Part 12 -- Conclusion: How the History of “Antiracism” May Read Like the History of Eugenics

A Critique of Kendi, DiAngelo, Hannah Jones, and Critical Race Theory

The previous eleven essays have described in detail Ibram X. Kendi’s and Robin DiAngelo’s false assumption that disparities in outcomes among people grouped by race are caused by racism, and how in order to justify those false assumptions, Kendi and DiAngelo must necessarily reject the classical liberal understanding that people should be treated as individuals, and instead insist, in DiAngelo’s words in her book White Fragility, that “white people do not exist outside the system of white supremacy.”

Kendi and DiAngelo embrace concepts akin to “racial health” and the need for government control to alter it.  And they embrace the use of genetics insofar as they focus on skin color (with skin color having a genetic mechanism behind it) as a measure upon which to judge which workers should be elevated, and which demoted.

It’s striking to realize how similarly these same concepts were employed in the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United States by proponents of eugenics -- a program based on the understanding that race should be used by the government to determine whom should be helped by its policies, and whom should be limited.

Thomas Leonard, in his book “Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era,” describes the eugenics movement in the United States in ways closely analogous to the movements Kendi and DiAngelo have inspired.  Leonard writes:

The progressives’ break with their classically liberal roots was one of the most striking intellectual changes of the late nineteenth century, one with far-reaching consequences … [Richard T.] Ely, [the first secretary of the American Economic Association, founded in 1885] firing the early shots of his AEA insurgency, made clear that progressive economists rejected the “fictitious individualistic assumption of classical political economy” and instead placed society above the individual. Washington Gladden, a charter member of the AEA and America’s most influential social gospeler, condemned individual liberty as an unsound basis for a democratic government.  The tradition of respect for individual liberty, Gladden preached, was “a radical defect in the thinking of the average American.”  John R. Commons said that social progress required the individual to be controlled, liberated, and expanded by collective action.

In the same way, Kendi and DiAngelo reject individualism as a defect in thinking (see Part 4), which they see as requiring government action to correct.

Leonard also writes, describing the eugenics proponents of the late nineteenth century:

The progressive economists’ rejection of individualism and their embrace of what Daniel Rodgers calls the “rhetoric of the moral whole,” was perhaps best embodied in Edward A. Ross’s concept of social control, which referred broadly to all means, public and private, by which “the aggregate reacts on the aims of the individual, warping him out of his self-regarding course, and drawing his feet into the highway of the common weal.” Individuals, Ross maintained, were but “plastic lumps of human dough,” to be formed on the great “social kneading board.” … The affinities between eugenics and labor reform help explain why so many progressives were drawn to eugenics—both movements shared vital commitments to anti-individualism, social control, efficiency, and the authority of scientific experts … American Progressive Era eugenics was anti-individualist and illiberal.  Its raison d’être was the belief that racial health was too important to be left unregulated. The individual’s liberty to make her reproductive, marital, labor, and locational choices free from state interference ended precisely at the point where her choices were seen to endanger the health of the race … The influence of the new sciences of heredity, including eugenics, helped economic reformers distinguish workers who deserved uplift from workers who deserved restraint.

Kendi and DiAngelo, too, base their ideologies on the idea that the well-being of groups based on race (“racial health”) is too important to be left unregulated, and that each individual’s liberty to make “her reproductive, marital, labor, and locational choices free from state interference ended precisely at the point where her choices were seen to endanger the health of the race.”  For Kendi and DiAngelo, the consequences of individual choices should be ameliorated by the government by penalizing others, with those helped and hurt determined by race.  Here we have Kendi and DiAngelo promoting a new form of group “racial health” (or group “racial disease”), but one that doesn’t even pretend to be based on science, but instead rejects the scientific method (see Part 5).

Far from improving upon the moral principles of the past, Kendi and DiAngelo would reject the foundations of humanism and the Enlightenment that helped humanity rise from the Dark Ages.  As Adrian Wooldridge writes in her book The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World, “Removing group-specific legal rights and replacing them with individual rights was at the heart of the Enlightenment project in the eighteenth century.”  But Kendi and DiAngelo, part of the “critical race theory” tradition, follow the precepts of Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, who make plain in their book “Critical Race Theory: An Introduction” that “critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.”

In “The Men Who United the States: America’s Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics, and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible,” Simon Winchester recounts the touching story of Clarence King, a brilliant geologist who became the first director of the U.S. Geological Survey in 1879.  King was instrumental in helping survey the American West, and in so doing he was one of the key uniters of the United States.  King also lived a double life, secretly marrying a former slave, Ada Copeland, while pretending to her to have black heritage himself.  King hid his love for Ms. Copeland from his other friends and colleagues for thirteen years.  But just before his death, King confessed his secret to Ms. Copeland and to his own doctor.  As Martha Sandweiss recounts in Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line, King’s physician, Dr. R. W. Craig “indicated on the death certificate that King was a married man.  He sent a telegram to Ada in Toronto with news of her husband’s death.  And on the death certificate, where the form asked for a description of the deceased, Craig struck out the word ‘color,’ and typed ‘American.’”

As Winchester adds:

Perhaps in some way, by marrying into a black family and siring five children who were of mixed race, melted down into one race alloy, King played his microcosmically small part in helping his country achieve [his vision of a racially unified America].  To the highly complex and multi-layered business of the uniting of the states, Clarence Rivers King contributed by his vital role in the great geological surveys, and perhaps also by crossing the lines of race and class.

Today, the internet and social media provide a new and wonderful potential means of uniting individuals across the states.  But some would use this new technology to instead divide Americans by elevating the crudest of obstacles: not the mountains or other geological barriers King surveyed, but the barbed wire fences of race and identity politics.

But while sheep can’t carefully step over barbed wire, we can.

Links to all essays in this series: Part1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5; Part 6; Part 7; Part 8; Part 9; Part 10; Part 11; Part 12

Collected essays in this series

Short video documentary on problems with popular critical race theory texts

Harvard Law School flashback