Helen Andrews’ Racial Crossroads Has a Blind Spot

Any account of our pathologies around race has to account for the right as well as the left

HELEN ANDREWS’ RACIAL CROSSROADS HAS A BLIND SPOT

Any account of our pathologies around race has to account for the right as well as the left

Greg Thomas

Editors’ note: This is the first of several pieces by regular JFBT authors that we are running in response to Helen Andrews’ recent Compact essay, “The Racial Crossroads.” She argued that America’s post-1960s “racial bargain” is breaking down because it was designed for a mostly white, biracial country and premised on temporary racial preferences that would disappear once racial disparities converged—but demographics have changed and convergence has not occurred.

Her thesis is that the country now faces a choice between restoring equality under the law or accepting permanent, increasingly pervasive racial favoritism across institutions.

She characterizes the latter path as “race communism”: an official ideology in which race functions like class did under communism, legitimating transfers of status, money, and power from disfavored to favored groups.

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In her recent Compact essay, “The Racial Crossroads,” Helen Andrews argues that America stands at a fork in the road: keep race-based law and watch it consume our politics, or strip race from the law entirely and let the fever finally break. As a description of where the DEI regime has ended up and why, her essay in Compact covers familiar ground. As an argument from principle, it doesn’t hold up.

Andrews deems the ideology of 2020 “race communism,” a system in which race functions as the source of institutional legitimacy, and dissent is treated as heresy rather than disagreement. This phrase cleverly borrows the old American dread of Communism at a moment when Democratic Socialists are notching real wins on the left. But if the sin of race communism is treating ancestry as the basis of who’s owed what, that sin certainly didn’t originate on just one side of the aisle. How about so-called “heritage American” advocates who sort citizens into rightful stakeholders and tolerated guests? Race realists who invoke group IQ differences to justify unequal treatment? They’d call themselves race communism’s enemies. But actually, they are its twins, built from the same premise of racial essentialism, just marching in the other direction. A writer ostensibly arguing from principle, not partisanship, owes her reader both mirrors. Andrews gives us one and sticks her head in the sand regarding the other.

I doubt that’s an oversight. The omission, methinks, is the argument. A writer capable of this much detail about one set of race-based excesses certainly has the wherewithal to see them on the opposite side. She saw them and kept it to herself. The result is the difference between a piece that really wants race out of American law and a piece that leaves ample room for the rightwing twins to take back the wheel. In fact, they’re already trying: Jared Taylor, the country’s most prominent self-identified white nationalist, titled his own response to her essay “Brilliant Diagnosis but Wrong Course of Treatment.”

Taylor doesn’t want a colorblind car. He wants the same one, with the hands that drove it during Jim Crow back on the wheel.

I actually agree with where Andrews says she wants to end up. My own work has spent years arguing against racialization as a governing logic, on the left as much as the right, in favor of the civic-humanist tradition that runs from Frederick Douglass through Constance Rourke, Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray, and Danielle Allen, a cultural tradition that asks Americans to answer to one another as citizens rather than as entries in a ledger of grievance, resentment, or blood. That is my principled position. But in my estimation, Andrews cares more about partisanship than principle, which lets her report the Trump administration’s countermeasures against DEI without turning the same critical eye on its excesses that she turns on the DEI complex.

Chloé Simone (previously Chloé Valdary) founded the Theory of Enchantment on principles that rebuke Robin DiAngelo’s model of race as a fixed identity to be managed as much as they rebuke anyone on the far right: treat people as human beings, not political abstractions; criticize to uplift; root the work in love rather than accusation. Hers was never the confessional, oppressed-vs.-oppressor scolding that made DEI so divisive once the industry folded in the “E” for “equity.” Valdary strove to answer that approach with a more generative model and method. Her business suffered anyway, flattened by a backlash too blunt or too uninterested to distinguish the ideology Andrews rightly criticizes from the people who were already building something better. A friend’s wife, a lawyer whose diversity and inclusion work rested on serious scholarship rather than slogans, had her contracts vanish the same way. Countermeasures that can’t distinguish “race communism” from the work of people long crafting constructive alternatives hands a sledgehammer to a wrecking crew and calls it repair.

An essay on race in America that catalogs the pathology on one side behind an attack slogan like “race communism” while waving the other side through doesn’t describe a crossroads. Andrews chose a lane and called it the high road. The actual test of whether someone wants race out of our law, rather than their tribe’s version of race back in charge, is whether she can name the excesses in both directions with the same nerve she brings to the ones she already dislikes. I’ve attempted to do that in my own work, here, here, and here. Andrews couldn’t be bothered.

None of this means her diagnosis is worthless. The dysfunctions she inventories are real, and a politics organized permanently around racial accounting is indeed a dead end. But naming the dysfunction isn’t the same as deciding who gets to drive. Andrews claims she is calling for race itself to be taken out of the car altogether. Read closely, what she is really offering is a set of keys, and an invitation for one tribe to slide into the driver’s seat while the other rides in the trunk, bound and gagged.

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Greg Thomas is CEO of the Jazz Leadership Project, a firm that uses the principles and practices of jazz music to enhance leadership success and team excellence in organizations such as JPMorgan Chase, Verizon, Center for Policing Equity, TD Bank, and Google. He is Co-Director of the Omni-American Future Project and Co-Editor of The Omni-American Review. In October 2021, he co-produced the two-day broadcast, “Combating Racism and Antisemitism Together: Shaping an Omni-American Future,” which may be viewed here and here. He blogs at Tune In To Leadership. He co-authored Reimagining American Identity with his partner, Jewel Kinch-Thomas, and Amiel Handelsman. He is currently working on his memoir, The Making of An Omni-American: My Journey from Race to Culture to Cosmos. He publishes regularly in the Journal of Free Black Thought where his articles and interviews include “Jazz, the Omni-American Ideal, and a Future Beyond Bigotry,” “Reimagining American Identity,” “Can Civic Jazz Resolve the American Dilemma?,” “Deracialization Now,” “Why Did Trump Prevail Again?,” “American Excellence” (with Aryeh Tepper), and on the FBT Podcast “Not Black but Café au lait.”