* “‘I have no power,’ Vanessa stated a leadership workshop for NYU students of color.”

Note: The workshop took place on November 6, 2015.

* “In her classes, she’d been taught ‘critical race theory,’ which denies that individual actions can lead to palpable change.”

Note: Critical Race Theorists understand power as indelibly connected to racism. According to CRT, racism is woven into the foundation of American society. There need not be individual racists to perpetuate institutional racism. By extension, individual goodness can’t undo institutional racism.

To understand the nuances of this argument, I recommend several scholarly readings:

Derrick A. Bell, Jr., “Does Discrimination Make Economic Sense? For Some – It Did and Still Does,” 15 Human Rights 38 (Fall 1988).

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, “Race, Reform, and Retrenchment: Transformation and Legitimation in Antidiscrimination Law.” Harvard Law Review 101, no. 7 (1988): 1331-387. doi:10.2307/1341398.

Richard Delgado, “Shadowboxing: An Essay on Power,” 77 Cornell Law Review 813 (1992).

* “Having power is the ability to ‘otherize’ – to taint people not like you as the malevolent stranger, the unidentified foreign object, the It, the Other.”

Note: According to Crenshaw, for example, the creation of an Other is a precondition for the exercise of power by one group over another. In the case of racist ideology, she writes that it is based on “an illusion of [white] unity through the oppositional force of a symbolic other.” And while I agree with this observation, Crenshaw utterly ignores those contexts in which nonwhite people wield the power to include or exclude white people — as I explained to my student, Vanessa.

* “After all, how else do we reform the cultures of institutions unless it’s through people? Cultures don’t make decisions. People do.”

Note: Former U.S. Senator and Secretary of State John Kerry cites a textbook example. Upon being elected to the Senate in 1985, Kerry and other Democrats found ways to work with the Reagan Republicans. They could do so “because people weren’t punished for it. Because there was no orthodoxy thrust on people within the caucus that said to them, ‘Don’t work with Them. That’s terrible.’ Or, even worse, people threatening their colleagues with primaries if they didn’t toe the line on a particular ideology. That began to happen. What changed was not the rules of the Senate. What changed were the people and their attitude… Honesty has not been rewarded lately in our system and we’ve got to get back to that… And so it’s people. People have to come to office prepared to exercise their own beliefs and courage, not beliefs that are forced on them as a matter of matter of orthodoxy.” AirTalk, KPCC 89.3 FM (43:28-44:45)

* “Relational leadership is when you concentrate on relationships so that you’re humane, tactful, and tactical all at once.”

Note: I believe that building relationships is the key to fighting racism not only among individuals, but also throughout institutions and systems. By recognizing that systems and institutions are comprised of human beings, and that every human has individuality even when s/he/they belong to identity groups, we create and execute policies with real human needs in mind rather than treating people as grand abstractions.

Consider the various policies adopted for desegregating public schools in the U.S. Why were Black schools closed and Black children bussed to white schools? The standard answer is that Black schools had far fewer resources than white schools. But then why didn’t officials shift some resources from white to Black schools, so that some Black teachers could keep their jobs, some Black students could remain with those teachers, and some white kids could share the burden of adjusting to new environments — just as Black students had to?

I’ve posed this question to several historians of education. A number have cited white supremacy. That is, white parents fought tooth and nail against sending their children to schools created for Black kids. As a result, there was no choice but to send Black kids to white schools.

This tells me that white parents feared “Black environments” because they didn’t have relationships with Black families. It also tells me something more: The makers and enforcers of educational policy had precious few relationships with Black educators themselves — the very educators who’d be disproportionately unemployed because white teachers would now be educating the majority of Black students. It didn’t matter Black teachers were individuals in their own right, with professional credentials and personal responsibilities such as feeding their families. Instead, Black teachers got cast as part of an amorphous Black “population”; a mass shorn of individuality. 

Hence the near-complete firing of Black teachers and equally dire consequences for many Black students. See Stuart Buck, Acting White: The Ironic Legacy of Desegregation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010).

* “Critical theorists arm students to unmask the system.”

Note: Crucial to the development of these tools was the work of Michel Foucault. See, especially, Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power.” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 8, No. 4 (Summer 1982), 777-795.

However, the clearest article that I’ve come across in this regard is also highly critical of Foucault. See Helen Pluckrose, “How French ‘Intellectuals’ Ruined the West: Postmodernism and Its Impact, Explained,” Aeon, March 27, 2017.