The Magical Thinking of "the End of Race"

with Stephanie Lepp

Many cultural and political conflicts today seem insoluble. It’s hard to imagine opposing sides finding common ground on, say, abortion and capitalism when entrenched interests in politics and the media have so much to gain from keeping these issues as divisive as possible. And sometimes the issues themselves have conflict baked in. If one side considers a newly fertilized embryo to be as worthy of moral consideration as a full-grown human and the other side doesn’t, then simply “turning down the temperature” won’t neutralize the conflict.

I’m prepared to accept that we’re just not going to come together around some issues. Sometimes, there’s no higher ground to be found. You simply have to fight for what you believe in, and let the most persuasive argument win. But my friend Stephanie Lepp believes that, more often than we might imagine, some creative thinking can synthesize seemingly antithetical positions and win more converts than an out-and-out dogfight. She’s leading a new project called Faces of X that tries to model how such syntheses can be found.

I’m skeptical. To be honest, I think the less polarized positions Stephanie offers are founded on premises just as politically interested as the ones they claim to subsume. In this clip, you’ll see me question the framing she offers around issues of race and slavery in the US. Yet I don’t think Stephanie’s efforts are worthy abandoning wholesale. Even if she’s not offering an end to the culture war, efforts like hers could limit the damage.

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GLENN LOURY: Let's talk about the other example that I wanted to talk about.

SPEAKER 1: Imagine if your ancestors were rounded up, chained, shipped to another country, and enslaved.

SPEAKER 2: I don't deny the cruelty of slavery in America. But perhaps what you deny is the progress that black Americans made despite that cruelty.

SPEAKER 1: We made progress for America. We fought wars for this country. And when we came home, we were lynched in our uniforms. We built America with our bare hands.

SPEAKER 2: Slavery didn't build America. Slavery stifled America because it took people who could have been innovating and treated them like animals. But what we did build were black Wall Streets in cities all over the country.

SPEAKER 3: Ladies, look. Racism has unleashed untold brutality on black Americans, and black Americans have exhibited untold resilience in the face of it. Which makes black Americans some of the most patriotic Americans, because despite America not living up to its ideals and its mistreatment of us. We believed in those ideals and fought to make them a reality.

That's all good. It's a clip and it leaves out a lot of what you guys develop.

STEPHANIE LEPP: How do you feel about the idea that it might be possible and even enlightening to integrate what Ibram X. Kendi has to say with what Coleman Hughes has to say? Let's just start there. Is that framing of the two sides a framing that you would get on board with and would want to see an integration of?

Okay, that's a helpful question. And my answer is I think such a project would be a fool's errand. I think would be completely misconceived. I think it would be magical thinking.

And that's because you think the thinking is just inherently unintegratable, like those two ways of thinking just don't play well together?

Both that but more importantly that I don't think that's a worthy intellectual goal. I'm sorry for how this will sound. I think it it's lazy. I think it presumes that there's, that either of them is creditable. And where'd that come from? You say framing. Where did that come from? Maybe there are more than two sides.

For sure. Again, this is so simplified, so yes.

But Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist, I think it's pop, pseudo-cultural criticism that caught a moment in the arc of American urban domestic political history. It's related to a lot of stuff going on in the universities, the George Floyd and Michael Brown stuff, and it's a part of the warp and the woof. But a touchstone, an anchor around which I would try to build a pole to which I would then juxtapose another pole?

And I would say in a similar spirit, although I'm more friendly to the concrete position of Coleman Hughes, I think a precocious young intellectual coming along who happens to be a complex social product of ethnic and culture and racial and so forth and so on with an interesting angle of vision on life hardly constitutes Socrates. The arguments for a colorblind America that I found in The End of Race Politics, they were reactive. You have the antiracists, but the antiracists are really racist because there are trafficking in these categories. The true antiracists were the civil rights icons. It's way too pat.

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You're doing the equal opportunity criticism. You're seeing the flaws of each side. You're looking at the bathwater, and I'm like, okay, so where's the little baby?

No, here's what I'm saying. I could try to invoke James Baldwin or somebody. I just wrote a memoir. I'm not James Baldwin. I'm not close to James Baldwin. Don't misunderstand me to be thinking I'm comparing myself to James Baldwin. I just wrote a memoir. It's about my life as a black man. I'm a black man, right? Race is important to me. My race is African American. I'm black.

I'm a descendant of slaves forged in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries on the North American continent whose ancestors, most of them, are of African descent, although some are of European descent and some may be of Native origin, my ancestors. But my narrative, how I understand my life, is intimately connected with race.

Now, to tell me that it's a lie, if I were that kind of person, I could say it offends me. I'm not that kind of person, but it certainly doesn't see me. It is too busy to make a sophomoric point. An obvious point. This [points to skin] is superficial. I understand that this is superficial. Foundational history, culture, and lived experience have been grounded on this. The guy that wants to simply call the whole thing off is not a neutral player in the game. He or she is an agent on behalf of forces in the game. Take responsibility for that position.

Yeah. So Glenn, I'm going to make a confession, in the spirit of confessions. I don't actually know fully where I land on that. So if you can, you might be able to guess who was advising me. One of the people that was advising me on this script was Greg Thomas. Where I was with something like, under what circumstances, if any, is race a useful idea? I wasn't sure I was willing to just completely close the door on race and say “under no circumstances.” I feel like I can imagine a couple ways in which we might want to retain that notion. I also very much see that race has been used as a weapon.

Race was invented to perpetrate racism. I'm actually not sure fully. My position might change. This is what ended up in the script now. But I can confess to you, I don't know. I'm still not fully, 100 percent sure that I would say close the door on the idea of race, always and forever.

I'll just say that. I'll confess that. That said, in the spirit of this doesn't just land right in the center and everyone gets to be happy, where the synthesis lands, even with that, the synthesis is saying the idea of race is not helpfu,l and reifying it in the way of antiracism is very unhelpful.

So it's landing on one. But it is saying, however, even Martin Luther King's idea of colorblindness accepts that race exists but says we should ignore it. And that's the difference, is that race doesn't exist, and we don't need to pretend it exists in order to [ignore it]. However, might we still retain it in some ways and like you just described? Maybe.

In a world in which we celebrate Ketanji Brown Jackson's elevation to the United States Supreme Court and Kamala Harris's elevation to the vice presidency of the United States of America, and we count that as progress; in a world in which a national movement has been set afoot by a police officer discharging his weapon in a situation of law and order, based on the racial identity of the people who were involved—white police officer, black kid—I have to ask myself, the people who are devoting themselves to the project of, let's get rid of race ... this is quixotic, and it's an avoidance somehow. I'm sorry, because this gets personal, and I don't mean to diminish the integrity of anybody. I'm not questioning the integrity.

Oh, and by the way, let's do a racial inventory of the race abolitionists. They're mostly black.

Yes, they are.

I don't know, maybe it's a small point. Race doesn't matter except with respect to the race of the persons who are raising the question about whether or not race matters.

I don't know if I would say race doesn't matter. I would say, yeah, race is an idea. And the way that I think about it, because this is just me, is I often use the refrain “under what circumstances, if any?” So for me, it's under what circumstances, if any, is race a helpful idea? Helpful for what? Obviously that begs the question. What are we trying to do here? Which is its own conversation. But that's how I would frame that.

And maybe I could just ask you. Under what circumstances do you consider race a helpful idea?

I don't think it's a helpful question, with respect. I prefer to think in terms not of generalized theoretical declaration, but in terms of, my grandchildren. My son Glenn has a white partner. My son Nehemiah has a Chinese partner. My granddaughter might be dating a white guy one of these days.

My other granddaughter decided to join a sorority that was not one of the Divine Nine—these black women's social organizations like the AKAs and like the one that Kamala Harris is an alumnus of—but to join a white sorority, because her friend, her really good and close friend whom she brought to my son Nehemiah's wedding, is a white kid.

A hundred years from now, blackness won't be anything like what it is today. And I think that'll be evident in the way in which families are formed and children are being raised and partnerships of a variety of kinds, including marital partnerships, are being undertaken. And I think it'll all be okay. I think it'll all be fine in the longer run, but in the same way that Irishness doesn't mean anything like what it meant at the turn of the twentieth century, in terms of identity and separateness and race, even racial self-understanding. I think we'll get there with respect to Africanness in the American context as well in the fullness of time.

But let's call the whole thing off! That's what i'm objecting to.

I hear you. I totally hear you. And I can say it sounds like we both want the same thing. The future that you just described, I think for me, that's where the rubber meets the road. What are we ultimately trying to do here, whether your strategy is “call the whole thing off” or “let it play itself out”? I'm okay with people having strategies, but it's good to know that it sounds like we're trying to move in the same direction. I'm still a little torn myself about “let's call the whole thing off,” too, for what it's worth.

But I like the idea. I like that it's as provocative as it is. I like the comparison to the idea of witches that enabled witch burnings. That is actually helpful for me. It's, oh yeah, gosh, what are we doing with this idea? What are we using it for?

We are different generations, you and I, Stephanie. I'm in my 70s, and I'm not asking you how old you are, but you're younger than that.

I'm younger. But Greg [Thomas] is in between us, and he feels very strongly about calling the whole thing off.

Yeah, I know he does. God bless him, he's a good brother.

Yeah, I was gonna say, you consider it not a worthwhile exercise to try to articulate a synthesis.

Let me be completely honest, because I'm on the record here about transracial humanism and about transcending identity. I have this speech I gave to the opening convocation—which is this big ceremony we have at the beginning of the school year here at Brown—called “Identity and Authenticity.” And basically my theme was, don't live in a silo. Don't define yourself by inherited characteristics, like your race or your sexual orientation or whatever. You are these things. I'm not saying deny them. But please don't make college into a reiteration of your identity. Think beyond this.

Yeah. That's such a great invitation.

Thank you. And I say this especially to the students of color who I don't want to be isolated from the fullness of the curriculum. I don't want them to not read a book because it's by a dead white male. I don't want them to not join a glee club or whatever, because I want them to grow. I want them to become. So I'm suspicious of the identity-centered framing of the educational experience.

And that's just one example of it. This is shifting the register a little bit, but it's in the same colorblind spirit. I want to say about George Floyd and Derek Chauvin, the cop is white and George Floyd, the guy that got the knee put on his neck, is black. And I want to say, was that a racial incident? And it was a racial incident. I don't want to get into an angels on the head of a pin argument with someone. I'm going to stipulate that it obviously, in some profound historic ways, was a racial incident.

I still want to interrogate the move that we make when we freight so much onto it based upon the racial identity of those people in that idiosyncratic encounter that transpired between them. And that impulse is very much simpatico with a “let's get beyond race” point of view. So I'm conflicted myself.

Yeah. What a great invitation to incoming college students. I feel like that is like such a great age and time to be inviting them. I honestly lately find myself almost laughing at myself anytime I say it sentence that starts with “I am.” Like, what? What am I other than a total and unbelievable mystery to myself? Do I have any idea?

And actually, the way that the race video ends is very much in this. I'lI just read: “Let's see each other as the multifaceted, multidimensional, much deeper than skin color human beings that we are.”

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