New York Times Op-Ed: On Broadway, ‘Centering’ Antiracism Is Delightful, by John McWhorter (Columbia; Google Scholar):
My 12-year-old daughter practically had to drag me into the musical “Six,” currently raging on Broadway, in which Henry VIII’s six wives all have their say about what happened to them. … [A]fter 15 minutes I was already itching to give it a standing ovation.
Each wife comes out, in her way, as a proud, self-directed figure. For one, I love that my daughters will get this slice of history from the point of view (even if stylized) of the women, and even more that the women are cast as people of color(s), fostering a view of them as humans rather than racial types. In this, the whole show is a kind of lesson in antiracism, regardless of whether a viewer is consciously aware of it. In that way, it is a quintessentially modern work of musical theater. …
“Six” can change your lens in an antiracist (and antisexist) way — while also turning you on to art, wonder, curiosity and excitement.
And this got me thinking about how much less vibrant, or even constructive, the antiracist mission feels at universities. Remember when, in 2020, the new idea was for them to “center” antiracism as their focal mission? One may have thought this was more trend than game plan, but it remains very much entrenched nationwide. According to the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, a conservative law firm, first-year law students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison just this semester were required to attend a “re-orientation,” learning that explained that white people have a “fear of people of color and what would happen if they gained ‘control’” and will never be free of “racist conditioning.”
A University of Notre Dame “inclusive teaching” resource from last year notes that “anti-racist teaching is important because it positions both instructors and students as agents of change towards a more just society,” emphasis theirs, with the implication that this mission has unquestionable primacy in a moral society. Statements that antiracism (and battling differentials in power more generally) are central to university departments’ missions are now almost common coin. I just participated in a discussion of antiracism as universities’ central focus at the University of Texas at Austin and am regularly asked to do so elsewhere.
And I think the persistence of this centering of antiracism at universities is kind of scary.
It may understandably seem, after these four years as well as the ones preceding, that for universities to maintain antiracism as the guiding star of their endeavors is as ordinary as steak and potatoes.
But in the spirit of John Stuart Mill advising us to revisit even assumptions that feel settled, imagine a nationwide call for all universities to “center” climate change as the singular focus of their mission. Or STEM subjects, historical awareness or civic awareness, each of these positioned as the key to serious engagement with the challenges of the future. We might imagine the university is to “center” artistic vision or skill in public expression, or even physical culture.
Note that all of these centerings would be about things most consider good, and even crucial, but the question would be why the university, as a general rule, should make any of those things the essence of what an education should consist of. Any university that did so would openly acknowledge that its choice was an unusual, and perhaps experimental, one.
One might propose that antiracism deserves pride of place as a kind of atonement for the sins of slavery and Jim Crow. But while getting beyond evils requires being aware of them, redressing past injustices — in fact, redressing just one past injustice — is not the basic mission of a university. The Scholastics of the Middle Ages “centered” education on Christianity, with the idea that education must explore or at least be ever consonant with the essences of natural law and eternal grace. Today we may view this focus as antique or unintentionally parochial. But it’s not just Christianity: We should question the idea that that any one issue, even one that feels urgent at this particular moment, must be regarded as the heart of education. …
In the foisting of an antiracist agenda upon the life of the mind, I see increasingly constricted space for what knowledge truly is. Our universities are becoming temples of a kind of dutiful score-settling, where the motto is less something about truth in Latin than “j’accuse.” It’s a narrow, soul-crushing abbreviation of what education is supposed to be.
