A mid-article piece that, among other things, serves as a shameful defense of the spike in campus antisemitism and violence since October 7 (reframed as merely laudable “Palestine solidarity”) is where Professor Jonathan Feingold of BU Law School and Isaac Kamola of Trinity College lay out their argument:
In this MAGA mythology, student anti-discrimination trainings, LGBTQ+ resource centers, fellowships supporting Black students, and diversity-focused initiatives are indistinguishable from–or more concerning than–the actual Nazis who chanted “Jews will not replace us” on the University of Virginia’s campus in 2017.17
17 For one example of the assertion that contemporary diversity efforts are “perhaps more insidious” than white nationalist projects and antisemitic conspiracy theories, see David Bernstein, Three Bad Ideas About Race in America, 4 Am. J.L. & Liberty 121, 123 & n.9 (2024).
That is not what I actually wrote in the cited article.
The United States has made substantial progress toward achieving the goals of the civil rights movement. While American society is not there yet, it is much closer in 2024 than it was in 1954…
There are two ideological threats to further progress. The first, from the right, is a potential return to the notion of the United States as a “white man’s” country. The potency of this threat is reflected in the increasingly popular “Great Replacement” theory. According to this theory, the powers-that-be are seeking to replace the United States’ white population with members of minority groups. These purported usurpers are mostly drawn from post-1965 immigrants, including illegal immigrants, and their descendants.9 While this conspiracy theory is wrongheaded and dangerous, those who adopt it fortunately hold little sway in elite and academic circles.
The second ideological threat is various racialist theories adopted by academics associated with the ideological left. These theories have spread to become something close to mainstream in some progressive circles. There is no single accepted moniker for this ideology, but many associate it with “woke,” “critical social justice,” and “critical race” theories of race and race relations. This ideology is perhaps more insidious than its counterpoint on the right; it reflects views held by people who call themselves “anti-racists” and who hold a great deal more cultural sway, especially among the American elite and in the establishment, than do right-wing racists.
Whatever one calls the theories emanating from the left, their advocates share a rejection of the racial liberalism that underlay Brown and explicit pessimism about the future of race in the United States. These theories also implicitly adopt racial essentialism as a working assumption, despite acknowledging that race is in fact socially constructed. As we shall see, some who reject racial liberalism favor encouraging Americans, especially white Americans, to strongly identify with their race.
That was written in late 2023, and with the reelection of President Trump and VP Vance’s open alliance with Groyper-lite(?) Tucker Carlson and his associates, I am not certain I would draw the same conclusions today about where the insidiousness lies.
That said, I did not publish anything like the alleged “assertion that contemporary diversity efforts are ‘perhaps more insidious’ than white nationalist projects and antisemitic conspiracy theories.” In fact, I did not mention “diversity efforts” at all, much less characterize such efforts as worse than “white nationalist projects.”
Instead, I examined three particular views that are common on the racialist left:
- Socioeconomic disparities among racial and ethnic groups should presumptively be attributed to present-day racism, racial hierarchy, or institutions serving the white majority, rather than to the many other cultural, historical, demographic, and economic factors that can produce group differences.
- Racial groups are collective actors with shared interests.
- White racial consciousness should be encouraged.
And if one wants to push the argument further and suggest that critiquing an ideology implies critiquing the products of that ideology, it should at least go without saying that diversity efforts are not necessarily a product of, and certainly not exclusively a product of, the ideologies cited above.
Indeed, many are not. To illustrate the authors’ concrete examples, “LGBTQ+ resource centers” do not have a direct link to contemporary leftist racialist ideology, and fellowships for Black students at predominantly white colleges have existed since at least 1918, when Grinnell College ran such programs in partnership with philanthropist Julius Rosenwald.
Academics ought to be careful about mischaracterizing their colleagues, perhaps especially those with whom they disagree, but the fault here also lies with the BU Law Review. Law reviews carry numerous drawbacks, yet one advantage they are supposed to offer is the practice of cross-checking an author’s statements against the sources cited. This does not guarantee protection for readers from every weak source, but it at least provides a safeguard, and in this case the law review failed to uphold that basic duty.
