We Need to Change the Narrative Around Race
In today’s America, there is probably no more sensitive topic than race and racism. Since at least the early 2010s, with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and the beaming of police brutality into everyone’s phones, the topic of race, racism, systemic inequality, and other such topics have been on the lips of political discourse.
As someone who is biracial (black father, white mother), race has been a part of my life since birth. The conversation about race has been a part of my life and my work for a long time. In some ways, I bridge the gap between communities. I sort of “get” both worlds and both sets of concerns. I was raised Republican and evangelical and left those movements and spaces later as they often did not reflect my values or how I wanted to change the world. Not only that, but I still understand those worlds a great deal and I think there are some ideas there worth talking about. Nothing has distressed me more than the political decisions the GOP has made in the past decade. America needs a strong conservative movement, and nowhere is the absence of that more glaring than in the conversations we have around race.
The conversation around race has certainly changed in my lifetime. I think many people, for better or worse, thought racism was a problem that had been solved by years of inclusion, cultural changes and topped off by the election of Barack Obama in 2008. I had dear friends tell me as much during the Obama years.
However, things have gotten toxic on this topic. In my view, it is practically 1968 all over again. Social media is filled with people saying incredibly racist things, and whole neighborhoods are voting themselves into new suburbs away from black/brown people. This phenomenon of “white fortressing” is very similar to what happened in American cities in the 1960s and 1970s. It is an uncomfortable chapter in a history of redlined neighborhoods, block breaking, and discrimination. I haven’t seen this much dialogue about correlations between IQ and racial groups in my lifetime, but a quick tour of X (formerly known as Twitter) will find hundreds of accounts promoting the idea.
This article is a retrospective of sorts. It is a look back at how our conversations have race have changed and how my attitudes have shaped and changed over time and how my unique perspective can possibly change our conversation about race. Our conversation about race is broken and it is causing unnecessary backlash. We can have a conversation about race without things like the weaponization of “white guilt” or making kids in school feel guilty just because of the color of their skin. We need a new conversation on race.
When I started writing about Race
I started writing about it critically in 2007 when I interviewed Alex Linder, who is one of America’s most prominent white supremacists and race activists. At 19 years old, I decide that I would look him up and have a conversation with him. I’m not quite sure what my logic was, but I thought the best thing to do was take a direct approach. I was writing about a double murder that was making the rounds, and he had commented on it. Somehow, I thought that perhaps a biracial reporter, he would either refuse to talk to me or wouldn’t realize who I was. Again, I was 19 and thought I was doing some real edgy journalism. But this would begin my writing about race and racism in America.
I originally wrote about Alex Linder in 2007 for a long-dead website. I recounted the story in 2019 when I said, “I dug into back into (this topic) in 2007 has been dominating news headlines. Alex Linder is on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of extremists. Domestic terrorism is on the rise, and I wanted to relive this moment with you to tell you a few things. One of those things is that this movement is not new. Timothy McVeigh, who committed the Oklahoma City bombing, aligned with these organizations back in the early 1990s after his military service. White nationalist groups have been something our society has had to deal with since Reconstruction. The mainstream media often makes it seem like it’s a “new thing” that “no one knew about”, however, anyone who has studied terrorism (like I have) knows that domestic terror is something that has been a part of the discussion for decades. However, these groups have grown bolder in the last few years, partly in thanks to President Trump and the space he has allowed for these groups to grow. One of the goals of VNN in 2007 was to recruit more people to their cause. I dare say they have fulfilled that goal in the intervening years. They are a premier website for those views, and others have also grown in their place.
I don’t know how we can exist in a society where some people would like all black people to either move to a part of a country they can separate from or to simply go back to Africa. It’s even harder to imagine trying to negotiate with people willing to resort to violence likes mass shootings and bombings to make their distaste for a pluralistic society known. This is closely tied to my past article, ‘The Death of the White, Christian, Heteronormative Narrative.’ America is changing, and people like Alex Linder are leading the resistance, and for right now, they are in the lead.”
That may seem harsh and unforgiving of the situation. That was before I learned some things. I was more circumspect in other areas. But I look at narratives and what people do and that is what interests me about these conversations. That was what interested me in cancel culture as well, especially of ordinary people who might have an opinion that some people on the internet do not like.
In 2018, I wrote about the sad case of Aaron Schlossberg, who was fired for saying something racist online. I said at the time, “I’ve had this unpopular opinion for a while. While I think it is helpful to call out people who do things that are blatantly racist, getting them fired from their jobs, thrown out of their living spaces, shutting down their businesses, and kicked out of their office space is not the kind of the behavior that is going to foster positive debate or make people feel included. To many people, it looks like a bunch of crazy people from the left just destroyed a man’s life over a comment made in a Starbucks. He probably didn’t even know he was going to be recorded when he said or did it.
Most people would be devastated if this sort of thing happened to them and I think the image of him running down the street from cameras, reporters, and protestors creates a “gut” response that is a huge PR problem for Progressives.
What Aaron Schlossberg did was wrong. But that is no reason to deprive him of his living through public shame. If the woman accused wants to press charges, then she may do so, and the court can decide if he needs to make restitution or sacrifice his freedom for his poor action. But the culture of public shaming we have around anyone who says the wrong thing or does the wrong thing is a kind of cultural fascism, that I, as an artist, find deeply troubling.”
When I returned to the topic for my first book, I decided to analyze American racial structures with a new lens, and to accomplish that, I started looking at how America’s racial system manifests for other groups. Those with southeast Asian heritage (Japanese and Chinese) have a particular history in this country that mirrors the experiences of African heritage people. I discussed anti-semitism and how it has manifest throughout the history of the country. The point was to show that our conversations on race do not include those descended from slaves. Any group that was too far from the Anglo-Saxon ideal was a target for legislation, and in the case of the Japanese, internment. The Chinese Exclusion act was the most racist piece of legislation and the first in American history to target a specific ethnic group.
Diversity, DEI and Woke
There is no more polarizing word in our modern language than “woke.” It started out as a sort of pretentious term for the “social justice warrior” who thought that they had reached some sort of enlightenment about societal structures. It has now morphed into a by-word for everything wrong with the country. Often, some of the most anger-inducing, vitriolic (and algorithm pleasing) facebook posts are from accounts that are unabashedly “anti-woke.” Language always reveals the truth of what is really being talked about when taken in context.
The anti-woke sentiment wants people to recall a time in the past where we didn’t have to address the issues around inequality in society. It recalled a different time when hard work, tenacity, and sober living were a solid pathway into the middle class and beyond. It also recalls a time when there were fewer people of color in public positions.
The anti-woke sentiment reached it stride with the recent discussions about gender, transgender people, and sexuality. Much like how the election of Barack Obama was considered to be the end of race in America, the Supreme Court ruling in favor in gay marriage in the Obergefell decision seemed to be the end of the conversation on LGBTQIA+ issues in this country. In just 13 years from 2000 to 2013, public opinion had shifted dramatically on gay marriage. Once thought to be an unreachable goal, suddenly, same-sex couples were getting married all over the country. However, it wasn’t long before we suddenly had a new discussion on the table: transgendered people. In the minds of many this was an unnecessary and dangerous discussion. Although the history of that is for another article, soon racial issues and LGBTQIA+ issues were melted together in conversations about diversity, equity, inclusion (DEI) and who was being represented in society.
Discussions on these topics were never particularly welcome and pretty soon, the entire social justice movement, DEI, and woke were sucked into this black hole of partisan, polarizing, ideological political soup of discourse from which we have yet to escape. I began to write about this new situation in 2022.
In my 2022 article, “Has Woke Gone too Far?” I wrote about a situation in Chicago in an art museum (of all places), “The Right has taken on this fight as it’s primary culture war fight. X (formerly known as Twitter) handles for those who find all this woke culture business have shifted from “no snowflakes” and “not a snowflake” to “anti-woke.” There is an entire online ecosystem devoted to lambasting the latest from woke culture. In a recent story, from Chicago Now, the Art Institute of Chicago let go its team of volunteer docents because the group of docents was not incredibly diverse. The docents were older, white, upper middle class and typically female.
The docents in the museum guide visitors and discuss the art. There is a lengthy training process, and the docents often work nearly full-time hours. These folks love the art and worked hard to be effective at their jobs. However, the Art Institute of Chicago wanted a more diverse group of docents but couldn’t recruit any volunteers from minority or lower income backgrounds. Instead, they let the volunteers go and opened three paying positions for museum guides so that they could hire and pay more diverse people to guide people through the museum. On the bright side of this story, new paid positions are open, but with only three, it will not make up for the 82 volunteer docents who had been leading visitors through the museum.”
I also addressed the college campus situation in the same article which had been brewing for years, “College campuses have been the front lines of the new culture. As the Left seeks to make the world more inclusive of more types than just a precious few, people have pushed back for “freedom” and “openness” but the line where freedom and openness end and making a space unsafe for certain people seems blurry. Obviously, the firing of the Weinstein brothers from Evergreen College in Washington state was a hot button issue. That happened when the school told white students to stay home, so students of color could have the campus to themselves. I will have to admit, having gone to a campus where there were only 450 black students and perhaps a couple of thousand others, I find this idea to be a bit daft. That said, universities are attempting to create environments where diversity, equity, and inclusion are at the core and are actively setting out to admit more diverse students, hire diverse faculty, and work on historical inequalities around income etc. This is a good idea, but the execution can often fall flat.”
The Rise of White Racial Consciousness
These conversations in the last decade are anchored in a sort of conflict between “white” as an institution and everyone who is not white as an “other.” This dynamic is not new, and the backlash has been to further entrench this divide. This has led to the rise of white racial consciousness. Whiteness is no longer merely a skin color or a societal institution, it is not an identity, just like many identities in this country. There is nothing wrong with that as such, but it can lead to violence, and it only further deepens the divide. I understand why it exists. It is reactionary to the exists of racial identity structures in society. It is an outgrowth of our modern identity politics that has broken our republican democracy. That being said, it is probably the most potent political force today, and its existence is the result of the broken conversations we have been having about race.
In 2017, I wrote an article about the rise of white racial consciousness and I said the following, “Racial voting consciousness is not a new concept. One of the biggest parts of the civil rights movement, after the end of segregation, was the recently gutted Voting Rights act. Even before the Voting Rights act, how black people voted mattered in elections. After the Farm Workers movement, led by Cesar Chavez, hispanic voting began to matter in elections as well. The voting habits of white people have been tracked by white people tend not to vote as a group. White voters ranged from very liberal in California to conservative in Texas. But 2016 was different. People that usually would have voted democrat voted for a GOP candidate that they did not like.”
In 2019, I wrote an article called, “Is Diversity Really Unpopular?” In the story, I recounted a conversation I had online with someone. “Recently, on a discord server, we were talking about diversity in society and multiculturalism and someone, who I had known for a while came out and said he was against diversity as a rule because it threatens white people. Keep in mind this person is white and young. So I decided to drill down into this idea with him, and his quote leads this section.
He views racial mixing as the slow disappearance of white people, and that the ultimate agenda is to just slowly erase white people from America. I’ve long said that I think one of the most important conversations we’re having right now is to see if America can function with more than one voice at the table of the national conversation. In the past, the only voice that really mattered was the white (preferable northern European) voice at the table. Now, other people, like African-Americans, Native-Americans, Latinx, and Asian voices are seeking to be a part of the conversation and craft a society and policy that benefits them. This is a radical change from the bulk of American history.
As far as my friend was concerned, the only voice that matters is the white voice because white people have made America what it is and without white people the country simply wouldn’t exist as we know it. His point is well-taken. The transatlantic slave trade would not exist (and neither would I!), and Native Americans would have likely kept on with their lives uninterrupted by Spanish, French, and British influences. However, that is not what happened.”
I conclude the article with the same idea I’ve had since the night of the 2016 election, “To many white Americans, the idea that some day they might not be able to be in charge and write policy as they see fit without others raising a fuss about how it might affect other communities is a threat. People voted on this threat in 2016 and will continue to do so. Modern diversity isn’t just something that is talked about and then ignored. It is in the culture now. People of all races are on stage, in music, on TV, in movies, the culture is changing to include all the people who actually live in this country rather than just the people running the country. Women are getting more college degrees than ever before. Black women are excelling in education and various fields. It is only a matter of time before the upper echelons of America’s elite companies begin to reflect this diversity. Demographically, America is becoming more brown and less white due to immigration and birth rates. America is not changing, America is becoming who she always was: a diverse country with diverse voices with different culture backgrounds. This is the change that many white people, like many of the recent people I’ve observed, can’t handle. They would rather not be a part of the conversation; they would like to be the conversation while everyone else merely abides by the decisions that they make. If that cannot happen, then many people would like these new changes to slow down or stop it entirely. Trump-era immigration policy is reflective of this. Those who want to break up the United States, so there can be a white-ethno state also reflect this value. Rather than be content to be a part of a greater society that is inclusive, they would rather separate and leave everyone else to their devices.”
Whatever Happened to Cancel Culture?
Another aspect of our present conversations on race, racism, and all things in the “woke” category is the action of trying to banish undesirable people from the public consciousness. Although celebrities are most known for crossing the line, regular people have come under fire as well. Consider the story of Aaron Schlossberg from earlier in this article.
In my 2021 article, “Puritans and Cancel Culture” I argued that such reactions were in our DNA from the founding of the country but that merely exiling people was not the conversation we really needed to have about these changes. I said, “In recent years, we have decided that we don’t want predatory men in powerful positions to abuse their power with sex. We have also decided that there is racist imagery around that needs to be expunged. We have also decided that the LGBT community is something to be accepted and even celebrated. A new kind of morality has sprung up that allows people to express their sexuality and gender in any way they choose, and those who stand against that or disagree with it are to be shunned from civilized society. I don’t necessarily think that this is a good course of action. The Civil Rights movement did not end racism. There were still people who had racist opinions after that bill was signed, and they maintain those opinions to this day. I am all right living in a society where people have racist opinions as long as they keep it private and don’t restrict access to services. Racism rears its ugly head in the form of voter suppression laws. I don’t need every actor and artist that I love to agree with me politically. We should have a spirited debate about how to handle these problems in society. While we cannot debate the existence of people (and we should not), we can certainly have a discussion about the effect these new changes are having on society and work to find solutions. If we cannot have a conversation about it, then what kind of society are we running.”
The reality is that cancel culture is a result of people using the power of their dollar and their attention to decide who is allowed in polite society and who is not. In the absence of any other forms of power, people are wielding what they have. While cancel culture became famous on X (formerly known as Twitter) for the various sexual issues of powerful men, the recent scandals for major companies around rebranding efforts like Bud Light or the latest casting decisions at Disney or even the Gillette advertising have empowered those on the Right to use that same power. “Go Woke, Go Broke” has been a battle cry for those pushing back against certain social changes and agendas. This has taken identity politics from the newspaper and TV airwaves and onto fractious online cultures, where we are siloed and Balkanized. Nearly anyone can say the right (or wrong) thing and be a celebrity and a villain on the same day based on their view of a situation.
For the regular person, people have lost jobs, families, houses, and careers. Celebrities like Louis C.K. still have careers. How powerful is cancel culture really? Not powerful enough to shun all celebrities and often not even powerful enough to break companies away from various PR strategies to embrace the new America we find ourselves living in. What it does do is create a lot of unnecessary stress and disagreement where very little is solved. This is a common occurrence now and is one of the reasons politics is so broken and why we can’t have a competent conversation about these issues, especially around racial issues.
Race and Class
As I remarked in my essay, “Racism 2.0” in my book, you can’t talk about race without quickly making it a conversation about economic class as well. I thoroughly enjoyed the book, “White Trash” by Nancy Isenberg where she discussed these dynamics at length. I echoed many of her comments. Many of the problems that are faced by African-Americans have to do with poverty and the predatory government programs that have attempted (and often failed) to fix those inequalities. We are still living in the shadow of those failures.
We also live in the shadow of redlined neighborhoods and government lending standards that cut out many black families from buying houses and gaining wealthy in the 20th century. The way interstates were planned around destroying “urban blight” affected all poor communities of various backgrounds. However, while black people were adversely affected by these things, many poor people were also cut out of those opportunities as well. Many poor people lost their homes to the interstate system coursing through cities. Although the focus on how minorities were impacted, plenty of poor whites were uprooted too. I think much of the vitriol around this topic comes from not fully acknowledging the class element. This is where the conversation needs to move, but there are major political forces who are not interested in having a conversation on class. I think that we, as Americans, are uncomfortable talking about class and highlighting class differences in a way that is common in Europe, where class is a much bigger part of identity and has been for centuries. European aristocrats don’t brag about buying coffee from McDonald’s like Warren Buffett.
The conversation around these things is important, but soon breaks down because of how the conversation is being had around these topics. If we simply talked about how we need to improve conditions for working people and working families, that could get more traction than the conversations we’ve been having around race.
Even the language is difficult; at first, we had “multiculturalism,” and then we had “diversity,” and then we had “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” or DEI. As I was pulling my quotes for this article, I noticed how even I changed the terminology “du jour” as the years passed by. It is a topic that changes and shifts with different theories and priorities. DEI has become entirely toxic, and while institutions embraced it in 2020, it is firmly being sent to the trash bin in 2024.
But the reality is that our conversations around Race have been broken for years. Despite the changing nature of language, moving to a post-racial society requires us to not look to the grievances of the past but to look to a future where the promise, and the opportunity of America works for everyone and meritocracy is at its strongest.
Where Do We Go From Here?
One thing is clear, we need to change the conversation on race. We have come a long way from the legal segregation that my father grew up under in Alabama. We have made progress in making a country where, regardless of your background, you can be successful. I agree with Bret Weinstein that our job, as a society, is to make meritocracy work. If there is one thing that is broken in our country, is our social mobility.
Are there some residual barriers based on race and ethnicity? Absolutely. Does that mean we have to demonize white or European-descended people? No. Does that mean we should back away from the work of addressing inequality in our society? No. However, playing into the stereotypes of the past and pretending that nothing has changed since 1964 is patently false. We have made progress. One of the great things about America is that a common tide can raise all boats. That is a future that we can work to create together as “the indispensable nation.”
