"To Achieve Racial Justice, Downplay Race."

That’s the first line of this morning’s New York Times newsletter , which later goes on to note:

Progressive activists often point out — accurately — the central role that race and racism play in the U.S. Polls show, for example, that a large percentage of Americans feel racial animus . That animus helped fuel Donald Trump’s political rise, starting with his promotion of the lie that Barack Obama was born in Africa. And racial discrimination continues to shape our economy, schools, criminal justice system and more.

What is happening in these paragraphs is that we’re discussing a more rational approach to race discussions. When people go fully woke trying to discuss race, especially if they’re privileged subdivision housewives on Instagram, it’s so comical and so easy to take down. That’s performative woke, where the goal isn’t any real change to anything, but to show to some of your acquaintances that you’re a “good person.” This is chasing woke and going broke. Nothing is achieved.

These paragraphs above are also discussing the problem with corporate diversity training, which typically has a tremendous amount of white male backlash, and guess what? For better or worse, white males still run most organizations. One of the reasons that diversity often feels like a PR stunt is that because it’s often designed to do nothing — the way of life for the people at the top of an organization absolutely cannot change. They cannot do any heavy lifting, or they will never hire that vendor again for a training. The goal is performative lip service in the name of “We checked this box,” because race makes people uncomfortable and, as noted above, there’s a lot of animus around the topic. It’s become more pronounced in recent years, because the younger, logically more liberal generation has more platforms and ways to amplify messages, and they also tend to scream and cancel as much as older white guys on the right side of the center. It’s a lot of noise, without many solutions.

What if corporate diversity training was focused on putting tables of six employees together — say, two managers and four employees, different departments — and having them have discussions about race and comfort levels? I would think that would be 17x more effective than the bullshit we currently trot out. My pastor has three adopted black kids; he’s white, with one biological white son. He says the biggest saving grace on empathy, understanding, and diversity was moving into a cul-de-sac with two white families, two Hispanic families, and one black family. Now the different kids play together and the parents interact, and the explicit race stuff fades away. When you live in a lily-white, expensive subdivision, the race stuff maintains animus because you don’t see anyone different from you all week. So what if we talked about race explicitly less, and had more conversations about what we want for our kids, other kids, our neighborhood, our city, our future, etc?

Here’s Cory Booker, who I am sure the most left of the left thinks of as an Uncle Tom, discussing baby bonds in that newsletter linked above:

“It’s very hard to undo centuries of racial policies by suddenly saying, ‘I’m now going to not be conscious of race in America,’” he said . But, he added, “This is a policy that I think can be embraced by you, whoever you are, whatever your background.”

The worst part of that quote is that so many people do think they can “end racism” by simply saying at a cocktail party, “Well, I’m conscious of racism now, so that’s my step.” No it’s not, Carol. This is an incredibly complicated, far-reaching ecosystem of stuff that cannot be solved by one person or one community. What we can do is have conversations about where the common ground lies, see where the “latitude of acceptance” lies , and try to go from there.

If you want to look at the two big trials of the past 2–3 weeks, everyone tried to make the Rittenhouse trial racial in nature, which is ironic and hysterical because the shooter and all the victims were white, and the prosecutor in Arbery barely mentioned race. What happened? Rittenhouse walked — and admittedly what was needed to be proven there is harder — and the left screamed like crazy. Arbery’s guys got put in the pokey. Maybe that’s a lesson that we need to mention race less to deal with racial things?

Takes?