At Areo:
If the astounding fact that Donald Trump received a greater share of non-white people’s votes in 2020 than any Republican president since 1960 reveals anything at all, it’s that this past summer’s racial reckoning didn’t resonate with many. In contrast to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s, which found expression in historic legislation, the results of this year’s cultural upheavals have been more symbolic than substantive. Statues were toppled—not just of confederates but of abolitionists and national founders; defund the police became the impromptu battle cry of progressive activists; dissenters like James Bennett, David Shor, Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan were fired from or pressured to leave their jobs for refusing to acquiesce. But, despite the fact that major corporations from Walmart to Goldman Sachs, along with almost every major media outlet, celebrity and cultural institution came out in full support of Black Lives Matter, conspicuously few national policies advocating structural reforms in policing have emerged as a result.
A sharp uptick in violent crime and homicides was the predictable outcome of the widespread anti-police sentiment galvanized by Black Lives Matter. Rioting caused billions of dollars in property damage in largely minority neighborhoods and dozens of lives were lost. It would be a terrible irony if a movement ostensibly dedicated to preserving black lives inadvertently cost more of them than it saved.
Trump’s gains among non-white, women and LGBTQ voters (and his setbacks among white male voters) have not stopped some progressives from blaming the unprecedented turnout of support for him on white supremacy, patriarchy and racism. Charles Blow, for example, has commented, “All of this to me points to the power of the white patriarchy and the coattail it has of those who depend on it or aspire to it … Some people who have historically been oppressed will stand with the oppressors, and will aspire to power by proximity.” Likewise Roxane Gay has asserted, “The way this election has played out shouldn’t be a surprise if you’ve been paying attention or if you understand racism and how systemic it really is.” Nikole Hannah-Jones tweeted that the Latino vote for Trump can be attributed to the whiteness of certain Hispanic ethnic groups. But the much more parsimonious answer is that demography is not destiny.
This is an ideology incapable of adapting to new information. Modern, race-conscious antiracism is not just a political affiliation, like libertarianism or democratic socialism. The sense of meaning it provides in our increasingly secular society has turned it into a quasi-religious belief system that grow stronger in the face of disconfirmatory information. If our political identity is our primary source of morality, any challenge to our political worldview will be perceived as an existential threat. In modern anti-racism, resistance to reality is more of a feature than a bug.
The misplaced assumption that racism killed George Floyd virtually guaranteed a disproportionate and jumbled response. The ostensible concerns of BLM—racial profiling in policing and the lack of accountability and transparency among officers—are laudable and well substantiated. But it was no coincidence that race and racism, rather than structural policing issues, quickly became the main issue.
Police killings of unarmed people of any race are exceedingly rare in the US (there were only about 55 last year). The group most targeted by police are the poor. Interracial violence is extremely uncommon and black police officers may be just as likely to kill black suspects as white officers. White people are regularly killed by police and in higher absolute numbers than black people. The death of a white man called Tony Timpa, who was killed in nearly identical circumstances to Floyd’s attracted little interest. The discomfiting reality is that racial gaps in policing start to close when we account for differences in crime rates and frequency of encounters with police. Any honest conversation about policing must also take into account the around 400 million guns circulating in the population along with America’s disproportionate rates of violent crime in relation to our peer countries. Around 81% of black Americans want as much or more policing in their communities as they currently have. All these facts have been ignored and treated as extraneous, at best. Those who raised them are often viewed with suspicion. Questioning whether racism really killed George Floyd opens one up to the charge of being a racist oneself. To be against Black Lives Matter is framed as being against black lives. To be against the current form antiracism has taken is framed as being in favor of racism. This discourages honest conversation.
It doesn’t have to be this way. If the advocates of anti-racism could address its two major blind spots—historical determinism and race essentialism—a better version would emerge. We can mitigate the lingering effects of racism in society without resorting to the same moral logic that gave rise to white supremacy in the first place: the use of group identity as a means to power and absolution. Any successful antiracist movement must begin with the premise that race is a fiction...Still more.
