The Ballad of Daryl Davis
What REAL Anti-racism Looks Like
I probably disagree with anyone who now identifies himself as ‘anti-racist’ on many, many things. Yet there are definitely areas of agreement. For instance: racism is a wrong-headed and malevolent force. Also, the American South was saturated with white supremacy until the 1960’s and there are still traces of those ideas and that history today. I think we could find common ground on those areas.
Anti-racists rarely talk about racism in terms of specific acts and words and ideas (unless they’re creating another racism hoax on a college campus or trying to cancel a public figure) because the idea of racism as something that is expressed through individual worldviews and actions isn’t useful to them. They’re not really trying to re-educate people or improve lives for black citizens. They’re trying to control institutions. As the seminal defining work of CRT (‘Critical Race Theory: An Introduction’) states: “CRT questions the very foundation of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law". CRT is anti-racism’s academic cousin, slightly upstream and more theoretical but drawing water from the same intellectual fountain in every respect. The fact that every great civil right leader and black reformer until 1960 was a proud PROPONENT of the liberal order and was struggling to achieve an equal place within it for his people is a glaring contradiction rarely acknowledged by the modern Left. The idols of the anti-racist are not King or Douglass or Powell.. they are Crenshaw and Marx and Delgado and Marcuse. What do we notice about the first list of names? Well, they lived when America was stewing in its racist depths. Also, they dedicated their lives to actively improving the lives of black folks, through organizing and sacrifice and courage. The Critical Theorists, on the other hand, have none of these attributes. They are all academics, who NEVER stepped outside of the classroom, never risked anything personally, and never actually confronted the malignant forms of true racism which used to infect the United States en masse and are still common in many parts of the world.
So anti-racists generally try to steer conversations about racism toward ‘systemic’ factors (and to label any disparity and fluctuation sufficient evidence of it). This even applies to definitions of basic words. ‘Racism’ isn’t actually something that black people can exhibit, according to anti-racists. They don’t have enough power. What about those black people or communities (rare, to be sure) who DO have inordinate social power? What about internalized racism, which reflects the white supremacy of the larger society? What about specific acts of hatred and violence committed BY black people BECAUSE of the victims’ races? What about in countries where blacks DO have control of the power structure, like Zimbabwe (where white farmers have been subject to mass murder and rape and land-theft, purely because of their race)? What about the future, when black people (in America, say) gain more social power collectively? Will they THEN be able to exhibit racism?
These all seem like excellent questions to me and I’ve asked them repeatedly and I’ve never received satisfactory answers. This is partly because anti-racists will lecture you to listen ad nauseum but they rarely want to actually have a dialogue with critical thinkers. To my knowledge a Critical Race Theorist/anti-racist has never debated his or her opponents publicly (!!!). The fact is that anti-racism imposes a racialized lens on its advocates, through which they must view all of society and history. The idea that ‘black’ and ‘white’ are distinct categories with completely different viewpoints and experiences and tendencies toward racism crumbles immediately when you consider that: 1.) there are many other racial categories in our country (not to mention abroad-this ideology has been awkwardly exported elsewhere) 2.) Many people fall into both categories 3.) there are many other meaningful factors that will affect ANY question or analysis, which this framing totally ignores. By forcing people into binary categories, anti-racism is doing what it accuses white supremacy of, which is forcing people into social boxes and then treating the attached labels as the most important characteristics of the individuals and groups.
Anti-racism’s failure is even more fundamental though. What do anti-racists propose we DO about racism? After all, if you label yourself anti-racist you must really be fighting racism in some meaningful ways, right? Well… no. Black people are already sanctified, in this view, and “it’s not their job to teach us.” White people should gaze inward, and listen to black people and read and discuss. I’ve listened to many black friends and coworkers throughout the years tell me that they believed that the problems of the black community were largely self-imposed, or that black people seemed a lot more racist than white people (their words, not mine), or that black people usually feel safer in white areas, etc. etc. I’ve also sought out and digested the works of many brilliant black social scientists, like Thomas Sowell, W.E.B. DuBois, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, John McWhorter, Coleman Hughes, Larry Elder, Amala Ekponubi, Henry Louis Gates, Glenn Loury, Gothix, etc. etc. So I’ve listened and read and reflected and these ideas I write now were all learned directly from those black teachers. I must be anti-racist then, right?
Of course, what anti-racists mean when they say listen and study is absorb their ideas and parrot them without question or doubt. But what about ACTUAL racism? I’ve never heard a sincere anti-racist idea to solve the racism seen in institutions or social disparity or general bias (again, they are not trying to fix these things; they are using a sweeping criticism to seize control of minds and institutions). What about actual RACISTS? Not the covert and oblivious and strangely kind and fair variety which nearly all white people typify. I’m referring to the outspoken, hostile, possibly even violent variety which is thankfully rare these days but are still around. They are the most glaring instances of individual white racism in our society. What do anti-racists propose we do about them?
Well… nothing. They almost never raise the issue and I suspect it’s because drawing attention to these reprehensible outliers shows an immediate contrast between them and the racists that they claim every white American is. The uncomfortable fact is that there is no race-centered worldview less concerned with actually engaging with or combatting serious modern cases of racism than anti-racism.
Even if you look at their proposals, their suggestions, their demands, what do we see? There’s a lot of: equity in hiring, bias training (which has been found to have no effect on bias and no benefit whatsoever), the use of terms like ‘microaggression’ or concepts like (the highly dubious) ‘cultural appropriation’, the introduction of POC (nonwhite)-only lounges or dorms in college. Strangely, none of these ideas were ever tried during the American Civil Rights struggle of of the 1960’s and 1950’s. Could this have been an oversight? Might the Southern Christian Leadership Conference have ended legal segregation even earlier if they had pushed for POC-only student lounges across the Southeastern United States? We will never know for certain.
For the rest of us, living in the real world and recognizing that racism begin and mostly ends with the mistakes and hostility of individuals and communities (and isn’t some mysterious emergent property of language or institutions) the ways to address racism are rather different. Here I want to focus on the most effective and the most admirable and the most educational strategy available to us. Like Martin Luther King, Jr., this man is not someone that anti-racists want you to think about too carefully. His life’s work is a glorious expression of actual anti-racism and it makes their brainwashed verbiage and bureaucratic strategy of institutional capture seem petty and ineffectual in dealing with this serious problem, which they certainly are.
Daryl Davis is a blues musician who has played with Chuck Berry and B. B. King, and that alone is enough to imbue his name with a faint glow of fame. He was born in Chicago, but moved frequently as a child. As someone who also moved while growing up (more than every two years, on average) I feel that I know something fundamental about Davis’ formation. When you are constantly introduced to new social groups in new places you gain a kind of equanimity about the prejudices and preferences and habits of human groups. You understand that the identities which seem so important and immutable to people who have stayed in their hometown for their entire lives are really just fragile and socially-constructed facades. If you’re confident and even a little extroverted you gain a kind of self-assurance and ease with new situations. I imagine it was this ease, combined with an open curiousity, which disarmed the racists who Davis encountered in his adulthood.
Davis travelled often for his music, and I imagine that being a celebrated blues musician in 1980’s and 1990’s America would give a person access to plenty of good times and interesting people and social resources without seeking out the spawning grounds of white supremacy. Davis recalls that he was truly inquisitive, though. He simply needed to understand something.
When you read the coming-of-age fiction of black Americans in the Jim Crow South (The Color Purple, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, et. al.) there is always a moment where the innocence of childhood runs up against the brutal walls of white supremacy. It could be white children or white adults confronting black children with threats or anonymous hate, or even violence, but it is described as a revealing (but still mostly confusing) and traumatizing event. People hating and fearing one another because of their differences is deeply ingrained in human psychology, but it’s still a confusing notion for children, who see the world simply and are often oblivious to those differences and the feelings they provoke. The children wonder why someone would hate a person who they don’t even know.
This was Davis’ gnawing question “…in [his] head from the age of 10: 'Why do you hate me when you know nothing about me?” He explains in the TED-X talk (below). “That question had never been answered from my youth.”
I’d rather David speak for himself. Listen to the talk, watch the documentary Accidental Courtesy: Daryl Davis, Race & America (produced by Matthew Ornstein), buy and read his book Klan-destine Relationships: A Black Man's Odyssey in The Ku Klux Klan.
The point is that using politeness and tact and common interests (southern cooking, honky tonk music) Davis approached and appealed to and reformed more than 200 Klan members, by his own count. What a goddamn legend.
The people creating cultural narratives today would simultaneously have you believe that a vast number of Americans have racist tendencies, and also that racism is the original sin of our country, which puts the bearer beyond the reach of polite society and makes him fit only for ostracism and social death. Both things cannot be true. If racism is common then we need top redouble our efforts to find and communicate with those people-banning them from our public spaces will only create fetid subcultures where their ideas predominate.
The next time you run into an anti-racist, bring up Mr. Davis and how much impact he’s had on the world simply using empathy and appeals to reason and personal engagement. Then ask that person what they have done to fight racism. How many racists have they transmutated into decent folks? How many racists have they defeated? How many racists have they even encountered?