Everyone is Wrong about Robin DiAngelo

I.
There is a scene in Good Will Hunting in which Professor Gerald Lambeau and Sean Maguire (Robin Williams) are discussing the future of Will Hunting. Lambeau, an MIT professor and Fields Medal winner, contends that he would not have had his success if he hadn't been pushed.

His belief is that Will should be pushed since that approach worked for him. Sean thinks it will have the opposite effect on Will.

II.
This is a post about the death of George Floyd and the cultural impact of Black Lives Matter. But it's also a post about white people and how they respond to the death of George Floyd and to Black Lives Matter.

First, some data:


Almost two-thirds of white people, to some degree, support Black Lives Matter, including one third who lean republican.

We've seen republican Mitt Romney speak up in favor of Black Lives Matter, and even show up to a protest. We've also all come to know the name Bubba Wallace, the black NASCAR driver who may or may not have had a noose tied to his garage.

I'm interested in understanding how the same movement can prompt opposite responses in people. I think the best example is people's response to Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility.

There are countless articles--including here, here, and here-- of why people think the book is trash. (My favorite is this podcast episode featuring a graphic designer who had to do a year of diversity training with DiAngelo. When a co-worker complained that one of the designer's posters had something resembling a Nazi symbol, DiAngelo insisted it must have bubbled up from the subconsciousness of the white graphic designer.)

And yet, her book has been at the top of Amazon's bestseller list since the protests began.

One of the common themes I see in the criticism is that it teaches white people to almost hate themselves. Therefore, it must be bad. But if that is so bad, then why do people keep reading and recommending the book?

III.
It is old news by now that antiracism behaves very much like a religion, and the whiteness-as-original-sin comparison isn't as revelatory as when I first read it years ago. But the analogy should help us understand that while the same concept of how the guilt of being a sinner can strengthen some Christian's faith and works, it can drive others from the Church altogether.

A lot of DiAngelo's training that led to her theory came from working in colleges. Her biggest criticism is of white, well-educated progressives who are against racism (ie the types of people who work in colleges), saying they are not doing enough. Her book is for them because it compels them to action. It makes them better antiracists.

This is what the critics don't get. For these people, DiAngelo's guilt works.

Here is what the DiAngelo stans don't get: not everyone is Professor Lambeau. Some of us are Will Hunting and seeing signs like "White Silence is Violence" doesn't make everyone want to be an antiracist. It makes them feel excluded, unwanted. Worse, it makes other ideologies more appealing.

As a White Nationalist person, I'm rubbing my hands together in glee that critical race theory, BLM thuggery, & other rogue Golems are increasingly driving self-respecting white people toward unapologetic white identity politics. https://t.co/OEmbGtHPYt

— Counter-Currents (@NewRightAmerica) June 26, 2020

Gross.

Now that we've learned that guilt does not have the same effect on everyone, it should make sense that this type of argument, while compelling to the DiAngelo critics, will not have the same effect on the antiracists who read her work. In other words, guilting them by pointing out DiAngelo's potential impact on empowering actual Nazis won't work because that is not the effect it had on them.

So what should we do?

First, I would go back to the Pew data. It's more helpful to think of support for Black Lives Matter as a spectrum; with Louis Farrakhan on one end and some average Joe on the other end. Joe doesn't pay much attention to racial matters but saw the Georgy Floyd video and answers the Pew pollster, saying "well of course black lives matter."

In other words, not every person showing support is equally versed in Critical Race terminology, understanding terms like "white complicity" or the ever-evolving definitions of "racism." Some people just sympathize.

I'm not interested in the strong supporters in the Pew chart. I'm interested in the 30 percent of white people who lean republican and the 30 percent of white people who lean democrat, down at the bottom of the chart. They both "somewhat support" Black Lives Matter. It seems to me that this is the group up for grabs. Let's call them the Fencers.

So if antiracism is about viewing everything through the lens of "does this create equity or inequity for black people" then we might think of how we can craft an antiracist message that moves the Fencers toward antiracist work (which would create more equity) and away from racist work (which would create inequity).

But in order to do that, you have to stop talking to them like an antiracist.

IV.
Words matter. And the way we talk about antiracism can have an effect on whether your movement is building coalitions or enemies.

So picture a Fencer who is disgusted with the deaths of Floyd, Taylor, and Arbery. But his brother is a police officer. Does he hear "Defund the Police" from Black Lives Matter supporters and think "Surely they just mean reimagining the responsibilities and structure of the police department, and not terminating my brother,"? Not if he reads the New York Times.

Picture a Fencer who is not politically active and is unfamiliar with the term "ally" but wants to show support for her black co-worker. Should she reach out to check in? Bad look for the Times again.

What about a white Fencer who learns about the government's role in housing segregation and wants to know how to help. If the first step is being told that he's racist and can never not be racist but can become an ally if he practices constant antiracism, does that make him feel welcome in the movement? Maybe just point him in the direction of a town meeting to abolish single-family zoning.

If the message starts with guilt, you're going to lose the Fencers. But if the tone sounds more like "you can help fix this," rather than "this is your fault," you might have yourself a coalition.

When to choose sacredness

I.
I heard Sherman Alexie give a lecture one time. He finished it by telling a story about a cab driver who broke down in tears and asked him to read a letter from an estranged friend since the driver did not have the emotional strength to do so himself. (There was a lot more detail to the story that makes this moment in the story very tense, but since Alexie gets paid to speak I don't want to give this away for free.)

Alexie said he opened the envelope and pulled out the letter. Then he says to the audience, "I'm not going to tell you what was in the letter. Because there are some things in life you should always keep sacred."

I still think about that story. I wrote a post wondering about why some people behave in ways that don't seem to ultimately serve their best interest. I wondered if it was foolish to think that they were always viewing things in a consequentialist/utilitarian lens. "Do the ends justify the means in this situation?"

I contrasted this view with Kant's categorical imperative, but I think a better way to think about this is sacredness. If I could talk to Alexie, I would tell him that I think we all keep things sacred. We just aren't always actively aware of what we choose.

Jonathan Haidt has done a lot of research into moral psychology. One of his tests was to ask people whether it was morally okay for a family to eat their dog after it had died. Often times, people say it is not okay. When asked why, they usually can't come up with a good answer. Haidt would say it violates that sanctity/degradation principle. Kant would say not eating one's dead dog is a categorical imperative. I might just say it's a sacred value.

II.
Whenever I see behavior that seems hypocritical, I try to see if I behave the same way. Unsurprisingly, it turns out that I do.

I'm more of a Martin Luther King, Jr. antiracist than an Ibram Kendi antiracist. King believed in ending discrimination based on race. Kendi believes in intentionally discriminating based on race in order to ensure equal outcomes. King believed in equality, Kendi believes in equity to ensure equality.

I thought about why I made this choice and it turns out that the idea of discrimination just feels icky to me. It feels like eating my dead dog. It's a sacred value that I didn't bother to think about and decide if the ends justify the means.

So how do I go through life knowing that this concept of sacredness rests in me, in all of us. I think there are several options.

1. I can choose to be self reflective and always strive to be a consequentialist, to always examine whether the outcome is worth it it even if I don't like the means.
2. I can just not think about it and continue living my life as normal, take sort of a status quo approach. This means that when things feel intuitively right or wrong, I'll just never think about them unless someone challenges me, in which case I'll have to spend a lot of time justifying that my initial instinct is, in fact, the correct and logical one.
3. Or I can take Alexi's advice and choose what things I want to keep sacred.

Option one sounds exhausting. Option two sounds like what most people do. Option three is like option two, only with more agency.

If I don't choose the things I'm going to keep sacred, my subconscious mind is just going to choose for me.

Choose your city

Choose one:

Jobopolis: the economy is booming with lots of well-paying jobs in your field. Tons of great restaurants and boutiques. If you move here, you won't know anyone. While the economy is great, if there is a recession and you lose your job, there is no social safety net, no unemployment insurance or public healthcare option. There are high levels of inequality. Even though you will make more money than most people in the country, your day-to-day interactions will mostly be with people who make more money than you.

Communitysburg: all your friends and family live here. You can hang out with them anytime you'd like. You and your spouse's parents are always available to babysit. The jobs don't pay particularly well and there isn't much of a social safety net. However, if you fall on hard times, there are numerous family and friends who will open their house to you. They also tell you about job opportunities before they become publicly known. Most people share your political and moral views.

St. Socialism: All citizens have universal healthcare and free education, including college; robust unemployment insurance; and a nice retirement plan, all regardless of employment status. The jobs don't pay that well and the taxes are high. Plus, you don't know anyone in the city. There is low inequality, most people make about the same as you and the ones who make more don't make much more.

Better yet: Imagine you are creating your ideal city. What percent should it reflect each of the above scenarios? I would say 55% Communitysburg, 30% Jobopolis, 15% St. Socialism.

Underpants Gnomes as a Categorical Imperative

Beware of Bull

There are two separate but closely related movements to change public schools. One is to teach all of U.S. history, including the messy parts, most notably the treatment of Blacks and Native Americans. The other is to teach Critical Race Theory to our students.

I am against the latter but I'm torn on the former.

The way we teach American history in public schools involves lies. Not just lies, but a certain mythology.

We mythologize our founders as brave inspiring men who fought against the evil British empire. We mythologize our "cordial" relationship with Native Americans (they taught us how to grow corn!) while yada yada-ing over the whole genocide thing. We mythologize Lincoln as the Great Emancipator, ignoring his detestable views of blacks.

These things are, at best, half-truths. So why not tell it like it really is? That is the question that has led to a growing movement to chip away at the American Mythology and expose the darker truth.

My worry is that this is a Chesterton's Fence scenario, where we are tearing down a fence just because we don't understand why it is up. And now we are staring down the face of a bull who is about to gore us to death.

The goal of primary education

The goal of education evolved over the years. In The Third Pillar, Rajan describes how it changed from a way to draw the community together, to a way to build more productive workers during the Industrial Revolution, to a way to close the inequality gap by ensuring equal access to education, and finally a way of signalling class status (since most poor families could not afford to have their kids in school and not working on the farm).

In Free to Learn, Peter Gray has a more cynical outlook.

"By the early nineteenth century ... the primary educational concern of leaders in government and industry was not to make people literate, but to gain control over what people read, what they thought, and how they behaved. Secular leaders in education promoted the idea that if the state controlled the schools, and if children were required by law to attend those schools, then the state could shape each new generation of citizens into ideal patriots and workers."

A more generous interpretation might be that a uniform public education was made to build up national pride.

But in order to do so, you need to create a myth. It's the same technique every cult, religion, and successful tribe, movement, or ideology ever has figured out.

So we told our children a simple story.

Columbus discovered America by being brave and crossing the Atlantic when everyone thought he would fall off the end of the flat world. We made friends with the Indians. We fought the British for our independence. We created the best government ever and made freedom cool.

But what if the reason we told these lies was because it was the only way to unify a large, growing, diverse group of people? What if tearing down that fence means tearing apart the social order?

Truth or Unity

I guess we have to decide what the goal of education is. For college, the goal is/was truth. That is where most people learned "the real story" about America. Is it possible that Truth Without Myth set the stage for today's civil unrest; a whole generation of educated citizens with no common religion, no common myth, no common story of triumph that builds a shared sense of civic pride?

Or are today's activists simply replacing the American myth with a new one?

The 1619 Project seemed to take a very unscientific approach to history. They started with a conclusion, America is and always has been racist, and selected the facts that fit that narrative. Despite the pleas from actual historians who saw that they have the facts wrong, the New York Times staff doubled down. Why? Because they are creating their own narrative. But in this one America isn't the hero, it is the villain.

But what is the goal of this new mythology? Is it seeking truth by highlighting neglected stories or is it seeking to unify the antiracists and social justice activists by creating a new mythology they can all believe in?

If the latter, then I can't see how this new myth, villainizing the foundation of this country while ignoring all its great accomplishments, will lead to the creation of something better. It falls prey to the same old myth by ignoring the positive aspects of our history, like all the ways the tools of the Enlightenment have brought more rights and raised the standard of living of women, minorities, and the poor; more than any movement ever.

If the goal is to seek truth by complimenting the traditional teachings of history with a more holistic view, I worry that giving up on the concept of mythology will lead to further disunity. But maybe my mistake is in thinking the antiracists are consequentialist to begin with.

Ends or Means?

I'm starting to think the goal of successor ideology is an even more rudderless plan than the South Park underpants gnomes.
Phase 1: call out racism, cancel all racists, shame white people for their privilege.
Phase 2: ?
Phase 3: ?

Omar Wasow, a professor at Princeton, was criticized by Current Affairs editor Nathan Robinson for a study he released that showed violent protests hurt Democrats at the polls and nonviolent protests help them. Here is part of his reply on Twitter.

The most generous interpretation I can give of Robinson’s critique is that he views my research as shifting attention away from a critical focus on white supremacy to “framing the facts” in a way that “blames” Black activists for resisting white domination. 10/

— Omar Wasow (@owasow) June 18, 2020

Robinson concedes that Wasow's research is "true empirically." But he doesn't like how it frames the conversation away from what Robinson thinks it should be about. In other words, the potential negative consequences of violent protests do not matter to activists like Robinson. Just like the health professionals support of the George Floyd protesters in spite of increased COVID-19 risk. The consequences of ignoring social distancing measures did not matter. All that matters is Phase 1: call out racism.

Take another example: the Bernie Sanders campaign tweeting a video of Joe Rogan saying he will probably vote for Bernie. How did that work out with Sanders' supporters?

This is a pathetic response and I’m done. It is clear the Bernie Sanders campaign does not care about holding transphobia accountable, among the many other awful things Joe Rogan has perpetuated on his program.

I am a human being and a trans person. I am not “another belief”. https://t.co/QCwpRCDb09

— Charlotte Clymer 🏳️‍🌈 (@cmclymer) January 24, 2020

Briahna Joy Gray, who worked on the campaign, gave a consequentialist response, but it fell on deaf ears. To the Charlotte Clymers of the world, keeping the campaign pure is more important than building a coalition that leads to winning and putting Sanders' policies in place. The ends do not justify the means. It's like speaking in different languages.

So maybe consequentialist arguments are pointless for these activists like Clymer. The ends will never justify the means because Phase 1 is a categorical imperative.

Kant would say you should not steal even to feed your starving family because stealing is categorically wrong. For certain activists, telling their story is a categorical imperative even if it stretches facts beyond credibility (1619 authors), even if it is a net harm (Nathan Robinson), even if it destroys society (dismantling American mythology).

(FWIW, I'm not saying that all racial policies should be viewed through a utilitarian lens. Even if stop-and-frisk policies do reduce crime, and there isn't much evidence it does, just because there is no way to measure the dehumanizing effect it has on all the innocent, false-positive citizens that the policy victimizes is no reason to justify its brutal nature. When deciding between more dignity or more crime, choose dignity.)

Unity Via Canceling

But what if there is a purpose to the successor ideology's public shaming? What if the goal isn't ending racism but unifying the tribe? In this sense, the villain is the racists (however broadly applied that term might be) and the purging of them from society (via cancel culture) is the activists' Revolutionary War.

I began this post by disagreeing with the push to teach Critical Race Theory in schools, or to put it more selfishly, to teach it to my kids. I originally disagreed with it because it does more harm than good.

But I've come to entertain the idea that the harm might be the point. It might be the new American mythology that attempts to unite us all in a hatred of White Supremacy.

It will obviously fail, but that does not diminish the point that we, as a country, are desperate for something to believe in. It doesn't make intuitive sense to lie, but if we pursue the messy truth, we become tribal and vicious. If we tell selective stories with clear villains and heroes, we can unite in our hatred of the other and the adoration of our mythical Gods.

For a while we believed in the American myth and shared high levels of trust. This came at the cost of alienating our fellow citizens with a historical connection to our dark past. As more people went to college and learned the truth, the myth began to fade. Chesterton's fence came down. The result has been growing levels of distrust, partisanship, and hatred.

We don't know how to put the fence back up and it might be too late. But even if we can find a way, it has become clear to me that the new fence should look nothing like the old one.

Searching for Moral Clarity in all the Wrong Places

I gave my best effort to understand people's reactions to the Tom Cotton editorial, but I'm not sure I quite had my finger on the pulse.

Here is a tweet from Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowrey that's made me rethink things:

American view-from-nowhere, "objectivity"-obsessed, both-sides journalism is a failed experiment. We need to fundamentally reset the norms of our field. The old way must go. We need to rebuild our industry as one that operates from a place of moral clarity

— Wesley (@WesleyLowery) June 4, 2020

I'm really hung up on his usage of "moral clarity." In that same blog post, I also wrote a lot about formative institutions, but I didn't spend a lot of time writing about the most prominent, yet declining, institution: religion.

If you can excuse my stereotyping for a moment, I would guess that most of the people who are happy to see James Bennett resign in the wake of the Tom Cotton brouhaha are under forty, coastal-living, well-educated, mostly white people who do not attend church.

They likely have not been a part of any formative institution. And this is why that matters:

Everybody worships...

I imagined taking my objections to these reactions and placing them in the context of a Catholic Mass. The priest gives his homily, then he invites his Hindu friend to tell the congregation about why they should worship Shiva. Then a Muslim cleric comes up and tells them they need to pray to Allah.

When the congregants object, the priest responds: "Hey, we're just trying to give both sides!"

The response of the hypothetical priest is so absurd, and would fall so flat on the ears of the people in that church, that I think I finally understand how these activists must feel. The New York Times is the place where they come for preaching, ahem, moral clarity.

When a priest gives his homily, he will often talk about current events and how the community of believers should approach them, how they should respond as people of a particular faith. He gives them moral clarity.

In the absence of such an institution, people are forced to look elsewhere for morality and community. Many of them have placed that need at the alter of the NYT op-ed page.

I chastise this type of purity and promote diverse viewpoints in institutions. But sometimes exclusion seems like the only logical conclusion. If it doesn't make sense for churches to promote both sides of a religion debate, then why should newspapers present both sides of a topic?

A moral community seems like the one place where we can all agree that outsiders have no right to intrude. Just as Christians agree that Jews should be able to have their own temple to worship, woke NYT readers would have no problem with the National Review running the Tom Cotton piece. It's not that the column was wrongthink and harmful to minorities, it's where it appeared, in the sacred New York Times.

I want to believe that the objections to the Cotton op-ed are just about preventing harm to black people and not a quest for ideological purity. Heather Mac Donald tried to make the case that the supposed "War on Cops" was preventing them from doing their jobs and driving up crime, leading to an increase in violent crimes in black neighborhoods. Predictably, things did not end well with her on the college tour since her solution was to stand up for cops.

Choose your God
The problem I have is that these activists have taken an institution, which plays a valuable role in society, and are trying to turn it into a moral community without replacing the institution they are attempting to usurp.

I understand your need for "moral clarity" but what about society's need for the institution of journalism to inform our citizenry?

So where does that leave the rest of us who hold onto the traditional view of media? I hate to keep coming back to it, but I think Jonathan Haidt is right. We can adapt his proposal for higher education to news.

Newspapers should choose their telos: social justice/antiracism/moral clarity for liberals, or a more traditional objective and curious approach that seeks to put events and facts into context. And they should be upfront about what their mission is and let the readers decide.

Institutions: Performative vs. Formative

This post is kind of a mess. I probably put more work into it than anything else I've written. It started out as 3 different posts but I felt they were all reaching toward the same idea, so I merged them. I hope it makes sense.

I.
I have not read the NYT op-ed from Senator Tom Cotton about why the military should be deployed to restore order among the riots and looting. But, like most people who have not read it, I have opinions anyway.

Apparently, this led to the highest cancellations in a single hour ever for the Times. It's even caused a schism in the editorial board.

A bad argument for the cause of the backlash would be to say that the readers are in an echo chamber and don't like hearing different opinions. I think a better argument is to understand how some people view the purpose of an editorial page.

The "old guard" believes it should present multiple viewpoints. I put myself in this category because I like being able to understand how people I disagree with think. It helps me refute their points better.

But a growing view is that an editorial page presents ideas endorsed by the newspaper. Therefore, the Cotton piece is an endorsement of the New York Times. If his argument is an Obviously Bad Idea, then it would make sense to distance yourself from the Times for endorsing such an Obviously Bad Idea.

Now that the Times has walked it back, reacting to the reaction but pretending like it was a rushed job, conservatives are calling them out for liberal pandering. But conservatives fall into the same trap. They were quick to call out publications like the Times or the Washington Post for denigrating the anti lockdown protesters for spreading the virus, while now justifying the George Floyd protests as necessary.

While it is certainly a double standard, aren't conservatives doing the same thing, conflating an explanation of a viewpoint with the publisher's endorsement? Aren't these newspapers just publishing viewpoints, helping people understand how an individual sees the two protests differently and not necessarily endorsing the hypocrisy?

We know that trust in institutions has been in decline for decades now, with people putting more faith in individuals. But institutions still matter when it comes to blame and I'm starting to see a transition in how media institutions see their role.

II.
Here's a thought: do we need major media? If all major publications disappeared tomorrow, what would happen?

There would still be journalists. They would still do writing and reporting and you would access their work through Twitter, blog posts, and YouTube. Maybe you subscribe to their newsletter or Patreon, but how much different would it be?

Do we really need newspapers at all? I say yes. The main purpose they serve right now is as gatekeepers. There is still some type of editorial standard that would be nonexistent in the absence of institutional media.

The fact that people's response was not "Did you see what Tom Cotton wrote?" and was instead "Did you see what the New York Times ran?" tells me that people still see media as an institution and expect it to serve as a gatekeeper.

But the gatekeeping was for quality journalism. That gatekeeping is starting to change and now newspapers are faced with two growing concerns.

• The Prisoner's Dilemma: The media has a nash equilibrium problem. The old guard knows that the Right Thing to Do is to be objective, informative, and fact-based. They also know that sensationalizing and partisan pandering will garner more clicks, more page views, and thus make more money. The first newspaper to defect to stories that seek to sensationalize rather than inform, will make money at the expense of everyone else.
  We're slowly seeing the effects of everyone defecting; more and more clickbait headlines. In a world with no media institutions serving as a check on one another, there will be no incentive for individual journalists to not write click bait articles.
• The Purity Dilemma. The second problem stems from the result of younger journalists conflating their views with righteousness. This growing ideology seeks purity. The antiracists want their narrative to dominate because the other side is not just wrong but harmful to minorities.
  Leaning into this direction also seems to have the effect of holding on to their most loyal readers, so there is a financial incentive as well. (Of course, I've read some news that many cancellations come from people upset about the "resignation" of James Bennett, the old guard editor who took credit for the Cotton piece.)

III.
I think about the Purity Gatekeepers of Media and can't help but be reminded of this line from Yeval Levin.

"We now think of institutions less as formative and more as performative, less as molds of our character and behavior, and more as platforms for us to stand on and be seen. And so for one arena to another in American life, we see people using institutions as stages, as a way to raise their profile or build their brand. And those kinds of institutions become much harder to trust. ..."

He says the purpose of formative institutions, which could be anything from joining the Boy Scouts to graduating from Harvard, is to form character and identity that allows you to answer a question:

"As a parent, as a neighbor, as a member of the PTA, as a member of Congress, as a CEO, what should I do in this situation? Not just what do I want, not just what would look good, but given my role here, what should I do? It is a question you ask when you take the institutions that you're part of seriously."

He says that many people don't want to be formed. They have their ideals and only want to use institutions as a platform.

I frequently see this on social media. In the wake of the George Floyd protests, everyone is quick to show their selfie from a rally, change their profile to black, or worse, link to a Robin DeAngelo book. Very few people focus on serious solutions to ending police brutality (it should go without saying that defunding the police is not a serious solution).

What's wrong with Robin DeAngelo's work? For starters, it's probably a scam. More importantly, it doesn't work (nor, unsurprisingly, does calling people "racist" work).

Study: Reading about white privilege doesn't make people any more concerned about the plight of poor black people; it just makes them less concerned about the plight of poor white people. https://t.co/VgmuMKRLa8 pic.twitter.com/5vbF5peQWM

— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) June 6, 2020

I can think of no easier way to fall into the trap of Maslow's Hammer than adopting an outlook based on being against something. If you are anti blue dots, you're going to end up hammering some purple ones.

That's why the problem with institutions and ideologies like Antifa, Antiracism, and even No Lables, is that they define themselves by something they are not. It's a clever word game, sort of a motte and bailey. You say you are against something everyone agrees is bad, then expand your mission to something more narrow and partisan, and anyone who tries to critique you will be labeled a Nazi or racist.

IV.

Based on all available evidence, I have no reason to believe that racism, being defined as a motivation or belief, played a role in the death of Ahmaud Abrery, George Floyd, or Breonna Taylor. Better yet, I have no reason to believe that their fates would have been different if they were white.

In most instances, I see a policy or incentive failure that requires a policy or incentive solution. If it's viewed as a racism problem, people will seek anti-racist solutions, which I believe are doomed to fail.

In Against Murderism, Scott Alexander talks about a schizophrenic patient who thought Jews secretly controlled the world.

"by totally ignoring the anti-Semitic aspect, I was able to successfully treat this guy with Seroquel, whereas if you tried to read him Elie Wiesel books, he’d still be in that psych ward today."

My worry is that if the anti racism crowd controls the narrative, they will do something similar, like requiring police officers to read Ta-Nehesi Coates essays, instead of something practical, like requiring de-escalation training, banning chokeholds, requiring warnings before shooting, or any other tactic in this study that correlates with a lower rates of police shootings.

In The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdor writes:

"The results of a poll conducted May 29 and May 30 by YouGov and Yahoo News do suggest, though, that police-reform advocates can win huge victories quickly if they choose the right battles...
If activists focus on proposals such as these, they might just achieve lasting change. If they choose or are dragged into a national debate that centers the propriety of riots, or abstract attitudes about policing, or white supremacy, or critical race theory, they are far less likely to achieve the urgent reforms that could reduce the frequency of police killings and brutality."

Campaign Zero is an example of advocacy that is serious and focused. (Activist DeRay Mckesson talks about his work on the Bill Simmons Podcast.) Their website does a great job of showing which policies work and includes an interactive graphic that shows which cities use which policies.

The goal of the campaign is to reduce police killings to zero, hence the name Campaign Zero. Notice that it isn't called Racism Zero.

V.
Performative groups are really good at getting media attention, but the energy is usually too diffuse and directionless to achieve any meaningful change. In fact, it's probably better to think of them as movements than institutions.

MLK was a pacifist. He practiced nonviolence, which is not anti-violence, or being against violence. Nonviolence is purposeful. It is telling someone "Do what I say or I'm going to make you hurt me."

King was able to answer Levin's question "As a Christian, as a pacifist, how do I respond to this situation?" He had a plan, he had leadership, he had a prophetic vision ("I have a dream ...").

The Founders didn't call this country Anti Britain. They had a vision for creating something better.

Today's activists have passion but they have not been formed by institutions that lead them to answer Levin's question, and largely, they lack prophetic vision. To answer Levin's question, you have to be for something.

To be fair, Robin DeAngelo's work does seem to be somewhat formative, shaping white people to be better versions of themselves. But its prescriptions lack efficacy and it falls into the trap of defining itself by what it is against, rather than painting a picture of utopia and how we can strive for it.

Black Lives Matter does seem to have a prophetic vision. It's website states "we’ve committed to struggling together and to imagining and creating a world free of anti-Blackness, where every Black person has the social, economic, and political power to thrive."

But is it a formative institution that seeks to shape people so they can answer Levin's question? I'm not sure, but I am hopeful. It has local chapters. It encourages positive things like voter registration. I guess it depends on whether the people seeking to join want to use it as a platform or as an opportunity to become a better version of themselves.

VI.
At this point, I'm sure that I sound like an institution stan, but the truth is I have been formed by nothing. I dropped out of Cub Scouts. I lost my faith in religion. I've never been affiliated with a political party. My alma mater is not a part of my identity.

Like many people in my generation, I resent the notion that I need some institution to transform me, that I need help in any way. But I keep coming back to a simple quote from David Foster Wallace's "This Is Water" speech: Everybody worships.

I believe that in the absence of formative institutions--ones with a history, some social infrastructure, a vision of a better tomorrow--people will give in to movements and performative ideologies that cater to our worst tribal impulses. They are bound to worship something.

When the media ceases to be a formative institution, it will completely devolve into tribal journalism. When higher education ceases to be a formative institution, it will devolve into performative students and activist professors.

And when important movements seeking necessary change are not led by people from formative institutions, it will attract the anarchists, looters, and performative demonstrators who lack the discipline and commitment to build a better society. It will attract the "anti" people who make it harder for the DeRay McKesson's of the world to enact change.

When more than a thousand U.S. citizens are killed by police each year, the stakes are too high to let this movement be carried by people with their own agenda.