Two Kinds of Anti-racists: Identitarian and Universalist

One school of anti-racism has this creation myth: Derrick Bell, father of Critical Race Theory, picked up the flag of anti-racism from the bodies of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, so now his crusading heirs are The One True Anti-racists. Bell’s school sees all other anti-racists as racists and can never admit to themselves that their claim on King and Malcolm X is only appropriation of the dead.

Now, when I talk about different kinds of anti-racism, I am using the term in its general sense — the Oxford Dictionary’s definition is “the policy or practice of opposing racism and promoting racial tolerance”. The word was rarely used before 1980. Bell’s students adopted it, which is why his school was simply referred to as Anti-racism in two classic essays, Rev. Thandeka’s Why Anti-racism Will Fail (1999) and Adolph Reed’s The Limits of Anti-racism (2009). Now that the word’s generic meaning is common, Thandeka and Reed are properly seen as socialist anti-racists who criticized Bell’s school.

If you imagine anti-racism is a tree, it has two trunks and many branches. The trunks represent ways of understanding humanity that are older than the idea of race: identitarians divide us by social identities like tribe and gender while universalists believe we are all equal members of the human family. The identitarian trunk bears black nationalists like Martin Delany, who coined “Africa for Africans”, Marcus Garvey, who declared himself Provisional President of Africa, and the Nation of Islam’s Elijah Muhammad, who claimed white people are devils. The universalist trunk bears integrationists like Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Paul Robeson, who all believed the only race is the human race.

During the civil rights struggle, the trunks grew close together as identitarians and universalists worked for equality in an uneasy alliance. The universalist trunk had three branches then: Democrats like John Lewis, Republicans like Alex Haley (who assembled The Autobiography of Malcolm X after Malcolm’s death), and socialists like Martin Luther King. The pre-eminent figure on the identitarian trunk was Malcolm X, but in 1964, he became the first major anti-racist to move from one trunk to the other. Two quotes after he left the Nation of Islam show that he cast off identitarianism to become a universalist:

“I totally reject Elijah Muhammad’s racist philosophy, which he has labeled ‘Islam’ only to fool and misuse gullible people.” — Malcolm X, 1964

“I believe in recognizing every human being as a human being, neither white, black, brown nor red.” — Malcolm X, 1965

After the civil rights movement accomplished its immediate goal of ending legal segregation and its greatest universalists were killed, racial progress was slow. Derrick Bell wanted a way to explain why so many black people were still in poverty, but he was not willing to criticize the capitalist system that provided his privileged life as an Ivy League academic. Instead, he became the second important anti-racist to move from one trunk to the other by questioning his early work for integration and embracing identitarianism. He began teaching that white people would always be racists who acted in their own interest and racism was a self-perpetuating system.

Because Bell’s school was developed by ruling class academics, it is especially popular with neoliberals — see Hillary Clinton’s use of jargon like “intersectionality” and the New York Times’ promotion of the 1619 Project. But Bell’s version of identitarian anti-racism also attracts some people who claim to be socialists, probably due to Bell’s student, Kimberlé Crenshaw. My suspicion is identitarian socialists should be counted as anarchists because their grasp of socialism is weak — “Workers of the world, unite!” does not mean, “Workers of the world, stay in your lane!” Anarchists have always been susceptible to the ideas of liberals — that’s why Lenin called them liberals with bombs. But perhaps I am quibbling. I’ll grant that socialism has been divided into universalist and identitarian camps, and that is on the list of reasons that the wealth gap between the rich and the rest of us continues to grow.

We have no polls to tell us if most liberals are now identitarians — we only know from the media that the rich who control it love liberal identitarianism. We also know that the basic definition of anti-racism explains why conservative anti-racism is taking black voters from the Democrats: the percentage of Republicans of color has grown steadily in each Presidential election from 4% in 2008 to 12% in 2020. Like Bell’s version of anti-racism, conservative anti-racism does little to nothing to help the working class, but it is very attractive to black billionaires like Robert Johnson and the many conservatives who are an important part of the reason approval of interracial marriage has gone from 4% in 1958 to 94% in 2021.

NEXT: I plan to write about whether systemic racism or class mobility is the better explanation for black poverty today.