Category: reason

We are, especially here in Brooklyn, living in Robin DiAngelo’s world. And yet she seems so unhappy about it.

The five-minute walk to my neighborhood bookstore to buy DiAngelo’s new book Nice Racism: How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm is filled with totems signaling the continued ascendancy of the self-styled anti-racist movement.

A window on my block bears the hand-scrawled sign “INACTION = CONSENT,” a Manichean formulation that DiAngelo echoes throughout her follow-up to the 2018 smash hit White Fragility (“if we are not actively challenging those [racist] structures, we are supporting them,” etc.). The storefront of my local State Assembly representative’s office displays not one but three Black Lives Matter signs. Across the street, the fence of my youngest’s elementary school is festooned with student art condemning discrimination and celebrating diversity. That school recently shrunk its zone (my house, 150 feet away, is no longer in it) and changed admissions policies in an effort to “disrupt zones of exclusion.” And just past the bookstore is my eldest’s much more diverse middle school, more famously known now as the subject of the New York Times podcast Nice White Parents, whose sardonic, guilt-encouraging title likely influenced DiAngelo’s latest.

This movement’s journey from obscurity to ubiquity has been neck-snappingly brief—and measurably lucrative for its leading lights. “My average fee for an event in 2018 was $6,200,” DiAngelo writes on her website’s “Accountability” page. “In 2019, it was $9,200. In 2020 (as of August), it has been $14,000.” In the book, she adds that she gives presentations on “whiteness and white fragility” on a “weekly basis.”

Taking those numbers at face value, that’s $728,000 a year just from speeches and workshops, to say nothing of book royalties and whatever the University of Washington is paying her. By most every yardstick, DiAngelo has achieved runaway success, lodging herself firmly in the top-earning 1 percent of the world’s richest country.

But Nice Racism is an unrelentingly sour book, depicting the fight against systemic oppression as a joyless, never-ending slog through minefields of potential missteps, while relying to a comical degree on DiAngelo’s exasperated encounters with people who have the temerity to disagree with her approach.

That latter description may sound uncharitable, but it’s not. In a chapter titled “We Aren’t Actually All That Nice,” DiAngelo belatedly berates a (white male) London cab driver for telling her that he was sick of being called a racist and that he feared a group of black men who hung around his neighborhood. “Also worthy of note was his typical white lack of racial curiosity or humility about the limits of his knowledge,” she snipped. “He had the author of a New York Times best-selling book who was in town to do interviews for the BBC in his cab, and he did not ask a single question about my thoughts on the matter.” The nerve!

If you are a white person who has challenged DiAngelo in one of her seminars the past couple of years, you are probably in this book. There’s “Sue and Bob,” who reacted to her eight-point talk on “What’s Problematic About Individualism?” by telling her that, no, they prefer treating people as individual human beings. “How could Sue and Bob have missed that forty-five minute presentation?” she huffed. “I was left wondering, yet again, what happens cognitively for so many white people in anti-racism education efforts that prevents them from actually hearing what is being presented.”

There was “David,” a white man who—after being asked to disclose his racial identity—chose an indigenous tribe he had just spent a few months living with. (“David held fast to his opening claim, which had a powerful impact on the seminar and which continued to direct our efforts and distract the group.”) There was a white woman who complained that a DiAngelo-led webinar was not “advanced” enough for those who’d been doing such work for years. (“This move demonstrates an inability to think strategically about our own role in anti-racist endeavors.”)

Then there were the white progressive participants of one presentation who, even after being told that “silence from a position of power is a power move,” nonetheless declined DiAngelo’s urgings to speak aloud about their experiences of “white socialization,” and then complained afterward. “Given that in the case of racism, the worst fear of most white progressives is that they be perceived as racist, and both myself and the BIPOC people in the room gave them direct feedback that the effect of their silence was racism, how could they continue to hold back? What was going on?”

What indeed?

There’s a palpable anxiety gnawing near the heart of DiAngelo’s project, one that gives me a bit of hope in our fraught racial times. Sure, people are buying her books, shelling out five figures for her appearances, and being confronted with her ideas at workplace seminars. But are they really getting it?

Clearly, many are not, even among the self-selected group of progressive knowledge-class workers with a professed interest in DiAngelo’s brand of anti-racism. (Lord help those in figurative flyover factories who are force-fed her enthusiasms for racially segregated “affinity groups,” among many other questionable ideas.) The selling proposition of Nice Racism is that DiAngelo can, by shaming those in her targeted demo who refuse to take their medicine, guilt enough of their cohort to double down on doing the work. And oh, is there so much work.

A subhed in a section near the end summarizes what’s required: “Lifelong Commitment.” “We must not ever consider our work toward racial justice to be finished,” DiAngelo admonishes. For those white people who deign to believe they have achieved true anti-racism, she offers an exhausting, impossible-to-achieve 21-point checklist, including such items as, “I use my position as a white ‘insider’ to share information with BIPOC people,” and “I have demonstrated that I am open to feedback on my own unaware racist patterns.”

Conclusion: “We must continuously educate ourselves through books, films, discussions, conferences, community groups, workbooks, and activism.” And she knows just the provider to help!

Much of Nice Racism consists of DiAngelo detecting racist patterns where others might instead observe people trying in their imperfect ways to be human. There is a whole section on white women’s tears, with the author criticizing some white mothers in one emotional session for empathetically crying with and consoling black mothers who described talking to their sons about racist cops.

The relentlessness of the tone-policing after a while makes your face numb: Don’t be too quick to show family photos of your BIPOC kids/grandkids, don’t be too “nice,” don’t “over-smile” to black people (I am not making that up). Don’t think that marrying a black man gives you a pass: “Sadly, many white women don’t demonstrate that their cross-racial relationships have provided a deeper understanding.”

There is a paradox at the center of this Miss Racial Manners stuff. DiAngelo’s starting point, fundamental to the anti-racist movement, is that just about every instrument and extrusion of society and government was born in racism and perpetuates racially unequal outcomes. You cannot secede from race; you’re soaking in it. Therefore, it is incumbent on all good people to consciously disrupt those systems.

But DiAngelo almost never talks about those systems.

There is a passing paraphrased assertion late in the book about how some state gun-rights law was somehow connected to racism. Yet any academically rigorous look at the connection between gun rights and racism will preponderantly show the opposite: The system of gun restrictions was originally created as a conscious effort to deprive black Americans of their Second Amendment rights, and the practical application of them to this day leads to tremendous racial disparities. Do the work, people!

There is almost no policy in Nice Racism. Perhaps that is for the best—at one point DiAngelo writes this whopper of a non-sequitur: “In discussing white people who define their politics as fiscally conservative but socially liberal, [Heather] McGhee notes that all poverty in the US could be eliminated by spending just 12 percent more than the cost of the 2017 Republican tax cuts.” That is not how either poverty or government spending works.

Applying the “systemic racism” analysis to actual systems requires understanding how said systems work, and having the humility—otherwise a DiAngelo-recommended virtue—to recognize that results are not the same as intent; that people who agree on ends will have heartfelt intellectual/policy disagreement about means. A fatal flaw coursing through the anti-racism set is a failure to acknowledge that people who are equally motivated by a desire to improve opportunities for historically disfavored populations may have different ideas about how to accomplish that. See the debates over charter schools, for example, or the minimum wage.

Tone-policing individual behavior, on the other hand, has a much more tangible call to action: Devote yourself to continuing education, participate in this seminar, and—of course—buy this book.

But will they read to the end? There are some people, I am sure, who have a taste for political self-flagellation, for being on the masochistic end of collective shaming, for being told that even the desire for forgiveness is untenably racist. But even among that unhappy subset, there surely are limits to consuming page after page of anxiety-wracked pessimism and an almost juvenile defensiveness over being challenged.

Toward the end of Nice Racism, DiAngelo quotes a 75-year-old man who has the gall to write an email criticizing her for making negative generalizations about old white people on NPR. The note runs all of 165 words. DiAngelo responds with a six-page rant, complete with enumeration of 10 “unspoken white racial ‘rules,'” blasting the correspondent’s “hostility and condescension.” It is a hilariously disproportionate and ungracious projection of the author’s by-now-evident personality traits.

“In addition, given that the writer is a white man chastising a white woman with more knowledge of the matter than he has, it also nicely illustrates the intersection of white and male arrogance: both whitesplaining and mansplaining,” she snarls.

Robin DiAngelo’s main contribution to racial discourse, for better and for worse, is prodding those of us with fair skin to be more cognizant that we benefit from a cultural and legal expectation that our immutable characteristics are the default “normal.” Those born different, she rightly points out, are too often denied individual agency and instead categorized negatively into a group identity.

But her response isn’t to confer that overdue individuality onto minority populations. It’s to enthusiastically commit the same category error with the largest category. When people recoil at the effort, well, that’s just their racism talking.

“There is deep racial resentment roiling just under the surface of many white people,” DiAngelo writes. Or at least under the surface of some successful white anti-racist educators.

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You know we have crossed a fiscal Rubicon when a presidential administration does not attempt to justify its spending, instead simply claiming that because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Americans must now welcome with joy and gratitude any spending bill, no matter how big, frivolous, or cronyist.

Based on that belief, President Joe Biden first backed a $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill that could not be justified by any broadly accepted economic theory. He then announced a $2.3 trillion “infrastructure” package that he described as a “once-in-a-generation investment in America unlike anything we’ve done since we built the interstate highway system and the space race decades ago.”

A closer look reveals that the plan is instead a jackpot for public unions and big business. Coming after two decades of spending indulgence under the last three presidents, culminating in an explosion of outlays during Washington’s COVID-fighting efforts, Biden’s spending extravaganza is in effect the final stage of an effort to centralize power in the federal government, which will fund ever more private, state, and local government -functions.

Gesturing toward fiscal responsibility, Biden plans to pay for most of his latest plan with a $2 trillion increase in corporate taxes, arguably the largest hike since World War II. The combined tax hikes, according to the Tax Foundation, likely will reduce private infrastructure investment by $1 trillion. A corporate tax increase from 21 to 28 percent, for instance, would reduce the after-tax rate of return on corporate investment in America and in turn reduce the amount of investment. The hikes will nevertheless please the anti-corporate wing of the Democratic Party. Never mind that the price will be paid by workers whose wages won’t grow and small-business owners who will have less access to capital.

The infrastructure bill creates an interesting tension. On one hand, Wall Street will hate these tax increases, the full effect of which will be felt in the next decade and a half. On the other hand, corporate titans probably are banking on their ability to fight these taxes while enjoying Biden’s $2 trillion corporate welfare handout today.

How else to explain the stock market upswing after Biden’s Pittsburgh speech announcing that trillions more dollars will be spent and taxed by Washington? Could it be that years of Federal Reserve liquidity injections, the promise of rescue, and artificially low interest rates have permanently transformed Wall Street into a corrupt moocher? It is as if corporate America believes the Fed will never let the market correct, guaranteeing growing corporate profits in perpetuity.

But there’s a reason we economists always remind people that the stock market isn’t the economy and the economy isn’t the market. In the short run, the stock market’s success tells you little about the soundness of policy decisions made by people in Washington. The reality is that one day, all that debt, cronyism, and lack of accountability will explode in our faces. It might take some time, but when the time draws near, don’t assume that interest rates will alert us to the impending disaster or that the Fed can save us without inflicting massive pain.

When we look back and wonder how we got there, we will see that there is a lot of blame to go around. By recklessly monetizing the public debt and suppressing interest rates, the Federal Reserve allowed deficit spending to become the norm. The party of small government, meanwhile, simply gave up the small part. Congressional Republicans remained mostly silent while the Trump administration ran up the public debt by nearly $9 trillion in just four years, slowed down the economy with protective tariffs, and imposed disgusting and costly immigration restrictions. Some Republicans offered their own central planning proposals in the name of fighting China; others endorsed plans for a federal paid leave law and a universal basic income for kids.

On the other side of the aisle, even the Keynesians seem lost in our brave new world. Lawrence Summers—secretary of the treasury in the Clinton administration, director of the National Economic Council in the Obama administration, and president of Harvard in the interregnum—fought a good fight to reduce the size of the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill. He argued that economic theory could not justify the package’s size. He lost.

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The Ohio Supreme Court has ruled school employees may carry guns on the job only if they have “satisfactorily completed an approved basic peace-officer training program” or have “20 years experience as a peace officer.” The ruling overturns a Madison Local School District policy that allowed school employees to carry guns at work if they had a concealed carry license and had passed active-shooter response training, a background check, and a mental health exam.

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When it comes to wasteful COVID-19 spending, it might seem like there aren’t many things the federal government hasn’t done.

But just you wait.

Broadway mega-hit Hamilton will receive at least $30 million and possibly as much as $50 million in federal bailout funds, The New York Times reported Wednesday, despite its status as one of the most successful and profitable musicals in American history. The funds are being delivered through the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant (SVOG) program, a $15 billion portion of the $900 billion COVID relief bill passed by Congress last December. Each production affected by the pandemic is allowed to apply for up to $10 million from the program, but Hamilton will get several times that total because the Broadway production and each of four touring shows are separately eligible, according to the Times.

Indeed, it must be nice to have Washington on your side.

Jeffrey Seller, Hamilton’s lead producer, tells the Times that none of the bailout money is going to the show’s producers or investors and that it won’t be paid out in royalties to artists like Lin-Manuel Miranda. Instead, the money will be used to “remount those shuttered productions” and pay off bills that accumulated during the show’s pandemic-induced hiatus.

Don’t buy this argument. Money is fungible and every dollar that taxpayers contribute to “remount those shuttered productions” is a dollar that the show’s investors and producers won’t have to spend or borrow to do the same. Let’s be very clear about this: Hamilton was absolutely going to return to the stage whether the federal government kicked in $50 million or nothing at all.

Worse, every dollar spent bailing out mega-hit Broadway shows is a dollar that can’t be spent to help get smaller productions and theaters that don’t have access to private credit and investments on the scale that Hamilton surely does. If there is any role for the government to play in helping entertainment businesses get back on their feet after the financial impact of the pandemic, that’s where the focus should be. How many community theaters could be saved with that same $50 million being showered on Hamilton?

That’s the problem with almost all government bail-out schemes. You gotta be in the room where it happens—metaphorically, at least. Successful businesses will always have an advantage over those who lack the lobbyists, name recognition, or culture cachet required to cash in.

On the other hand, the federal government’s firehose of COVID relief spending—$5.9 trillion and counting—means it is easier than ever to get bailed out. So far, the government has responded to the pandemic by sending money to people who earn six-figure paychecks, paying fully vaccinated people not to work even though there are millions of available jobs, bailing out state governments that are running huge surpluses, and using the pandemic as cover for a massive bailout of union-run pension funds, among other things.

Like with Hamilton, there doesn’t seem to be any consideration of when or how much government aid is necessary. We’ve pumped so much money into the system—nearly all of it borrowed and added to the country’s long-term debt problems—and it has to go somewhere.

Did a bunch of fake celebrities whose only claim to fame is being former contestants on The Bachelor need the federal government to dump as much as $20,000 apiece into their bank accounts? Nope, but they got the cash anyway, according to data gathered by ProPublica and reported in a variety of media outlets.

The likelihood that those funds are critical to preserving the American economy from the scourge of COVID-19 is less than the chance of someone finding true love on a trashy reality television show—or the odds that the curtain would come down on Hamilton without millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded aid.

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On Tuesday, the San Jose City Council unanimously advanced a number of novel gun control proposals, including requirements that gun owners carry liability insurance and that they pay a fee to cover the public costs of gun violence.

“While the Second Amendment protects the right to bear arms, it does not require taxpayers to subsidize gun ownership,” said San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo in a Tuesday press release. “We won’t magically end gun violence, but we will stop paying for it.”

These proposals come a month after a workplace shooting at a light rail facility in San Jose left 10 people dead, including the shooter.

The mayor describes San Jose’s insurance mandate as a “first-of-its-kind” policy, although the idea has been floating around for a while. Following the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting, a flurry of state lawmakers from Connecticut to California introduced bills mandating gun owners carry insurance. None of those proposals become law.

A House bill introduced this year by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D–Texas) would create a federal insurance mandate in addition to requirements that gun owners get a license, pay an $800 licensing fee, and register their individual firearms.

Most of the details of San Jose’s proposed gun laws have yet to be fleshed out, including the fee structure for gun ownership and how much insurance gun owners might be required to purchase.

The city is asking the Pacific Institute for Research Evaluation (PIRE), a nonprofit research group, to prepare a report on the costs to San Jose taxpayers of gun violence, which will then be used to calculate appropriate fees.

A preliminary report prepared by PIRE ahead of Tuesday’s vote put the annual costs to federal, state, and local governments from gun violence in San Jose at $39.7 million. That figure includes all the costs stemming from murders and assaults as well as suicides and unintentional shootings.

Fee revenue would be split with Santa Clara County, which contains San Jose, to cover things like emergency room treatment, victim assistance, jail, criminal prosecution, and mental health services.

Because the city of San Jose doesn’t have a register of firearm owners, it’d be up to individuals to proactively pay any required fees and get insurance coverage. Those who didn’t would be at risk of fines or having their guns confiscated.

Anthony Mata, chief of the San Jose Police Department, said that officers wouldn’t go door to door to enforce the coverage mandate, but would ask for proof of insurance should they find a gun during the course of other police work.

“Where there’s an interaction, a lawful car stop or consensual search, that’s the opportunity where the officer finds a gun, he can ask the question,” Mata said at Tuesday’s meeting.

San Jose’s proposal is already attracting controversy from gun rights activists. The Sacramento-based Firearms Policy Coalition, a gun rights group, and Gun Owners of California have both said they intend to sue the city. “The mayor will have his rear end handed to him in a basket by the courts,” said Sam Paderes, executive director of the Gun Owners of California, to the Guardian last week.

Liccardo himself was quite cavalier about the possibility that the city would end up in court, saying Tuesday that “when it comes to sensible gun control, no good deed goes unlitigated.” The mayor also said that the city had consulted with a number of outside groups, including the Giffords Law Center, a gun control group, on the legality of its proposals.

George Mocsary, a law professor at the University of Wyoming, says that San Jose’s proposed gun control policies raise a number of constitutional issues.

It’s highly questionable, he says, if insurers will actually write the kinds of policies that San Jose would require gun owners to purchase. If they don’t, then they would be unable to comply with the city’s mandate, and thus effectively would be prohibited from owning firearms.

“You can’t intentionally ban something indirectly if you can’t ban it directly,” he says, adding that if gun owners were required to pay exorbitant fees or to purchase more insurance than what would be considered “actuarially fair,” that would likely also be unconstitutional.

Mocsary also raises some practical concerns with requiring gun owners to carry insurance, arguing that it could increase the potential for more firearm injuries.

“The best way to incentivize more of an activity is to take away the financial consequences of that activity,” he tells Reason. “If you are taking away from individuals the financial consequences of people being hurt by their guns because their insurance will pay for it, the natural behavior will be for people to take less care.”

The memorandum that the San Jose City Council approved yesterday laid out only the broad strokes of its insurance mandate and gun ownership fees. It directs the city attorney to draft more detailed ordinances by September. Once complete, those ordinances will then go before the city council for another vote.

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