The racialist creed doesn't add up. William Voegeli writes:
Two of 2020’s best-sellers were published in 2018 and 2019, respectively: White Fragility, by Robin DiAngelo, and How to Be an Antiracist, by Ibram X. Kendi. (DiAngelo, a consultant, is white; Kendi, a professor who recently left American University for Boston University, is black.) It’s strange for books to achieve their greatest commercial success a year or more after publication, but this year’s circumstances are even stranger. In America’s reckoning over race, catalyzed by George Floyd’s death while under arrest in Minneapolis, journalists, entertainers, professional athletes, and corporations have embraced a social justice dogma. DiAngelo and Kendi’s books provide many of its core principles, which distinguish acceptable thoughts and attitudes about race from unacceptable ones. The resulting framework’s first attribute is an unwavering focus on socioeconomic disparities that leave black Americans worse off than whites. Racial inequalities, as Reuters reports, “have proven immune to decades of laws and policies meant to address them.”
As a result, blacks have “less education, less wealth, poorer health and shorter lifespans.” White adults, for example, are significantly more likely than blacks to have a four-year college degree. (Actually, blacks have made impressive progress in educational attainment. From 1995 to 2018, the proportion of black Americans over 25 years of age who had earned at least a bachelor’s degree nearly doubled, from 13.3% to 25.6%. Only because whites are getting more education, too—38.8% of white adults had bachelor’s degrees in 2018, compared to 25.4% in 1995—does this particular black-white gap persist. If closing it is of the highest urgency, then the crucial need is for white “allies” to stop sending their own kids to college.)
[William Voegeli, "The Bigotry of Social Justice,” The American Mind, September 14]
