When Anti-Racism Comes for the Anti-Racists with John McWhorter and Vincent Lloyd
https://glennloury.substack.com/p/when-anti-racism-comes-for-the-anti
Earlier this month, Vincent Lloyd, professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University, published an article in Compact that ought to make “anti-racists” everywhere think long and hard about what they’re doing. While leading a summer seminar last year at the Telluride Association entitled “Race and the Limits of Law in America,” Vincent found himself accused of the very forms of anti-racism his course was designed to interrogate. Under the influence of a Telluride-appointed anti-racism workshop leader Vincent refers to as “Keisha,” his students turned against him. No longer able to teach effectively in an environment turned hostile, Vincent ended the seminar early.
The irony is that Vincent is a committed anti-racist. He is the director of Villanova’s Africana Studies program, he leads anti-racist workshops, and he publishes on the topic of anti-racism. And, not for nothing, he’s black. One would think that those bona fides would insulate him from charges of perpetuating white supremacy. Indeed, even after being treated so shabbily by Keisha, Vincent remains a staunch anti-racist. As John notes in the following excerpt from our conversation with Vincent, all of this was, in some ways, predictable. The anti-racist mindset divides the world into victims and oppressors. When no true oppressor can be found, one will be conjured from the materials at hand in order to reestablish the phantom social order that anti-racism requires to justify its existence.
In our conversation, Vincent says that, while he was a victim of anti-racism run amok, he views Keisha as a victim, too. Perhaps she is. But if so, then the oppressor is the very worldview that seeks to lock people those two very narrow, inhuman roles. A true commitment to social justice would demand that we relinquish any paradigm that operates by reducing intelligent, kind, dedicated people like Vincent to mere nodes in a structure of domination. If anti-racism truly defended the full humanity of black people, then its own premises would require it to wink out of existence. Vincent’s story ought to be proof of that. Unfortunately, consistency seems too much to ask in this case.
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