The Perils of a Psychological Approach to Anti-racism
Update: After publication, I was contacted by Shaya Tayefe Mohajer, who attended the JAWS conference as a 2018 Betsy Wade Legacy Fund fellow. She alerted me to two letters published by JAWS fellows: an initial letter of complaint and a response to the JAWS apology letter. Both documents give an account of the JAWS conference and the ensuing controversy from their perspective.
The latter document states, in part, “our carefully sourced allegations found false equivocation in vague, unattributed claims. We named names to the board, and expected those who apologized would name themselves publicly. Instead, the response from the JAWS board appears to speak for a vague and apparently elite class of JAWS membership that secretly felt aggrieved but is staying off record.” Their response makes clear their belief that the JAWS apology letter is an unreliable account of what happened at the conference. The quotes in my article thus repeat JAWS claims that JAWS fellows themselves contest. Among other things, the fellows assert that they never received some of the apologies that the letter claimed were offered.
In a recent essay, my colleague John McWhorter argued that the current social-justice paradigm is a dead end—fighting racism and sexism are still necessary, he wrote, but the left went astray when it stopped focusing on the sociological project of changing laws and social structures.
Today’s left is too focused on psychology, McWhorter argued, as if injustice and inequity are best opposed by calling out problematic language or getting white people to acknowledge their privilege. As he sees it, those modes do little to help people while tending toward “defeatism, hypersensitivity, oversimplification, and even a degree of performance.”
He grants that bias remains in American life and acknowledges the good intentions of those trying to vanquish it. But the culture of shaming that activists have created has morphed “from a pragmatic mission to change minds,” he writes, into “a witch hunt driven by the personal benefits of virtue signaling, obsessed with unconscious and subconscious bias.” He urges activists to continue their fight, but with less quasi-religious fervor and a renewed focus on sociology rather than psychology.
The essay struck me as powerfully argued. Still, I thought that Jamelle Bouie, then of Slate and now at The New York Times, issued a fair challenge: The essay “confidently asserts that the contemporary left sees the battle against racism in psychological terms,” he wrote on Twitter, “while never quoting or engaging with anyone identified with the contemporary left.”
If the phenomenon McWhorter described is real, we should be able to find leftists who intend to fight bias
