Are All White People Racist?
Today I’ll share a letter I wrote to a colleague and participant in my Cultural Intelligence course, Vince Horn, host of a popular podcast, Buddhist Geeks. A month ago, I appeared on the podcast, which inspired Vince to take my course. An assigned essay, Culture vs Race: A Polemical Take, a longer, more refined version of a blog post first seen here several months ago, prompted an email response from Vince, which, to me, was so intriguing and full of possibility for fruitful dialogue that we decided to make our exchange public. The theme of the exchange is: Are All White People Automatically Racist? You can discover my answer and read the entire exchange here.
Below, in media res, is the last letter, which I posted just yesterday. In it, I comment on the high stakes of the current presidential election, critique the social hegemony of anti-racist ideology, and bring to light an alternative: a Black American lineage—the blues idiom wisdom tradition—that undergirds my work as a leader and intellectual. Intellectual activity invariably involves ideas; activity implies action. Together, ideas and action will continue to change the world. If wisdom guides both the ideas and their enactment, the change to the other side of this global phase shift can be for the better.
I urge you to read the letter below in the spirit of democratic dialogue. That spirit and that process, enacted wisely, has the potential to elevate and evolve the course of the discourse over race in the United States.
Vince,
Regarding your wariness “of weighting anti-racist critiques too heavily,” yes, there are deep threats to the civic culture of the nation aside from wokeism and anti-racist ideology. Although as a radical moderate I’m neither Democrat nor Republican, I see the current Oval Office administration as an existential threat.
Yet, as I've mentioned, the Intellectual Dark Web (IDW) has valid critiques, whether they derive from “white defensiveness” or not. I ain’t white or defensive, yet I agree with them. My issue with the IDW is their seeming unwillingness to dialogue with the best, most reasonable, representatives of the positions they critique. Sam Harris, a meditating atheist, debated Deepak Chopra a decade ago about consciousness. In July, Bret Weinstein’s DarkHorse podcast featured a marvelous roundtable discussion among black intellectuals from the center to the right of the political spectrum.
So why won't they engage in dialogue with law professor Kimberle Crenshaw, a major theorist of intersectionality? Why not debate Alicia Garza, a co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, now promoting her book, The Purpose of Power? How about inviting Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose work in The Atlantic and best-seller Between the World and Me is an intellectual foundation for this most-recent phase of activism, for a conversation?
I have critiques of each of the above, but I’m also willing to engage in democratic dialogue with them. My own issue with anti-racism is its hegemony over the discourse of race, power, and inequality on the left, in academia and liberal media, and across organizations in many fields. I dislike how they ride roughshod over other positions dedicated to many of the same goals, but which approach those worthy objectives with a wiser, more soulful, even compassionate touch.
Blues Idiom Lineage
My lineage, alluded to in my previous letters and the essay that prompted this exchange, is an example of such an approach. That lineage includes Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Anna Julia Cooper from the 19th century; W.E.B. DuBois, Alain Locke, Jean Toomer and Zora Neale Hurston from the early 20th century through mid-century; Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray, and Romare Bearden from mid-century through the late 20th, as well as jazz great Wynton Marsalis, novelist Charles Johnson, cultural critic Stanley Crouch, autobiographical author Thomas Chatterton Williams, and political philosopher Danielle Allen of Harvard.
This lineage, which encompasses the pragmatist pluralism and rooted cosmopolitanism mentioned in my second letter, I deem the blues idiom wisdom tradition. Rooted cosmopolitanism allows for traditional group identification with simultaneous embrace of worldcentric values.
Let’s dive into pragmatist pluralism. This philosophical stance derives from American pragmatism—via William James and John Dewey—in which identity is not stable and unchanging. Identity is formed, enacted, in action. Du Bois, for instance, enacted pragmatism with Boasian anthropology to fight white supremacy.
Even though culture is my master key concept, I emphasize pragmatist pluralism over "cultural pluralism." Cultural pluralism, as proposed by Horace Kallen, became a foundation of postmodern “multiculturalism,” in which a mosaic of cultures, ethnicities, and religious groups are viewed as unchanging wholes whose solidarity is intrinsically valuable. Kallen was a student of William James, but his understandable turn-of-the-century goal, via “cultural pluralism,” of more tolerance for immigrants within the fabric of U.S. society, demonstrated that he wasn’t a good a student of James’ pragmatism. W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Locke (the first American Negro Rhodes Scholar, in 1907) better assimilated James’ teachings.
Kallen’s cultural pluralism, which he coined as a term in 1915, became a basis for what today we call identity politics.
Horace Kallen and Alain Locke
Kallen and Locke—famous as the “father” of the Harlem Renaissance—disagreed about the correct way to interpret James’ Hibbert Lectures at Oxford in 1908, published as A Pluralistic Universe. In 1905, when Locke and Kallen met at Harvard, Locke declared that “I am a human being” and that his “color ought not make a difference . . . We are all alike Americans.”
Kallen disagreed, telling him that race "had to make a difference and it had to be accepted and respected and enjoyed for what it was.” [Emphasis added]. As literary scholar Ross Posnock writes in his marvelous Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual:
Adamant that Locke must organize his life around race, Kallen converted ‘the right to be different’ into a command, thus imprinting on pluralism an element of coercion that has remained indelible in its contemporary incarnation as multiculturalism. The note of bullying paternalism in Kallen’s attitude toward Locke makes vivid how a ‘dictatorship of virtue’ brought cultural pluralism into being.
—Ross Posnock
Alain Locke
Locke, on the other hand, developed a philosophy of democratic cosmopolitanism in which “culture goods” are shared through reciprocity rather than proprietary ownership. His conception profoundly influenced Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, who developed Locke’s James-derived pragmatist pluralism into a full-fledged perspective of rooted cosmopolitanism which Murray called the blues idiom.
In case you wonder why this branch of American pragmatism isn’t better known, race may be a small factor. But a larger and more crucial reason is the following explanation from Posnock’s first chapter ("After Identity Politics”):
Refusing the paradigm of identity/difference, pragmatist pluralism escapes the circular logic of cultural pluralism: becoming a mirror image of what it set out to repudiate–racialist, nativist thinking. These alleged enemies both fetishize difference. This is the one reason pragmatist pluralism has remained marginal: both right and left, nativists and cultural pluralists (now multiculturalists) make culture a matter of blood inheritance, of ownership (‘ours’), rather than something achieved, such as citizenship.
This brief overview, Vince, shows the power of ideas as influences on human action, over time. The ideas we take action on today may well determine our future course. Let’s choose wisely.