Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Question of the Week
What roles should “color-blindness” and race-consciousness play in personal interactions (as distinct from public policy)?
Send your responses to [email protected] or simply reply to this email.
Conversations of Note
In recent editions of this newsletter, I highlighted the TED Talk “A Case for Colorblindness,” by Coleman Hughes, as well as Hughes’s subsequent debate with the New York Times opinion columnist Jamelle Bouie. After listening to them consider the proposition “Does color-blindness perpetuate racism?,” I noticed one way that their exchange could advance this often polarizing conversation.
When defining his terms, Bouie suggested—reasonably, I think—that color-blindness is “the idea that we should strive to treat people without regard to race in our public policy and our private lives.” He quickly declared his own main concern to be public policy and focused on it for the rest of the debate. In a future edition of this newsletter, we will focus narrowly on public policy, and you’ll hear more about Bouie’s position, as well as the strongest counterarguments.
But today, our focus is on interpersonal “color-blindness.”
At one point, after Hughes reiterated his own belief that we should not racially discriminate or treat others with regard to race in the law or in our personal lives, Bouie responded with this distinction:
But the issue is not our personal interactions here. The issue is structural group inequality, right? Like, I’m color-blind in my everyday life, where I don’t treat people differently on the basis of race. But I’m also very much aware of structural group inequality as a result of historically contingent things and things that we can see in the public record, in policy, in law, and all these things. That’s to me the vector which we’re discussing, not so much our individual relations––which, again, people should be color-blind person to person––but in terms of public policy and the shape and nature of our society.
Bouie is too wide-ranging, interesting, and historically informed as a thinker and writer to be reduced to any ideological type. Still, I found it striking for a popular columnist who fits firmly in the mainstream of elite progressivism––with bygone fellowships at The American Prospect and the Nation Institute––to declare that “people should be color-blind person to person,” and to treat that position as uncontroversial. I perceive it as sharply at odds with the progressive project of equating a “culturally competent” or “anti-racist” person with one who is intentionally race-conscious, not aspirationally color-blind, including in their personal interactions.
I am not alone in regarding that approach as both widespread and alienating. Here’s Tyler Austin Harper in The Atlantic describing how interpersonal race-consciousness negatively affects him:
In their righteous crusade against the bad color-blindness of policies such as race-neutral college admissions, these contemporary anti-racists have also jettisoned the kind of good color-blindness that holds that we are more than our race, and that we should conduct our social life according to that idealized principle. Rather than balance a critique of color-blind law and policy with a continuing embrace of interpersonal color-blindness as a social etiquette, contemporary anti-racists throw the baby out with the bathwater. In place of the old color-blind ideal, they have foisted upon well-meaning white liberals a successor social etiquette predicated on the necessity of foregrounding racial difference rather than minimizing it.
As a Black guy who grew up in a politically purple area—where being a good person meant adhering to the kind of civil-rights-era color-blindness that is now passé—I find this emergent anti-racist culture jarring. Many of my liberal friends and acquaintances now seem to believe that being a good person means constantly reminding Black people that you are aware of their Blackness. Difference, no longer to be politely ignored, is insisted upon at all times under the guise of acknowledging “positionality.” Though I am rarely made to feel excessively aware of my race when hanging out with more conservative friends or visiting my hometown, in the more liberal social circles in which I typically travel, my race is constantly invoked—“acknowledged” and “centered”—by well-intentioned anti-racist “allies.”
Another academic, Johann Neem, explored similar themes from the position of an immigrant of color. “It was when some scholars on the academic left decided that the primary story to tell about America … was ‘whiteness’ that I first started feeling myself unbecoming American,” he lamented in a Hedgehog Review essay. “Overcoming racism requires recognizing the capacity of all people to share in the nation’s common life. But there can be no common life of the nation when, from the perspective of scholars of whiteness, that common life is the property of white people.” Those scholarly ideas began to negatively affect his day-to-day interactions in recent years, as he described in an interview that I conducted with him for The Atlantic in 2020.
He explained that while he abhorred Donald Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric and felt frightened to learn about hate crimes, encounters with such hostility “isn’t my daily life, fortunately.” He continued:
I’m more likely to run into progressives who read works like White Fragility, by Robin DiAngelo, and then have a kind of conversion experience. They may have had white skin, but they weren’t necessarily “white”—they were just people who believed in equality and opposed racism. But after reading books like White Fragility, they convert to being white for the first time in their lives. They think of themselves as embodying whiteness. They talk about needing to do work on themselves. And then they bear whiteness before others. They’re so aware of their whiteness that there’s a wall between us that wasn’t there before. Sometimes they’ll attribute something to whiteness and I’ll think, I’m not white and I believe that or do that. That’s just American. I’ve noticed a lot of the things they now think of as “white” are things we used to share.
A lot of white people are overly sensitive to questions of race in such a way that race is constantly being imposed into conversation, creating boundaries. These are progressives. They’re trying. I’m obviously not conflating them with white nationalists. They do it to be welcoming, but it doesn’t always feel welcoming. It’s a constant redrawing and minding of racial borders, making it more difficult for immigrants like me to be part of the nation.
The race-conscious approach to interpersonal interactions described by Harper and Neem is now common in U.S. institutions, where it is promulgated in the name of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” by literature, consultants, and human-resources professionals. Bouie’s position may not reflect on progressives as a whole, but if other progressives of his stature see this approach as wrongheaded, then the divide between mainstream progressivism and public opinion is narrower than I imagined, and there is common ground between many advocates and critics of public-policy “color-blindness.” I hope that more progressive thinkers will find it worthwhile to clarify their positions. And going forward, it is useful, in conversing about color-blindness or race-consciousness, to clarify whether one means in personal interactions, public policy, or both.
On “Heroic Masculinity”
My colleague Caitlin Flanagan writes, “If the noun masculinity can be modified by the adjective toxic, then there must exist its opposite, which can be revealed by a different adjective. What is it?”
She argues:
The opposite of toxic masculinity is heroic masculinity. It’s all around us; you depend on it for your safety, as I do. It is almost entirely taken for granted, even reviled, until trouble comes and it is ungratefully demanded by the very people who usually decry it.
Neither toxic nor heroic masculinity has anything to do with our current ideas about the mutability of gender, or “gender essentialism.” They have to do only with one obdurate fact that exists far beyond the shores of theory and stands on the bedrock of rude truth: Men (as a group and to a significant extent) are larger, faster, and stronger than women. This cannot be disputed, and it cannot be understood as some irrelevancy, because it comes with an obvious moral question that each man must answer for himself:
Will he use his strength to dominate the weak, or to protect them?
Newcomers to the GOP
In a recent taxonomy of the Republican Party, Nate Cohn divided its voters into the Moderate Establishment (14 percent), the Traditional Conservatives, the Right Wing (26 percent), the Blue-Collar Populists (12 percent), the Libertarian Conservatives (14 percent), and the Newcomers (8 percent). So who are the Newcomers?
Cohn argues:
They’re young, diverse and moderate. But these disaffected voters like Democrats and the “woke” left even less … This is the youngest and most diverse group of Republicans. Just 59 percent are white, and 18 percent are Hispanic. More than a quarter are 18 to 29. Nearly three-quarters identify as moderates or liberals. They overwhelmingly support immigration reform and say society should accept the identity of transgender people …
But … they back Trump … Nearly 90 percent said the economy was poor … A similar number said the country was heading in the wrong direction. So while they may not be conservatives … they’re certainly not happy with Democrats. They were the likeliest group to say they would rather back a candidate who focused on fighting the radical “woke” left than one focused on protecting law and order. By a two-to-one margin, they said they would rather vote for a candidate who promised to stop “woke” business, rather than a candidate who said businesses should have the freedom to decide what to support. They’re the smallest group of Republicans today, but this group of relatively moderate but anti-woke voters might play an important role in the Republican Party in the years ahead.
At Notes From the Middleground, Damon Linker reacts:
Whereas every other group has some tie to a longstanding policy and ideological commitment of the Republican Party, the Newcomers appear to reject just about everything the party stood for in the Reagan era, as well as most of what it has come to champion since Trump’s hostile takeover less than a decade ago. With two crucial exceptions, that is. First, they share the Right Wing’s pessimism about the country, especially in economic terms; second, they detest so-called “woke” trends and are firmly committed to voting for the GOP (including Trump) as a means of combatting them …
They are young men who listen to Joe Rogan. They’re the “barstool conservatives” my old colleague at The Week, Matthew Walther, wrote about so vividly a couple of years ago. They’re the descendants of the “South Park Conservatives” Andrew Sullivan and Brian Anderson took note of two decades in the past. They’re people like some of my son’s college-aged friends, who are tired of having their thoughts and feelings subjected to constant moral scrutiny and judgment by self-appointed finger-waggers. They’re lifelong Democrats disgusted by the rigid moralism of progressive activists and the way liberal institutions have come to impose it through bureaucratic edicts in schools and workplace HR departments …
I have a little of them inside me. Ask me my views on any number of topics, from economic policy to immigration to social issues, and I’ll sound like a moderate or pragmatic liberal … But if you tell me remaining in good social standing (keeping my job, getting published, maintaining professional ties) requires that I endorse a highly tendentious account of American history or accept a thoroughly unpersuasive view [of] sex and gender, I will be irritated—at the feeling I’m being required to recite a catechism, and at the presumption of those imposing that requirement on me. Who elected or appointed them as our moral commissars? And why do so many Democrats, from the president on down, seem willing to defer to these civic scolds on certain issues? …
Where I diverge is in refusing to give the GOP a free pass as a reward for joining me in opposition to things I don’t especially like about the left. The Democrats may annoy me, but the right scares me. That’s because I’m convinced Republican deference to and efforts to mobilize far-right and conspiracy-addled voters pose a threat beyond anything we’ve seen from the left. I also think Trump’s presidency was an enormous gift to social-justice progressivism, which surged during the Trump administration and has begun to wane in the years since the Orange Man left office. So I part ways from the Newcomers. But I see them all around me—and worry they may be the future of the GOP.
Provocation of the Week
At the Cato Institute, Johan Norberg defends the Swedish approach to the Covid-19 pandemic:
Sweden was different during the pandemic, stubbornly staying open as other countries shut down borders, schools, restaurants, and workplaces. This choice created a massive interest in Sweden, and never before have the foreign media reported so much about the country. Many outsiders saw it as a reckless experiment with people’s lives. In April 2020 President Donald Trump declared that “Sweden is paying heavily for its decision not to lockdown.”1 In the New York Times, Sweden’s laissez faire approach was described as “the world’s cautionary tale” and in the same pages Sweden was described as a “pariah state.” There remains a popular perception in the rest of the world that Sweden’s strategy resulted in a human disaster, and many people think that Swedish decisionmakers came to regret the strategy and, in the end, adopted lockdown policies similar to those in other countries. This paper dispels those unwarranted assumptions, describes Sweden’s actual pandemic policy, explains why the country followed that course, and presents what we know about the results so far…
After all was said and done, astonishingly, Sweden had one of the lowest excess death rates of all European countries, and less than half that of the United States. One reason why Sweden got through the pandemic in a much better shape than many scholars, journalists, and politicians expected was that they only thought in terms of strict government controls or business as usual. They failed to consider a third option: that people adapt voluntarily when they realize that lives are at stake. Swedes quickly changed their behavior and mostly followed the recommendations. As early as April 2020, half the workforce worked from home and public transport usage had declined by half. Mobility data from telecom providers show that mobility patterns in Sweden were similar to those in neighboring countries. If anything, Swedes reduced their travel a bit more in the aggregate.
The difference was that if Swedes decided, based on local knowledge and individual needs, that they had to go to work, exercise, or meet a relative or a friend, they could do that without being stopped by the police. This meant that the pandemic became less politicized in Sweden and perhaps also that people accepted the need to live under extraordinary conditions for longer than they would have if they didn’t have these individual emergency exits.
The full report, which is far more detailed, is here.
Thanks for your contributions. I read every one that you send. By submitting an email, you’ve agreed to let us use it—in part or in full—in the newsletter and on our website. Published feedback may include a writer’s full name, city, and state, unless otherwise requested in your initial note, and may be edited for length and clarity.