When it entered office, the Biden-Harris administration promised to “lower the temperature” of America’s divisive conflicts over race, identity, and recognition. While Biden’s campaign appealed to moderates, however, his policies and appointments so far show him embracing a progressive “anti-racist” agenda fundamentally at odds with his image as a liberal centrist: Equality is dead, long live “equity.” The stage is set for another round of clashes between the radicals and reformists, the race-conscious and colorblind, that have been a familiar feature of American racial discourse at least since the 1960s. If we wish to avoid replaying this predictable and irresoluble conflict (though it is by no means clear that we do), we should turn back to a philosopher whose insights penetrated to its source.
Sixty years ago, the émigré political theorist Hannah Arendt argued that American anti-racism is by its very nature beholden to a kind of totalitarian temptation. In an instantly notorious 1959 essay, “Reflections on Little Rock,” Arendt defended a tragic outlook on America’s race problem, and on the movement against Jim Crow, that has since faded from public memory as the ’60s ethos has been sacralized. She knew that slavery had left a stain on the American tradition, and she detested racist bigotry. Yet she insisted that American civil rights talk was dangerously incoherent, and warned that its contradictions—if unthinkingly enshrined in law and liberal opinion—could only be worked out on the corpse of the American republic, to the grave peril of American Jews. In suggesting that our chosen cure for Jim Crow was worse than the disease, she did not deny the urgent need for a cure or the horrors of the disease; she only regretted that a more permanent and effectual remedy had not been found for a patient well worth saving.
Just as Arendt envisioned, the ideology that calls itself anti-racist has steadily expanded to demand the leveling of inequity in ever more and further flung domains—however ill-suited to analysis in racial categories—while doing depressingly little to correct concrete injustices or materially assist the disadvantaged. It has also formed an alarming alliance with corporate business interests, especially in the technology sector, that stand to benefit from the flattening of hierarchical or exclusive social institutions (such as labor unions) and the elimination of laws designed to protect them. Yet this is not, as many liberals would like to believe, merely the radical perversion of an earlier virtuous doctrine, the corruption of civil rights by “identity politics.” Nor is this malaise imported from abroad, via Frankfurt and Paris, as conservatives tell the story. The truth is more difficult to accept: Anti-racists of the woke left are consummating a dangerous potential that Arendt recognized was always latent in the rhetoric of civil rights and the American conception of equality, but is only now being fully realized.
<snip, snip, snip>
That is Arendt’s warning, but she did not counsel despair of racial reconciliation. The problem with “equity,” which is nothing but the mutual perversion of the social and political spheres, is really that it is not anti-racist enough. In lifting up some, it brings others down; it proposes no positive vision; it cannot forge any lasting bonds of solidarity. Arendt responded by calling Americans back to the ideal of the republic, in which all are made equal not by being leveled to the lowest common denominator in society, but by being elevated—along with their differences—to the noblest and the best politically. That requires reclaiming public institutions as public and insisting upon a political life that is political—in short, the renewal of the res publica as a genuinely common possession worthy of our unanimous esteem.