Six on History: Culture Wars over Teaching U.S. History
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And it is working. The schools have become, Rufo notes, “a school-to-radicalism pipeline.”
But it is not just in radicalized Portland or Seattle where these forces hold sway. In my own home county of Loudoun County, Va., the radicals have seized control and plunged with abandon in a radical direction, leaving much of our community gasping at the temerity of their tactics and shuddering at the implications for the future of our community and our nation should they succeed.
Loudoun is the school district that suspended its teacher, Tanner Cross, for having the audacity to speak for one minute at a recent school-board meeting in opposition to a proposed sexual/political mandate. Let that sink in. Before the policy was in place, a highly regarded teacher was suspended for simply disagreeing with a proposed policy.
The legal organization I lead, Alliance Defending Freedom, represents Tanner. I was astounded when, in the midst of a hearing seeking a temporary injunction to reinstate him, which the court granted Tuesday, the school district’s lawyer volunteered the fact that he was the eighth employee in the past two years who has been suspended for out-of-school speech. Apparently, consistently violating the First Amendment rights of its employees makes everything all right in the minds of this school district.
The school district seems oblivious to the fact that they are losing not just conservative parents, but the great bulk of the middle-of-the road families who simply want their children to get a quality academic education.
The leadership of the Loudoun County Public Schools may be woke, but they are blind. They do not seem to see the growing signs of an educational revolution that is stirring in communities all across the nation. Parents have simply had enough of the politicization of their local schools and the attempts to turn their children into young but full-throated activists for the progressive movement.
Parents don’t want their children taught that they are oppressors if they have the wrong skin color. Teaching little white kids that they are evil because of their race is wicked, just as it was when the worst schools of our past taught little black children that they were intellectually inferior because of their race. Vanishingly few parents want their children immersed in a one-sided racial vendetta seeking to blame seven-year-olds for the acts of some people with their same skin color from past generations. This is racial scapegoating, growing from the same depraved ideology that in times past has conferred guilt and blame on entire people groups based solely on race.
Parents don’t want their children sexualized with a constant discussion of gender fluidity and other concepts that were considered mental illnesses just a few years ago and whose treatments are still fiercely debated by medical experts around the world.
And the parents of female athletes are outraged that their daughters are losing spots on varsity teams and award stands to biological males who have subjectively identified as female.
Coerced uniformity of opinion is the tactic of tyrants. In international law, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and related treaties all proclaim that parents have a right to insist that children receive an education that is consistent with the values of the parents. And the enforcement treaties make it clear that this right cannot be overcome even in situations where the existence of the nation itself is at stake.
Even before this, in the midst of World War II, our Supreme Court issued a stern rebuke of efforts to homogenize children through the public schools:
As governmental pressure toward unity becomes greater, so strife becomes more bitter as to whose unity it shall be. Probably no deeper division of our people could proceed from any provocation than from finding it necessary to choose what doctrine and whose program public educational officials shall compel youth to unite in embracing.
The Court explained the ultimate futility of the efforts to coerce uniformity, as evidenced by failures of such efforts in Nazi Germany, the Russian Revolution, the Inquisition, and the Roman attempts to banish Christianity.
There are only two choices. The wisest choice, where public schools are concerned, is to simply depoliticize public education. Get back to an academic emphasis with very generalized instruction in values on ideals that unite Americans such as honesty, hard work, equality, and love of country.
The second choice is more likely. The tactics of public schools are bonding together a sufficient number of families who want alternatives to the chaos reigning in their local schools. And a political and legal tipping point is fast approaching at which some form of educational choice where public funds follow the parents will be enacted by legislation or by litigation. This latter choice was recently strongly endorsed by former attorney general William Barr at an event I led last month.
School leaders are extremely serious about advancing their radical agenda. But parents who are complacent about many things will not sit by idly while their tax dollars are being used to indoctrinate them.
Parents have a limit. Public schools have crossed the line."
“SLAVERY IS NOT just something that just happened with the people who were white to people who were Black,” said Lisa Kinnemore, a member of Georgia’s state board of education, as it deliberated a resolution on Thursday restricting classroom discussion of racism. “Black people were actually slaves to Black people. It goes all the way to back even to ancient times, slavery in Egypt and Rome and all around the world.”
This sentiment — an explicit rejection of the horrors of American slavery and its roots in white supremacy — underpinned the 11 to 2 vote by the board to adopt a resolution to provide a framework for policy revisions on the teaching of race and sex in Georgia’s classrooms.
Kinnemore’s comments left Jason Esteves, chair of the Atlanta Public Schools Board of Education, momentarily speechless as he discussed the vote with The Intercept shortly after the meeting.
“Look, this won’t impact [Atlanta Public Schools],” he said. “We’re going to keep doing what we’re doing. This will have an effect on counties that are more conservative, that were still making moves toward equity and inclusion.”
Parents — mostly white — have been storming school board meetings across the state over the last few weeks, heeding a call by conservative demagogues to fight against “critical race theory” being taught in schools. Gov. Brian Kemp wrote a letter to the state board of education last month, calling critical race theory a “divisive, anti-American agenda” which “has no place in Georgia classrooms.” Kemp echoes a wave of protests across the country over the last two months, from rich Virginia suburbanites launching a campaign to oust the state school board to a disrupted meeting in Scottsdale, Arizona, with parents protesting mask mandates — unmasked, of course — along with critical race theory.
In practice, these white parents haven’t been railing against the arcane legal theory but against the idea that students should be taught that racism is a real, current problem created by longstanding structural inequality. Local school board meetings have devolved into vitriolic shouting matches, with boards looking for ways to control public comment afterward.
The board drafted the resolution without public input and then blocked comments from the YouTube livestream. Impassioned pleas, it seems, are fit only for those on one side of this argument.
“There was so much energy and excitement behind, finally, making some movement toward those issues,” Esteves said. “We’re now seeing a complete reversal. The state board of education just took away their cover and gave opponents a weapon to use against those efforts. Eventually what they want is for people not to talk about it any more.”
About three out of five of Georgia’s public school students are children of color. Demography projects Georgia will become a majority-minority state within the next decade. But even as Republicans continue to argue against the legitimacy of the November election, the political reality remains: a purple state on the knife’s edge of flipping permanently Democratic because it has run out of racially resentful white voters.
Kemp and others have begun to implicitly draw a connection between the eroding defense of white supremacy among white voters and their own political futures by describing anti-racist education initiatives as inherently political. Basically, they’re saying the quiet part out loud.
Take Kinnemore, for example. Then-Gov. Nathan Deal appointed Kinnemore to the board in 2013 after her kamikaze run against a well-respected local Democratic legislator in DeKalb County.
Kinnemore, who is Black, lives about a mile due south from my house, in a community that is about 90 percent Black, in the shadow of the largest memorial to the Confederacy in America. I note in passing that the keepers of the Stone Mountain carving have been open to recontextualizing the monument despite the wailing of Lost Cause revisionists, because the redolent racism of the carving’s history is noxious. Those white supremacists are Kinnemore’s audience. Her political existence is a 4Chan-style trolling operation designed to elicit pain from Black parents for the amusement of white supremacists.
The Georgia landmark is a testament to the enduring legacy of white supremacy
Her appointment is in no way an attempt to build support for conservative politics among nonwhite voters. Republicans do not have a plan for that here. Instead, they hope to preserve the racial biases of young white voters intact as long as they can, staving off losses as older white conservatives die and younger ones change after contact with the real world.
The resolution contains language barring instruction in ways that suggest that racism is acceptable. But it also says the state school board believes that no teacher, administrator, or other school employee should offer instruction suggesting that “meritocracy or traits such as a hard work ethic are racist or sexist, or were created by a members of a particular race to oppress members of another race; (or) that the advent of slavery in the territory that is now the United States constituted the true founding of the United States; or that, with respect to their relationship to American values, slavery and racism are anything other than deviations from, betrayals of, or failures to live up to, the authentic founding principles of the United States, which include liberty and equality.”
How one teaches the political dimension of slavery on the crafting of the Constitution, with the three-fifths compromise, the ramifications of the Civil War, the lingering effects of Jim Crow, the Trail of Tears and the reservation system, turn of the century anti-Asian discrimination, the civil rights movement, and the many, many other facets of white supremacist ideology on America is a lesson left to the reader’s imagination.
The resolution does not itself impose standards for the state’s schools, Georgia education board chair Scott Sweeney said. “It does not mention critical race theory per se. This is not something going directly after critical race theory. What it is trying to do is draw a distinction between divisive ideologies in finding their way into standards. This is a foundational statement more than anything else. With regard to divisiveness, for example, can you imagine any supremacist ideology making its way into standards? I cannot. So, this is agnostic with regard to those types of divisiveness.”
The nature of racism today is what is left unsaid and unexamined. One has to assume there is no white supremacist ideology baked into the current curriculum for his statement to be considered true.
The board’s vote drew swift condemnation.
“The prohibitions outlined in the resolution would undermine Holocaust education in Georgia,” said Allison Padilla-Goodman, vice president of the southern division at the Anti-Defamation League. “Indeed, it could prohibit teaching that the Nuremburg laws were taken from Jim Crow America. The resolution is fundamentally contradictory. It claims to respect First Amendment rights and strongly encourages educators, who teach about controversial public policy or social affairs issues, to explore them from diverse and contending perspectives. Yet, the resolution clearly would prohibit a teacher or student from talking about systemic racism or inequity in America. And the resolution is so vaguely written that it undoubtedly will come under constitutional challenge and may suffer the same fate as President Trump’s divisive concepts executive order.”
“Discussions about race and its place in our history and in current events are an important part of education and one that Georgia educators will continue to address,” added Craig Harper, executive director of the Professional Association of Georgia Educators. “The non-binding resolution adopted at a special called session of the State Board of Education does not prohibit educators from continuing to teach and discuss all aspects of our history as they do now. The board members’ conversation highlighted the importance of including more people and perspectives. Our many communities and educators, who have valuable insights and expertise, must work together to determine how Georgia will address these critical issues moving forward.”
Esteves expects teachers to gear up for a fight.
“Teachers can speak out and talk about how this limits their ability to have really important conversations in their classrooms,” he said. “School boards can affirm their commitment to equity and inclusion. They can resist any efforts to disrupt or pause equity initiatives.”
"The public portion of a Commack school board meeting Thursday night began with a string of students asking that more attention be paid to systemic racism, ethnic studies and the lives of minorities in the United States.
The meeting followed an unruly forum Tuesday on the district's multiracial curriculum, where parents accused school leaders of teaching critical race theory, sometimes yelling over students who said they experienced racism in their schools.
The school year brought a national reckoning on race home to Long Island, starting after thousands of students and alumni in districts, including Commack, signed petitions and public letters demanding school leaders do more anti-racism work last summer after events that included the killing of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis.
Reaction has grown in recent months from some parents who said that work is divisive and enforces a politically progressive agenda in schools.
A common refrain is that districts are teaching critical race theory, a body of academic thought examining the intersection of race and the law.
At the meeting Thursday night at Commack High School, Marina Khan, an alum, told the board the refrain from some parents that children don't recognize skin color is false.
A Muslim student whose family came to the United States from Pakistan, Khan said she experienced frequent Islamophobia and racism throughout her 12 years in district schools.
"Color blindness ignores the experiences of race," she said.
On Tuesday, Commack Superintendent Donald James started the community forum with a disclaimer: "There is no critical race theory in the buildings; we’re not talking about critical race theory."
That pledge, and educators’ explanations of curriculum they said was meant to teach critical thinking and respect for other cultures, did not satisfy some parents.
On video of the forum viewed by Newsday, one man asked each board member to repudiate critical race theory. A woman demanded that the board stop "pushing diversity on innocent babies … They don’t see color unless you teach them that they’re different colors." That woman, who did not give her full name, wore a shirt with the logo of Long Island Loud Majority, a group that supported a slate of school board candidates that unseated incumbents in neighboring Smithtown.
The Commack district established a review panel last summer to ensure curricula and books are "age appropriate, fair and balanced and that no student is put in a position where they feel ‘less than’ others," according to a slide in James’ presentation.
Some material, including the children’s book "Be Who You Are!," is intended to teach young students about each other’s differences and similarities, educators said.
The educators’ presentations addressed race and racism only glancingly: a middle school social studies unit focuses on the U.S. civil rights movement, and educators mentioned "I am Malala," a memoir of an Afghan childhood, and the novel "Of Mice and Men," which has themes of race and racism.
Some students Tuesday said the district needed to pay more attention to race and include more authors of color on reading lists. They were repeatedly interrupted during the forum by shouts from the audience. One student said in an email later to Newsday that they belonged to the local chapter of a national organization, Diversify Our Narrative, described on its website as a student-run group pushing for education reform. She asked not to be named.
Several of the student speakers mentioned the graphic novel "Persepolis," a memoir of a girl’s experience of the Iranian Revolution, which James said had been removed from the required reading list because some content was deemed not appropriate for high school students.
The book "will still be available on our reading lists and available for electives," district spokeswoman Brenda Lentsch said.
The 5,875-student district straddles the towns of Huntington and Smithtown and was 79% white, 10% Asian or Pacific Islander, 10% Hispanic and 2% Black in the 2019-20 school year, according to the New York State Education Department."
"Last month, Republican lawmakers decried critical race theory, an academic approach that examines how race and racism function in American institutions.
"Folks, we're in a cultural warfare today," Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., said at a news conference alongside six other members of the all-Republican House Freedom Caucus. "Critical race theory asserts that people with white skin are inherently racist, not because of their actions, words or what they actually believe in their heart — but by virtue of the color of their skin."
Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., added: "Democrats want to teach our children to hate each other."
Academics, particularly legal scholars, have studied critical race theory for decades. But its main entry into the partisan fray came in 2020, when former President Donald Trump signed an executive order banning federal contractors from conducting certain racial sensitivity trainings. It was challenged in court, and President Biden rescinded the order the day he took office.
Since then, the issue has taken hold as a rallying cry among some Republican lawmakers who argue the approach unfairly forces students to consider race and racism.
"A stand-in for this larger anxiety"
Andrew Hartman, a history professor at Illinois State University, described the battle over critical race theory as typical of the culture wars, where "the issue itself is not always the thing driving the controversy."
"I'm not really sure that the conservatives right now know what it is or know its history," said Hartman, author of A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars.
He said critical race theory posits that racism is endemic to American society through history and that, consequently, Americans have to think about institutions like the justice system or schools through the perspective of race and racism.
However, he said, "conservatives, since the 1960s, have increasingly defined American society as a colorblind society, in the sense that maybe there were some problems in the past but American society corrected itself and now we have these laws and institutions that are meritocratic and anybody, regardless of race, can achieve the American dream."
Confronted by the Black Lives Matter protests of last summer, as well as the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1619 curriculum, which roots American history in its racist past, Hartman said many Americans want simple answers.
"And so critical race theory becomes a stand-in for this larger anxiety about people being upset about persistent racism," he said.
Legislative action
States such as Idaho and Oklahoma have adopted laws that limit how public school teachers can talk about race in the classroom, and Republican legislatures in nearly half a dozen states have advanced similar bills that target teachings that some educators say they don't teach anyway.
There's movement on the national level too.
Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., has introduced the Combating Racist Training in the Military Act, a bill that would prohibit the armed forces and academics at the Defense Department from promoting "anti-American and racist theories," which, according to the bill's text, includes critical race theory.
Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., said he is co-sponsoring legislation that would prevent federal dollars from being spent on critical race theory in schools or government offices.
"The ideas behind critical race theory and [its] implementation is creating this oppressor-oppressed divide amongst our people," Donalds told NPR. "And so no matter how you feel about the history of our country — as a Black man, I think our history has actually been quite awful, I mean, that's without question — but you also have to take into account the progression of our country, especially over the last 60 to 70 years."
Donalds said the country's history, including its ills, should be taught, but that critical race theory causes more problems than solutions.
"It only causes more divisions, which doesn't help our union become the more perfect union," he said.
A post-racial country?
Nearly half of the speakers at the Republican news conference in May invoked Martin Luther King Jr., expressing their desire to be judged "by the content of their character, not the color of their skin."
But Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, a sociology professor at Duke University, said King's dream was about the future. "He didn't say, 'We are now in a colorblind society,' " he said.
Bonilla-Silva, whose book Racism Without Racists critiques the notion that America is now "colorblind," says he too shares King's dream, "but in order for us to get to the promised land of colorblindness, we have to go through race. It's the opposite of what these folks are arguing."
He says the idea that American society is post-racial is nonsense.
"We are not, because we watched the video of George Floyd, and we are not because we have the data on income inequality, on wealth inequality, on housing inequality," he said.
As an example, Bonilla-Silva noted the opposition of whites to affirmative action in the post-civil rights era.
"Many whites said things such as, 'I'm not a racist. I believe in equal opportunity, which is why I oppose affirmative action, because affirmative action is discrimination in reverse,' " he noted.
"That statement only works if one believes that discrimination has ended," he added. "But because it has not ended, claiming that you oppose affirmative action because it's presumably discrimination in reverse ends up justifying the racial status quo and the inequalities."
Motivator for the midterms?
The fight over critical race theory will likely continue to be a heated issue ahead of next year's midterm elections. Although November 2022 seems a long way away, Christine Matthews, president of Bellwether Research and a public opinion pollster, says pushback to anti-racism teaching is exactly the kind of issue that could maintain traction among certain voters.
"I think it's just one more addition to the culture war that the Republicans really want to fight and it's what they want to make the 2022 midterms about," she said.
Matthews noted that Biden's approval ratings, in the mid-50s, are significantly higher than Trump's were throughout his term in office, "so Republicans are wanting to make this about othering the Democrats and making them seem as extreme and threatening to white culture as possible."
"If Republicans can make [voters] feel threatened and their place in society threatened in terms of white culture and political correctness and cancel culture, that's a visceral and emotional issue, and I do think it could impact turnout."
These issues could be used to galvanize conservative voters and increase their numbers at the polls.
"We have seen evidence that the Republican base is responding much more to threats on cultural issues, even to some degree more than economic issues," Matthews said.
But Rep. Donalds said the Republican Party doesn't need to rally the base to get it to show up to vote.
"When it comes to the '22 elections, we don't need additional ammunition," he said, pointing to what he views as a list of failures from the Biden administration, from budget and taxes to shutting down the Keystone pipeline.
Doug Heye, the former communications director for the Republican National Committee, said in some ways, the attempts to mandate what schools can or can't teach highlights just how far the GOP under Trump has moved away from traditionally conservative principles — like wanting less federal involvement in schools.
"A lot of what we might have described as conservative policy five years ago, 10 years ago, now just isn't that case," he said. "If we're pushing what is a current priority for the Trump base, that's defined as conservative, whether or not that's a federal top-down policy or not. So the old issues of federalism has really been upended under Donald Trump's reign as the leader of the party."
Heye said at this point, critical race theory is still politically a "niche issue" among conservative voters, but he expects it to play a larger role in state assemblies, governors races and school boards rather than in national politics.
He said he believes it's an issue some candidates will raise "to further rile up the base that is already pretty riled."
"So the question will be then for Republicans: What else are they really emphasizing?" he said.
From a strategy perspective, Matthews says she thinks it will all come down to messaging.
"The Republicans are trying to make it a bad thing," she said, "but I feel like if the Democrats got the messaging right, they could make it a good thing."
Both sides have a little more than a year to do that."
"Everyone should want to be an antiracist. Who wouldn’t want to stand against the evil that declares that some people, because of the color of their skin, are inferior to others? Who wouldn’t want to live in a society that honors the dignity and sacredness of every human being and that judges every one of us according to the content of our character?
All of which made me, in adulthood, determined to break free of rigid orthodoxy and ideological thinking. So much so that I founded a company with the mission to teach people how to love themselves and also love people who appear, on the surface, to be nothing like them. My theory is that self-compassion leads to compassion for others. When we can truly approach another human with curiosity and generosity of spirit, it becomes a lot harder to be a bigot. This is why I believe that compassion is our best weapon against racism and extremism.
I came to this realization in my senior year in college, when I took a class called “Anthropology of Magic, Religion, and Witchcraft.” My professor was an agnostic and a liberal, two identifiers I did not respect at the time. I made assumptions about her lived experience and put her in a box labeled “other.”
One day, that professor screened a documentary, “Jesus Camp,” which unfavorably portrayed an evangelical community. I did not recognize the people in the film. I did not worship in the way they did. Even so, I felt a greater kinship with those who practiced a spiritual devotion than with those who did not.
The next day in class, a fellow student, a professed atheist, railed against the community portrayed in the film. She called them “trash” and “worthless.” This made me feel small and insignificant, because the practice of spiritual devotion really mattered to me.
My professor’s response, however, would change my life.
To my astonishment, she remonstrated with the student. She explained that the purpose of the class was to investigate and find points of connection to all that makes us human, including our need for community, love, self-expression, and security. If we could not view fellow humans through that lens, if instead we dehumanized them and reduced folks who were different to something less-than, we would be doing them harm, and hurting ourselves in the process.
In other words, a person I had just judged, whose lived experiences I had made assumptions about, was speaking about the humanity of a community I thought she would reject.
That floored me. My professor’s open mind and heart forced me to confront the shallow frameworks I’d been using to size up others. It triggered a crisis of identity in me that led to a deep sorrow and depression; I had to reevaluate all that I thought to be true, and then I had to let it go and grieve its loss. But that epiphany was also a spiritual awakening, a realization of the rich complexity of human beings. We cannot be sized up and fit into a box.
Black intellectual James Baldwin made a similar observation in his debate with conservative thinker William F. Buckley in 1965 at Cambridge University. Here is how he described Sheriff Jim Clark, who at the time was brutally and violently oppressing civil rights protesters and African American citizens in Selma, Ala.:
This observation is striking because the man that Baldwin casts as a tragic, pitiable figure is the racist who has material power. Baldwin’s moral analysis emphasizes a man’s inner life, which is immaterial and yet is the only force that allows us, if we so choose, to pursue good over evil; this inner life determines what we create and who we aspire to become.
Yet today our society seems obsessed with the outer state of our fellow humans. This comes at their expense but also at ours. If we claim that the sum of another is what constitutes that person materially — race, resources, physical power — what is it that we’re missing?
This surface-level thinking underpins racism. It reduces a man to his external features or circumstances, and in the words of Baldwin, represents “the denial of the human being, his power, his beauty, his dread.” Even more presciently, Baldwin wrote that “white people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this — which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never — the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.”
This is a psychological, spiritual assessment of human beings. To transform external, systemic structures that teem with racism, what is needed is for folks to see the whole human being with all of her complexities, idiosyncrasies, and intricacies.
If instead we reinforce a shallow dogma of racial essentialism by describing black and white people in generalizing ways, I fear we will mainly spread alienation that leads to insecurity, the stymieing of fellowship among peers of different races, and an atrophying of the spirit of brotherhood and sisterhood. A loveless wasteland provides fertile ground for racism to take root.
Ibram X. Kendi, whose book “How to Be an Anti-Racist” has topped best-seller lists and who serves as the director of the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, says that “the heartbeat of racism is denial, and the heartbeat of antiracism is confession.”
Much of Kendi’s writing is about government policies that have perpetuated inequity and his proposals for reversing it. He says an antiracist action is “any measure that produces or sustains racial equity between racial groups,” while racist policy “produces racial inequity between groups.” One solution he proposes is a federal Department of Antiracism that “would be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.”
I don’t think that would be wise, but let’s set aside for now a debate over public policy. Organizations around the country have brought Kendi in to give talks, and schools have added his work to classroom curricula, including in Virginia, California, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. And I fear that in such settings, discussing race in broad strokes and calling for confession lay the groundwork for well-intentioned seekers of racial justice to pursue the opposite.
For one thing, the focus on racial groups implicitly asserts the existence of monolithic and stereotypical “white” and “black” Americas. Life is far more complex than this limited taxonomy would allow. In fact many Americans are black and white: There are few black descendants of slaves in the republic who are not also partially white. American culture itself is a blend of European, African, Asian, and Native American traditions.
Beyond that, in the words of the Pulitzer Prize-winning hip-hop artist Kendrick Lamar, we all have “power, poison, pain, and joy” inside us — regardless of our racial identity. We are all assailed by the fear of death, haunted by the specter of insignificance, and tempted by the possibility of attaining unfettered power. I also believe that we are all sacred, made in the image of the Divine, in need of love and belonging, and searching for a sense of worth and meaning. Understanding this is the first step toward building and renewing a truly antiracist, multiethnic country.
Ralph Ellison once wrote that “it is quite possible that much potential fiction by Negro Americans fails to achieve a vision of life . . . commensurate with the complexity of their actual situation. Too often they fear to leave the uneasy sanctuary of race to take their chances in the world of art.”
Ellison was demanding an end to an oppressive tendency to deal with human beings as caricatures. Unfortunately, businesses and school districts across the country are embracing diversity training in which white attendees are held responsible for the sins of their ancestors, and their lived experiences are prejudged (by extension, so too are those of their nonwhite colleagues). White attendees are told that they are fragile — to use a word promulgated by another prominent diversity consultant, Robin DiAngelo — and that such fragility proves their racism. They are told that they must commit to becoming active antiracists and get with the retraining program: Admit you suffer from the sin of being white and seek penitence.
The worst thing a business or school can do is alienate its employees or students by treating people as political abstractions and making them feel insecure. Instead we ought to be asking ourselves how to create conditions that lead everyone to flourish. What is needed is an antiracism training rooted in a framework of abundance, not a framework of scarcity that puts white people into the reductive category of oppressor and black people into the equally reductive category of oppressed.
I believe the key to fostering spaces of diversity and inclusion is to teach people how to make peace with their human condition. This requires a spiritual practice that will help people wrestle with flaws, vulnerability, fear, mortality, and the infinite gifts that human beings bring to bear in the world. It means helping people think in terms of complexity instead of caricature. It means helping people develop a capacity for empathy and compassion for both themselves and their neighbors.
Such work requires more than a mandatory hour-long diversity and inclusion workshop. This is the work of the company I founded: ongoing training as coaching, rather than one-offs that help shield employers from liability for workplace discrimination. This also is, in essence, the work of restorative justice, which seeks to elevate human relationships. We can look to such practitioners of this philosophy as Father Gregory Boyle of Homeboy Industries, in Los Angeles, which helps rehabilitate former gang members by giving them job skills, therapy, and a support system. Similarly, the Inside Circle Foundation helps the incarcerated heal and build lives of service from inside prison.
Black jazz critic and essayist Albert Murray called this “impromptu heroism culture”: a process by which human beings confront and contend with “the infernal absurdities and ever-impending frustrations inherent in the nature of all existence” and build their resilience. He thought of jazz and the blues as examples of this skill in action.
This is also what the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. described when he talked about the “beloved community.” The end of the process is “reconciliation,” which “transforms opponents into friends” and may bring about “the salvation of our civilization.” Doing this kind of work will help create conditions that organically lead to diversity and inclusion, because it will foster interdependence, collaboration, and belonging — and it would do that without presuming things about people because of their skin color."
