Thread by @tzimmer_history

From the reactions we’ve witnessed since the VA election, it’s clear that there are a lot of White folks out there who consider themselves Democrats/Liberals and are all too willing to go along with scapegoating and demonizing Black intellectuals if it promises electoral success.

I want to reflect in detail on a reaction that I have personally gotten to the tweet below. I believe it is emblematic of a widespread - and rapidly spreading - attitude among White Liberals and seems to be quickly gaining the upper hand (again) within the Democratic Party.

https://twitter.com/tzimmer_history/status/1456301538377351176

Here is the reply I would like to dissect. It is from someone with a fairly big Twitter following, someone I’m sure won’t be happy about being called out (I have purposefully blacked out all individual information as I want neither abuse nor attention coming their way).

This general attitude is not only emblematic of many reactions I have gotten - more importantly, I believe it shows how certain ideas of “popularism” and the anti-“CRT” panic are intersecting and animating a counter-mobilization among liberals against racial justice.

Let’s start with the idea of “denouncing the CRT crowd.” Who, exactly, are we talking about? The response was prompted by my critique of the claim that Democrats should simply “disavow” Robin DiAngelo or Ibram Kendi.

Kendi, in particular, has become the Right’s preferred bogeyman: He’s the one name every rightwinger brings up – and quite often the only concrete example they offer, as if he were the White House’s official Czar of Making White People Hate Themselves.

However you want to classify Kendi’s work, simply putting him in a basket labeled “CRT crowd” is misleading. As an academic body of thought, Critical Race Theory emerged in the late 70s / early 80s – Kendi was born in 1982, I think, and he’s a historian, not a legal theorist.

But, of course, that’s exactly what is so revealing about the “CRT crowd” remark: It’s evidence of how far the rightwing moral panic has already spread, how self-proclaimed Liberals have already accepted and adopted the bad-faith terms set by the anti-“CRT” crusaders.

The whole point about the anti-“CRT” campaign is, as Christopher Rufo has been eagerly telling us, to lump every critical perspective on racism in America’s past and present together under a “scary” term so that it can be attacked, demonized, and de-legitimized.

https://twitter.com/johnshuntington/status/1455216424415375363

So, yeah, under that definition of “Critical Race Theory”, Kendi fits. And Liberals are running with it, all too willing to oblige and help spread the bad-faith moral panic, allowing rightwingers to set the terms of debate.

Let’s talk about the idea of “denouncing” CRT next. What this self-proclaimed Democrat is casually throwing out there is to demonize some of the most prominent, most important, most well-respected Black scholars and academics of the past 40 years or so. Remarkable!

The underlying assumption, of course, seems to be that these Critical Race Theorists *deserve* to be “denounced” – that there must indeed be something wrong, something radical, something dangerous about their work and their theories.

And again, these are exactly the tenets of the rightwing moral panic, and this ostensibly “liberal” position is distinguishable from that perhaps in tone, but hardly in substance, and not at all in effect.

Let’s turn to the way “popularism” interjects and shapes this “liberal” thinking: If David Shor tells us to denounce Black intellectuals, we should denounce them. This is, to be fair, not what Shor advocates – but I’d argue it’s a predictable and logical adaptation of Shorism.

What Shor argues explicitly is that Democrats should de-emphasize issues that aren’t popular, and focus on issues that poll well – specifically with White moderates and rural White conservatives whose votes are privileged due to the distortions of the political system.

In a vacuum, “popularism” may sound like a common-sense approach. But American politics is not conducted in a vacuum. It is, for instance, conducted in an environment in which, as @lionel_trolling points out, conservatives consistently set the terms of debate in matters of race.

https://twitter.com/lionel_trolling/status/1456240529453293573

The perspective on “popularism” changes if we analyze who is making those claims, why they are attractive to certain people, who / whose interests and demands they are directed against, who benefits from Shorism becoming the Democratic Party paradigm, and who is hurt by that.

Again, David Shor advocates *not emphasizing racial justice issues because they are unpopular with White folks* - but it’s well within the logic of the Popularist Persuasion to go from there to “How about we actively denounce racial justice?”

The underlying worldview is that Democrats need to focus on the sensibilities of White moderates / conservatives (in swing states!) – “in our messaging,” the popularists say… well, “denouncing Black intellectuals” is an example of why there is no such thing as “just messaging.”

It seems to me that a very thin line separates “Don’t talk about race stuff because White people don’t like it” from “Simply not talking about race stuff isn’t enough, we need to actively denounce it, because it is so unpopular.”

Where is the limit of the popularist paradigm? Is there a minimum level of racial justice to which Democrats need to be committed, even if it’s extremely unpopular with White conservatives? Is there a line of white grievance appeasement Democrats shouldn’t cross?

If there is a line, the person who sent this reply obviously doesn’t think “denouncing the CRT crowd” is crossing it – and that’s a position that has rapidly become normalized among at least the Very Serious Punditry of the liberal center, the Mounks and the Yglesiases.

At the very least, Shorism puts the agency firmly in the hands of the Right and its powerful propaganda machine – the rise of the “Popularist” Persuasion and the rightwing anti-“woke” / anti-“CRT” panic are now conspiring to set the cause of racial justice back significantly.

For anyone who cares about racial justice, and about America hopefully becoming a truly functioning multiracial, pluralistic democracy, this development – while not all that surprising, of course – is disheartening and, honestly, quite terrifying.

Addendum: This is such an important point on how many “moderates” who initially pretended to be on board with “popularism” purely for tactical reasons have already arrived at more or less openly declaring that racial justice has gone too far - the White elite has had enough.

https://twitter.com/ben_alpers/status/1457776885572648973

“and Kendi isn’t an intellectual.”

Perfect. From someone whose timeline is all Yglesias, Friedersdorf, Chait. Well then.

https://twitter.com/thefuzzybastard/status/1458108602191855622