Race Ain't Over Yet

with John McWhorter

I welcome some of the necessary and predictable changes in approaches to race and identity the Trump administration is strong-arming universities into accepting. The overweening insistence on the progressive party line on race led to an attitude that condescended to black students while fostering in them an anachronistic sense of their own embattled status. They were being prepared for a struggle that ended a long time ago, inculcated with a defensive posture toward the world, when the moment calls for African Americans, like everybody else, to charge out into the world, to take advantage of the opportunities available to them.

I’m fond of quoting something the late, great Stanley Crouch once said to me decades ago: “Man, don’t you know that race is over?” Like a lot of things Stanley said and wrote, I still find myself laughing and puzzling over it. I think he meant that the conception of racial identity that galvanized the Civil Rights Movement—the sense of purpose, pride, and righteous struggle—had been overtaken by history. The goals of the Movement’s heroic era had largely been achieved, at least at the level of national policy. We wanted equality under the law, and with a lot of sweat, blood, and political maneuvering, we got it. The political meaning of race, as it was understood in 1965, is a part of the past.

And yet race isn’t “over.” Its political meaning has simply changed, or is in the process of changing. In means something different today than it did sixty years ago, and today’s young people will discover new meanings for themselves. It is not necessarily my place to say what they will be. That’s for the generation of young black people coming up today to decide. They’re the ones who will have to live with it. Yes, today’s students must learn to seize hold of their agency. But what they do with that agency is up to them. And, at least for the foreseeable future, race is going to play some role in their self-conception, in how they choose to act, in what they deem to be important.

It is not crazy to think that universities should have some role in helping to guide and foster that sense of agency and its uses. As John says in this clip, that does not require layers and layers of administrators charged with enforcing the outmoded party line on race. But it does require some space within official university policy to acknowledge and tend to issues that black students—and students of all races and ethnicities—will bring to campus with them. I point to the example of the administrator who may offer black students formal or informal advice about navigating what may be an unfamiliar and intimidating social and educational environment. Does the counsel and comfort that administrator offers to the student qualify as “DEI,” with all the pejorative connotations that term has acquired? Is the student acting inappropriately in seeking out a black official whom the student believes will understand his issues? If the black official offers comfort in his capacity as an administrator, is he acting in a discriminatory fashion?

No, of course not. But I worry that an overemphasis on uprooting DEI from the university’s formal structures might place such an administrator in the crosshairs. It might make the student hesitant to seek out help. Race may be “over,” but it’s not over. If students with legitimate concerns related to race can’t find a place to air them at their institutions, we may find ourselves right back where we started, with a black student body angry that they’re being treated with hostility on the basis of their race. That would be bad. It would be worse if they were right.

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This is a clip from an episode that went out to full subscribers earlier this week. To receive early access to TGS episodes, an ad-free podcast feed, Q&As, and other exclusive content and benefits, click below.

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GLENN LOURY: Now, I'm getting letters from people saying you don't like the DEI. 'Cause I'm not all that happy about the anti-DEI rampaging. One of my students here at Brown, his name is Alex Shieh, has become small-register famous because he took the initiative of asking all of the DEI administrators at Brown what they did last week, in the spirit of Elon Musk. And he used some technical apparatus, and he had an AI bot searching through the register of the employees of Brown University looking for identifying information, and then sent these people an email kind of pretending to be a journalist. Not really. There's a defunct conservative student newspaper here at Brown that he resurrected for the sole purpose of doing the journalistic investigative area.

JOHN MCWHORTER: Did anybody answer?

They answered, “Go to hell” or “I'm offended by this.” I think a few people did actually answer in a more direct way. But I think most people were annoyed or upset by it, and the administration came after him, although he ultimately prevailed in a disciplinary hearing. But I'm just saying, DEI is on the ropes. DEI bad. Get rid of DEI.

The question I have for you is whether or not you and I have any responsibility in our sustained attack on the people with three names and our contempt for the overemphasis on racial identity factors. And you've given voice to it in describing how you think that some in the humanities have over-played that card, and that shouldn't be the only thing. I, of course, agree with that, and I think we're both more or less happy with what the Supreme Court did in 2023 with affirmative action, and so on.

I was at the Manhattan Institute until just recently, and Christopher Ruffo is a name that you think of when you think of the DEI. The Manhattan Institute is a critic and an instigator of a reaction against it, undoubtedly important in advising people within the Trump administration on these questions.

Do we have blood on our hands, metaphorically speaking, for having abetted this revolution? Is it a revolution? The wheel is turning for sure. Not only are we past peak woke, we're in reverse, going full speed in the opposite direction on the campuses and all of that. They're on the defensive. And do we have any responsibility for that?

No. That kind of question implies that we shouldn't have said anything, or that we should have only mumbled in an academic way, which would've had no effect. Something needed to be done, because we live in a real world of real people. The backlash was gonna be too extreme at first and maybe could be trimmed, as happens when someone like me writes that long piece, as the courts fight back against the worst of these sorts of things, etc.

Life is messy. A lot of those people on the left back then were saying that change is messy. Revolution is messy. Yes, some of this is excessive, but this is how it goes. This how it goes when you're on the other side, too. You and I and people like us—and white people along with us—were fighting for black dignity. I defend that, and I fully understand that social history is gonna be messy. But our hearts were in the right place and silence would've been inappropriate.

And I'm gonna say this, I don't know her personally, but for example, Claudine Gay should not have been president of Harvard. She did not have the qualifications that people before her had of any kind. Some people had more of A, some people had more of B. She didn't have that. She was put in that position because she was a woman, and especially because she was black.

A [white] version of her—call her Polly Prescott—would not have been put in. She was put there because she was a black woman. That was wrong. I didn't like seeing that when it happened. Pictures of her with the big smile. I was thinking she hasn't earned that yet. Maybe as she got older. But that wasn't right. That's the sort of thing that we were pushing back against, the DEI. Christopher Ruffo is not nice, but a lot of what he's doing comes from a place that people like that need to come from.

I'm sorry. I really am sorry. But 2020 happened, and also 2018, 2019 happened. Our jobs were to push back against that and to show that it doesn't make you self-hating, doesn't make you a racist to do it, or that if anybody calls us that, they know they don't mean it. So there you go.

Yeah, I think I agree. Certainly if you go back and roll the tape, I was very critical of Harvard in elevating Claudine Gay to that position. I didn't think she had the gravitas and the depth of scholarly achievement. Of course, you could say college administration is not necessarily scholarship and then gravitas in general.

There's other stuff. Why her?

But the plagiarism was deadly. And given the arguability of the question about her gravitas, the plagiarism—instance after instance—was just more than anybody could bear.

And then her at first not wanting to step down, as if, because I'm black, it's okay. And that won't do that. It just won't do.

But what about the kid that comes to campus from inner-city Detroit or somewhere and is looking for a community and looking for administrative support? He needs a kind of shelter. And there's an associate dean I actually know—I don't want to name her—a woman who has a position of associate dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion here at Brown. LaJuan and I went out to dinner with her and her husband, basically at her invitation. She just rang me up and we had a Zoom meeting and I could see she was an intelligent, devoted person.

The stories that she told about her work moved me. One story, just to give an example, was a kid who was getting ready to not graduate because he was behind in paying his fees.And she basically said, you could avail yourself of this or that emergency fund and you could get your fees paid. The kid was black and this woman is black. She put her arm around his shoulder and protected him. And I don't know how different that is than, I don't know, a Jewish kid going to Hillel and working something out.

I'm not trying to pick a fight with anybody here. I'm just saying, the identity of the kid—black, from inner-city America—coming to Brown. Brown is a very elite place. Having an office where he can go in and close the door and somebody he can talk to, and that person marshaling resources within the community on the behalf of the kid, I'm sure that story can be repeated over and over again.

What's wrong with that? That's the kind of thing that's being run outta town on a rail here. That's the kind of thing that gets assimilated to, “They have a black orientation, they have a black graduation, they have a whatever.” And you don't need to have a black orientation or separate people into different lines in the in the seminar to say you're privileged and you're not.

The particular needs that emanate from the racial identity, and counseling and support? I'm not sure I'm against that, even though I'm against racial affirmative action and the different standards and not having the high expectations and tunnel vision, where all they think about is race and they don't think about learning the German language or higher mathematics.

I completely agree with you. And anybody who has a problem ... The woman is usually named Margaret or Brenda. And if it's a guy, he's Ernie. That guy on any college campus, that woman on any college campus in that administrative position, who either officially or unofficially is the place where the black students can go and close the door.

The issue is, though, that there have been Margarets and Ernies since the '90s, at least on any college campus worth its name that has a representative number of black students. That's the way it used to be. There was nothing wrong with having a Margaret and maybe also a Brenda and then maybe Ernie over somewhere else. Maybe three people. That's enough. The issue is you don't have to have a whole bureaucracy of that.

There will always be , like within our time, black people, black students who are not really comfortable unless they're with their own people. And it's understandable, that kind of person. They're not gonna be as comfortable talking to a white administrator, especially if they grew up not knowing many white people.

So yeah, that black person who can go like that. But we already had that. We had that 30 years ago. They were beginning to have that when I was in college 40 years ago. The question is, how much? And when you read about 150 people at UVA who are DEI or DEI-adjacent, and they're taking up money that could bring in 125 faculty. That's the problem.

Yeah, I agree with that.

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