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As I have pointed out many times, Yglesias’s colorblindness politeness norms for white liberals will inevitably come crashing against the rocks, as they always do, the second that BIPOCs refuse to get with the program. All of this handwringing about how to execute a delicate social dance to obfuscate universally-understood truths, and it’s all taking place without the input, and without the buy-in, of the core group being spoken about.
“Alright, Nikole Hannah-Jones. I and the other white liberals have had a long conversation, and we’ve decided that talking about race is no longer acceptable.”
“Fuck you, honky.”
These social taboos have only ever gone in one direction. They’re a unilateral surrender by non-blacks. What mechanism does Matt Yglesias have with which to enforce his preferred taboos on black people? Black people, writ large, are not going to stop seeing themselves as a distinct group with an inherently fraught cultural relationship with White America! They’re not going to stop noticing disparities, nor are they going to stop thinking about the reasons for these disparities! And no white liberal, least of all Matt Yglesias, has ever demonstrated that they have any clout within the black community to even begin to promulgate any “colorblind” norms among them.
It’s not as if white liberals don’t know how black people think about them. White liberals obsessed about the film Get Out, which is a raw expression of the psychodrama blacks experience around white liberals and their labyrinth of strained politeness norms around race, which blacks see as hostile and profoundly dishonest.
Yet Matt believes that by writing Substack posts, he’ll not only be able to get white people to recommit to not thinking too hard about race, but that he’ll get black people to make that same commitment? It’s delusional.
Hmm ouch. Yeah, I agree that the ethnic identity and in-group loyalty is the largest hurdle to moving towards an alternative and Matt can't create any orders that to dismantle that. He isn't going to change anything by telling NHJ to stfu. But, NHJ is probably more famous among white liberals than black people anyway. So, step one: don't manufacture more NHJ's. It's okay to not indulge in NHJ's and Kendi's. They're wrong, unserious, and worsen race relations. White liberals can accept it in that order. Changing this perception is something even if it isn't an overhaul.
The disparities aren't going away and because of this we can't achieve a colorblind wonderland. We can work towards something closer to it though. Instead of manufacturing a Kendi as the prototypical black intellectual they could elevate some sort new form. A Glenn Loury/Coleman Hughes/Pastor hybrid rather than indulging in the Uncle Tom othering. They don't need to be conservative, in fact they can't be seen as conservative for awhile, but there are potentially new types of black identity that could be constructed as the Black Thinker. The next Rev. Al Sharpton can resonate, but not incite because we see where that's gotten us. Turn the knob a few notches a decade at a time.
If Matt can provide white liberals a different program that is not inconsequential. Even if white liberals are hopelessly disconnected from actual, real black people and only expose themselves to the black professorate. If the program helps fade disparity of outcomes equity stuff, nudging it a little further back, then that could be a substantial improvement for degrees of colorblindness given what I've lived through. There have been taboos regarding black people that haven't always advantaged them, but I know what you're saying.
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