The Racial Crossroads. By Helen Andrews at Compact Magazine.
Our current racial bargain was struck in the 1960s … [It] has worked for a long time, but soon it won’t work anymore. We will have to choose between one path and another. There are two reasons for this, and they are unavoidable.
Demography has changed dramatically:
The first reason is demographic. Our racial bargain was made for a country that was biracial and almost 90 percent white. …
For Generation Z, the beneficiaries of our system of racial benefits are no longer a marginal 10 percent of the population. They are a demographic majority. Non-white Zoomers — and, to an extent, white women as well — benefit from both demographic predominance and an explicit or tacit boost in any head-to-head competition with white men, which, in combination, means that affirmative action is no longer a matter of white Americans sacrificing the occasional promotion. It means white men in particular are effectively shut out of many prestigious fields and institutions, especially in the lower rungs.
This is both unfair and unworkable. …
Unworkable, because the challenge of making every institution match our national demographics becomes more difficult as our diversity gets more diverse. Diversity used to mean making sure there was a black person in the room. Now it means finely calibrating multiple demographics, which requires putting race at the forefront of personnel decisions.
Racial discrimination was supposed to be only temporary:
The second reason race relations are approaching a crisis is that our racial bargain was supposed to be temporary. …
At the time, it was sincerely expected that black and white outcomes would converge. A study by the Urban Institute in 1971 extrapolated black progress over the previous eight years and predicted exactly when the catch-up would occur for various metrics such as poverty rates, college completion, and infant mortality. The one that would take the longest, life expectancy at thirty-five years, was predicted to reach white levels in 2019. …
The unrealistic lefty assumptions of 1964 were of course dashed. Now the racists want government-led discrimination to achieve equality of outcome:
As equality of opportunity recedes as a plausible goal for the civil rights regime, having failed to arrive after three generations, there is a growing market for pessimists like [Ibram X. Kendi] who want to shift the goal to equality of outcome. …
The ideology of 2020 has a historical antecedent in the theories of decolonization developed in 1960s, which held that all of the Third World — Asia, Africa, Latin America, and even the ghettos of the United States — was united in a single struggle between white oppressors and people of color. In that struggle, people of color were entitled to seize the wealth of whites because that wealth had all been stolen from them in the first place. This “Third Worldism” was essentially a variation on Marxism with people of color in the place of the proletariat. …
Race communism:
The term that I prefer for the ideology we saw in 2020 is race communism. …
“Race communism” captures the fact that race holds something like the place in our ruling ideology that the working class held in communist countries. Taking stuff from the bad class and giving it to the good class is the source of the state’s moral legitimacy; decisions about jobs, promotions, housing, and university admissions are all tilted toward favored groups.
Proficiency in the ruling ideology is a criterion for advancement in any kind of career. Every large workplace has an ideological enforcer whose job it is to make sure the institution is aligned with the ruling ideology publicly and internally.
“Communism” makes people think of gulags and the midnight knock on the door. But for most of its existence, the Soviet empire was a fairly normal place to live. Its uniqueness lay in the way it put Marxism-Leninism at the center of society and judged every program, event, or phenomenon by whether it advanced its particular notion of progress. Race has come to play a similar role in the United States.
Race communism is a blunt term. I came to accept it only by a slow process. It started when I noticed how normal it had become to speak in dehumanizing terms about white people. When Sarah Jeong had her position on the New York Times editorial board called into question in 2018 over social media posts such as “Oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men” and “Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins,” her defenders said that her posts were just part of the Millennial online vernacular. This was true, and that was the problem. …
Diversity training module for Coca-Cola employees told them to “try to be less white,” meaning “be less oppressive, be less arrogant, be less certain, be less defensive.” Whiteness was talked about as something to be eliminated or abolished.
The next step came when I noticed how race was intruding into completely unrelated topics of conversation. Reading a book about euthanasia in 2021, I was jolted to see a quote in it to the effect that, since over 90 percent of people who seek assisted dying are white, we shouldn’t worry about it. …
Some states put whites with multiple comorbidities behind non-whites with none in their distribution of the Covid vaccine. Everywhere I looked, people were spending real money and making real decisions based on the idea that non-white people deserved more consideration than their white counterparts.
Powerful people talked about the need to reorient institutions toward the goal of fighting white supremacy. Joe Biden said he decided to run for president after the “Klansmen, white supremacists, and neo-Nazis” at Charlottesville in 2017 showed him a “battle for the soul of this nation” was underway. ..
Our race laws have become all-pervasive in part because there are simply more people running around who qualify as their beneficiaries — more claimants, more claims. That is why there can be no going back to some ideal moment when our civil rights regime struck a better balance. There is no way to maintain our current laws and our current demographics without our entire politics revolving around race. ...
Like the Soviet Union in the 1980s:
Living in America today feels like the dying days of the Soviet empire. The official ideology is simultaneously omnipresent and the object of widespread cynicism. People who invoke the ideology are frequently assumed to be doing so for opportunistic reasons, but open dissent from the ideology is still forbidden in many contexts. …
Living under an official ideology of anti-racism doesn’t mean that the average person thinks about race all the time, any more than the average Russian circa 1980 walked around thinking about Marxism-Leninism. In any society, most of life is just going to work and figuring out what to make for dinner. A person usually runs up against the regime ideology only when he tries to do something: start a business, move to a new house, publish a book, organize politically. …
Non-white privilege:
Any form of regulatory approval that includes a provision about “equal opportunity,” “public interest,” or “community needs” can be used as leverage by activist groups to extract handouts. …
An entire infrastructure has grown up to facilitate this transfer of resources. Former US Attorney General Eric Holder charged up to $2,295 per hour for conducting “racial equity audits” as a lawyer at Covington & Burling. …
Facebook adopted stricter content moderation policies on speech aimed at “vulnerable groups.” These changes were recommended not as nice things to do but as ways for the company to stay in compliance with civil rights law.
We take it for granted now, but it would have sounded bizarre to the framers of our constitution that the government can simply command a company to get rid of employees from one ethnic group and hire more employees from another. The laws that mandate workforce diversity are not like other regulations. They are not quotas, which one either meets or doesn’t. They ban discrimination, elastically defined, which leaves companies unsure whether they are in compliance. Over and over again, the biggest companies with the most carefully designed HR practices have been hit with nine-figure settlements in racial discrimination lawsuits, Texaco in 1996 ($176.1 million), Coca-Cola in 2000 ($192.5 million), Merrill Lynch in 2013 ($160 million). …
In 2017, three sociologists published the book Rights on Trial about anti-discrimination lawsuits — not the multimillion dollar national kind but the everyday cases, with a single wronged employee and a median settlement amount of $30,000. As they collected data on their sample group of about 1,800 cases, they initially asked their research team to include an assessment of the merits of each case, that is, whether any discrimination had actually occurred. They abandoned this idea when the researchers rarely agreed. “Some were clear instances of ‘frivolous’ cases,” they wrote, “and a few seemed to have ‘smoking guns,’ but the vast majority fell in between.”
The threat of these lawsuits matters more than any particular case. An entire class of ideological enforcers has been called into being by the very ambiguity of these laws. The job of an HR person is to sniff out anything that might create legal liability for a company. That includes any department with insufficient diversity and any employee communication that might be interpreted as politically incorrect. How many people currently work as ideological enforcers for our racial regime, and how much do we spend on it? …
A 2024 audit of the University of Virginia found 235 people with jobs related to DEI, with the highest paid earning $587,340 and all of them together costing $20 million a year. …
Government power grows:
If the government can intervene any time it sees a racial disparity, then its power is effectively unlimited, because those disparities are everywhere.…
For a long time, these concerns remained theoretical, in part because activists and judges showed some restraint in the application of these sweeping principles. This restraint has been eroded.
More and more aspects of daily life, far removed from DEI’s usual spheres, have come under attack in the name of racial justice. Many cities, including Philadelphia and Los Angeles, have limited routine traffic enforcement because too many of the drivers pulled over for minor offenses were non-white. Discipline in public schools became noticeably worse in the last decade, because, under Barack Obama, the Department of Education made it harder to suspend disruptive students since too many of the students suspended under the old policy were black. (The Trump administration revised that federal guidance in July.)
The University of California system currently has test-blind admissions, meaning that students can’t submit their SAT scores even if they want to. This has produced classes of unteachable freshmen who can’t do basic fractions, according to professors. …
Frogs in communist hot water:
We all like to think that if we were living in a communist country, we would know it. We would be afraid to speak our minds. But with every passing year the idea of America as a country of fearless plain speakers sounds more old-fashioned. Many people recognized something Soviet about the atmosphere of fear that prevailed during the peak of wokeness, when telling the wrong joke could get you fired and truth was no defense against charges of wrongthink. What went underappreciated at the time was that this atmosphere of fear was not just a side effect of an episode of mass hysteria. It could also be traced back to the government.
Ask a real estate agent whether a neighborhood is safe or if the local schools are any good. She can only give evasive answers, even though those are reasonable things for any prospective home buyer to want to know. It’s not because she is dancing around an awkward subject. It is illegal for her to give a straight answer, because the facts might have racist implications. …
Companies that part ways with employees over controversial social media remarks are usually perceived as caving to public pressure, but the relevant pressure here was not from the public. … created a “hostile environment” in the technical sense and thus opened the school up to a civil rights lawsuit.
Government censorship in the US has taken this indirect form, laundered through private actors, because the American people have traditionally rejected overt censorship. Around 2020, that changed. The idea that dangerous ideas should be suppressed became more acceptable. Publishers hired “sensitivity readers” literal censors, to purge manuscripts of anything politically incorrect. HBO withdrew Gone With the Wind from its streaming service and only reinstated it with a disclaimer. Surveys found college students growing more likely to say that controversial speakers should be banned from campus and a majority saying professors should be reported for saying bad things, such as denying any anti-black bias in police shootings.
The advent of social media revolutionized the manipulation of public opinion. The need to contain “hate speech” became a versatile tool in the hands of censors, and the line between hate speech and conservative opinion was deliberately blurred. …
The assassination of Charlie Kirk led to a surge of interest in starting new chapters of Turning Point USA, but some students found that they were banned from doing so on the grounds that TPUSA was a hate group. …
This tactic of using accusations of “hate” to hobble conservatives will only get more common as demographic change proceeds. More political issues will take on a racial character as the country becomes more diverse. …
Literary critic Gary Saul Morson, an expert in Russian literature, wrote in The Wall Street Journal in 2020 that he could pinpoint the moment that he knew younger Americans had very different ideas about free speech: “I used to get a laugh from students by quoting a Soviet citizen I talked to once. He said to me, ‘Of course we have freedom of speech. We just don’t allow people to lie.’ That used to get a laugh! They don’t laugh anymore.” Morson’s students no longer laugh because it matches how Americans think about free speech in their own country today, only in our case a better phrasing would be that we have free speech, you’re just not allowed to spread hate.
How did the people who lived in the Soviet Union come to realize that theirs was an evil system? The answer is, mostly, they didn’t. Even those who realized that something wasn’t working were unable to see that it was the system itself that was the problem. Even the dissidents, who put their lives on the line to criticize the regime, were all socialists. …
It’s shocking to go back and realize this in retrospect: These were smart people, brave people, and yet they could not see what was right in front of their faces, that the problem with communism was communism. Even the independent thinkers believed in the system too much to get their minds outside it. They wanted economic reforms, like Mikhail Gorbachev, or more personal freedoms, like Andrei Sakharov, but they didn’t want to give up on the socialist dream.
Communist regimes end because of dysfunction:
Communism didn’t end because people were persuaded to abandon it. It ended because it collapsed under its own dysfunctions. These dysfunctions mostly involved the misallocation of resources. Communism elevated people to positions of authority based on ideology rather than competence. …
It demoralized the most capable individuals by not offering them any incentive to reach their potential, since their standard of living would be similar either way. In the 1970s, Leonid Brezhnev decided that the ladies who swept the streets of Moscow should be paid more. Their wages were duly raised. “But then people in the government slapped themselves on the head,” recalled an economist. “Engineers, doctors, and teachers are making about the same as a cleaning woman. What a mess. Why study to become an engineer if you can make almost the same amount as a street cleaner?” …
Racial favoritism makes institutions less efficient, by definition, because it elevates people for political reasons rather than merit …
The danger is that these inefficiencies build up over time and start to threaten the functioning of important institutions. That is the point we are reaching now.
The slackening of racial hysteria in late 2024, the so-called “vibe shift,” had many causes — the most obvious being Donald Trump’s election victory — but one underappreciated cause was Kamala Harris. Her presence on the ticket in 2020 was a result of candidate Joe Biden’s pledge to choose a woman as his running mate, and the pressure exerted on his campaign amid that year’s racial reckoning to select a black woman. When her presidential candidacy flamed out, it called into question one of the basic principles on which the affirmative action regime is based.
Look what DEI got the Democrats
The premise of affirmative action is that a qualified minority candidate is always out there. It might take you longer to find him, and he might not be as qualified as the most qualified white candidates, but he will be good enough. All the Democratic Party had to do in 2020 was find a black female vice-presidential candidate who met minimum standards, but it seemed the best they could do was Kamala Harris, who self-evidently did not. She flubbed softball interviews, perhaps because, according to former staffers, she had a history of refusing to do basic prep work. …
Usually, complaints about affirmative action are framed in terms of fairness, that the more qualified person should have gotten the job and skin color should not have mattered. Now it was brought home in the most vivid way possible that unfairness was sometimes the least of its problems.
Another mediocrity who crashed and burned on the national stage that year was Claudine Gay. Even before the plagiarism scandal that led to her resignation, Gay was transparently unqualified for the role of president of Harvard University. Her academic resume was unimpressive; she had not published a single book. Previous Harvard presidents included scholars of distinction like Drew Gilpin Faust, whose books won national awards.
The best Harvard could afford
Harvard is one of the richest places in the entire world in money and talent. You might think that if any institution could afford a few affirmative action hires without threatening its ability to function, it would be Harvard.
But mediocrities attract mediocrities. They carve out little fiefdoms and drive out the real geniuses. … Eventually the entire apparatus is eaten through with termites, and the mediocrities are able to claim the institution for themselves. …
Republicans failed to oppose race communism effectively:
No GOP presidential candidate since Herbert Hoover has won a majority of the votes of any non-white ethnicity in any election (just as no Democratic candidate has won a majority of white votes since 1964).
It’s not because the GOP hasn’t tried. It’s because you can’t beat something with nothing. If one party offers an array of racial privileges and the other wants you to give up those privileges in exchange for nothing, that is an easy choice.
Think of the ways the Democratic Party makes life materially better for its clients every day. Under our system of racial preferences, your kid gets into a better college than he otherwise would. Your boss thinks twice about firing you because it might be a legal headache. If he does fire you, or just doesn’t promote you fast enough, you can sue him and maybe get a five-figure legal settlement. …
Don’t compete in the auction — ban the auctions as immoral!
Compared to the material advantages offered by our system of racial preferences in housing, education, employment, and just plain cash, how can Republicans compete? Not with better arguments. So the only way to avoid the end point of a racial spoils system is to do something decisive: to take race-based redistribution off the table completely.
Right now, the strategy of the Trump administration is to make our race laws apply equally to everyone. …
But if we continue to wage our political battles through lawsuits on behalf of one race or another, then race will continue to be central to our public life. A better way to think about these lawsuits, as a matter of long-term strategy, is as a way to inflict enough pain on institutions that they agree to a compromise: no more race-based lawsuits of any kind.
The racial crossroads thesis:
That is the point of the racial crossroads thesis. If we keep race-based laws and programs, then the force of demographic change and persistent disparities in outcomes will result in those laws consuming our politics and creating dysfunctions that will drive the country into a ditch. The year 2020 was a bad time, and lots of people are currently acting as if they would like to forget the hysteria of that year, but a replay of 2020 is what we should expect so long as our laws remain unchanged.
The only way to avoid that toxic dynamic is to eliminate race entirely from our laws so that those forces no longer have a foothold. Under the new bargain, institutions would be free to have DEI programs and also free not to. HR departments would no longer be able to wield the threat of lawsuits to bully the rest of the company. The upside for Harvard is that it gets to keep its affirmative action program. The upside for conservatives is that they can start a new school with meritocratic admissions without fear of having different policies imposed by a lawsuit. …
We don’t have to abolish race as a concept or a source of meaning for some people. We just need to get rid of it as a legal tool. People can talk about race. They just can’t sue over it.
There will still be tensions and conflicts in society that take on an ethnic character. But at least we won’t be locked into a path to a politics that revolves around race. History proves, contrary to the left’s assurances, that there is no good version of that outcome.
