Are We Ready to Abandon Racial Solidarity?
from a debate with Robert Woodson, Shelby Steele, Kmele Foster, and Reihan Salam
Last month, a momentous event took place at the Manhattan Institute: a debate on “The Ethics of Black Identity” with me and Bob Woodson on one side, Shelby Steele and Kmele Foster on the other, and MI President Reihan Salam moderating. At issue was the question of whether the persistence of black identity remains necessary in solving the problems facing black communities today. Bob and I took the affirmative position while Kmele and Shelby took the negative. Reihan had quite a job on his hands, as all four of us debaters are, shall we say, opinionated.
The following excerpt from that debate engages one of the discussion’s through-lines. Collective action served black Americans well in the past. Without racial solidarity founded in institutions like black churches and black community organizations, it’s doubtful that the Civil Rights Movement could have achieved all that it did. Black people, even those who were relatively well-off, were willing to sacrifice money, time, and their very bodies to secure basic rights not only for themselves but for their people.
But has racial solidarity served its purpose? I’ve often argued on behalf of “transracial humanism,” the setting aside of identity categories like race in favor of species-level identification. We’re all human beings, and we should all have the opportunity to lay claim to the fruits of human achievement, whatever their origin. Tolstoy is mine as much as Charles Mingus is mine. Yet I cannot simply define away my blackness. It’s at the core of my self-understanding. To deny it would be to deny myself. And as Bob points out, there are strategic political advantages to calls for racial solidarity, especially when they’ve been nearly monopolized by the Left. (Let me say once more with feeling: My blackness is not in conflict with my conservatism.)
Shelby and Kmele are much more skeptical of the uses of black identity in the present. I believe, with them, that transracial humanism is the way of the future. The question is whether that future has yet arrived.
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REIHAN SALAM: I want to underscore something here. I'm struck by the fact that, among the four of you, there's actually a fair bit of agreement about what we see as an attractive moral outcome over the very long term. I think that all of you agree that being seen as an individual has value. But one thing I detected both in Glenn and Bob's remarks is this idea that there's certain kinds of sacrifices that are appropriate to make in the name of solidarity.
That is, one version of your sensibility, Kmele—and this will be ungenerous, but I'm curious to hear your reaction but also Glenn's—is that essentially what you're saying is that we live in a much freer society now. We live in a society in which one can have more agency and freedom of action, and that it is a moral imperative, to claim that and to claim that individualism, to de-race oneself.
But another view is that poses a kind of collective action problem in which you have people who have the ability to capitalize on those opportunities through the kind of attenuation of those rigid racial ties. And then what you see is the defection of people like you from this larger collective, the public good of acting on behalf of a racial group that has been stigmatized and excluded. I wonder if that makes sense to you, what your reaction to that is. And I also want to hear from Glenn, if that sounds roughly right to him, that part of what we're saying is that, yes, it's a good and healthy aspiration to be free of those group obligations, but those group obligations really bite right now. And that there is a responsibility for those who have—
ROBERT WOODSON: Can I ask, how do they bite?
REIHAN SALAM: Well, I just wanna throw out the idea to ...
ROBERT WOODSON: No, but I mean that's, it seems to me, a key point. Bite. Do you mean racism? That people are still being victimized by racism? I'm just trying to really get a sense of ...
REIHAN SALAM: I'm trying to kind of advance what I take to be part of Glenn's view, so maybe he would be ...
GLENN LOURY: Well, the collective action problem, just very straightforwardly. You have goals toward which you would like to mobilize people to achieve those goals. Each one individually might not have the interest to make the sacrifices if they only thought of it in their own terms. But if they see themselves as part of a collective—and I gave the example of nationalism. You have a country, you have people asked to sacrifice, to pay taxes, to fight and die, if it comes to that. And underneath that is a sense of identity. It's a sense of, in this case, Americanness to which they feel a certain degree of obligation and responsibility.
SHELBY STEELE: What do you do when racism is gone?
What I'm saying is the black church—I give that as a concrete example—is an institution. It has a history, it has a narrative, it has a sense of self-understanding, and it gives meaning to people's lives.
SHELBY STEELE: It'll never be the same, Glenn. Freedom. We're in freedom now. The black church was formed when we were in naked oppression. Today we're in freedom. Racism is not there. You can worship any way you want. We're so free, we don't know what to do with it.
No, we're in agreement about that. We're in agreement about that, Shelby.
SHELBY STEELE: I'm a jazz fan. I love the music. Follow it way too much. Because it's, to me, a rare, magnificent creation that does come out of the black experience. But that experience doesn't exist anymore. Racism is simply not a problem. It doesn't deserve a cultural response.
ROBERT WOODSON: Shelby, what I find disturbing is that the Left, the elite Left, are using race to the disadvantage of poor people, and they are dying as a consequence of their misuse of it. But if you're not going to confront that reality with some idealized version of post-racism and just say, well, it doesn't exist anymore, so we'll just act like it doesn't exist. We've got to take action, I think, in those places to confront those who are misusing race. And the way we do it is to gather groups who are suffering the problems, like the mothers who lost children to homicide, to stand up to the Black Left and say, we are against defund the police. And so it is important to have those suffering the problem as the symbols of that pushback.
SHELBY STEELE: Why would you exclude whites from the latter approach?
ROBERT WOODSON: Because it doesn't have the same power. In other words, when someone derives their moral authority by saying they represent you, when you stand up yourself and say “they don't represent me,” that undermines the moral authority. But if I go in and say, “Oh, I have to have a white person on my arm to walk in to claim it.” No. I mean, it's a strategic move, Shelby. It's not an ideological bias. It's a strategic move.
SHELBY STEELE: You're saying you have to have a black person, only black people on your arm?
No, no, no. What he's saying is they don't speak for black people. The message that we want to give is those blacks who have appropriated race on behalf of race-card-playing nonsense don't speak for black people.
ROBERT WOODSON: Exactly.
So in order to say that, there are two things you could do. One of them is, I'm black and they don't speak for me. The other is blackness is a fiction, nobody speaks for black people. We opted for the former move.
KMELE FOSTER: That's the decision that's being made. I just think that it's impossible to—well, no, it's not impossible. It's imperative that we take a look at what the costs might be. And to the extent we are refurbishing sustaining notions of racial difference, a notion of there even being any authority whatsoever or respectability and asserting that you are speaking on behalf of a particular group of people, that there is a particular opinion that is held by all people that look a particular way. That is something that we ought to be wary of.
And I would go a step further. You're absolutely right, Bob. It is imperative that you are pushing back against dangerous currents in our culture and that you're confronting people who insist on framing things with respect to race in order to derive some sort of cultural or political power. At this point, we can't even talk about student loans without invoking race and talking about it, because it's a powerful tool. That said, the best way to actually undermine that is to acknowledge that this tactic is being deployed and, two, not to give even the appearance that this is a respectable way to conduct business, to focus, I think, very narrowly and specifically on the defects of the policies that are being proposed and to provide affirmative solutions, like better alternative approaches.
I think you've mentioned a few times, Glenn, the black church and other valuable institutions that exist that have some sort of a racial context. I'm not interested in obliterating the black church. I'm not interested in telling people that they shouldn't think about their church as a black church. But I do think a lot about a young pastor who's planting a church today, a brand new church, who insists on it being kind of affirmatively, unapologetically black. A lot of things go along with that. And that is something that happens today. Most of those people are buying into a set of ideological priors that are wildly inconsistent, I think, with progress, and certainly wildly inconsistent with an individualist perspective of how to think about free people operating in a free society.
There's a real sense in which our embrace of this concept, whatever the advantages we imagine we're deriving from it, are an obstacle to some of the broader philosophical projects that we might want to engage in. And I think, at a minimum, it's worth contemplating. We had the March on Washington, we had King give his “I Have a Dream” speech, and it was and is beautiful and powerful. But at the same time, it's imperative to note that, no, they're not white girls and black girls. They're just girls. That's a step in a particular direction. There's a particular line that's being drawn in the sand there.
That is a whitewashing of history. Look, the AME Church—
KMELE FOSTER: I'm not asking us to change our perspective on what happened historically. I'm talking about the way forward.
ROBERT WOODSON: You know, the reason, that we are a counterculture is because of our inability to communicate important values and convince people that those values are important. That is what the Left does. And I think Ralph Nader is a perfect example of how you market ideas and principles. When he comes before the Congress to convince the Congress that we need to regulate automobiles, he comes with the weeping parents of a 16-year-old who was lost in a Pinto, a wrinkled fender of a Pinto with blood on it, and then he says, “This is the consequence of that policy. Now, let me tell you what changes have to be made.” By contrast, conservatives will come with four white guys with blue suits, with ties, with charts, with data. Who wins that fight?
And so I think it's important that you have to have the right symbols. I choose to take the people suffering the problem, who lost children. And when they say that we must stop talking about white people for a year and address the enemy within, that has much more power than if I were to come with some interracial group armed with some niceties of post-racialism.
I just wanna get a word in here, because so much is flying by. I think you guys are overreacting. I think you're basically right. And I think the long run that you envision and I envision are very similar long runs. It's just that I think that the abolitionist move, the principled rejection of the category, race, on behalf of an ideal is, as Bob has said, strategically surrendering too much.
And I also think it's a little bit ahistorical. The African Methodist Episcopal Church—I'm talking about Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, these guys at the end of the eighteenth century in Philadelphia where slavery was still running strong, founded an institution that is now a global institution of black people striving to do exactly with their freedom what Shelby would have 'em do: determine their own fate, take responsibility for their lives and for the raising of their children, and so forth and so on, nested within a certain narrative, a certain sense of “our history.”
Now, I have many ancestors. And some of them are European. 23andMe tells me some of my ancestors are European. But the account I give of from whence I have come is deeply nested within this African American history. And all I'm saying is it's not yet time to throw that over, even as we understand the deeper philosophical truth of transracial humanism as the goal toward which we should all be striving.
SHELBY STEELE: You're fighting a straw man. We would never throw it over. How could you? Why would you want to? I've been studying black American culture all my life. I love it. It is ... there's gotta be a word stronger than “identification.” It has made me who I am. I'm grateful for it. And yet, the world works by evolution. It evolves. It transforms. We won our long fight against racism. For example, in 1964, when the Civil Rights Bill was passed—what is that, 60, 70 years ago—we won. It wasn't manifested in reality yet entirely, but increasingly we have just become more and more and more and more free.
And at this point, it seems to me, we are balking in the face of freedom. We are intimidated by what it asks of us. And some of that is that we're gonna be sort of ripped away from that narrative that you mentioned. We're gonna have to invent ourselves as free men and women, and we're gonna have to change what it means to be black. It doesn't just mean responding to racism and hatred. It did at one time. But today we black people, our biggest problem is modernity. The modern world. We're unprepared to live in it, to thrive in it. That's our problem. And maybe there's a little racism in there somewhere, but the real problem is, in California last year, black kids who graduated from high school read at an eighth grade level. That's the problem.
Should other groups engage in a similar form of collective solidarity and, where needed, uplift, which is based on and focuses on common ethnoracial, cultural, and, in some cases, geographic experiences and perspectives? I understand it can sound audacious if not clueless to suggest the group at the center of this discussion can or should just cast off any sense of deeply-rooted black identity as if it were an item of clothing one had physically outgrown. Not after hundreds of years of blackness being imposed as a negative identity in every horrific way imaginable. But I can’t help thinking of what John McWhorter has sometimes said. To paraphrase: when we discuss disparities and struggles within the black community, we’re not really talking about black Americans as a totality, at least not in 2022. We’re talking about approximately 1/3 of black Americans who live in somewhat isolated, insular, dominantly black, low income neighborhoods, most often in bigger cities. These are the people Robert Woodson is so admirably focused on working with to build positive, community-led organizations, informed and driven by people with a personal and local knowledge and stake in the problems they’re confronting and solutions they’re not only proposing, but exemplifying. Robert Woodson doesn’t work with Glenn Loury because Glenn Loury needs help, but because Glenn Loury gives a damn and knows a lot and is in a position to help some of the community-led organizations Robert Woodson has helped to build. I don’t know much of anything else about these gutsy women’s personal politics, but I agree that there are few rejoinders and criticisms more powerful than when Tamir Rice’s mother and the mothers of other young men lost to fatal encounters with police, speak up and shame BLM for their phony, selfish, greedy exploitation of their sons’ deaths and their fundamental unseriousness regarding most aspects of the challenges facing these women’s communities. When rioting was destroying parts of Minneapolis two years ago, nothing stopped me cold like seeing an older, disabled black woman crying because all the local stores she relied on for her essentials were burned down or gated and abandoned, or smashed and looted. She was scared and didn’t know what to do or where to go. There is a real moral authority there nothing and no one exogenous can dismiss. At a time when there is such overwhelming cultural and financial and institutional emphasis on bureaucratic, top-down policies imposed from without, policies which have too often proven inadequate at best, no one can seriously begrudge the sincere personal commitment of people like Dr. Loury to pitch in. We all ought to care - when it comes to any of our struggling fellow Americans. I just rewatched Mario Cuomo’s speech at the 1984 Democratic National Convention. We cannot live and thrive as a civic nation when we ignore or abandon the suffering of other Americans, as the problems of some anonymous, atomized individuals, irrelevant to ourselves. And RFK and Jesse Jackson, to his credit, were seldom more powerful and compelling than when they spoke up for more than one race, one group, and instead insisted we see the common humanity and care equally about people as apparently, superficially different than black Americans living in endemic poverty in inner cities, and white Americans living in geographic isolation and deep intergenerational poverty in Appalachia. One could extend this analysis and sense of solidarity to other groups, too, of course. My guess is a lot of Robert Woodson’s community-driven approach is also what’s likely to be most relevant, compelling, and effective in these other contexts as well. As someone whose (much older) grandparents grew up as sharecroppers in eastern Kentucky, who ended their schooling in the third and fourth grades, do I have a special responsibility to contributing to community-led organizations in Appalachia? Ironically, I was born in Detroit, and my early view of the world was one of black and white Americans living next door to each other (in our high-rise at least) and mostly getting along quite beautifully. Due to where I’ve lived since, I’ve done far more work related to the concerns of urban black American communities than I have in or related to my now somewhat distant Appalachian heritage. According to JD Vance, his grandparents moving to Middletown, Ohio in search of opportunity was enough to make him an outsider when they’d return to visit in the Summer, no matter how much close family remained as deeply-rooted there as before.
To return to my opening question: as demographics change with accelerating speed, as intersectionality and equity are imposed with ever more force in ever more institutions and contexts, as white Americans report sharply more pessimistic attitudes re: their own futures and the future of this country compared with black, Latino and other Americans, and as life expectancy among white Americans actually continues to decline, especially within that most dreaded and derided cohort of aging white men, due to deaths of despair - fentanyl, alcohol, cigarettes, loneliness, isolation, depression, utter loss of meaning, purpose, community, hope, how should we as Americans, and how should I, as the son of a man born and raised in Appalachia who faced his own death of despair at only fifty-two, regard the need for empowerment among profoundly struggling, and, if we’re being honest, grossly demonized lower-working class and impoverished white Americans? The only (presumably) white people I’ve personally encountered who had an kind of time for white identity politics have been mostly ignored idiots commenting anonymously here and there online. Half of them could be bots or troll farm accounts for all I know. I can’t stand most forms of identitarianism and white identitarianism is among the dumbest and least constructive. And not just for the blindingly obvious historical and contextual reasons. But a lot of white Americans comprise a population in free-fall, and so many started in awfully bleak circumstances to begin with. At the same time, they are increasingly being scapegoated for everything and defined out of our polity - out of having any moral standing at all - by the major party I had always supported. Elites absolutely cannot wait until more of them die off, as soon and in as much misery as possible. Virtually no one cares that so many can no longer afford to form stable families or have and raise children in a stable environment. If you saw Chuck Schumer’s stunningly blunt admission the other day, elites have no concern whatsoever about why struggling Americans, black or white, can’t have kids at the rate so many would desperately love to. There zero concern or even curiosity. Schumer’s solution and pledge is that Democrats will, beginning with DACA, seek to legalize and offer full citizenship to every single illegal immigrant in the US (and presumably any who want to come, with no limit). He openly stated this applies to all illegal immigrants, “however many there are” (Twenty million? Thirty million? Who knows!) This is a very overt declaration by the Majority Leader of the US Senate that struggling Americans who can no longer afford to responsibly form families and have kids, no matter how much they want to, should and will be replaced, “to keep the American Dream alive”. I can’t help thinking of the legacy Americans, black and white and every other group, who have given so much to this country. And to many in charge, they don’t deserve help and support and community-led resources (as well as federal policies re: immigration and trade, etc). They deserve to be replaced by people who have been able to leverage a subsidized illegal immigrant model for family formation and having and raising kids. That’s not a model that can work for American citizens. My instinct is that investment and uplift for all of our struggling citizens is best grounded in the solidarity of civic nationalism and positive, inclusive, unifying patriotism. But the very notion and meaning of citizenship has been grossly degraded over the past decades, and quite intentionally, often from an overt ideological basis. Even the most benign patriotism has been ever more widely ridiculed and dismissed as anachronistic and actively contemptible. So is our only realistic option for uplift and community building a special at times localized ethno-racial solidarity? The black American historical experience is obviously unique in profound ways. But in 2022, with race essentialism and zero-sum tribalism, separatism, and new supposedly oppression-based hierarchies of group status and standing increasingly dominant throughout elite culture and most of our institutions, does it make sense for the at-heart universalists, individualists, and humanists among us to continue to give racial identity and solidarity primacy in our organizing efforts? If it’s an effective strategic counter to the shibboleths of left identitarianism to say, “No, we’re black and we live here and you don’t speak for us or understand the kind of constructive support we need. Your distant fantasies are making things worse”, for how long? When and how will we know when we don’t need to resort to in-group appeals and rationales? And yes, I’m concerned that, as the material fortunes and standing of already badly struggling white Americans continue to plummet, as identity insult after insult is piled on top of material and spiritual suffering, as gross open discrimination against already struggling white Americans becomes ubiquitous in the name of “equity”, there will be ever more resort to and exploitation of a toxic and hostile white identitarianism. How much and for how long do we want groups who suffer hardship and mistreatment to respond with racially conscious appeals which imply a negative integration rather than the solidarity of shared citizenship?
Great stuff guys. In what I think is an appropriate metaphor, we are called to be our parents and ultimately we cannot be. My overused phrase is "I'm from a small town called Black." It recognizes what's real, where I was born and raised and under what historical conditions. I know the house of my childhood is still in my dreams, and dead siblings populate those dreams as the children they were. Psychologically many of those things about me are fixed.
I agree with Steele who says living in that past keeps people unprepared for the modern world. We cannot go back to that small town. We have to recognize it for what it was, and that as fully self-actualized human beings we cannot remain there psychologically. In America, our blackness reminds us that we never belonged there in the first place, really. But that was what it was, today we have to deal with what is.
I'm writing this to you today over the internet. I'm in Medellin, Colombia watching Mexico battle Poland on TV while listening to Windham Hill ambient music through wireless headphones. But my attention to you, and to this subject survives. But it doesn't survive because I have no choice, but because I voluntarily participate in moral discernment in the context of liberty. My cosmopolitain outlook as a citizen of the world and of world history is real - I make it real. That's a network of meaning that we sustain with all due respect to all of the history our curiosity can inherit. But we cannot let any definition of racial identity, especially America's at this moment, restrain that curiosity. We cannot let any definition of racial solidarity constrain that human inheritance. That's the fundamental mistake.
I just learned to play the opening melody of Pannonica on my piano. I am once again blown away by knowing that thing in a new way. Discovery matures free people, not 'permanent interests'.