How do you turn racist comments by Latinx members of the LA City Council into an attack on me? Ask @nytdavidbrooks who in his recent column misrepresented my scholarship, which the @nytimes routinely allows its columnists to do.
This is what happens when accuracy is nothing. 1/
This is what happens when accuracy is nothing. 1/
.@nytdavidbrooks claims there are two sides of "a long-running debate in this country over how to think about racial categories.” He claims that one of these sides is “often associated” with me, which was news to, well, me. 2/
The side he falsely claims is “often associated” with me, sees: “American society as a conflict between oppressor and oppressed groups. They center race and race consciousness when talking about a person’s identity.” He also uses a quote out of its fuller, explanatory contest. 3/
If Brooks knew my work, then he'd know I've rejected the worldview “about a zero-sum war of group against group.” I show how racist policies/practices harm people of all races (at different levels). I speak about the problem being racist power/policy; not that other group. 4/
Brooks stresses the importance of “emphasizing how complex each person’s identity is –that it includes race but so many other things, too.” In How to Be an Antiracist, I emphasized this complexity with chapters on ethnicity, culture, skin color, class, gender, and sexuality. 5/
Brooks claims I push “racial essentialist categories,” when in fact I spend a chapter in How to Be an Antiracist proving why we should *not* essentialize the races. I write about in How to Raise an Antiracist how we can actively protect our children from essentializing race. 6/
Brooks is either ignorant about my scholarship or lying about my scholarship. Which one is it @nytdavidbrooks? 7/
After misrepresenting my work as essentializing race, Brook claims “the other side” argues that “racial categorization itself can be the problem. The concept of systemic racism is built upon crude racial categorization.” This is the “side” that apparently Brooks supports. 8/
Instead of 2 sides, I have found that there have been 3 sides to the debate throughout American history. 1) Those essentializing race and who are now driving the US into oblivion by convincing White Americans they're being replaced, and they need to make America White again. 9/
2) Those who colorblind theorists who believe “crude racial categorization” built racism and thus we must stop categorizing by race. 3) Those like me who document how racism built “crude racial categorization” and thus we must deconstruct racism and construct anew. 10/
In Stamped, I document how as racist policies emerged and changed, racist ideas emerged and changed to justify them, and as thinkers made and remade racist ideas, they made and remade racial categories. My scholarship is there if Brooks reads books instead of talking points. 11/
The paradox of his column isn’t lost on me. A situation when a Black child was crudely characterized is being used by Brooks to falsely characterize a Black scholar. *This* is a “a way of talking too readily accepted in this society.” Ironically, Brooks’s closing words. 12/12
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