I examine and critique three influential propositions regarding race promoted by some academic theorists and pundits.
Part I discusses and rejects the notion that differences in socioeconomic status among different American subgroups are best explained by the power relationships groups have with the dominant white majority.
Part II considers the claim that racial categories define collective actors who inevitably have common interests and outlooks. This Part concludes that this idea is flawed and perhaps incoherent.
Part III addresses the proposition that white Americans should be encouraged to cultivate a “white racial consciousness” so that whites will recognize their privilege and become “antiracists.” Part III concludes that such encouragement is both wrongheaded and dangerous.
Those who promote the ideas discussed and critiqued in this essay share several premises: pessimism about the US overcoming its racist history; what I consider a naïve belief in an identitarianism shaped by antiracist ideology as the best way to mitigate racism; and a concomitant belief that preserving the salience of existing socially (and legally) constructed racial categories is both inevitable and mostly desirable.
These premises, in turn, are ultimately based on a skepticism of or hostility to the ability of liberalism to overcome racism. In other words, they represent a rejection of the optimistic racial liberalism prevalent among civil rights activists when Brown was decided.