It’s very clear now that the criticisms of Claudine Gay is part of a coordinated attack on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs on college campuses and beyond.
The focus on DEI is this year’s right-wing racist bullshit, the follow-up to last year’s right-wing racists bullshit criticizing Critical Race Theory.
These attacks are the “polite” way for right-winger to gin up racism among white folks who are still not comfortable with the idea of standing in equality with Black people and who can be easily motivated to think that attacking white supremacy means abandoning ideals of universal equality and instead, embracing Black supremacy. This is nonsense.
I’m going to write in more detail about this at some point. But for now let me just say that yesterday I started reading a book that purports to provide an intellectual critique of DEI and CRT. It is clear how bogus the books is within five pages.
How is it bogus> Most importantly because it runs together ideas and practices that *are* genuinely problematic but are rarely found in academia or schools with ideas and practices that are good ideas.
For example, is racial segregation wrong? Yes, of course. And there are a couple of examples where misguided schools have decided that racially segregated classes as a whole make sense. But they are rarely found. The goal of Democrats and liberals remains integration.
On the other hand, is it useful for Black and white students to occasionally meet separately to discuss maters that are difficult or uncomfortable to discuss in mixed groups. Yes, that makes a great deal of sense, especially when the results of conversations in separate affinity groups is brought back to a larger mixed group. It does not violate our universal ideals to recognize the impact of racism on our lives and to take steps to rectify it.
Or to take another example. When there is striking evidence, as there was, that Black were being vaccinated against COVID-19 at far lower rates than white people in some cities, was it wrong to open innoculation sites in lower-income Black communities and limit them to Black people–so as to ensure that white people in other neighborhoods do not overwhelm the sites. No, it was not wrong. It was a recognition that Black and white people have differential abilities to access vaccination sites. And it was not any different that putting additional government resources into vaccination sites rural areas–which are majority white–because their are problems in accessing health care in those communities.
Steps like this programs are not meant to be permanent. The former are ultimately meant to result in a breakdown of the racial barriers that make conversation between white and Black people difficult. And the latter are meant to be a step toward improving access to health care for everyone.
Far from being a rejection of universal ideals, these programs are meant to realize our universal aspirations. But they also are determined not to reinforce racial hierarchies by failing to recognize how decades and centuries of white supremacists practices, and the racism that created and were reinforced by them, have put Black people at severe disadvantages.
The trouble however, is that white people who profess to believe in universal ideals can’t get their heads around the idea that not only have we fallen short of reaching universal ideal but (1) public policy not just 100 or 50 or 30 or 10 years ago but still today is systemically racist and (2) seemingly universal policies can be racist in effect.
As I wrote two year ago, Pennsylvania distributed both housing and education COVID relief funds in ways that seem universal but that shortchange Black communities. And that, at least on the part of some Pennsylvania Republican legislators. This didn’t happen long ago. It happened in 2021.
People who otherwise well meaning keep falling for the latest version of the oldest play in the right-wing playbook: divide white and Black people with common interests by turning them against one another.
And even people who call themselves liberals fall for it. They blame Democrats for embracing identity politics in supporting “racist” public policies when in fact Democrats have NOT embraced those policies (any more than they have embraced infanticide or open borders or pedophilia).
The right-wingers repeat the same lies over and over again. And find one or three examples in a country of 340 million people that make their point, and these, generally old white male liberal say Democrats need to stop talking about race (and gender, too.)
But the fact is that Democrat politicians are not the ones talking about race and gender all the time. In fact they don’t do so very often, except to call for the same universal values they have always stood for.
Democrats could stop talking about equality for Black people and women for the next six months and Republicans would keep repeating the same lies. We would hear again and again that Democrats have retreated from universal ideas and seek a world in which we are all “locked into identity groups” and treated as members of groups not individuals.
This is just nonsense. But it is dangerous nonsense.
Don’t fall for it. And push back on it whenever and wherever your can.