Scrapping the Color Code

Even as the murder of George Floyd unleashed a deluge of declamations about white supremacy, wokeness, critical race theory, and other American racial obsessions, a hard-won feeling of “been there, done that” kept me from jumping in. “It’s difficult to say anything about race that hasn’t been said before; difficult to say anything that isn’t at least half true; and still more difficult to mean whatever one does say amid the fog of half-truths and euphemisms enveloping the subject,” I told an interviewer for the Atlantic in 1997, the year I published Liberal Racism: How Fixating on Race Subverts the American Dream. The book’s title was partly an effort to cut through that fog and find a clearer, broader understanding of what I believe is our American destiny to transcend race as we know it. Liberal Racism is only partly an indictment of liberals. It’s also a protest against making racial identity a central organizing principle of our public life. The new U.S. Census strongly suggests that there’s no longer a civic-cultural norm in “whiteness” but also that no official racial color-coding can tell us who “we” are.

I developed that conviction after 1977, when I put a new Harvard doctorate in my back pocket and left Cambridge for five years in central Brooklyn, where I was the only white tenant in an eight-unit walk-up and wrote for inner-city weeklies, the Village Voice, and Dissent. Working and living with African Americans who held some power over my prospects boiled out a Cambridge lefty’s racial romanticism and left deeper interracial affinities and bonds, as I recount in The Closest of Strangers (1999). I explained why some well-intentioned “progressive” notions about race are wrong, if not indeed racist. I learned that my own aspirations to an American, civic-republican identity were shared pretty deeply by Black neighbors and co-workers who feel diminished by over-solicitous liberal (and ideological leftist) stereotyping almost as much as by the conservative racism that is the prime evil. Progressives who resist acknowledging this were surprised this year when many Black New York Democratic voters chose Eric Adams, a former police officer and centrist politician, over a more “woke” Black candidate as their party’s mayoral nominee, as New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall reported.

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