Read on Twitter
Had some time on my hands for a thread.
I imagine why so many find such dust ups & self-righteous takes (like @conor64 offers) frustrating is we have long dealt w these issues & in much more compelling ways to address more fundamental questions. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/meta-arguments-about-anti-racism/615424/
I imagine why so many find such dust ups & self-righteous takes (like @conor64 offers) frustrating is we have long dealt w these issues & in much more compelling ways to address more fundamental questions. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/meta-arguments-about-anti-racism/615424/
Anti-racist arguments aren't problem. A simplistic sense of what constitutes race, racial oppression & anti-racist politics is. Other than Barbara & Karen Fields, these aren't theorists of race/racial oppression, though *most* are important thinkers we shld read.
What strikes me is that folks like @conor64 & others have prob w influence Kendi & DiAngelo have w mainstream (white) readership, not with works on race & racial oppression as such.
This article does demonstrate the prob w believing that by reading a single book one has the answer to anything. But its concern is more broadly w anti-racism as such, tho it fails to fully present its case.
There is a sense that in showing flaws w @DrIbram et al., or with how readers deploy his work, they are putting forwrad better ideas & if you disagree w them ur too deeply committed to bad ideas of race/identity politics. But it doesn't seem ideological debate is at issue.
There is no serious engagement w vast literature (academic or popular) on race, racial oppression, or anti-racism, whatever one takes that to be. There's a dismissiveness dressed up as insight that belies an unwillingness to grapple seriously w complex issues.
Take this from @conor64: "if you can’t explain your position unless everyone reads your source material, then the fault lies with you. No one in a public meeting should have to read the books you consider important, much less accept that the ideas in those books are sacrosanct."
This is an excellent, if somewhat commonsense point. I always stress to student the necessity of working thru ideas & never assuming ur interlocutors know ur concepts. E.g., how does one engage someone who disagrees w ur conceptual frames or guiding premise?
This article presents acolytes in an obscure mtg as an ex of probs w anti-racist concepts & politics, wo demonstrating that this IS anti-racism as such. We are expected to accept the mtg as paradigmatic of a larger prob. But if you don't accept this, then the article falls apart?
This is why explaining yourself is so crucial, which @conor64 doesn't do: "Anti-racism is a contested concept that well-meaning people define and practice differently. Folks who have different ideas about how to combat racism should engage one another."
Yet he never defines what he or anyone else defines as anti-racism. Curiously, he suggests folks might "attempt a reciprocal book exchange, in which everyone works to understand how others see the world."
Wait what?
Wait what?
I haven't seen @conor64 complain abt the problem w complex ideas, but I have seen ple he lauds complain, on Twitter, abt complex ideas—when @jbouie simply defined how he used "black" in discussing Kamala Harris, or when others have explained the use of "Latinx."
@conor64 has referenced German philosopher Martin Heidegger, hardly easy reading, but only Karen & Barbara Fields on race. I wonder if he's read Jamaican philosopher Charles Mills, or Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, especially her "Playing in the Dark"?
For all the criticism of Kendi and how others use him, consider Kendi's "Anti-Racist" reading list: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/02/antiracist-syllabus-governor-ralph-northam/582580/
Whatever u think of Ibram's work this is a good list, esp if you've never thought seriously abt race, racism, & how you might be complicit in racial oppression. So what are those criticizing him after? Those he is speaking to? A market audience? Hmmm
I have criticisms of @DrIbram's approach, tho it's not what @conor64 and his ilk complain of. I think the issue is far more complex than he and his detractors suggest. But I don't write for @TheAtlantic so there's that.
@DrIbram does invite readers to engage a broader body of work. The prob w the group @conor64 discusses in his article is no one (including him) seems to have read any of those works. Such an engagement doesn't promise easy answers and, to borrow a phrase, it tells no lies.
Consider the Black women, in addition to Karen & Barbara Fields, on Kendi's list: @DorothyERoberts Maya Angelou @janetmock @ProfessorCrunk Audre Lorde @jesmimi @DainaRameyBerry Isabel Wilkerson @elizabhinton Deborah Gray White @KeeangaYamahtta Angela Davis @haw95 @ProfCAnderson
In their work one encounters ideas, analyses, approaches, and programs that in turn build on & are in conflict w one another, that are in respectful but serious debate. Reading these one comes away w a sense of the diverse political orientations on offer, not a singular view.
Read their intros alone & it's hard to conclude there is a singular problem that might loosely be called anti-racism. Read their works in full & encounter something more complex, capacious, troubling & generative than simply THE answer.
Regardless of your politics, one shld come away clear that no single group is alone in its commitment to thinking critically abt the world & the challenges confronting us. That @conor64 et al. seem to have never considered this is alarming, if predictable.
For they seem to have never considered that they might be articulating their own groupthink. And it is this lack of self-reflection, the dismissiveness of declaring everyone else dangerous while failing to grapple w their own solipsisms & blindspots, that is most irritating.
But another of the theorists, Danielle Allen, from @conor64's list, is appropriate here. In her Forward to Hannah Arendt's "The Human Condition," she argues that "the tools of scientific thinking are powerful [but] the point is not to abandon them." Rather,
we must "integrate the knowledge they provide into a broader, richer conversation about what we human beings are doing and should be doing, and why." She goes on to speak more generally:
"When we confront the hardest social problems—like mass incarceration or economic disruption as occasioned by globalization, or climate change—we need to accelerate the pace of our acquisition of understanding. We have to use every available tool to think what we are doing."
