Thread by @whstancil

As I have suggested many times, the core belief motivating a lot of white peoples’ exhaustion with “race issues” is the idea that race is a parochial topic that affects nonwhite people but is basically a subset of a more universal, more fundamental politics (often economic).

This belief underlies a lot of political choices of white people. I am convinced it is a large part of the appeal of old-style socialism to young men, since that worldview promises to subordinate confusing race talk to a simple, class-based universality.

White people often find it very hard to resist minimizing the role of race or talk of race. It’s an intellectual knot that is difficult or impossible to fully untangle and it’s hard to resist ideas that promise to cut right through it.

The problem is, race is incredibly deeply embedded in our society, our economy, and virtually all of our social relations. Yes, that includes you, fancy liberal commentators with sinecures. I assure you that your interactions with peers and colleagues are heavily colored by race.

The hunt for “race-neutral” frames satisfies the psychological need of white people to cut through the messy tangle of race, but at the cost of accuracy. Most major American political issues, if discussed accurately, would have a significant racial dimension.

Does that mean every political discussion must be first and foremost about race? No, of course not. Does that mean that there are never countervailing political concerns about centering race? No, of course not.

But there is an instinct among many white writers - maybe most! - that bringing race into a policy discussion is an artificial framing. That instinct is wrong, and backwards. Instead, what’s usually true is, when you ignore race, you are artificially flattening the topic.

And when you flatten political rhetoric by omitting race, you are doing so by pushing aside the perspective of the many, many Americans who are not white - Americans, it should be noted, who make up a hugely disproportionate share of the Democratic Party! That’s a real problem!

Of course it’s impossible to say, in the abstract, what the ideal rhetorical balance of “race framing” is on any given topic, especially given it may differ between different settings and speakers.

But we really do need to be wary of white people arguing in favor of minimizing racial frames.

It’s very easy for that to seem like an obvious choice to white people, since it’s their lives who are getting simplified, through the obliteration of other peoples’ perspectives.

The problem gets worse, too, when these ideas are mostly being discussed among white people. One person proposes minimizing race and everyone else agrees it seems very logical. Since they don’t see their perspective as racialized they don’t see that it’s like agreeing with like.

Even if a few people of color are participating, what are they supposed to say? If they insist on framing things around race, it’s more evidence for white people that race is parochial. E.g., “Of course the black writer always writes about race, but we write about economics.”

And finally, there's a risk, if people indulge too much in this kind of thinking, that the desire to minimize race can cohere from a kind of base-level instinct for white people, into a coherent, overt political commitment - one that with obvious appeal to other white people.

I firmly believe we're seeing this in segments of the left-of-center commentariat right now. What's changed isn't the underlying urge to minimize race, but that intellectual frameworks are being developed that allow white people to more easily indulge in that instinct.

Think about it: how much more difficult would it have been, a year or two ago, for someone left-leaning to say "Democrats should talk less about race" and leave it at that? It would be a controversial position, one that would have to be defended very robustly.

But now, it's the kind of thing that you can say, and not only is it significantly less controversial, but lots of liberal white people will jump in to nod in agreement. There's a real change here; certain ideas have been developed to make a lot more space for this viewpoint.

The problem isn't that this view is always wrong.

The problem is that aligns neatly with the prerogatives of white people, while running roughshod over the more complicated questions facing people of color, whose political considerations include the right to be seen and heard.

Anyway, I don't have a substack, so you get a bunch of tweets. But it's just really really important to be careful about espousing political ideas that primarily burden other people. The end.