The New Religion of Anti-Racism

Resource: Making Sense Podcast with Sam Harris - Episode 217: The New Religion of Anti-Racism

I have been on a bit of a hiatus as in the past few weeks, I have moved across the country and started a new job. It has been a bit overwhelming, and this blog has fallen to the backburner. As I get ready to start the second week of my new job, I am finding how to best add this back into my new routines. I don’t think I’ll be posting as often as I was while unemployed, but I think I’m going to shoot for 2-3 posts a week.

I am part of a “White Fragility” (as in the book by Robin diAngelo) discussion group online, and someone posted this podcast link to discuss. It is an episode of the podcast “Making Sense: by Sam Harris in which he interviews James McWhorter. They discuss this sort of new anti-racism movement in which the “wokeness” is referred to as a cult or religion. Both men are academics, and to be quite honest, much of the information presented went over my head, but there were several things I took away from it (I won’t summarize the whole episode here because I don’t think I can do a great job). The first was that these men were denouncing the unrelenting focus in society on anti-racism as a religion/cult, and criticized it for being too narrow-minding in complex issues that they say revolve around more than race and for most of the movement focusing on performative allyship (my words, not theirs) and being woke without taking any actions that actually benefit Black folks. They denounced systemic racism, but then went on to describe things impacting people of color that I would call systemic racism, so maybe that’s more a matter of semantics.

My reflection after listening: I listened to the Spotify shortened version, so I missed the end of the podcast. Not really being an academic, there was a lot of this that went over my head. As a white person who has been working on learning about my privileges as a white person and an educator who strives for anti-racist instruction and curriculum in my practice, I feel a little unsettled (I'm not sure if that's the best word) by the idea of "being brainwashed" into these ideas. I feel like I don't have a good pulse of the BLM/progressive movement as a whole, in terms of how much of it is performative vs taking action. (And overall haven’t heard about what BLM as an organization is doing outside of protests). In my own personal life, I try to back up my opinions/beliefs with actions, and I would say that a lot of the people I work closely with are doing the same. I agree that the sort of blind support for something like BLM without action of some sort (I guess that might be virtue signaling) doesn’t lead to meaningful changes, and it can be really easy to hide behind “being woke” without actually doing anything meaningful. It seems like a lot of people are supporting the movement superficially because it’s the thing to do (exacerbated by seeing others do the same on social media). I don’t think white folks recognizing privilege and the sort of awareness around race is inherently bad, but I think that just recognizing it and seeing that as “good enough” or “checking off a box” and not doing anything to impact real change (whether that’s pushing their work place for more equitable hiring practices or voting for folks who can make broad changes) is just as bad if not worse than being ignorant of it. I agree with the idea in the podcast that white folks learning about privilege doesn’t lead to action, but I don’t really think that action could happen without that awareness. Even though they denounced (I think) the idea of systemic racism, the way they talked about addressing the root of the issue (in this case they focused on the war on drugs) does address systemic racism (at least how I think of it). The academic nature of this podcast and the approach to these topics makes me feel like they were minimizing the realities faced by folks. As a white person, it’s easy for me to fall into the “well let’s look at the data or statistics with logic about how bad this actually is.” But when I think about my experiences as a woman in a male-dominated field and the sort of low-level discrimination or unease that I sometimes feel isn’t something that can be captured by data, I remember that not all situations can be captured by the sorts of data we collect and base logic off of. That’s not to compare my experience as a white woman to the experience to folks of color, but it made me think about how by and large it seems like peoples’ individual experiences aren’t valued as evidence or data, even though these similar experiences keep popping up.

One thing that surprised me was the idea of lowering standards as a way to fight racism. The example in this episode was someone (I think a professor) saying that it is racist to expect black folks to be mathematically competent (paraphrased) which I interpreted as “the bar needs to be lowered in order to increase diversity in STEM fields.” In other words, in order to get folks of color to be more represented in STEM fields, the standards and knowledge that these folks need to be lowered. This is something that I’m not well-versed on, but in the ways that I have seen in making STEM more equitable is recognizing that while western science (which we teach in schools) is one way of doing science, there are other ways of doing science (like Indigenous science). When Harris and McWhorter were denouncing STEM as being racist, I’m not sure what they were referring to, but it made me think about what is happening out there that I’m not aware of.

I’m going to end it here. It doesn’t feel entirely coherent, but this space is really a place and way for me to reflect to connect information in my brain I know that there is a lot more I could reflect on in this episode, and I bet if I took another listen, I would be able to understand more than I did in the first listen. Starting up the blog again has been hard, even after just a few weeks away from it, but writing this post has made me a lot more motivated to continue. So here’s to more learning!