It's Racism. Call It That.
The long habit of treating white people as the nation's main characters has now been weaponized as a "DEI" purge. Here's why this form of racism works, and why you shouldn't let anyone push it on you.
Recently a friend lent me his copy of Barbarian Days, William Finnegan's much-admired memoir of surfing as a child in Hawaii and around the world as an adult, and I tore through it. It’s a really good book. Surfing, in my experience, is by and large a physically beautiful adventure that makes for terribly boring stories — one conversation with a surfer will confirm this for you — but Finnegan manages to use it as a device to explore his own restlessness and immaturity, the colonial gentrification that the sport brings to unsuspecting communities around the world, and the mindless commitment to repetition and danger that sends kids like him into the water dawn after dawn. But as I returned the book to my friend, I pointed out in my thank-you note two things that I disliked about Barbarian Days.
The first is that he several times makes the offhand point that in his experience no one can become a truly accomplished surfer who didn't learn as a child. Only childhood experience makes you a real surfer, he keeps insisting. As someone who hangs a great deal of my personal joy on surfing, but who took it up to ward off a depressive crash in my 20s and am just barely getting the hang of it in my 50s, I want to gently respond to this beloved sage of surfing A) careful with judging those of us who didn't share your good luck at growing up in Hawaii and B) go fuck yourself.
But the second thing I disliked about the book is the difference between passages like this…
"a quiet, bespectacled guy named Mike"
"Rich Wood…was short, aloof, a bit roly-poly, sarcastic, a year older than me"
…and this…
"two young black men in 49ers warm-up jackets were silently putting a pair of miniature remote-controlled dune buggies through their paces"
"I became a math tutor for a couple of nerdy African American girls in Pacoima"
While the author doesn't always do this — and to his enormous credit Finnegan spent years covering apartheid and other forms of institutional segregation around the world — in unthinking moments he falls into a specific white-people habit that I've been trying to shake for years. It's describing non-white people — and especially those who happen to be Black — by their racial background. White narrators like myself do it even when that racial background has absolutely nothing to do with the events of the narrative, and, worse, when we're using that racial background for effect, as in to draw a surprising contrast, playing on the negative bias we presume we share with our white audience. Too often my stories over dinner have starred This Black Guy in my class. This Nice Elderly Asian Man. This Latina Woman on the bus.
The storytelling assumption that a character is white unless explicitly described otherwise is everywhere in modern society, and while for years I thought of it as a relatively benign form of racism, one that's a side effect of the statistical experience of living in mostly white spaces more than an outright moral failing, it’s become code for a larger racist horror that is taking more ground day by day.
I had the life-changing good fortune to be hired as host and co-writer of a documentary called Hacking Your Mind, which explored the ancient, highly predictable and highly biased circuitry that governs so much of our decision-making. The thesis of the show was that instincts that once kept us alive in early tribal settings and in life-or-death quests for food and shelter are not only poorly suited to making rational choices in the modern world, they're easily and increasingly manipulated by marketers and politicians.
I call it "life-changing" because at the time, as the son of a historian of slavery and a public-health academic, I considered myself someone who had left behind any biases I once held about other races, genders, and orientations. Clearly I was too modern for that.
But it took only a few months of shooting our series to understand how wrong I'd been, and how primitive my circuitry truly is, as all our circuitry turns out to be. The conceit of the show was that I was the guinea pig, and by subjecting myself to test after test, revealing my deeply held but unconscious biases along the way, I could demonstrate to the audience that no one is above our evolutionary legacy of tribal instincts and cognitive shortcuts. And demonstrate it I did, revealing my ageism here, my sexism there, my tribalism everywhere. I learned that none of us, especially not myself, is free of bias. We all have it, it's part of the wiring. The trick is not to let it drive, and to actively acknowledge and resist it.
But the show’s lessons don’t tie off as tidily as that, because unfortunately fighting those biases is harder than we'd like, and so much of modern life happens (or seeks) to move us in the wrong direction. For me this was most dramatically demonstrated by the work of Jennifer Richeson, a psychologist at Yale whose soft-spoken manner and reluctance to go on camera belied the crackling power of her findings.
Richeson, in a 2014 paper, compared the political leanings of everyday white people with ones who'd been primed to think about the fact that they will probably fall out of the racial majority in the United States in their lifetime. The unprimed group held a predictable range of political opinions about racism, and about non-race-related political topics like climate change or fiscal policy. But the ones who'd been asked to think ahead of time about the fact that they would soon no longer be part of the largest racial group in the U.S. — well, their opinions on more or less everything leaned more conservative, even on issues that had nothing to do with race.
The paper came to be dubbed “The Trump Study” after 2016, when it became one of many explanations for the mysterious success of a presidential campaign whose central ideological platform was racist fear. (As a result it received enormous scrutiny, which in one case led to a relatively minor correction on its method, although the findings stood up just fine.)
What Richeson’s work suggested is that being in the racial majority is a form of power and comfort that provides the psychological bandwidth necessary to be considerate of people and issues beyond the warmth of your tribe’s campfire. Time and again in our show we interviewed researchers who reinforced this broad idea, that we are the most generous and principled version of ourselves with people who look like us, and easily manipulated using our fear of people who do not.
And once we got to the fact that the modern world derives money and power from exploiting these sorts of biases, the show got real dark real quick. During our last few weeks of shooting a show that we, like so many people, assumed would air during the Hillary Clinton presidency, we suddenly realized we were documenting the rise of Donald Trump and the rhetoric on which he ran, and it dawned on us that perhaps we weren’t all on a path to resisting our ancient circuitry after all.
I’ve known for a long time that white people assume, consciously or unconsciously, that they are speaking only to one another. But I have only recently watched the alarming rise of an entire rhetorical system, supercharged by social media and the propaganda of Fox News, that reinforces that assumption, and weaponizes it.
First it was the diminution of the phrase Black Lives Matter to the bloodless acronym BLM. As a reporter I have seen over and over again — and occasionally in my own work — the ways in which Black lives are discounted when covering national tragedies.
One way is in the coverage of mass shootings, which have for years been vaguely defined, and are generally only called by that name in press coverage when they include large numbers of unconnected people in workplace, recreational, or school settings. By that definition perhaps a dozen such shootings take place in the United States each year. But the newly accepted definition of a mass shooting is now any shooting in which four or more people are killed, and that brings the incidence to as many as two mass shootings per day. Now consider that gun violence disproportionately kills Black people. While only 14% of the nation is African-American, those Americans account for 60% of firearm deaths. Add in that while gun violence has been the leading cause of death for children since 2020, it’s been the leading cause of death for Black children since 2006.
This undervaluing of Black lives is also true in the case of opioid overdoses, which took the national stage when they began afflicting “good kids,” a thinly disguised racial term still in use when trying to describe the national scope of the heroin and fentanyl crisis today. It’s clear that Black lives have been deeply discounted all this time.
We needed a phrase like Black Lives Matter, but it was quickly and efficiently collapsed into a name that sounds like an intrusive political party or a hated government branch. Now we’re seeing it again with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, collapsed into the much more unpleasant-sounding acronym DEI. But this time it’s not a rejection of the idea of structural racism, as the anti-BLM rhetoric was. Now it’s out-and-out racism, a just barely disguised denouncement of anyone in a job that isn’t white. And it’s being deployed without hesitation, in even the most inappropriate circumstances. President Trump and his Vice President baselessly blamed diversity policies at the FAA for the death of 67 people in a plane crash last week (while filling his cabinet with deeply unqualified hires, and after firing top safety officials at the agency).
It would be a laughable form of racist bullshit, idiocy thinly disguised, if it weren’t being used as a sweeping pretext for everything from freezing federal health and science communications to abandoning all federal efforts at pursuing environmental justice, and if it weren’t becoming a standard talking point of hundreds of elected and appointed officials. And that’s why it’s critical to keep calling it racism. When an official mentions a “diversity hire,” boo the screen if the interviewer doesn’t cut in to ask that official whether he means only straight white men could possibly be qualified for the job. Don’t stop, until every use of it to demean non-white people is an embarrassment to the speaker.
Jennifer Richeson, meanwhile, has more to teach us about what’s going on with this sort of racist panic. Since her 2014 paper she’s continued to publish on the topic, and in 2022 she released a new paper that showed that the effects she’d found in white voters were still there, but were now split along ideological lines. These days, if you’re a progressive, your tendency to panic and lean conservative when you hear about your own racial disenfranchisement has faded — you’re more likely to hold your ground. But if you’re a conservative, you’re even more likely to lean into those beliefs once your racial power is threatened. Something is going on with our political and informational ecosystem that is deepening the polarization between those two groups. Perhaps the good news is that progressives are seeing beyond their ethnic identities in ways that make them less susceptible to race-baiting. But the bad news is that as thin as Trump’s ad-hoc racism may seem, it’s that much more likely to animate many of his voters, and the habit of pushing non-white people out of the story will, at least in the short term, be a matter of policy.