Why I Stopped Blogging About Race

I don’t write to be controversial. 

I think of my blog as a place to air out ideas others might find interesting, relevant, or useful. Stoking controversy is for writers with thicker skins and loftier professional objectives. Having said as much, I could end this post right here. But the title of this piece (admittedly a little controversial) demands further explanation. So here goes. 

When I began blogging back in 2018, I listed race as one of my key preoccupations:

Here on All of That, I’ll be blogging about race every now and then, largely to sort it out for myself. It’s a sensitive and complex issue and not one I come to expecting some epiphany or bold resolution, like Alexander the Great cleaving the legendary knot. This conundrum, I think, takes a ton of patience even to comprehend fully, much less to resolve.

I wrote that the same year I had cancer surgery and found myself with lots of downtime for reading. I think it was Eddie Glaude Jr.’s Democracy in Black that got me started exploring wealth inequality and the plight of African Americans in the U.S. From there, I read just about everything Ta-Nehisi Coates ever wrote, which in turn led me to Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, W. E. B. Dubois, and others. During that same period, my daughter was completing a sociology degree at Barnard College, so I routinely sampled her reading assignments as well. It was through her coursework that I first encountered Critical Race Theory and the idea that racism is invisibly coded into the functioning of American society. By the time I finished all this self-study, I felt reasonably au courant—though by no means expert—on race and the struggle for equality in America.

Race has always been a personal subject for me. My father, a presbyterian minister, crusaded for civil rights in the 1960s; and my siblings and I grew up in central Denver when the school system was attempting, rather clumsily, to integrate. Anyone who attended Smiley Junior High or Manual High School in those days saw firsthand how kids from wildly different backgrounds can either thrive together or duke it out in the parking lot. During that time, I saw the best of racial interactions: close and lasting friendships formed among black, white, hispanic, and Asian kids. But I also witnessed the worst: racial slurs hurled in the hallway, fights in the cafeteria, and end-of-school-year riots. With this complicated background informing my world view, and after having read so deeply on race as an adult, I was eager to join the so-called conversation taking place in boardrooms, living rooms, and on social media. Hence my early blog posts on the subject.

I didn’t realize, however, that, while I’d been studying up, the national perspective on race had changed dramatically. In June 2018 Robin D’Angelo came out with her now-famous book, White Fragility. The next year Ibram Kendi published the wildly popular (at least among progressives) How to Be an Antiracist. Then came the death of George Floyd in May 2020, and all the social unrest that followed. CEOs, politicians, and college presidents everywhere issued public statements announcing their commitment to social justice. Black Lives Matter emerged as the new face of a “national racial reckoning.” Silence became violence. Mispronounced names became microaggressions. Intelligent people I’d always known as sympathetic to racial equality apologized for their privilege and promised to “do the work” or “have the tough conversations,” as if no one ever had. 

To my astonishment, when I looked for an entry into this national dialogue, I was told that people like me—middle-aged, male, white—were supposed to listen, not talk. I wrote about one such excoriation on Twitter, though I left out the racial component.

Startled by this change of mood, I did as instructed: I listened. 

Sadly, what I heard sounded nothing like a constructive exchange of ideas but a loud and disturbingly Orwellian recital of slogans. The new shibboleths of social justice got to be so predictable that some genius created a lawn sign that laid them all out in the shape of a heart: white privilege, oppression, dominant culture, social justice, racism, ally.

None of this struck me as instructive or conversational. It felt instead like a group of strident ideologues had taken control of the national discussion, refusing to yield the floor under any circumstances. What if a person believed that, while the march toward equality had some distance to go, the American democratic project was not founded on racism? What if you took issue with the idea that only those in the majority can be guilty of racism? Or you believe that immutable characteristics like skin color should not define us?

Nope. Uh uh. 

Any departure from the orthodoxy led to breathless accusations of hurtful speech, insensitivity, phobia, or even racism. Dissent was nowhere to be found. 

After that, any time a public figure pushed back against the new orthodoxy, ran afoul of the ever-changing lexicon of social justice terminology, or veered outside a prescribed “lane,” he or she got eviscerated or “de-platformed.” People I’d always known to be boldly outspoken grew suddenly reticent for fear of having the ray gun of public disapproval aimed in their direction. More startling, though, was the fact that these terrified people were smart, open-minded, reasonable human beings, all of them sympathetic to, even passionate about, social justice causes. They just didn’t happen to buy into the specific talking points of the new Big Brother.

Whenever I considered posting on race or gender or any of the related hot-button subjects, I decided it wasn’t worth it. It had already become obvious that people weren’t trying to understand each other anymore. They were trying to find fault with each other. What struck me as particularly sad was how folks seemed most likely to turn against people with similar ideological stances who, for whatever reason, wandered too far from the flock. Then the offended piled on top of the offender as if they’d never shared a cocktail or walked their kids to school together. That’s not a conversation; that’s an ambush.

Perhaps I’m naive to believe the intellectual climate is changing for the better. But it feels that way some days. More people seem to be acknowledging that the national dialogue shouldn’t be hijacked by any faction, and certainly not by those who squelch thoughtful debate on highly nuanced issues. As for me, I have found plenty of subjects to write on without stirring up much controversy: dog walking, prostate cancer, business, popular culture. Even with my cautious approach, though, I’ve taken some lumps—from wholly unexpected critics. That’s the risk bloggers take. I suspect that by the time the climate has cooled enough for a casual blogger like me to post on race, the ideologues will have spent their wrath and gone looking for other villages to burn. That’s fine with me. Maybe then we can stop eviscerating each other and get back to the sober, ongoing, and enormously important work of building a more perfect union.