A Moral Chimera

Diversity, Illiberal No-White-Male Policies and the Power of the Black Radical Tradition

Photo by BP Miller on Unsplash

This is a guest post by Dr. Scott Miller — for The Woke Watch Canada UnWoke Essay Series.

In March of 2022, the dean of the faculty of arts and sciences at the University of Toronto made a statement at an Anti-Racism Pedagogies Roundtable event which described her very illiberal faculty hiring policies. The dean explained that her diversity and inclusion initiatives, which have been developed in the last three years, mean that when department chairs bring forward their proposals to hire new professors a very particular and a very contrived set of identity strictures now determine an applicant’s chances of success:

 “We modified our process so that the priority was on any proposal that came forward to hire a faculty member that would achieve our commitments toward equity, diversity and inclusion. So, for example, if there is an identification of a black colleague in a particular area where there is need — we would look at only those proposals first, before we would consider any other proposals.” [1]

In other words, faculty hiring practice at Canada’s top university adopts a no-white-males policy (meaning, it offers preferential hiring to every applicant not a white male) and therefore proceeds along blatantly racist and sexist lines. Similar policies at the University of Waterloo and at the Canada Research Chair program, which awards research positions across the nation, have recently been reported by the press.[2] And there are other similar precedents besides this.[3]

This sort of activism turned institutional activism, which contends that it is moral and fair to discriminate against a person based on their immutable characteristics (as long as those characteristics mean that they belong to the current ethnic majority), may remind one of the sort of thinking behind new classroom social practices such as the “progressive stack” (which requires that black women should be called on to speak first in class, followed by people of color, followed by white women, and, lastly, white men).  Or perhaps this sort of activism may remind one of the oft-discussed position of critical race theorist Ibrahim Kendi, which is that “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.”[4] This sort of thinking is the same as that enacted by university administrators on a policy level despite the fact that, according to 2020 Statistics Canada information, the number of women and visible minorities in Canadian population is in perfect demographic alignment with the aggregate total number of women and visible minorities involved in Canadian higher education at the level of Ph.D graduate and higher (roughly 50% and 22% respectively).[5]

For a brief time, the West had adopted an entirely different set of social and legal principles according to which it was desirable to transcend excessive race consciousness and to strive for fairness through race neutral or colorblind race policies. For those whose parents favored such integrationist sensibilities, or who have come to favor such sensibilities for some other reason, it hardly needs to be pointed out that the reversion to identity-based hiring is glaringly and manifestly illiberal — illiberal in the sense that it aims to replace this version of fair with something else. The aim of the discussion to follow will be to answer for the reader an important question: what is that something else?

To address this important question, one must be able to parse the basic differences of American race activism (which have all sorts of spill over consequences for America’s sister-nation, Canada) and so an accounting of the Martin Luther King / Malcolm X dichotomy will be necessary. As is well known, King believed in the integration of black society with the white populace and that civil rights legislation represented the fulfillment of the liberal and moral potential present (but dormant, in his conception) in the American constitution.[6]   These convictions signal a belief in the basic capacity of capitalist liberal-democracy to perform a profound social and philosophical feat and to achieve a sort of unity (which, in the absence of philosophically liberal principles and laws, is unnatural to the human condition). For the most part, the activism of the integrationist civil rights movement as exemplified by King, the aims of which were enshrined in US law with the 1964 civil rights act, will go unexamined here. This mode of activism is problematic mainly in that, from 1965 on, it was checked, countered and supplanted by non-integrationist and quintessentially illiberal black activist movements.    

The illiberal black activist movements, collectively the black radical tradition, are personified for many Westerners by the figure of Malcolm X. In contradistinction to King, Malcolm X believed that racial integration could never occur in America-as-it-is, that racism and capitalism are inextricably linked, and consequently, “black liberation and socialism are directly linked.”[7] Invoking Malcolm X will signal to many readers what the black radical tradition entails, but here is a list of words and concepts stemming from that same tradition which may not register as “black radical” (but which should!): African-American, intersectionality, identity politics, systemic racism, black power, Black (spelled with a capital “B”), anti-black racism, visible minority, critical race theory, blackness, whiteness and lived experience, decolonizing (America). The origin of these terms and concepts will be contextualized and documented in the discussion to follow below.

Many of the terms and concepts that were just indicated, through the power of institutionalized activism, through the social sciences, through postmodernist jargon, through the current day social justice and woke movements, have become so mainstream that their origin in the black radical tradition is now less than obvious. But we all know the ideological innovations of black radical tradition (if only indirectly) and for broad swaths of the general public some of these terms have come to stand for axiomatic truisms. This is the language through which diversity, inclusion and equity policies are argued, and, as will be borne out below, such terms are obscurant ciphers for hard affirmative action (affirmative action of the quota sort); in turn, affirmative action, although once liberal in its phrasing, was long ago reshaped by black radical politics.

The major ideologies of the black radical tradition sketched below cannot be exhaustively described here, rather the intention is to highlight those aspects of the tradition which are patently illiberal in support of the thesis that the black radical tradition (more so than any other radical ideology) has shaped the illiberal institutional policies which we are witnessing today and which are currently emerging.  

Sketch of black nationalism: According to historian Wilson Moses, writing in “The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850–1925,” black nationalism first arouse in the late 1700s in the climate of the then active system of US slavery.[8] The earliest known written expression of the ideology of black nationalism is that espoused in the final days of slavery, more precisely, that presented in the work “The Condition, Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered” written in 1852 by Martin Delaney.[9] Delaney, who was born free in a northern state before emancipation, and certainly before civil rights were extended to black persons living in America, promulgated some of the core contentions of black nationalist rhetoric (which have remained essentially static for the last 170 years): i) black America constitutes a nation within a nation;[10]  ii) Pan-Africanism, that is, the idea that blacks of all countries are one brotherhood (usually coupled with the utopian idea of establishing a homeland for blacks somewhere);[11] iii) from a contemporary of Delaney, Henry Turner, black nationalism acquires an emphasis on black pride, and the directive to “cease striving to be white.”[12]

While 19th century black nationalist ideology was thus definitively ethnocentric (in the sense of emphasizing the paramount importance of black identity) some strains of this ideology were also patently racist. Wilson Moses states that black radicals such as Delaney, Crummell, and Griggs held that, in comparison to blacks, whites are frigid and aggressive (among other attributes).[13]  This line of thinking is the probable root of the current day “melanin theory” maintained by black supremacists and some Afrocentrists. According to this belief system, blacks acquire a superior intellect by virtue of their higher melanin and, while black people are “sun people,” white people are “ice people.”[14] To be clear, black nationalists are not always (or perhaps not usually) black supremacists, but black supremacy is nevertheless a subsect of black nationalism. A well-known example being the Nation of Islam, the black supremacist group to which Malcolm X belonged.

While the major tenants of black nationalism had already solidified in the era of slavery, the socio-political infrastructure of the American system was in a definite state of flux. The emancipation of the slaves came in 1863 during the civil war. Further, in the reconstructionist era that followed (1865–1877), a number of major legislative reforms were brought forward mainly by Republicans (the party of the north at that time): in short succession the civil rights act of 1866 was passed which brought new definitions of US citizenship and which required that all citizens be equally protected by law (with the overarching purpose of extending this status and these protections to blacks, including recently freed slaves); the fourteenth amendment to the constitution was made in 1868 which served to support the provisions of the 1866 civil rights act. However, it is important to note that both the civil rights act and the constitutional amendment were aimed at protecting a citizen from discrimination from state and local governments (they did not address private discrimination such as workplace discrimination). In 1876 congress passed an additional civil rights act providing (or requiring) equal treatment of all citizens when accessing public transport and public accommodations (such as restaurants, educational institutions and so forth); however, the supreme court struck this act down in 1883 on the grounds that the fourteenth amendment did not cover laws and regulations for the private sector and hence the 1876 bill was unconstitutional. The striking down of the 1876 civil rights act would mean that segregation and discrimination in the private sphere i.e. in privately owned businesses could continue apace (that is, until Rosa Parks and the civil rights act of 1964), and this produced a surge in black nationalism in the late 1800s.[15]

Yet another iteration of black nationalist ideology arises in the US in the early 1900s as, following the collapse of colonialism in various Caribbean nations, waves of Caribbean blacks came to the US seeking jobs and ended up mixing with black Americans in customarily black American neighborhoods (such as Harlem).[16] Black nationalism radicalized segments of these black communities, now made up of a mixture of American and newly immigrated blacks, uniting adherents behind the notion that blacks were a separate nation within a nation, and more poignantly than ever, that blacks from all parts of the world were one brotherhood (Pan-Africanism). In this era Marcus Garvey, an immigrant from Jamaica, become the most influential organizer of the movement. From Garvey, black nationalism acquired an even greater emphasis on black pride, but also an emphasis on Africa not only as the former fatherland but as the future utopian promised land of current day blacks, a mode of thinking which paved the way to Afrocentrism. Garvey declared that black social-reformers who advocated for social equality with whites and for integration were “social agitators” because, as a race separatist, he believed blacks must create their own segregated economy in order to demonstrate black potential (and, ultimately, in order to emigrate elsewhere).[17]

Due to the prolific success of UNIA (United Nigro Improvement Association), Garvey’s black nationalist organization, black nationalism is from this point on sometimes referred to as Garveyism. At its height, black membership in the UNIA was by far the largest for any organization of this sort in US history and is estimated to have numbered in the millions;[18] considering that the black population of the US was about 10 million in 1920, this would indicate that card carrying UNIA members would have been at least 20% of the black population while portions of black America sympathizing with the movement (but not holding membership) would have been much higher. This high rate of adherence continues in more recent times: the Million Man March of October 1993, organized by Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam, brought something like one million demonstrators to Washington united in a sort of black nationalist fervor. Even today, ethnocentrism or race consciousness among black Americans is extremely high compared to the rest of the population: a 2019 pew poll found that 74% of black Americans answered that being black is of high importance to their self-identity (in contrast, 15% of whites answered that being white is of high importance to their self-identity).[19]    

Following the successful activism of integrationist and liberal minded movements such as the one headed by Martin Luther King, and following the passing of a new civil rights legislature in 1964, adherents of the black nationalist mode of activism reclaimed their cultural momentum. Some groups which had been integrationist and fundamental to achieving the desegregation of the 1964 civil rights movement switched to black nationalism after 1965: notably, the SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) and CORE (Congress on Race Equality).[20] Other groups, such as RAM (the Revolutionary Action Party) and the Black Panther Party, took black nationalism in a new direction replacing “black pride” with a more aggressive slogan: black power. This new slogan was also revolutionary in the Marxian sense as will become clear from the sketch of black Marxism to follow.

Key concepts from black nationalism: blacks are a separate nation,[21] black is beautiful,[22] Black (spelled with a capital ‘B’);[23]  African-American,[24]  critical race theory.[25]

Sketch of Black Marxism: for those who think that there is something controversial about associating the black radical tradition with Marxism, witness the title (not to mention the contents) of Cedric Robinson’s 1983 work “Black Marxism: the Making of the Black Radical Tradition” (Robinson is a black studies professor). The synergy between Marxism and black nationalism goes all the way back to Vladimir Lenin, who not only founded the Soviet empire but who also declared in 1917 that US blacks should be “classed as an oppressed nation.”[26] This statement, which mirrored the black nationalist conviction that blacks constituted a separate nation within a nation, should perhaps be considered to have been that moment in which classical Marxism, with its focus on class struggle, first tilted toward the Neo-Marxism of today, with its identity based struggle.

The Soviet strategy of exploiting and antagonizing a “rift” in American society did not develop in the precise way they had intended it to (in that it never produced a significant number of black card-carrying communist party members).[27] Despite this, Marxism found a niche of a different sort in the radical black tradition. Black revolutionaries and intellectuals would adopt aspects of Marxian ideology for their own purposes, fusing doctrines such as anti-oppression, anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism to already existing black radical critiques of the West. This developing line of thinking can be seen in the ideas of W.E.B. Du Bois, a prolific and highly consequential scholar, the first Ph.D holding black sociologist, founding member of the NAACP, a member of the Socialist Party of America (and therefore a Marxist), who held that black America was a colony, and that overcoming black race problems in America was part of the global anti-imperialist struggle.[28] Lenin himself wouldn’t have put it any differently. Activist groups from the black radical tradition, such as the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB) and the Black Panther Party (BPP) saw themselves as Leninists — insofar as Leninism could actually be denuded of its (white) Soviet agenda and redeployed in the service of black separatism. From Tony Thomas’ 1972 article Black Nationalism and Confused Marxists, it is clear that these ideologies were never entirely compatible.[29]

Key concepts from black Marxism: systemic racism and black power,[30]  blackness, whiteness and lived experience,[31] anti-imperialism and decolonizing (America).[32]

Sketch of Black Feminism: finally, in recognition of the way that it has indelibly impacted the current day social-political landscape, black feminism cannot be neglected. For those unaware of the link between feminism and socialism, it’s worth noting that the Soviet Union was the first country to fully legalize both divorce and abortion.[33] Black feminism and communism also have a link: in a sympathetic treatment of this topic, Erik McDuffie (a black studies professor) describes black feminism as praising the model of the Soviet family, and as combining “black nationalist and American Communist Party (CPUSA) positions on race, gender, and class with black women radicals’ own lived experiences.”[34] “Lived experiences,” it was pointed out above, were introduced as a supposed category of knowledge by black Marxist Frantz Fanon in 1952. 

The ideology of black feminism differs from mainstream feminism in one obvious and constantly reiterated detail – black feminists are concerned about being black while simultaneously being women. McDuffie relates that the early “triple oppression” thesis (the prototype of intersectional theory), which holds that black women are oppressed on account of their race, gender and class, was originally argued by black feminists who alleged that the communist party of the USA itself (ironically!) left black women “marginalized” and “unattended.” In the mid-1900s, black feminist Claudia Jones would help to popularize the triple oppression thesis in American black feminist circles (that is, prior to her deportation for communist agitation in 1955).[35] In the 1960s, the Combahee River Collective, a black feminist and a Marxist organization, was the first to use and popularize the concept of identity politics and they are credited with having coined the term “identity politics.” The metaphor of the “intersection,” and “intersectional theory” (which holds that black women are doubly oppressed because they are black and female), are merely neologisms created by critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 — this is simply the same black feminist and Marxist ideology rehashed with a trendy metaphor (the intersection), not, as is often supposed, a novel and innovative postmodern theory.

Incidentally, it is worth noting that if the central claim of black feminism and intersectionality was ever correct, it certainly isn’t correct today. According to Farber and Sherry (writing in 1997), black women out-perform black men on today’s job market (meaning they are not “double oppressed”). They write: “black women who have jobs now earn as much on average as white women with jobs, and black women with college degrees actually earn more than white female college graduates. A recent study shows that black women were heavily over-represented among law teachers compared to their percentage of the lawyer population, more so than black men or white women.”[36]

Key concepts from feminism: triple oppression / intersectional theory;[37] identity politics;[38] visible minorities.[39]

The Black Radical Tradition and Affirmative Action: during and following the great migration, a time in the early and mid-1900s in which millions of blacks migrated from the South to the North, the poverty rate among black families was cut in half between 1940 and 1960. This remarkable improvement, which occurred in the space of twenty-years and which pre-dated the civil rights legislation of 1964, was the result of black Americans moving out of the segregated South and, secondly, the result of significant improvements in the quantity and quality of black educational attainment.[40] As is well known, however, these developments did not result in harmonious race relations in the US. In the early 1960s, black civil rights groups such as CORE (Congress On Race Equality) and the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) staged protests and sit-ins to agitate against what they saw as discriminatory hiring practices in northern industry, most famously against the hiring practices of the construction industry in Philadelphia. These activist groups “demanded racial quotas for city contracts and apprenticeship programs ‘to make up for years and years of exclusion of Negroes from the skilled trades.’ The group would be satisfied with nothing less than the allocation of 15 percent of construction jobs to black workers.”[41] But demands for quota-based hiring met with stiff resistance from the building trades and the trades unions and the impasse led to a series of protests which brought a halt to construction projects in the city. Clashes between protesters and counter-protestors turned violent and forced a resolution from the then sitting president, John F. Kennedy. 

The philosophically liberal position has never been in favor of racial hiring quotas and preferential treatment. The origin of the term “affirmative action” was in John F. Kennedy’s executive order No. 10, 925 which was issued in 1961 and which called on federal contractors to ‘‘take affirmative action to ensure that the applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color or national origin.’’[42] As Thomas Sowell observes, this language is a clear articulation of developed liberalism, or (what in plain language is) a colorblind race policy.[43] In similar manner, when the civil rights act of 1964 was later drafted under Kennedy’s democrat successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, the language and policy direction it required was entirely in keeping with a colorblind race policy. The civil rights act served to instantiate into law the equal opportunity of all individuals without regard for race, creed, color or national origin.

It is no coincidence that the debate about how affirmative action should work was sparked by northern building trades like the construction industry in Philadelphia. Since medieval times, guilds such as building guilds had operated on an apprenticeship system whereby a tradesman sponsored his son or other family member for entry into the trade — meaning that, since such a system continued even in early 1960s America, it would be entirely possible for incoming black populations to be effectively excluded from the building trades even without overt or intentional racial discrimination (which wasn’t legislated against in the private sector until Kennedy and Johnson in any case).[44] However, waves of black activism and protests continued in the wake of Kennedy’s executive order with the result that the chair of the House Education and Labor Committee (Adam Clayton Powell Jr. (D-N.Y.)), and Kennedy’s Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz, in June of 1963, set out new regulations which governed selection standards for building trades. These regulations: i) removed the old sponsorship system (whereby a father sponsored his son for entry); ii) required the adoption of policies and hiring process language that were actively anti-discriminatory; and iii) required companies take “any steps necessary” to “offset” the racial disparity which had resulted from (allegedly) discriminatory practices up to that date. The latter was taken by the labor unions as the implementation of a veiled quota system by the Kennedy administration.[45]

From this point, which is in fact still the very inception of the new Western policies on hiring, things only deteriorate for that version of affirmative action which is supposed to be colorblind and liberal in principle. Subsection 703(j) of the Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 specifically declared against race based preferential treatment, stating that nothing in Title VII exists “to grant preferential treatment to any individual or group on account of any imbalance which may exist.”[46] And yet Johnson, who presided over the Civil Rights Act, issued executive order No. 11, 246 which, in 1965, led to the creation of the EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission). In turn, the EEOC would immediately set about using its government mandate to pressure employers across the country to begin hiring on the basis of racial quotas (the opposite of equal employment opportunity), in part because of the pressure which civil rights groups like CORE and the NAACP had put on the EEOC to do so, in part because Alfred Bloomrosen, the head of the EEOC at the time, was already inclined to push the country to racial quotas anyway.[47] Supreme court justice Thomas Clarence criticized the “disparate impact” doctrine of the EEOC thusly: “in their quest to eradicate what they view as institutionalized discrimination, disparate impact proponents doggedly assume that a given racial disparity at an institution is a product of an institution rather than a reflection of disparities that exist outside of it.”[48]  In sum, just a few years after it was ventured as an official socio-political policy, equal opportunity had already withered on the vine.

The trajectory which hard (=quota) affirmative action would take from 1965 to the present-day diversity, equity and inclusion can only be sketched in passing here. The race riots of 1966–1968 resulted in some 290 violent outbreaks, 169 dead, seven thousand wounded, forty thousand arrested, hundreds of millions of dollars damage “nearly all of it in the black ghettos.”[49]  By the time that Nixon took office in 1968, the threat of renewed racial unrest (i.e. riots) had become a particularly strong bargaining chip used by civil rights groups (some of which, such as CORE, had become overtly black nationalist at this time). Of course, this bargaining chip with the result that, in 1969, Nixon reissued an updated “Philadelphia Plan” which definitively required the building trades in that city to hire a quota (termed a “goal”) of black workers.[50]  As Critical Race Theorist Gary Peller (in this case correctly) observes, in the late 1960s “black nationalism arguably had overtaken integrationism as the dominant ideology of racial liberation among African Americans....”[51] and it was in this context that black nationalist consciousness swept the plants in the late 1960s leading to the appearance of “black union caucuses and the development of other black workers' organizations…”[52]

It was also at this juncture that black power became institutionalized in the academy: black power leaders such as Chisholm, Carmichael, Hamilton etc. believed that black control of community institutions, especially the educational institutions, is necessary for black power.[53] Activism pre-empted the creation of black studies departments: for example, in 1968, armed black students occupied a building in San Francisco State college. Black students similarly occupied Cornell University and demanded “an autonomous all-Black college, the hiring of Black faculty and administrators, and the recruitment of poor urban students to the Ivy League university.”[54] Cornell refused the demand for racial separatism but acquiesced on the creation of a new department. Black studies (later African-American studies) departments were founded in hundreds of educational institutions across America, funded by white philanthropists but driven ideologically by black radicalism. Black studies departments provided an intellectual home for critical race theory pioneers such as Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Ian Haney-López, Richard Delgado, Gary Peller, and Cheryl Harris all of whom take Carmichael's theory of systemic racism as their fundamental presupposition. Their arguments for legal reform, for example, are made on the assumption that systemic racism shapes the US criminal justice system.[55]

Colleges and Universities have fully embraced “diversity, equity and inclusion,” terms which serve as a cipher for the illiberal hard version of affirmative action. The term “diversity” originates in a 1978 supreme court decision which ruled in favor of allowing the University of California to give preferential treatment to minority students. Four supreme court judges had voted against this proposition, four had voted in favor. The ninth judge (Justice Lewis Powell), whose decision was all important as the swing vote, forever shaped affirmative action in education by casting his vote for quotas. It was in passing over politically and racially charged rationales for his decision (such as the rationale of compensating for past discrimination), that Justice Powell arrived at the abstract argument that student bodies ought to be “diverse,” a baffling and abstract sentiment which nonetheless will forever assist university administrators in obfuscating their illiberal race policies behind a cipher.[56]

It is obvious that a very substantial part of today’s diversity ethos derives from the women’s movement which has not been discussed here. Yet, it is equally obvious that a major driver of academic diversity quotas, to include the emerging no-white-males policies (which offer preferential hiring to every applicant not a white male), is the identarian language which originated in the black radical tradition and which has contributed to the conceptual framework of the new institutional ideology: concepts like identity politics, visible minorities, systemic racism, special regulations for intersectional persons, decolonizing the campus and so on. In Canada, this same ideology is now apparent at all levels of government, for example, Trudeau’s minister of public safety has recently ordered the RCMP, Canadian Intelligence services, Correctional Services of Canada and Canadian Border Services Agency to “reduce systemic racism.”[57] It is apparent in Trudeau Jr.’s favorite phrase “diversity is our strength.”[58] In the US, according to the white house press secretary, the current administration considers it “responsible” to teach the next generation about systemic racism, and this is categorically not “indoctrination.”[59]

Wokism itself is, more than anything else, the mainstreaming and the weaponizing of the black radical tradition (even when certain of its precepts have been adopted by other identity groups and adapted to their purposes they are, on closer examination, ideologically black radical). And yet, as was borne out above, much of this ideology is drastically outmoded conceptually. It is argued here that the thinking that now drives policy has its roots in pre-emancipation black nationalism — from the black nationalist idea that black identity is the way to liberation; to the Garveyite notion that black industry must be built by blacks;[60] to the black power idea that black control of community institutions is necessary for black power;[61] to the activism of black studies departments which argues that black role models (brought about by racial quotas) are necessary for the advancement of black education (incidentally, the latter position has been absolutely controverted by empirical studies).[62]

To the philosophically liberal thinker who, like Martin Luther King, Kennedy or Johnson, believes that genuine fairness can only come from the principles of enlightened and developed individualism, race neutrality and universalism, nothing good can come from policies driven by identitarianism and an excess of race consciousness. Long ago, critical race theorist Gary Peller argued in an essay entitled Race Consciousness that “in our times” (he refers here to the year 1990), it is only the conservatives who continue to embrace the “rhetoric” of liberal universalism, i.e. who continue to see the way to fairness as removing race consciousness from laws and from institutional policies. Instead, Peller advocated for inserting policies driven by black racial consciousness.[63] What Peller was also saying, is that the “liberals” of his day side against liberal universalism, against the notion that what is fair for me is fair for you. Was he wrong? If he were substantially incorrect on this count why have the leftist institutions of today, such as the university, whole-heartedly and with apparent unanimity embraced diversity policies? To be socially “progressive” has for decades meant to favor arguments like that of critical race theorist Gary Peller, or like that of Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau. Diversity is our strength, and quotas are empowering (to some, and discriminatory against others) – liberal-minded race-neutral equality of opportunity, now that’s weak and unprincipled. 

Peller’s arguments and those of the other critical race theorists are in a sense performative, in that, like a wizard’s spell, the recitation of these arguments call into being in the public, and in public policy, those convictions which they advocate for;[64] the result, as Peller accurately maintained, is that there are few on the left today who would be prepared to controvert the importance of (black) racial consciousness in current day institutional policy. If it hadn’t seemed so before, in point of fact Ibrahim Kendi’s statement that the “only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination” is not radical — it is not radical because what he says accurately describes what has actually been mainstream Western policy for over half a century. The only thing genuinely striking about Kendi’s statement is the fact that he opted to put it in plain terms as opposed to following the standard Western convention of using nonsense ciphers like “diversity.”

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[1] The statement was made by dean Melanie Woodin on March 31st, 2022 at an event called Anti-Racist Pedagogies Roundtable, hosted by the Asian Institute at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. The above quotation was transcribed by the present author.

[2] About the policies at the University of Waterloo see: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/waterloo?fbclid=IwAR3XkERY3jhw30iQZNEXjiIYs2sNtpi6AJghz-dW8SI1ba4eSck4F64Iruk ; About the policies at the Canada Research Chair program, see: https://nationalpost.com/opinion/jamie-sarkonak-why-canadian-universities-are-refusing-to-hire-able-bodied-white-males?fbclid=IwAR3-6TDDu9uDCvhiJ76S0L9ylgEQzhJ2X53F196gUyQbZULW0XROnOh1dW8

[3] A no-white-males policy appeared at Yale in 2013. See: https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2013/06/03/a_new_way_to_purge_white_males/ See also: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-finds-yale-illegally-discriminates-against-asians-and-whites-undergraduate

[4] Kendi 2019, chapter one.

[5] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/200922/cg-a001-eng.htm with reference specifically to chart 1 https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/200922/cg-a001-eng.htm

[6] McCartney 1992, 94, 106.

[7] Thomas 1972, 47.

[8] Moses 1978, 25.

[9] Zamalin 2019, 19.

[10] Delaney 1852, 11–13; Skyers 1982, 19; Dawson (2001, 97) states that “for at least a century and a half, many blacks have argued that they belonged to a separate nation confined within the borders of the United States” (hence, that would work out to over 170 years at the time of the current author is writing).

[11] An early attestation of this idea occurs in the form of literary fiction in Delaney’s utopian novel “Blake; or the Huts of America” written in 1859. In this work, Delaney “fictionalized a global slave insurrection and Pan-African community” (Zamalin 2019, 21).

[12] Skyers 1982, 17.

[13] Moses 1978, 25.

[14] See Howe 1998, 272-276 for a discussion of Afrocentric and black supremacist notions of race. According to Howe, although something of the “sun people / ice people” dichotomy can be seen already with Garvey in the early 1900s, that particular phrasing comes from Black Studies professor Leonard Jeffries. Incidentally, Jeffries was dismissed from his position at CUNY in the early 1990s for being exceedingly racially divisive which, given the typical modus operandi of Black Studies departments, and the fact these departments are essentially the black radical tradition institutionalized, is something of feat unto itself. Another example of a melanin theorist would be Yusra Khagali, co-founder of the Toronto chapter of Black Lives Matter, who was called out by Huffpo for multiple racist statements (an unusual show of moral consistency for this newspaper): https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/james-di-fiore/black-lives-matter-toronto-yusra-khogali_b_14635896.html

[15] Skyers 1982, 14.

[16] Robinson 1983, 213.

[17] Garvey 1924, An Appeal to the Soul of White America. In this same chapter, Garvey plays upon the “liberal” sensibilities of white Americans, petitioning them to aid black America in splitting itself off from whites (missing or misrepresenting the fact that liberal philosophy is (or at least, ought to be) universalizing, the opposite of the separatist’s agenda).

[18] Rolinson 2007, 2; Robinson (1983, 214) gives a more ambiguous estimate: “hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—of Blacks were enrolled in the organization.”

[19] https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2019/04/09/race-in-america-2019/ . Critical Race Theorist Gary Peller, despite his field, is probably correct in attributing this current day disparity in race consciousness to major differences in white and black culture. In order to conform to trends which appear progressive and enlightened, current day whites must reject race nationalism and thus never develop “either a consciousness or a political practice that comprehend[s] racial identity and power as centrally formative factors in American social relations.” Conversely, a considerable faction of black Americans sees race nationalism as having “a positive and liberating role for race consciousness, as a source of community, culture, and solidarity to build upon rather than transcend" (Peller 1990, 761). It is good for black people to be that way, it is bad for white people to be that way — get it?

[20] This is evident in Martin Luther King’s autobiography. King, who disputed the merit of the term “black power,” noted most of the SNCC and CORE staff members he was in contact with had joined radical Stokely Carmichael in advocating the widespread adoption of the slogan “black power” for civil rights activities (Claybourne 2001). See also Montooth 2017, 2.

[21] Skyers 1982, 19; Dawson 2001, 97.

[22] As Skyers (1982, 62) relates, “black is beautiful” is a basic tenant of Garveyite black nationalism.

[23] As documented in a (sympathetic) report from CBC. The Garveyite convention was originally to capitalize the “N” in negro, but later black nationalists, and a portion of the left, now capitalize the “B” in black (see: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/capitalizing-black-style-1.5626669). By way of comparison, it is worth noting that generally the only people to capitalize white are white supremacists or social science ideologues complaining about “Whiteness.”

[24] The story of how “negro,” which had been a universally accepted term for black persons before 1965, became a politically incorrect term involves the activism of Queen Mother Moore (Moore was a communist and a black nationalist. Her title queen is an honorary title conferred on her by African groups). According to Moore’s wikipedia entry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_Mother_Moore), she was the co-founder of "the African American Cultural Foundation, Inc., which led the fight against the slave term 'Negro.'" In what is undoubtedly a huge irony, Moore’s original reason for taking umbridge at the term “negro” appears to have been that the communists no longer recognized black America as a separate nation within a nation (as black nationalists continued to do and as white Leninists had done for a time). This is reported by McDuffie (2011, 134): “by the end of the war, Queen Mother Moore claimed that she had become frustrated with how Communists ‘had relinquished their position . . . that we were a Nation.’ At the same time, she had an epiphany. She came to realize that the term ‘Negro’ was a white supremacist invention to mentally enslave black people.” African-American is an ideological neologism intended to represent to blacks and to everyone else that black Americans are first African and second American — the term was used by Moore and her black nationalist circles decades before it was popularized by Jesse Jackson in his 1984 presidential run (see: https://blackpolitics.org/queen-mother-audley-moore-80-years-of-activism/). Certainly not all black Americans agree with the ideology laden term “African-American,” for example, Smokey Robinson famously pointed out that negro “is just how you say ‘black’ in Spanish” (https://genius.com/Smokey-robinson-a-black-american-annotated).

[25] For a (sympathetic) discussion of how Critical Race Theory deliberately actualizes the race consciousness of black nationalists such as Malcolm X within the academy, see Peller 1990. On page 759 Peller notes: “The commitment to a race-conscious perspective by many critical race theorists is dramatic because explicit race consciousness has been considered taboo for at least fifteen years within mainstream American politics and for far longer within the particular conventions of law and legal scholarship.” By “far longer” Peller is likely intending to the civil rights act of 1866. Ideas such as those advanced by Derrick Bell, that white society is still (and will always be) racist seem inherently non-integrationist and an endorsement of the black nationalist axiom of blacks as a nation within a nation. Crenshaw’s brand of critical race theory with its emphasis on intersectional theory is simply a reiteration of the ideas of the black radical tradition (specially, black feminist theory — see below). Critical race theorists operate on the assumption that the US justice system is “systemically racist” (the latter term referring to a theory developed by black nationalist and Marxist Stokely Carmichael — see Elias and Feagin 2016, 241).  For a refutation of some of the core claims of Critical Race Theory, such as claims of racial discrimination in legal studies, or that black scholars produce distinctive or more valuable work on race matters than white scholars, see Kennedy 1989.

[26] Lenin made this statement in his Statistics and Sociology communication which is easily accessible here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/jan/00d.htm?fbclid=IwAR3K-wha11LAEGwrAuZnWywLn_XUkmfgdIYJmr_2MUSlPN7emopBhE1KSL0

[27] For the analysis that Lenin was intentionally exploiting a rift within American society in order to pursue as strategy of dividing and weakening his American enemy, one can consult the chapter “Turning Friends Against Friends” written by Timothy Murphy for HUAC (House Unamerican Activities Committee) — Murphy, Timothy. 1956. Soviet Total War, ‘Historic Mission’ of Violence and Deceit. p. 144 (see: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/012284373). For an account of Comintern (a branch of the Soviet government dedicated to spreading communism across the globe, including America) and its attempt to court black America, for example, by requiring the communist party of America to recognize black America’s right as an oppressed nation to separate from the rest of the country (a Comintern directive issued in 1928), see Klehr 1984, 324–327. Klehr also discusses how the race baiting of the communists (for a variety of reasons) never produced a significant level of black participation in the communist party of the USA.

[28] Steinmetz 2008.

[29] Naturally, those black nationalists veering too close to actual Marxism risked undermining their identity absolutism.

[30] Systemic racism is a concept widely attributed to Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton who proposed the
“theory” of institutional racism in 1967 in their book “Black Power: the Politics of Liberation in America” (the theory institutional racism is more commonly called the theory of systemic racism today). Carmichael was of course a one-time leader of the Black Panther Party, and a black nationalist as well as a Marxist. As the title of the book entails, Carmichael played a pivotal role in transforming the ideology and mode of operation of the late civil rights into black nationalist activism as indicated by he popularized: black power. He wrote in his 1967 work: “the black community was told time and again how other immigrants finally won acceptance: that is, by following the Protestant Ethic of Work and Achievement. They worked hard; therefore, they achieved. We were not told that it was by building Irish Power, Italian Power, Polish Power or Jewish Power that these groups got themselves together and operated from positions of strength." Contrast this with the statement of Martin Luther King who totally opposed the black power slogan: “No one has ever heard the Jews publicly chant a slogan of Jewish power, but they have power. Through group unity, determination and creative endeavor, they have gained it. The same thing is true of the Irish and the Italians. Neither group has used a slogan of Irish or Italian power, but they have worked hard to achieve it. This is exactly what we must do” (Claybourne 2001).

[31] The term “blackness” and the notion that one cannot understand the state of blackness without personally possessing the “lived experience” of being black, proceeds from Frantz Fanon, a pan-African and a Marxist intellectual who wrote his influential work “Black Skin, White Masks” in 1952 while living in France. Fanon’s notions of “blackness” and “lived experience” have been repeated ad nauseum in the various radicalized humanities departments, and by adherents of the black power movement (see, for example, the article The Ideology of Blackness: African-American Style, published in 1969 by Tildon Lemelle). The notion of lived experience is, of course, an affront to liberal and rational epistemology (theory of knowledge), which is universalizing and which holds that true knowledge can be known and can be communicated to anyone.

[32] For “anti-imperialism” and its Marxist root, see the discussion of black Marxism above. The more specialized term  “to decolonize”  and arose from the work of black Marxist Frantz Fanon, specifically, from his book “The Wretched of the Earth.” When Fanon uses this term he is referring to decolonizing countries which were at the time still literally under colonial rule — however, the concept of decolonization was then adopted by black power radicals who were inspired by Fanon and used “decolonization” and other Fanon concepts to agitate against America of the 1960s (for example, the concept is used by Stokely Carmichael’s black power movement). For a useful summary of the evolution of this concept see the legacy section of Fanon’s Wikipedia entry:   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frantz_Fanon

[33] McDuffie 2011, 29.  This is hardly surprising as the entire ideology of feminism, as well as the word “feminist” itself, was cooked up in the early 1800s up by one of the founders of socialism — specifically, by Charles Fourier (google Charles Fourier).

[34] McDuffie 2011, 3, 40.

[35] McDuffie 2011, 26–27, 48–49.

[36] Farber and Sherry 1997, 129–130.

[37] For the early history of this theory in black feminism when it was “triple oppression” see McDuffie 2011, 26–27, 48–49. The introduction of the intersection as a metaphor came when black feminist and critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term “intersection” in her 1989 paper entitled Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.

[38] This term and concept originates in the manifesto of the Combahee River Collective, a group which was black feminist and also Marxist (and also queer). In the manifesto, issued in 1977, they state: “This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else's oppression. In the case of Black women this is a particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at all the political movements that have preceded us that anyone is more worthy of liberation than ourselves. We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough” (see: https://americanstudies.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Keyword%20Coalition_Readings.pdf).

[39] The term “visible minority” was coined by Canadian black feminist Kaye Livingstone and is a term that only exists in Canada. For the information that Livingstone was a black feminist, one has to refer to sympathetic sources (see Mills 2015, 428). The idea behind “visible minorities” was to group all non-white Canadians together under one activist label in order that this category may more effectively lobby against the white majority. Despite that many visible minorities actually out-perform whites on the job market, this terminology and this categorization has been adopted at all levels of Canadian legal, bureaucratic and governmental practice (see: https://c2cjournal.ca/2022/02/its-time-to-abolish-the-absurd-and-slightly-racist-concept-of-visible-minorities/). 

[40] Sowell 2003, 119. As Sowell points out, all of this great reduction in black poverty came directly before the onset of affirmative action, yet, counter to the claims of affirmation action advocates, the decade of the implementation of affirmative action (the 1970s) saw a mere 1% drop in black poverty levels. As Urofsky also observes, reduction in black poverty corresponds to the development of core skills which also positively impacts poverty levels nationwide: “in the eight years between the time Kennedy took office in 1961 and Johnson left, the portion of Americans living below the poverty line dropped from 22.2 percent to 12.6 percent. Great Society programs such as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act did much to improve the quality of the nation’s poorest schools while at the same time reducing school segregation. Medicaid and Medicare, both part of the 1965 Social Security Act Amendments, extended health care to millions of poor and elderly people” (Urofsky 2020).

[41] Sugrue 2004, 163.

[42] Sowell 2003, 124. For precise wording of the executive order, an electronic copy is available at: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/executive-order-10925-establishing-the-presidents-committee-equal-employment-opportunity

[43] Sowell 2003, 124; see also Urofsky 2020.

[44] Urofsky 2020.

[45] Urofsky 2020. Sugrue (2004, 167) states that craft unions in Philadelphia, where black quota activism kicked off in earnest, had by 1963 voluntarily adopted policies of “nondiscrimination on the basis of race, creed, or color and emphasized the right of individual” in an effort to stave off the possibility of government backed quota-hiring demands of the activists.

[46] Sowell 2003, 122.

[47] Stryker 2001, 20; Uroksky 2020.

[48] Thomas 2015, 8. Perhaps not unexpectedly, Clarence Thomas is here paraphrasing Thomas Sowell (he cites Sowell 2013, Intellectuals and Race, 132).

[49] Urofsky 2020.

[50] Sugrue, 2004 171; Sowell 2003, 125.

[51] Peller 1990, 761.

[52] Thomas 1972, 50.

[53] McCartney 1992, 164.

[54] Rooks 2006, 20.

[55] Elias and Feagin 2016, 241.

[56] Sowell 2003, 115. The supreme court case involving the University of California is known as “University of California V Bakke” and a convenient summary of its history is given by slate:  https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2002/05/the-legal-fiction-of-diversity.html

[57] https://nationalpost.com/news/combat-misogyny-and-systemic-racism-canadas-public-safety-agencies-told

[58] https://pm.gc.ca/en/news/speeches/2015/11/26/diversity-canadas-strength

[59] At least, this is what then White House press secretary Jen Psaki was trying to say, in her own garbled words: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-briefings/2021/05/13/press-briefing-by-press-secretary-jen-psaki-may-13-2021/

[60] Skyers 1982, 53; Rolinson 2007, 2. Similarly, Thomas (1972, 49) states that in his day, the 1970s, “black nationalism demands complete African-American control over the eco- nomics, politics, culture, education and every other sphere of the life of black people.”

[61] McCartney 1992, 164

[62] Sowell 2003, 144 with note 65. For a refutation of the Critical Race Theory claim that black scholars produce distinctive or more valuable work on race matters than white scholars, see Kennedy 1989.

[63] Peller 1990, 762.

[64] The comment is defensible in view of the incessant way in which the arguments of critical race theorists, especially intersectionality, are regurgitated and reiterated in every social science classroom in North America, in the major grievance studies departments (black studies, women’s studies, gender studies, English literature, culture studies, post-colonialist studies, cultural anthropology, sociology, etc.).