A Fieldston student says that students are often told ‘if you are white and male, you are second in line to speak.’ This is considered a normal and necessary redistribution of power.” But it is far from “normal” or “necessary”. Putting the atrocious sins of America’s past on the shoulders of children and teenagers is a form of child abuse.

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For black children, the situation is no better. Students are being taught that it is the system, not their own effort and abilities, that will determine their future in life. This discourages hard work, motivation, ambition and aspiration. It also breeds distrust and hostility towards white teachers, further truncating their abilities to learn and progress in school. As Ian Rowe points out, “the narrative that white people ‘hold the power’ conveys a wrongheaded notion of white superiority and creates an illusion of black dependency on white largesse”.

And in the schools themselves, this often leads to physical segregation. Paul Rossi, a former teacher at Grace Church High School in New York, recently described how “racially segregated sessions” were “commonplace” at his school. Down in Atlanta, meanwhile, last month a concerned mother filed a lawsuit alleging that black students at Mary Lin Elementary School were being assigned to only two of the six second-grade classes.

But “you can’t treat one group of students based on race differently than other groups”, as her attorney eloquently put it. After all, any ideology that separates people due to their immutable characteristics will not lift up minority students, but drag society down into neo-segregation. Indeed, it’s hardly surprising that students today seem more anxious, scared and lacking in confidence than any previous generation for which we have data.

Nevertheless, the grievance model methods are spreading through American schools like wildfire. Take Ralph Northam’s state of Virginia, which is implementing the “Road Map to Equity”, which suggests that making equity is more important to education than academics. Perhaps that’s why Virginia legislators passed a bill this year that requires all educators to “complete instruction or training in cultural competency and with an endorsement in history and social sciences to complete instruction in African American history”.

Rather than push race to the foreground of education, anti-racists would do better to cultivate a learning environment for students where the focus is on being kind and respectful. Real diversity and inclusion are more likely to flourish when students are taught to help their fellow classmates — rather than view them through a crudely racialised prism.

Last week, I spoke to Katharine Birbalsingh, the Headmistress of the remarkable Michaela Community School, which serves families from disadvantaged backgrounds and achieves incredible results. When I asked Katharine what their secret was, she told me: “We’re very traditional. We believe in things like belonging. We believe in personal responsibility in a sense of duty to your family, to your community.”

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And that is what it comes down to. All children and students want to belong. But demonising white students and re-segregating black students does the very opposite: it divides far more than it unites.

A focus on personal responsibility also goes a long way, both for students and for those looking to help. When watching some of the Virginia Department of Education webinars on equity earlier this week, I heard no mention of empowering or helping individual black children. The conversations revolved around “personal reflection” and “doing the work”, with little explanation of what this means in real life. There was no mention of tutoring, mentoring or guiding struggling students.

If we are going to have an honest conversation about elevating black students, we must throw out buzzwords such as “equity” and start talking about practical solutions. There is, after all, a genuine appetite for this: a recent Pew report found that 76% of Americans said that “racial and ethnic diversity is good for the country”.

And that will only be achieved by encouraging community service and involvement, and requiring teachers to focus on respect and academic rigour within their classrooms. What we must not do, however, is outsource education to a three-letter abbreviation, be it CRT or DEI. They are shallow, short-sighted and performative — and, most importantly, will do nothing to improve the futures of our children

But while Gorsuch and his colleagues applied protections against discrimination on the basis of “race, colour, religion, sex or national origin”, he also made clear that the legislation in question was designed to protect “individuals not groups”. According to the ruling, a scheme that “promotes equality at the group level” would fall foul of the law if it involved discrimination at the individual level.

And so, even as Bostock was heralded as a major moment for LGBT rights, Gorsuch’s opinion set off alarm bells in progressive circles. In particular, many wondered whether his understanding of discrimination spelt trouble for the system of race-based college admissions that has been in place since the civil rights era. Did the last great liberal judicial victory contain clues about the next great liberal defeat? Is “affirmative action” doomed?

These questions may soon be answered. The Supreme Court is currently deciding whether to hear Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard, a case brought by a group of Asian-Americans who claim they were illegally discriminated against as part of the university’s pursuit of a diverse student body. Lower courts have found in favour of Harvard, but many suspect the conservative majority on the Supreme Court may see things differently.

The past pronouncements of Chief Justice John Roberts, without whom a defence of affirmative action has little chance of survival, suggest sympathy with the students’ arguments. “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” was his blunt summation in a 2006 case concerning high school integration efforts.

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The lawsuit against Harvard doesn’t just accuse the university of discriminating against Asian-Americans but doing so systematically by marking them down on personality scores that rate traits such likability, “positive personality”, courage and kindness. Analysis of admissions data by the Duke University economist Peter Arcidiacono, an expert witness in the case, found that an otherwise identical Asian-American male with a 25% chance of admission would have a 32% chance of admission if he were white, a 77% chance if he were Latino and a 95% chance if he were black.

Suspiciously, the very smartest Asian American students tended to score higher for their personalities. The plaintiffs argue that this amounts to a soft quota system and compare its enforcement to the way in which Harvard used “character and fitness” criteria to, with a nod and a wink, cap the number of Jewish students on campus in the 1920s and 30s.

For now, the court has bought itself time by asking the Biden administration for its view of the case. Nonetheless, the stage is set for an almighty battle over one of the most contentious policies to emerge from the civil rights era.

Indeed, whenever the Supreme Court has dealt with affirmative action, its judgments tend to be reflected in the racial politics of the time. In the 1960s, affirmative action was presented as part of a package of emergency measures necessary in the immediate aftermath of Jim Crow and legal segregation. By 1978, the court moved away from explicit desegregation. In Bakke, it found that racial quotas were unconstitutional but that the pursuit of “diversity” for its educational benefits was legal, and that race might be considered a “plus factor” in the admissions process. (It is this vague goal of diversity that explains the scoring system under fire in the Harvard case.)

But this 20th-century liberal fudge is getting harder to sustain. The backdrop to any affirmative action case being heard by the Supreme Court in the near future will be the increasingly strident anti-racist creed preached on college campuses, supported by the Democratic Party and subscribed to by the media and business elite.

Ironically, it is the assertiveness of today’s racial politics that may make the defence of affirmative action more difficult. In other words, the problem for the American Left is that they have said the quiet part out loud. Rather than hiding behind the fig leaf of the pursuit of the educational benefits of diversity, or arguing for time-limited, case-specific policies, many progressives are happy to call a quota a quota and see the fight against racism as a never-ending all-encompassing struggle.

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Take Ibram X Kendi, today’s prophet of anti-racism. He is explicit about prioritising group iniquities over discrimination against individuals. In fact, his whole approach is about tinkering with outputs rather than striving to treat people equally. “The defining question is whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity,” he writes in How To Be Antiracist. “If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist. If discrimination is creating inequity, then it is racist.”

To Kendi, equity is measured in terms of outcome, and has only been achieved “when two or more racial groups are not standing on approximately equal footing”. By Kendi’s logic, not only is a system of explicit racial quotas not racist; it’s the only truly antiracist approach.

The Biden administration doesn’t express things in such hardline terms. But it nonetheless claims to be putting “equity”, and not equality, at the heart of everything it does. In an early executive order Biden defined equity as “the consistent and systematic fair, just, and impartial treatment of all individuals, including individuals who belong to underserved communities that have been denied such treatment”. That may sound innocuous enough, but in reality it has so far meant numerous straightforwardly discriminatory policies.

And many of these measures have already run into legal roadblocks. In Wisconsin, a judge has halted a Department of Agriculture programme that allocates loan forgiveness on the basis of race. In Texas, a judge has ruled against a measure in the Covid relief bill that explicitly prioritised restaurant-owners of certain racial backgrounds.

The infrastructure bill that passed the Senate last week was also infused with the logic of equity. For example, in the bidding for contracts to install solar power or reconfigure the roads in American cities, the government will prioritise minority and female-owned businesses. Legal challenges will surely follow.

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Perhaps a compromise can emerge. One option would be for an affirmative action approach focused on giving a leg up to Americans that really need it. Rather than engineering a cosmetic and subjective kind of diversity that keeps consciences clean and money flowing into the endowment pot, America’s elite colleges could positively discriminate in a more explicit but socially useful way. Richard Kahlenberg, an expert witness in the Harvard case, argues for socio-economic preference in college admissions, which would drop the offensive charade of personality assessments and target working-class blacks, hispanics and whites. It’d be a less dishonest, less divisive and almost certainly a more beneficial approach.

Meanwhile, if the Biden administration wants to target extra support at the neediest farmers, it need not pander to “equity” with openly discriminatory policies. Instead, it could simply… target the neediest farmers. Doing so would be fairer policy and better politics.

In the meantime, whether in the Harvard case or elsewhere, a legal and political collision seems inevitable. There has always been a tension between the more expansive policies born in the civil rights era, foremost among them affirmative action, and the kind of colour-blind creed consistent with the constitution and preached by Martin Luther King and others. But today’s combative and ascendant anti-racism is stretching that tension past its limit. It is a powerful dogma — but it could soon meet its match in the Supreme Court.

By June, every title in the top ten of the New York Times’s bestselling nonfiction list was an anti-racist book. Magazines, newspapers, Instagram influencers, book clubs and bookshops all encouraged readers to educate themselves about racism by reading an approved list of books. The same titles kept reappearing.

A new canon was soon established. It included, among others, Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, Ijeoma Uluo’s So You Want To Talk About Race, Akala’s Natives, Layla F. Saad’s Me and White Supremacy and Ibram X. Kendi’s How to be an Antiracist. Never mind that these books differ from each other in content, style and genre; they constituted an integral wish-list for any aspiring anti-racist. And DiAngelo’s was top of the pack.

DiAngelo’s latest book, Nice Racism: How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm, is released this week. The audience is, of course, progressive white people; she describes her intended “white progressive” readership as generally on the Left, but they can also be moderates, centrists and soft conservatives. They probably read The Root or the New York Times and “listen to NPR or the BBC as they commute to their job at a non-profit or tech company”.

Like so many of these recent books on race, Nice Racism is, quite explicitly, a self-help book rather than an anti-racist polemic.

Though she now has a very successful career, DiAngelo had a harrowing childhood. Her parents separated when she was young, and she moved apartments several times a year; her single mother couldn’t pay the rent. DiAngelo grew up without medical and dental care. She was called dirty at school and shunned by her peers. When she was ten, her mother died of cancer.

DiAngelo received her undergraduate degree in her mid-thirties at Seattle University, and her PhD, in the field of multicultural education, more than a decade later at the University of Washington. It was between the time of her degree and her doctorate that she became a diversity trainer, since when she has spent 20 years advising white-led businesses and organisations on how to positively interact with black and ethnic minority people. It was out of this work that she conceived the concept and title of her bestseller: white fragility.

White fragility is white people’s inability to discuss race and racism without being defensive and anxious. Whenever the vexed topic of race comes up, DiAngelo argues, white people bristle. This is because white people have been “socialized into a deeply internalized sense of superiority that we either are unaware of or can never admit to ourselves”. Everywhere you look you see white people in positions of political, economic, and cultural power; white standards of beauty are the norm; and black and ethnic minorities are presented throughout society as stupid, incompetent, and dangerous.

And all of this has been normalised to such an extent that, when such racial inequities are pointed out, “we become highly fragile in conversations about race”. Because the challenge to the “internalized superiority” of white people triggers a response of debilitating discomfort, anti-racist white people need to “build” their “racial stamina”— their ability to endure such conversations.

White fragility, however, is not benign: “it is a powerful means of white racial control and the protection of white advantage”. The genius of DiAngelo’s argument is that she can use any rejection of her thesis as evidence of its soundness. Condemn it out of hand and, well, you’re just suffering from white fragility.

What leads to white fragility, DiAngelo argues, is the belief that racism is individual actions committed by unkind people. This is an outdated view. Racism is instead deeply woven into the institutions of our society; every white person is socialised to be racist, and it is up to each individual white person to undo this socialisation.

This is why DiAngelo has no truck with individualism, meritocracy, and colour-blindness — they obscure the collective social fact of racism by suggesting we are unique individuals outside the matrix of race, or we can achieve social mobility without race, or that race doesn’t shape or influence how we perceive the world.

Even though DiAngelo explicitly disavows individualism, there is an essentially individualist mindset implicit in her argument: the individual who has to face up to her own socialisation in white supremacy. Individualism is bad because it suggests white people can escape from the forces of socialisation; but the only way to tackle white fragility, DiAngelo suggests, is by strengthening our individual capacity to sustain such conversations. White Fragility is not a utopian manifesto. It is not a Marxist polemic. It is a self-help book for white people who want to know how to confront racism.

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Yet while many self-help books are about making you feel good, or at least providing you with the tools to feel better, this isn’t quite the same with DiAngelo’s work. There is a Lutheran-like emphasis on the need to purge yourself of racism. And there is a distinctly pessimistic strain: “Racism is so deeply woven into the fabric of our society”, DiAngelo writes, “that I do not see myself escaping from that continuum in my lifetime”.

The two books often bought alongside White Fragility, Saad’s Me and White Supremacy and Kendi’s How to be an Antiracist, encourage the reader to use a journal when reading the text – a confessional volume itemising their list of racial sins. Becoming an anti-racist is not a walk in the park.

In her 2001 book, Race Experts, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn analysed the intersection between race and the vogue for individual self-improvement in the wake of America’s civil rights movement. “The race experts”, she argues, “moved in to fill a void created by the collapse of the civil rights coalition and the loss of the clarity of the early movement, capitalizing on a long-term trend in American culture toward reliance on experts for guidance in all aspects of public and personal life”.

The civil rights movement was characterised by a commitment to egalitarianism and a universal standard of moral conduct: “It rested”, Lasch-Quinn writes, “on historical truths about America’s pluralism and its racial crimes. It rested on moral truths about harmony and justice”. The rhetoric of the new race experts, by contrast, is characterised by an emphasis on racial difference and individual self-expression:  “The therapeutic notion of identity called for unlimited self-expression as a goal”, Lasch-Quinn writes, “instead of a collective rehabilitation aimed at the formation of a morally viable community”.

Nevertheless, underneath the seeming chaos of individual self-expression lurks the strictures of ritual: “Despite its ostensible commitment to baring all emotion and thought”, Lasch-Quinn writes, “it has its own rituals and forms that actually constrain certain kinds of expression, perhaps the kinds we as a public need the most”. We are encouraged to educate ourselves about racism, and what is lost in our vain attempt to make full sense of the complexities of race is compensated for by the security of race experts telling us what to do and think.

DiAngelo’s tone is earnest and straightforward. There is a charm to how briskly she addresses contentious issues. The world is confusing and she encourages humility in her readers. She has the charisma of a prim no-nonsense teacher.

Saad possesses a similar quality, but she is more explicit. Her book Me and White Supremacy began as a 28-day Instagram challenge. It then became a PDF workbook that was downloaded by over 100,000 people around the world.

It is written as a companion guide for white readers to unpack their complicity in white supremacy. Saad is our Virgil: with characteristic humility, she describes her work in the introduction as a “one-of-a-kind personal antiracism tool structured to help people with white privilege understand and take ownership of their participation in the oppressive system of white supremacy”.

That Saad was born in Britain and grew up there and in Qatar — where she currently lives — does not stop her from using a term like BIPOC (black, indigenous, and people of colour) to refer to ethnic minority people. Like all successful self-help authors, she knows her own audience: they are either American or have internalised American culture to such an extent they can read about the marginalisation of “indigenous communities” without batting an eyelid.

At times Saad sounds like a boorish Italian-American boxing coach from the 1950s, or a barking Army general in a Stanley Kubrick epic: “There are no safety nets, no shortcuts, and no easier routes. You will want to close the book, run away, and pretend you never heard of me”, she instructs her reader: “You will want to blame me, rage at me, discredit me, and list all the reasons why you are a good person and why you don’t need to do this work. That is a normal, expected response. That is the response of the white fragility and anti-Blackness lying inside”.

But you can, of course, overcome this. She is more upbeat than DiAngelo. Like an old-fashioned textbook, there are questions at the end of each chapter to answer.

Kendi’s How to be Antiracist, by contrast, is distinct in one important way from many other contemporary anti-racist books: he believes black people can be racist to white people. As a college student, Kendi briefly thought white people were aliens. He no longer believes this. “Whenever someone classifies people of European descent as biologically, culturally, or behaviourally inferior”, he writes, “whenever someone says there is something wrong with White people as a group, someone is articulating a racist idea”.

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In How to be an Antiracist, definitions are absolutely critical for Kendi. He wants clear and consistent definitions on the terms racist and anti-racist. A racist is someone “who is supporting a racist policy through their actions or inaction or expressing a racist idea”. And an anti-racist is someone “who is supporting an anti-racist policy through their actions or expressing an anti-racist idea”.

How to be an Antiracist is the most unnuanced book I have ever read; he splits everything down the middle. There is no such thing as a race-neutral policy: every policy is either producing or challenging racial inequities. “The opposite of ‘racist’”, Kendi writes, “isn’t non-racist. It is ‘anti-racist’. One who ‘believes problems are rooted in groups of people’ is a racist”. By contrast, one who “locates the roots of problems in power and policies is an anti-racist.”

But for Kendi, being a racist is not the worst thing in the world. “It is not the worst word in the English language; it is not the equivalent of a slur”, he writes. “It is descriptive, and the only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it — and then dismantle it”.

Kendi, like DiAngelo with her concept of white fragility, is effectively saying: get over yourselves. Stop being squeamish about being called racist. This aggressively dispassionate style of reasoning, however, is opposed to the true emotional character of people — something earlier anti-racist activists appealed to rather than denied. How, for example, can we be animated to fight racial injustice if we strip racism of its moral content and treat it as simply an analytical tool? isn’t the fact we are upset by being called racist a good thing because it implies we have intuitively accepted the moral case for fighting racism? Of course, many evidently racist people deny they are racist because of the social stigma attached to being called racist. But it’s still possible to identify their dishonesty without diluting the moral content of the term. To do so would be to undermine the legacy of those who proscribed racial prejudice in polite society.

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Ultimately, both Kendi and DiAngelo, despite themselves, fit established stereotypes about America. The individualism, the meritocracy (they are both now wealthy and distinguished public thinkers), the vigorous evangelical piety, and, perhaps the most American thing about them: the neurotic fascination with race.

In her latest book, Nice Racism, DiAngelo’s fixation with race reaches a new pitch of intensity. Among her practical solutions for confronting racism includes attending something called an affinity group. A white affinity group is white people meeting together to discuss their internalised superiority, implicit bias, confusion, and resentment — and doing this in a racially segregated space so as not to cause harm to “racialized people”.

Another thing she suggests is getting “accountability partners of colour”. This is a black person who has agreed to coach you, think with you, and challenge you on your inevitable racism. And you should pay them for this.

If you are inclined, you could also seek out white accountability partners. DiAngelo says she doesn’t offer to pay her white friends for this, but she generously informs us that “there are white people with strong analysis and deep experience who do offer professional aid coaching”.

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Apart from the dangers of encouraging and retrenching racial segregation, there is something so intensely cringeworthy about all of this. An accountability partner? White affinity groups? DiAngelo’s prose, in this book, is deadening rather than enlivening, tedious rather than instructive. Her analysis and recommendations lack sophistication, original insights, sprightly sentences, and astute observations. It is like reading a HR manager’s attempt to write a bestseller.

How can we have constructive discussions about race when everything is so tightly scripted? How can we have genuine conversations when our emotions are disregarded rather than acknowledged?

DiAngelo evinces no curiosity about the lives of ethnic minority people: they come out of this book as shallow as a street puddle. There is no attempt to dig beneath the surface of oppression and marginalisation. How, exactly, can we build authentic cross-racial relationships on the basis of all of this?

But, as she reminds us in one passage, her book is not an attempt “to teach white people about Black people. I am seeking to teach white people about ourselves in relation to Black people and other people of color”. In the end, it is supposed to be about the individual white person overcoming a barrier to greater racial enlightenment. In truth, what is offered is not enlightenment but an emotionally and intellectually enervating form of narcissism.

Or are we? They don’t teach the history of Mao’s China in schools — I mean, why would they? — but for those who have read a book or two, the surface similarities to the present moment can be unnerving. Yet while the rallies are a powerful phenomenon and Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi are certainly selling well on Amazon, I think our tendency to look for past precedents that confirm our present anxieties can blind us to the uniqueness of the now. Yes, a shift is taking place, but not only is it not 1968, it is not anything else either: this moment is its own thing.

Take the mass gatherings, for instance. In China these went on for months and were not so much protests as state-sponsored displays of loyalty towards a monstrous narcissist who would turn up to bask in the frenzied love of his adoring worshippers. Here the monstrous narcissist is so reviled by the crowds that he had to tear gas his way into a church so he could wave a Bible at a camera for a photo op that may well go down in history as the moment when even his most ardent apologists thought: oh hell no.

Unlike the Cultural Revolution, or the Iranian Revolution, or the Russian Revolution, this moment has no clear leader. It does have spokespeople, however, and the American media — being the sad, decadent, exhausting travesty that it is — has unerringly zeroed in on the most unreasonable and extreme voices, providing them with a platform upon which they can undermine their own cause.

Excusing looting that destroys the livelihoods of working-class people is fairly typical for bourgeois radicals and so lacks sufficient frisson; thus they quickly moved on to demand that the police be defunded or even abolished — though there is some disagreement as to what that actually means. Fortunately for them, Trump is now so damaged that even this generous attempt on their part to hand him back the political advantage may fall short.

The iconoclasm, too, is very different. In the UK a monument to a slave trader was tossed in the water, and activists have set their sights on everyone from Churchill to Gandhi to Baden-Powell. In the US it was Columbus who took a bath while a statue of Thomas Jefferson in Portland was pulled down, and the bitter debate over Confederate monuments has flared up again. During the Cultural Revolution, however, the destruction was so thoroughgoing that radicals didn’t just topple monuments; they smashed up the tomb of Confucius, dug up a dead emperor and denounced him and incinerated countless artistic treasures. Sadiq Khan’s review of London’s statuary is a feeble and unambitious affair in comparison.

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Then, too, there are the texts. There is no equivalent to Mao’s Little Red Book, and not just because White Fragility has a long way to go before one billion copies are in circulation. This is America and voices are many. The ideas of critical race theorists might be leaving campus and entering the mainstream, but its leading authors — unlike Mao — will have to compete with other writers on the same topic, with readerly indifference, with critical readings, and with the fact that most people will never read them.

It is striking, meanwhile, that they have so far aimed their texts exclusively at an affluent, well-educated audience, making no effort to sell their message to the masses, which all great revolutionaries know is essential. Lenin and Mao were experts at crafting memorable slogans, while Stalin took the dense body of Lenin’s works and produced the catechistic Foundations of Leninism. Meanwhile, despite the increasing conformism of elite American journalism, it remains a fact that the best critical review of both Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi was published in The New Yorker.

Which brings me to another point: the inestimable Ed West, seeking to illustrate the difference between now and a similarly radical moment in 1968, recently pointed to the “almost universal establishment approval” bestowed upon the 2020 protests and the ‘Great Awokening’ in contrast to 50 years ago, when the establishment was less united in its response to protests.

This is true, but isn’t the establishment looking kinda rotten? Trust in the media is low; newspapers and magazines rely on billionaire patrons to survive, new media can’t turn a profit, and while rebellious NYT staffers successfully defenestrated their opinion page editor so their 5 million subscribers could have a more soothing reading experience, Joe Rogan gets 100 million downloads a month and promotes the kinds of thinkers NYT staffers dislike intensely.

‘Woke’ corporations are only woke up to the point where it hurts their bottom line; Google was firing employees at the center of labour-organising efforts not long ago; and nearly half of the American workforce works for small businesses anyway. Meanwhile, America’s elite universities, founded by Puritans to instill purity of heart and thought in future preachers, have gone back to their roots, only students now have to pay a fortune for the privilege of having their minds narrowed.

These institutions are so rich they can do what they like, of course, but two-thirds of Americans do not have a college degree and, as Richard Hofstadter pointed out long ago, America has a strong anti-intellectual tradition. People here do not defer to their ‘betters’ and that seems unlikely to change any time soon, given that America’s elites are not exactly covering themselves with glory, hyper-polarisation having destroyed much of their capacity for anything remotely resembling intellectual honesty.

And that, in turn, brings me to another point: the fundamental unruliness of American culture. Puritans may have climbed off the Mayflower and founded the first colony, but it was tea-dumpers who kicked off the revolution and founded the Republic. Nobody in America ever gets it all their own way; at most, you get two years. The horror of George Floyd’s death, and the moral bankruptcy of the president created a moment of unity, regardless of the excesses of some asshats. Everybody could agree that this kind of thing had to stop.

But already I can feel the centrifugal forces kicking back in. The disappearance of what was left of the centre means that the dismal state of politics and journalism will likely get worse; the two sides will push each other further out to the extremes, the national discourse will grow more bitter, and the loudest voices in the country will resume the unhappy work of tearing things apart, while the many millions of reasonable people look on in dismay.

Even as I type this, Sean Hannity’s researchers are undoubtedly providing him with a cheat sheet on critical race theory so he can start rambling on about it much as he did about Saul Alinsky during the years Obama was president. I’m so old I can even remember Greta Thunberg: she promised us that we didn’t have a future. Well, she was wrong about that. When that cop killed George Floyd, time didn’t just start moving again, it accelerated.

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But even if I am mistaken, and this truly is a revolutionary moment, let us not forget that revolutions never turn out as planned. Let us return to the Cultural Revolution. How did it end? Well, after an awful lot of destruction, Mao grew tired of the excesses and imposed discipline, sending the youthful radicals away to live in the country with the peasantry. After he died, the surviving ringleaders were sent to prison, and Deng Xiaoping, whose son had been tossed out of a window during the madness, came to power and introduced the economic reforms that began the transformation of China into the not-terribly-communist place it is today.

In Russia in 1917, there was similar disappointment: the revolution that started in Moscow was supposed to sweep across the world, starting in Germany. Instead it got as far as Mongolia and then stopped. Stalin had to invent a new doctrine to justify the failure, and resort to massive violence to keep everyone in line.

And so on. Complex, messy reality has a way of reasserting itself over both the best (and worst) intentions. If I were Joe Biden, I’d be worried about what I was letting myself in for: should he come to power, he will inherit the highest unemployment rate since records began, an intensified culture war and possibly a new wave of coronavirus. Meanwhile the emboldened radical wing of his party will almost certainly overreach (as victorious parties always do), provoking a comeback from a Trump-free Right two years later.

There are reasons to study the history of communism other than to learn about what went wrong: you can also learn about what those who didn’t lurch to extremes got right. Radicals have long been frustrated by the fact that most people are not interested in revolution; that the workers, when given a choice, always chose reform over millennial dreams of transformation. The radicals will be disappointed again.

The pendulum will swing one way, then it will swing another way. And yet mysteriously, America will continue to move forward, and people of good will shall do what they can to try and prevent tragedies such as the death of George Floyd from happening again, despite all the histrionics and performative showboating. And things will get better.