So it was gross, but it was also symptomatic of something bigger, something real. One thing Trump understands is people’s dislikes. He has an expert nose for the simmering resentment, the latent energies of discontent suppressed by polite opinion. And a lot of people really don’t like DEI — which stands for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and refers to the regime that manages relations among the various identities of ethnicity, sexuality, and gender, and prescribes proper attitudes and behaviors regarding those relations and identities, in organizations, businesses, universities, and schools.

When Trump uses the term, though, he’s usually, implicitly, talking about race, and media outlets and progressive commentators have been quick to characterize popular discontent with DEI as some mix of delusions and aversions grounded in racism. This reflects an important failure of simple political perception. To respectable figures, the idea that one might oppose diversity initiatives is something like a category error. Affirmation of diversity is merely a given, a necessary assumption — not needing to be argued one way or another — of respectable living in modern society. DEI people often say that “whiteness” is systematically normalized and depoliticized, legitimized by being removed from discussion. You might say the same thing about DEI. In its way of moving through bureaucratic channels where authority is effectively irresistible, the diversity regime has both depoliticized and radicalized racial discourse in many areas of American life. That is, it has removed several core racial issues from public contestation while imposing a decidedly Left-wing understanding of those issues on everyone it rules. This is a recipe for populist reaction.

Strange as it may sound now, there was a time when people talked and argued about race and racial preferences in America without saying or even thinking the word “diversity,” much less the initials “DEI”. Before the dull, bureaucratically depoliticized trope of “diversity” took over, that is, America had the openly, virtuously public and political concept of “civil rights”. For the 25 or 30 years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, people argued about whether racial preferences — “affirmative action”, racial quotas in hiring, racial set-asides in government contracts, and so on — were a legitimate application of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, or if they were a violation of it. The idea that they were a legitimate application of the Act was articulated most famously by the man who signed that Act, Lyndon Johnson. Johnson worried that, given the historical disadvantages black people faced, merely removing the overt legal obstacles before them would not be enough. In a 1965 graduation speech at Howard University, Johnson said, “You do not take a man who for years has been hobbled by chains, liberate him, bring him to the starting line of a race, saying, ‘You are free to compete with all the others.’” According to Johnson, something more than just removing barriers — something “affirmative” — had to be done.

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Donald Trump and the myth of whiteness

By Matt Feeney

There was a live debate here. On one hand, the dilemma that President Johnson dwelt on was real. Merely making overt discrimination illegal would not correct the many historic wrongs against black Americans, and it would not remedy their deeply unequal material status. On the other hand, openly discriminating in favor of black people was still discriminating based on race, and it was thus a violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, in the most literal and obvious readings of those documents.

There were other ways of addressing the issue as well. The black conservative economist Thomas Sowell, for example, wrote several books arguing that racial discrimination was not the main problem black Americans faced, and so civil rights remedies such as affirmative action were misplaced (as well as illegal and unconstitutional). He argued that other American ethnic groups — most notably Jews, Chinese-Americans, and Japanese-Americans — had also faced serious discrimination in America and yet outperformed the white Christian majority by substantial margins in education and income. Sowell’s critics argued back that what the black descendants of the victims of chattel slavery had experienced was far crueler and more hobbling than what other ethnic groups had experienced. And so on, back and forth.

My point is: it was a debate. The debate was largely contested in the terms of public law and public policy. Were racial preferences a legal and legitimate extension of civil rights legislation? Were they needed? Were they effective? Were they fair?

But as this debate went on, something else was happening that, by the Nineties, would make that debate largely obsolete and irrelevant. An increasing number of powerful institutions were aggressively employing racial preferences, but these racial preferences weren’t really an extension of civil rights law, as Lyndon Johnson imagined they might be. In the view of the U.S. Supreme Court, they were a strange exception to civil rights law, operating directly in tension with it. This exception arose from the 1978 case California vs. Bakke, in which a white medical school applicant named Allan Bakke sued the University of California for rejecting him while admitting several black applicants with inferior academic records. In its ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with Bakke, finding that the sort of racial preferences that resulted in his rejection are illegal because they amounted to a race-specific “qualification” or quota, and these violate both the text of the Civil Rights Act and the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.

But — and this is one of the most consequential buts in American history — the court said universities could consider race in admissions, to some small degree, if it served some “compelling interest”. The admissions department at Harvard, for example, considered race as one part of its broader quest to compose diverse incoming classes — on the belief that human diversity of background and geography and, yes, race might contribute to a richer educational experience for its students. (A core element of this approach to diversity at Harvard, at the time, was the quaint practice of striving to admit at least one student from every U.S. state.) As New York Times writer Nicholas Confessore wrote in an explosive 2024 article on DEI programs at the University of Michigan, “the Supreme Court outlawed racial quotas in college admissions, while allowing a narrower form of racial preferences.”

But bureaucrats at American colleges and universities resisted this narrowness. They did this not by seeking other justifications besides diversity for enacting racial preferences, but by convincing themselves that diversity was more fundamentally important for education than anyone had ever imagined it to be, before 1978. The result was a thematic reordering of campus priorities, so that diversity — a minor consideration before Bakke — became a sort of institutional fetish, rising to number one on official lists of campus “values”. These days, someone from an alien civilization visiting the administrative offices of an American university might assume it’s a religious institution, and the object of its solemn devotions is this word, this holy concept, Diversity, whose earthly incarnation is the small collection of different-colored young people pictured on the pamphlet they handed out.

In other words, not only did administrators keep the deeply unpopular and legally suspect practice of racial preferences alive at American colleges and universities, they redefined the very purpose of their institutions so that this pedagogical novelty — diversity? the most important thing? since when? — was now at its very center. Not coincidentally, this brash and peremptory centering of diversity in their institutional missions also resulted in a pleasing centering of them, the administrators of diversity, in the power structures and institutional goings-on of their schools.

The diversity story is a thus lesson in the self-empowering ingenuity of bureaucrats. Remember, the Bakke case had ended in a ruling against the racial preference at issue. But one Supreme Court justice felt bad about telling a medical school its well-intentioned racial quotas were illegal, and then he remembered Harvard liking those different kinds of diversity, and so he threw in some stuff about diversity — and those college functionaries ran with it. The rest is history.

Racial politics on campus was now a bureaucratic project. The operational appeal of the diversity framework to campus bureaucrats should be obvious. Within this framework, students were understood as belonging to specific types. When students of different types came into conflict, that conflict would be understood not as a conflict of individual students, something regular that’s going to happen on any campus, but as a conflict of types, two categories within the administrative rubric of diversity. For those administrators such a conflict was always a sort of wonderful crisis. It was right in their wheelhouse. They were administrators, and here was something they could administrate the hell out of. And every such administrative occasion was a chance for the bureaucrats of diversity to enlarge their claims of importance over campus life in general. In other words, they had an incentive to make a big deal about it.

The legal origins of diversity power were different in employment settings, but the institutional dynamics have been somewhat similar, especially in large corporations. The origin of much diversity oversight in workplaces was the “hostile work environment” framework laid out by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in the wake of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. By making the amorphous network of human interactions that constitute a “work environment” a possible site and source of legal trouble, the EEOC gave employers a strong incentive to set up an apparatus of monitoring and training that would control the risk of such trouble.

I’m more favorably disposed toward the hostile work environment framework than I am to the campus diversity framework, for a couple of reasons. First, it emerged out of good-faith efforts to enforce duly passed legislation, specifically Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act — as opposed to the uncanny power-grab by campus administrators that founded the diversity empire in higher education. And, second, the Civil Rights Act did in fact outlaw employment and workplace discrimination, and an environment of persistent, low-level racial torment is both all too easy to imagine as a fact of life in a workplace and clearly valid as an enforcement target under that Act.

It’s probably the case that the urgent diversity propaganda on college campuses informed the self-understanding of people in other institutions, such as Human Resources professionals charged with managing corporate work environments. The term itself carries such pleasant connotations — human variety and everyone being nice about this variety, not just tolerating it but celebrating it. The happy nomenclature spread easily, everywhere, into marketing and NGO-speak and all levels of education. And, for Human Resources departments, the diversity framework was a natural, deeply administrative way to visualize the human field of the workplace. The administrator of people begins her task in search of ordering categories, and the diversity framework hands her an array of categories, ready-made.

But in both university and workplace settings, the administration of diversity took on a disciplinary edge that people seriously resented. Where the civil rights framework drew on older liberal models of rights as the possession of individuals against government and other institutions, the diversity framework empowered institutions over individuals, rendered individuals prone to the disciplinary whims of those institutions. This is obvious and notorious in the case of universities, whose diversity bureaucracies often double as star chambers, secretive judicial bodies that punish students and professors for violating both imperiously written and mysteriously unwritten codes of speech and conduct.

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So Trump nixed your bullshit DEI job

By Ryan Zickgraf

It’s a little different in the workplace. There you can still imagine an individual seeking to vindicate a legal claim against real racial harassment by his boss or his colleagues, and this does happen from time to time, such as in the recent case of a Tesla factory in California. But, in the hands of corporations, with their governing interests in risk-management, the threat of such complaints about hostile work environments tends to result in an extension of employers’ surveillance over their employees, rather than an expansion of employees’ rights against unlawful discrimination. Indeed, the sorts of corporate diversity initiatives inspired by the hostile work environment framework are likely to be aimed not at enabling but at preempting civil rights claims by employees: “We can’t be guilty of maintaining a hostile work environment! We do diversity training! We brought in Robin DiAngelo last year! We paid her thirty grand!”

And then there’s that diversity training. The most notorious versions of diversity training take the form of searing interrogations from which the white employee can’t escape without admitting unearned racial privilege and indelible racial guilt. But corporate diversity training doesn’t always come from fanatics like DiAngelo, author of the now-notorious tract White Fragility. It doesn’t always resemble a suffer session from China’s Cultural Revolution, with workers set upon to confess their despicable privilege, and told their dubious attitudes toward the DiAngelo paradigm only prove their guilt, and humiliated for crying “white tears” in the face of the interrogation and accusation. But even the more innocuous forms of diversity training can feel like another of those spiritual burdens that today’s employers force their employees to bear, like “team-building” retreats that are meant to convince workers to invest not just their efforts but their inner selves in the make-believe community of their job.

That is, the average person experiences institutional DEI efforts mainly as the expression of institutional power. It’s not something done in public by a righteous movement for racial justice. It’s just something done to her, in private, on her boss’s orders, on the assumption that there’s something wrong with her soul that needs to be fixed by a consultant. And it can only embitter the resentful employee even further to learn that there’s no practical point to the soul-sucking hassle and/or humiliation of her diversity training sessions, that they don’t even work. But it’s now widely known that this is the case, that most diversity training programs don’t reduce internal bias or improve external behavior. Sometimes these programs increase bias. Sometimes they make people more racist in their behavior. About this there’s now a sort of reckoning, so to speak, everyone realizing that businesses and organizations are paying millions of dollars to diversity consultants who don’t appear to know what they’re doing.

One other area in which people encounter diversity and DEI as blandly depoliticized in their form — borne to them by functionaries, a fait accompli of institutional practice — and yet politically very radical in their content is their children’s schools. This is not surprising. America’s education establishment — public schools, teachers’ unions, schools of education — has been on a Deweyan quest for over a century. That is, it is constantly trying to extend its portfolio from training students in academic subjects to using schools’ daily possession of those students as a way to influence the nation’s handling of its larger social problems. The stubborn problem of race is both useful as an object in this broader quest and an ongoing dilemma that schools themselves have to deal with. Racial differences in academic performance present themselves to educators every day. They’re a festering legitimation problem for the entire education establishment, but also a rich opportunity for the many activists within that establishment. No one knows quite how to close those differences, and so the default approach for educators is a righteous busyness of themes and symbols, an official belief in racial oppression as the main problem, and an official embrace of anti-racism as the remedy.

Neither is it surprising that schools have been the focus of the most prominent and successful agitating against DEI. People don’t like their kids being politically programmed during their school days, and they really don’t like their kids being programmed in ideas that they themselves find obscure and obnoxious. And education is one area where the ideas that animate DEI regimes can’t be buried in administrative procedure, presented to people merely as obligatory workplace operations or unargued dictates of unseen university bureaucrats. In education, the animating ideas have to be stated outright sometimes, often in formulas simplified for children, which reveal just how radical they are. When your 10-year-old’s teacher says she joins Black Lives Matter activists in “disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family”, or tells you that she learned how to deconstruct her white privilege in school today, you might suspect that some aggressive politics is happening somewhere, that public issues are being decided via private channels. You might not like that the people involved have also involved your kids.

It’s easy and affirming for liberals and Leftists to ascribe this parental suspicion to a “desire…to protect whiteness”, in the words of one Slate writer. This familiar smugness betrays a failure to even think about what DEI is, in both its basic pragmatic details and its political nature and origins. In its pragmatic details DEI is a collection of disciplinary practices that institutions deploy on people in order to manage risk and enhance their own power. In America, it’s often lamented that courts are often used as a dubious end-run around democratic decision-making. The DEI regime does this one better. It originated in large part as an end-run around both democratic decision-making and courts. It is the creation of functionaries working under cover of bureaucratic darkness, who directly harry people and drizzle agitprop into their children’s education. It has the weak and hollow legitimacy you would expect in a bureaucratic creation that does those things. I’m sure some people don’t like it because they’re racists or afraid of change or whatever. But they have deeper reasons than that not to like it. They are citizens, and it insults their status and their prerogatives as citizens.

For my part, I find many of the background ideas that inform DEI — the academic arguments often described as Critical Race Theory — to be some mix of partially plausible and occasionally stimulating and eye-opening and, also, tendentious and wilfully pessimistic, readily challenged in both analytical and practical terms. They are far from a settled science of social relations. They have not earned the standing to be taught as unquestionable fact in schools, or to form the theoretical basis for peremptory regimes of behavior management and attitude adjustment and secret punishment in workplaces and universities. They are part of the intellectual mix, one interesting side of the vital debate that once happened about race and racism in America, before that debate was rendered moot by enterprising bureaucrats who don’t do debate, who just give orders.

If you spent 10 years trying to write a satire that encapsulates our present moment in American Democratic politics, you could do no better than this story. It is practically art. It is divinely ridiculous. But it’s also an incident from which certain conclusions can be drawn — about where the Left stands politically, and what the future holds, here at the almost-halfway point to our next presidential election.

The LatinX IncluXion Luncheon took place on Monday, in the Texas city of San Antonio, and Biden was attempting to compliment civil rights activist Raul Yzaguirre. “Raul helped build this organisation with the understanding that the diversity of this community, as distinct as the bodegas of the Bronx, as beautiful as the blossoms of Miami, and as unique as the breakfast tacos here in San Antonio, is your strength,” she said — mispronouncing “bodegas” as “BO-guh-duhs”. For the uninitiated, that is basically the closest thing we have in New York City to the crime of lese-majesty.

The backlash came swiftly from the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, which released a statement that read, in part, “NAHJ encourages Dr. Biden and her speech writing team to take the time in the future to better understand the complexities of our people and communities. We are not tacos.”

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The white privilege of BLM

By Kat Rosenfield

The First Lady, of course, did not write this speech herself — as evidenced by the fact that it included a word she didn’t know and couldn’t pronounce. And the “tacos” line, of course, is not something she — or any normal person — would ever come up with organically. It’s pure political strategy, a too-earnest pandering to various identity groups that has dominated the liberal discourse for the past six years. It’s just unfortunate for Jill Biden that her speechwriters and political aides failed to realise that this type of rhetoric has not only reached the limits of its usefulness, but has lately become akin to walking around with a sign on your back that says “cancel me”.

This happened quite fast. It is only two years since the racial reckoning of 2020, a year when you couldn’t open your email without combing through half a dozen new corporate diversity declarations from every organisation you’d ever had contact with in your life. Your newspaper, your cable company, your dermatologist, the company that mails pineapples to your in-laws every year as a holiday gift: all of them wanted you to know that they stood in support of social justice. This was the year when the diversity industry climbed to a $7.6 billion valuation (and counting), and expensive DEI consultants flooded en masse into corporate life. It’s when Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility was a bestseller in its (approximately) 53rd millionth printing; when Democratic politicians took the knee wearing kente cloth; when celebrities purged their white guilt in self-produced confessional videos.

The momentum of the diversity movement was unstoppable, partly because Americans were united in genuine horror over the murder of George Floyd, but also because the country had been in pandemic lockdown for months, and everyone was bored and stir crazy and absolutely desperate to do something. Here was something to believe in and an excuse to flout the stay-at-home order, and by God, we were going to take it.

But as the landscape of daily life became littered with solidarity statements and BLACK LIVES MATTER signs, the significance of these expressions began to subtly shift. What started as legitimate outrage and demand for change was evolving into a sort of status signal, a code by which good liberals could recognise others of their kind. And as the summer wore on, the signs started taking on a subtext: not just I’m one of you, but also please don’t hurt me. Store owners plastered social justice slogans in their windows in the hope that their businesses would be spared if a riot broke out. Diners at sidewalk cafes were confronted by mobs of angry protesters who refused to let them eat until or unless they raised a fist for black lives. Silence, of course, was violence — and power was coalescing in new and different places.

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Why Hispanics gave up on the Left

By Alex Perez

The desperation to demonstrate that you were down with the cause was palpable, and not unfounded. In one viral video, released at the moment when cancelling so-called “Karens” had become America’s new favorite spectator sport, a sobbing woman tries frantically to shield both her face and her licence plate from view. The unseen videographer accuses her of calling him the n-word; she protests that she’s done no such thing. “I have a black husband!” she shrieks, terrified.

To some people, the sight of that sobbing, desperate woman was deeply distasteful: a sign of things gone too far. But to others, it was a lightbulb moment: here was an opportunity. You could see it in the way that allegations of racism began to run rampant — not on the political Right, but through the most diversity-conscious, progressive spaces. The industries rocked hardest by the reckoning, and where most cancellations occur today, were not hotbeds of white supremacy but Left-liberal havens, populated by highly educated white people who prided themselves on their progressive bona fides and lived in terror of causing offence.

Media, fashion, publishing, television, the non-profit industrial complex: somehow, it was always the people doing the most who were next on the chopping block. The yoga studio owner who hosted free classes for students of colour. The novelist who diligently sought sensitivity reads in hopes of avoiding offence. The café owners who set out to create a welcoming LGBT community space. The summer camp with not one but two separate diversity committees to address issues of racial equity. The greater your dedication to diversity, the less likely your business was to survive a callout for even the most minor offences against it. Suddenly, nothing made you a target quite like being an ally (except apologising, of course).

And those statements that used to signal solidarity, even status — that used to be a tool for self-advancement in a world where caring about diversity was the best thing you could do for your brand — have taken on a new shade of meaning. Now, to say you care is to advertise your susceptibility to allegations of not-caring. You’re telling people that you can be squeezed, for apologies, or for money, or for whatever shred of publicity or attention or advantage might be gained by humiliating you.

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In defence of wokeness

By Tomiwa Owolade

Jill Biden is being squeezed. Not because she actually did anything wrong, but because she cares about being seen to do right, and that makes her vulnerable. Let’s be clear about this: nobody actually believes that the First Lady of the United States, a 71-year-old professional with a doctoral degree, needs to be instructed as to the difference between people and tacos. Even the group of people who just issued a public statement declaring themselves not to be tacos do not believe it. Biden’s speech was many things — cringy, pandering, clearly unrehearsed — but it was not racist, not by any stretch of the imagination.

And yet, as long as someone can benefit from claiming they believe otherwise, they will — and the rest of us have to go along with it.

This might be the worst part: that everyone, from the First Lady to the NAHJ to the media covering this ridiculous story have to keep pretending that it’s a real thing, that it really matters. Journalists have to dutifully publish the interviews with the offended parties, who in turn dutifully manage to keep saying “We are not tacos” with a straight face. Jill Biden has to dutifully apologise and thank her interlocutors for the opportunity to listen, learn, and do better. And ordinary liberals who want to remain such, in good standing, have to dutifully nod along as if the party weren’t on the verge of collapsing under the weight of its own ridiculousness.

Meanwhile, the economy is imploding, no laws are being passed, our president’s approval rating is hovering around 30%, and those Latino voters who we claim to care about so much are fleeing in droves to the Republican party — where a candidate need not bother with endless racial sensitivity charades that cater solely to the sensibilities of an elite class of progressive activists. Donald Trump not only refused to celebrate diversity, unless you count tweeting a picture of himself on Cinco de Mayo — eating, of all things, a taco bowl — alongside the caption, I LOVE HISPANICS! He also vowed to build a wall to keep Mexicans  — who, he suggested, were mostly rapists — out of the country, a comment for which he refused to apologise. And yet, for a growing number of voters, even that is better than the cringe coming out of the Left.

And if things continue this way, that tweeting, taco-bowl eating orange ex-President will be re-elected in 2024 by a multi-racial coalition who care far more about the price of gas than they do about the culture wars. Melania Trump, who not only makes no apologies for her husband’s coarseness but really doesn’t care about immigrants will resume her position as the least-enthusiastic, and least seen, First Lady ever to set foot in the White House. But sure, let’s keep holding our politicians hostage to increasingly tortured purity tests. Let’s nitpick and police and snipe over etiquette until every last normal person in our orbit has fled. Let’s keep schooling the First Lady on the difference between a taco and a person. This will definitely end well.

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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The Godfather of Critical Race Theory

By Tomiwa Owolade

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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The fightback against Critical Race Theory

By Douglas Murray

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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What liberals get wrong about race

By Eric Kauffman

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

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.

In his debate with Joe Biden, Donald Trump claimed that critical race theory is racist and teaches people that America is a horrible place to which Biden responded weakly by claiming that Trump was the racist. Trump’s previous attacks on critical race theory produced a mass of conflicting claims about what critical race theory is, what precisely has been proscribed by the administration and what its motivations were for doing so.

The memo stated: “[A]ll agencies are directed to begin to identify all contracts or other agency spending related to any training on “critical race theory”, “white privilege” or any other training or propaganda effort that teaches or suggests either (1) that the United States is an inherently racist or evil country or (2) that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil.”

The memo also says that “employees across the Executive Branch have been required to attend trainings where they are told that ‘virtually all White people contribute to racism’ or where they are required to say that they ‘benefit from racism'”. The memo describes critical race theory as “propaganda” five times, “divisive” five times, “unAmerican” twice, and “anti-American” once. Critical race theory is declared to be “contrary to all we stand for as Americans.”

This is an odd claim, since racial inequality and attempts to remedy it have been a constant in American history. Consequently, there have been two centuries of scholarship and activism by African-Americans and others in the realm of American race relations.

The president has also declared that he is raising funds to educate people as to the “real history of the country — the real history, not the fake”. This is concerning to those who are not convinced the president is a reliable judge of what is and isn’t fake news, historical or current. It was similarly alarming when Mr Trump said that he would sign an executive order to create “patriotic education” that will teach young people “to love America with all of their heart and all of their souls”. The implication is that Trump wants to promote an entirely prideworthy version of American history. If so, it is unclear how the enslavement of African Americans would be taught.

Prominent critical race theorists responded to the memo angrily. To Kimberlé Crenshaw, it was “McCarthyism 101” while to Ibram X Kendi  it amounted to a claim that to be American was to be racist. “There is danger here” said M.E Hart, provider of federal diversity trainings. “We have to see each other as human beings, and we have to do whatever it takes to, including whatever classes make that possible.”

So, what is critical race theory? Is it divisive propaganda that claims America and white people to be racist and evil? Or is it simply the recognition of all people as human beings?

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The theory traces its roots back to the writings and activism of freed slaves including Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, who argued strongly for the recognition of African-Americans as full human beings. However, the theory as we know it today could best be understood to have its founding father in the sociologist, W.E.B Du Bois (1868-1963). Du Bois argued that the idea of race was created to provide a biological justification for the enslavement, mistreatment and exploitation of African-Americans. He was right.

Du Bois, however, was inclined to believe that African-Americans needed to raise themselves out of their subordinated position by showing white Americans how wrong they were to devalue black Americans in this way. During the Civil Rights Movement, a more activist stance developed which required white Americans to take more responsibility for their own racist assumptions and help to reorder society more fairly.

Following the legal success of the Civil Rights Movement the movement stalled. Legal victories had been won but racist attitudes remained. Thus, what was needed was a “critical” approach. The word “critical” refers to a practice of critiquing institutions and broader society with a view to revolutionary political change. This was in contradiction to the liberal approach of reforming existing structures so that everybody had equal access to them.

As Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic wrote in the introduction of Critical Race Theory: An Introduction: “Unlike traditional civil rights discourse, which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.”

The founding father of critical race theory was Derrick Bell, professor at Harvard Law School. Bell argued that racism has not improved and is, in fact permanent, and that whites simply find less obvious and legal ways to maintain their dominance. Bell developed his theory of “Interest convergence” which argued that whites only extend rights to blacks when it is in their own material interest. This cynical and pessimistic materialist approach tends to present empirical evidence of disparities and then claim racism as the sole cause of them, while ignoring progress.

Materialism held sway in critical race theory in the 1970s and 80s but gave way to postmodern ideas from the 1990s. In 1991, Kimberlé Crenshaw defined intersectionality as a “provisional concept linking contemporary politics with postmodern theory.”  She critiqued liberalism for its universalism which held that all people should have access to everything regardless of their identity and argued instead for an identity-based approach.

This critique marked a shift from liberalism to identity politics with added postmodernism. The postmodern approach to critical race theory focused less on material aspects of society and more on concepts of power, knowledge and language.

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This owes much to the thought of the French theorist Michel Foucault, who argued that oppressive systems of power are maintained by ways of talking about things — discourses. Powerful forces in society get to decide which ways of talking about things are legitimate and they do so to maintain their own privileged positions.

Having legitimised certain discourses, the general population then accepts them as common sense and speaks as though they are true, thus upholding power structures such as white supremacy without realising what they are doing. Critical theorists exist to explain these systems and how they work so people can see them and dismantle them.

This is how critical race theory developed within the academy. However, since around 2010, it has moved into the mainstream. The ideas we are most likely to hear are those of Ibram X Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. Kendi’s How to be an AntiRacist (2019) and DiAngelo’s White Fragility (2018) were New York Times bestsellers for months and sold out again following the death of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests.

The work of Ibram X Kendi seems to draw most of its spirit from the materialist approach, presenting us with two intertwined false dichotomies. Firstly, one can only be racist or anti-racist. Secondly, one can either support the existence of disparities between races as right and natural or one can attribute them to racist power structures and policies in society and oppose them.

That is, either one accepts that all disparities are the result of racist structures in society and devotes oneself to opposing these as such, or one is a racist. Kendi does not claim that all white people are racist but maintains that all people can behave in ways that are racist or anti-racist according to his definitions.

He writes: “One endorses either the idea of a racial hierarchy as a racist, or racial equality as an antiracist. One either believes problems are rooted in groups of people, as a racist, or locates the roots of problems in power and policies, as an anti-racist. One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an antiracist… . The claim of ‘not racist’ neutrality is a mask for racism… . The only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it — and then dismantle it.”

Robin DiAngelo takes a thoroughly postmodern approach. Her belief is that white people are unavoidably racist because of the ways in which they have been socialised in white supremacist countries. DiAngelo identifies America as just such a country but also much of Europe, including the UK.

For DiAngelo, “whiteness” is a system that whites perpetuate with everything they do. In White Fragility, she describes whiteness as a “constellation of processes and practices” consisting of “basic rights, values, beliefs, perspectives and experiences purported to be commonly shared by all but which are actually only consistently afforded to white people”. For DiAngelo these processes are “dynamic, relational, and operating at all times and on myriad levels”.

Elsewhere, she sets out a tenet of anti-racism, stating that “The question is not ‘Did racism occur?’ but ‘How did racism manifest in that situation?'” There is no possibility of not being racist and DiAngelo’s training aims to get white people to accept that they are racist — as the Trump memo claims.

So, is the Trump administration right? Does critical race theory claim that America is racist? Yes. Does it claim that white people are racist? If the training is based on DiAngelo, yes. If it draws more on Kendi, a racist is anyone not entirely convinced that all disparities are due to racism. Interestingly, 43% of black Americans are not convinced of this and believe an unwillingness to work hard is a major cause compared to only 30% of whites who believe so. This doesn’t mean they are correct and the perception being higher in black Americans could well be better explained by a tendency to conservatism related to their greater, often Protestant, religiosity as a group.

Is Hart correct that critical race theory and anti-racism training simply want all people to be recognised as equally human? No, this universal humanist approach is explicitly criticised in critical race theory as the failed liberal approach. Critical race theory works by foregrounding identity, not our shared humanity. Is the Trump administration thus correct to call it “divisive”? Absolutely.

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Defenders of critical race theory training often miscategorise it as a standard form of essential workplace training, but training people in critical race theory is not like training them in protocols of data protection where compliance with the law can reasonably be required. It is more like training them in a belief system like Christianity and denying employees the right to be openly Muslim, Jewish, Hindu or atheist. Nobody should be required to pretend to believe themselves to be racist or to believe in invisible systems of whiteness if they don’t.

Critical race theory and particularly the anti-racism of Robin DiAngelo require people to reject individual agency and the individual’s knowledge of and control over their own mind, and to accept that they must believe precisely what one set of American theorists insist they do. While believers in critical race theory often insist that only white people reject its ideas, studies show that progressives who hold these kinds of views are much more likely to be white. Black Americans are even split in believing that race relations will improve by focusing on commonalities (liberal universalism) as on differences (identity politics).

By banning training rooted in critical race theory for federal employees, President Trump has defended freedom of belief and taken a stand against coerced speech. Yet there is cause to be concerned. The rhetoric about “patriotic education” and “anti-American propaganda” indicates that Trump could intend to replace one biased and ideological narrative with another and thus deny American children a rigorous education about the racial history of America.

Following the release of his memo, he tweeted, “This is a sickness that cannot be allowed to continue. Please report any sightings so we can quickly extinguish!”

And rather ominiously, at Tuesday’s debate the president also responded to requests to condemn white supremacy by telling the far-Right street fighters Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by. But I’ll tell you what: Somebody’s got to do something about antifa and the left.”

While American liberals might share the president’s wish for critical race theory to cease and desist, they must retain their principles of freedom of belief and be on their guard lest this language presages authoritarian censorship.

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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.