It's probably best to begin a discussion about this topic by making it clear that one can already see the cheapening of real concern about woke-ism. Trumpists have already elbowed their way onto the stage where the national standoff is taking place. In characteristically boneheaded fashion, they have co-opted talk of critical race theory's damaging influence, at least to a degree that allows those on the dismissive left to write off concern as the unfounded fears of a bunch of yay-hoos.
That's unfortunate, because identity-politics militancy is real, pervasive and metastatic.
Examples from academe continue to proliferate:
A music theory professor at the University of North Texas published a critique of another scholar’s critical-race argument about music theory and his dean opened an investigation in the name of reaffirming “our dedication to combatting racism on campus and across all academic disciplines.” A Princeton professor of Classics came under fire for a dissenting letter against his colleagues’ racial justice demands and faced professional consequences as a result. A professor at University of North Carolina was accused of creating an “unsafe learning environment” for a pedagogical role-play exercise on social and economic justice.
Even at the at the University of Chicago, a school that has been on the forefront of free speech and civil debate and discourse with its Chicago Principles, a professor of geophysical sciences was attacked as “unsafe” for explaining his concerns about how his department was implementing diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives; he rejected the idea that in order to hire more women in science, the university needed to lower its standards. And attempted cancelation has ensued.
Mobs coming for professors have become so commonplace that this phenomenon has petrified and silenced many students as well, students who regularly report wanting to hear a diverse set of ideas but are afraid to speak up, as well as the handful who challenge woke, intolerant ideas and make national news. A tribal mentality on college campuses built around progressive calls for reform has emerged, and students and professors who push back against these leftist ideas are essentially cancelled, leaving them at risk of ostracism, intimidation and facing threats of significant consequence.
Composer Daniel Bernard Roumain has made a good career leveraging his skin color. He writes pieces with titles like “i am a white person who ____ Black people.” He argues that orchestras should “focus on BLACK artists exclusively” (capitalization in the original). He has solicited funding for a work written “EXCLUSIVELY for BIPOC [black, indigenous, and people of color] members of ANY orchestra.”
When a percussionist on Roumain’s Facebook page suggested that such a work would be divisive, Roumain told him to “speak less and try to listen and learn and understand more.” BIPOC musicians “FACE racism everyday” from their white orchestral colleagues, Roumain added. In fact, Roumain argues, white musicians’ contracts should be term-limited as reparations for “decades of benefitting from orchestral racism.”
Roumain’s racial-justice profile has earned him a seat on the boards of the League of American Orchestras and the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, as well as a faculty position at Arizona State University. He has been commissioned by Carnegie Hall and is working on film, TV, and opera scores.
He likely seemed a natural choice, then, to write a piece to commemorate the centennial of a race riot in Tulsa. That explosion of violence, from May 31, 1921, to June 1, 1921, followed a still-undetermined incident between a 19-year-old black male and a 17-year-old white female. Tulsa officials tried to protect the male from a possible lynching; armed black residents circled the jail where the teen was being held as another line of defense. Gunfire broke out around the jail, killing 10 whites and two blacks. In retaliation, white rampagers looted and set fire to hundreds of homes and businesses in the black section of Tulsa called Greenwood. Entire neighborhoods were reduced to ashes, leaving thousands homeless. A 2001 report by the Tulsa Race Riot Commission confirmed 26 black and 13 white deaths from the riots; unofficial estimates put the death toll at several hundred. Many more were wounded.
Tulsa Opera planned a concert called Greenwood Overcomes as part of the city’s riot centennial events. Eight black opera singers, accompanied on the piano by Metropolitan Opera assistant conductor Howard Watkins, would perform the works of 23 living black composers, as well as traditional songs and spirituals. Tulsa Opera commissioned four new works for the concert, the first commissions in its history.
Roumain received one of those commissions, and it was a peach: writing a short aria for mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves. Graves’s Metropolitan Opera debut as Carmen in 1995 received rousing acclaim, drawing international attention to her full-bodied vocal tone and smoldering stage presence. She would be the biggest star of the Tulsa concert; any composer would jump to have her perform his work.
Roumain titled his aria for Graves: “They Still Want to Kill Us,” referring, he explained, to “the murder of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd,” deaths that provide evidence of the “bloodlust sown deep within the American psyche.” Roumain’s titles are his calling card, into which he puts his greatest effort, he says—arguably an unusual emphasis for a composer; once he comes up with the name of a piece, the musical writing comes easily.
Roumain also wrote the aria’s lyrics, which begin with brief phrases about the rampage and end with:
They still want to kill us.
God Bless America
God Damn America.Before Roumain composed the piece, Graves had sent him possible texts as an example of what might appeal to her. This was not it. Graves baulked at the aria as written. “I don’t have trouble with strong lyrics,” she explained in a written statement. “As a Black woman I am a huge supporter of all Black Lives, Black expression, and creativity.” But the aria’s concluding words did not “line up with my personal values,” she wrote. She could not “find an honest place to express the lyrics as they were presented.”
Roumain would not even consider changing the lyrics, so the Tulsa Opera removed the piece from the lineup. All turned out well, one might say. Really? This guy caused a dustup where none was remotely called for. His dark vortex sucked light from what was otherwise a dignified yet appropriately candid response to a dark episode in Tulsa history.
What motivates a guy like Raj Patel to opine, in the pages of The Guardian, that that quintessential icon of American life, one that ranks with baseball, Mickey Mouse and Elvis Presley, actually has its roots in brutal oppression?
Resting on gingham cloth, a sugar-crusted apple pie cools on the window sill of a midwestern farmhouse. Nothing could be more American. Officially American. The Department of Defense once featured the pie in an online collection of American symbols, alongside Uncle Sam and cowboys.
Not that apples are particularly American. Apples were first domesticated in central Asia, making the journey along the Silk Road to the Mediterranean four thousand years ago. Apples traveled to the western hemisphere with Spanish colonists in the 1500s in what used to be called the Columbian Exchange, but is now better understood as a vast and ongoing genocide of Indigenous people.
He similarly goes after the sugar and the gingham mentioned in his scenario:
Not that the sugar on the crust is uniquely American. Sugar cane was first brought to the US by Jesuits in 1751, but most US sugar remained an import until the Haitian revolution. When enslaved workers seized the French colony in 1791, European capitalists sought new sugar cane fields and workers. French merchants of sugar and slavery landed in Louisiana in the late 1700s. Within 50 years, the US produced a quarter of the world’s sugar cane, and New Orleans had become a concomitant hub of the slave trade. After emancipation, the economics of sugar shifted. The American civil war pushed the frontier of sugar westward. Hawaii’s sugar plantations grew during US Reconstruction. When the Philippines was a US colony between 1898 and 1946, Filipino workers were exempted from the “Asiatic barred zone”’ to work in the US sugar plantations in Hawaii, replacing more militant Japanese labourers.
Not that the gingham on which our apple pie rests is uniquely American. Columbus recorded cotton being used and worn during his first voyage by his Indigenous hosts. The gingham pattern likely originated in south-east Asia, the word deriving from the Malay genggang, a striped cloth that arrived in Europe as Europe colonized Asia. Cotton from India became central to the British East India Company, representing three-quarters of the corporation’s exports by 1766. As Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton tells, this war capitalism enslaved and committed acts of genocide against millions of Indigenous people in North America, and millions of Africans and their descendants through the transatlantic slave trade. In the process, cotton laid the basis of finance, police and government that made the United States.
Since this is quite a lot to acknowledge, it is easier to misremember. In the drama of nationalist culture, the bloody and international origins of the apple pie are subject to a collective amnesia. In the imagining of American community, the dish is transformed into a symbol of domesticity. By 1910, it’s possible for a theatre review to celebrate a wholesome play, “as American as apple pie”.
In the world the likes of Patel envision, there is to be no convention, no pastime, no foodstuff left unexamined for its role in establishing white male capitalist tyranny.
There is no winning with these people. Theirs is the most movable goalpost in the history of the world.
Consider Robin diAngelo. She makes clear in her new book that white fragility is not merely, or even primarily, a problem among uncouth yay-hoos, but rather among her own ilk - that is to say, highly educated, culturally "sophisticated" progressives:
The worst of the worst, says Robin DiAngelo, are not those who identify as neo-Nazis or white supremacists or members of the KKK or the Aryan Brotherhood.
No: In her new book, “Nice Racism: How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm,” DiAngelo posits that white, liberal, intellectual, coastal progressives — you know, the people who used her first book, “White Fragility,” as an intellectual hairshirt — are the most bigoted, the most harmful, the greatest threat to racial equality.
As a professor of “multicultural education,” DiAngelo is credited with coining the phrase “white fragility” in 2011. Of late she’s developed this into a lucrative career — along with Ibram X. Kendi of “How to Be an Antiracist” and others — teaching white people why they’re racist. Oh, DiAngelo is white.
CEOs of multibillion-dollar multinationals force their rank-and-file to sit through her corporate scoldings ($15,000 a pop as of last summer).
As Maureen Callahan, author of the linked piece, says, blowback is happening, and from people whose credibility as responsible cultural observers is unquestioned:
Writing in the Atlantic last year, John McWhorter, the esteemed black linguist, author and Columbia professor, said that with “White Fragility,” DiAngelo “openly infantilized black people” and “simply dehumanized us.”
On NPR, McWhorter called it an “Orwellian indoctrination program” that “is racist . . . If you write a book that teaches that black people’s feelings must be stepped around to an exquisitely sensitive degree that hasn’t been required of any other human beings, you’re condescending to black people. In supposing that black people have no resilience, you are saying that black people are unusually weak. You’re saying that we are lesser . . . that’s discriminatory.”
Yes.
In the Washington Post, Carlos Lozadacalled “White Fragility” “oversimplified,” “self-serving,” and offering only “circular logic . . . nothing ever changes, because change would violate its premise.”
Medium: “A destructive book full of bad reasoning.”
Jonathan Chait (!) in New York magazine: “Kooky, harmful,” and espousing “outright racist ideas.”
Still, the insertion of the ideas of diAngelo, Ibram X. Kendi, and Ta-Nehisi Coates into America's school curriculum and corporate human-resources training materials is a done deal. Assertion of another viewpoint has to be done in reaction to it.
Which gets us back to the matter of boneheads taking expression of alarm about this to the lowest level. Any conservative who wished to heed the exhortations to enter school-board races and other local-level arenas of action would have to spend considerable energy on distinguishing himself or herself from the rabble. The yay-hoos are not equipped to tangle with leftists whose position is "you-have-no-idea-what-the-actual-definition-of-CTR-is." If the squaring-off is left to the yay-hoos, it will quickly deteriorate into sloganistic accusations that ignore the essential point to be defended: namely, that a comprehensive approach to American history is a good thing, but must be undertaken without agenda.
Does an emphasis on this aspect of the matter seem unduly preoccupied with a tangential aspect of it? I think not, for the reason that the Trumpist message to those who are non-Trumpist but alarmed about these developments is along the lines of "If-you-have-any-cojones-you-will-join-us-on-the-front-lines." They will assume the mantle of the genuinely concerned, and once again excommunicate anyone who doesn't qualify. And let us not forget the power of numbers they have within the Republican Party.
Anyone who says that identity-politics militancy is a real and toxic threat to our civilization is stating a truism. But not everyone who so posits is equipped to articulate the reason this is so and offer a constructive alternative.
The whole subject is too urgent to get wrong.
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