A few thoughts on this moment

On race, justice and liberal ideals

Over the past month, I’ve watched debates unfold—about racism and policing, free speech and tolerance, white privilege and cancel culture—without contributing much to the discussion. For the most part, I haven’t felt that mine is a voice that anyone particularly needed to hear. But as the conversation online and in newspapers and newsrooms has turned to the role and responsibilities of the press, and to troubles within economics, silence has begun to feel like a cop out. I find myself in deep agreement with those who have pointed out the absurdities of much of the cancel-culture panic: and in particular the failure of the panicked to reckon with the racism embedded in the structure of our elite institutions and in our understanding of liberal principles broadly speaking. I’ve been impressed by the journalists who’ve had the courage to speak up in response to mistakes made by their employers. And I’ve come to think that it might be useful to add my voice to theirs and explain how I’ve come to think about these issues.

This is not to say I’ve got it all worked out. I’m still reflecting on how I do my job, the ways I’ve made myself part of the problem, and what I can do better in the future. And lest skeptics dismiss my views out of hand, let me also say that overreactions do of course occur, and companies which reflexively fire employees because Twitter is being Twitter, never bothering to do some hard thinking and moral reasoning for themselves: well, they aren’t helping themselves or the cause of justice. But using overreactions as an excuse to avoid grappling with systemic racism or implying in any way that the two are equally deserving of attention and scorn are serious moral failures.

The context for this, for those who’ve not followed all the stories adjacent to the worldwide protests in response to George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police, is a series of furores about race, representation and speech at elite institutions. During the early days of the protests, the New York Times ran an opinion piece by a US senator, Tom Cotton, arguing that American troops should be sent into American cities to quell looting and violent protest. The piece generated a number of objections and led to an outcry among Times staffers, then the departure of opinion editor James Bennet, and then a backlash from other writers (including Times columnist Bari Weiss) over what they saw as an assault on the free expression of ideas.

Then, more recently, Harold Uhlig, an economist at the University of Chicago and editor of one of the profession’s top journals, made disparaging comments about Black Lives Matter protestors on Twitter. Uhlig has a history of making questionable comments on the subject of race, and furthermore the profession as a whole has been grappling with problems related to hostile departmental cultures and a lack of diversity. His tweets prompted a wave of criticism from other prominent economists and demands that he lose his position as journal editor, given its critical gatekeeping role. But soon enough other economists began warning that Uhlig was a victim of a mob of thought police who would soon be coming for all the politically incorrect white men in economics.

So where do I stand? 

Let’s begin with a point we all ought to be able to acknowledge: for a very long time now, elite platforms in society—in business and politics, media and academia—have been populated mostly or entirely by white people. There has been progress. But to a remarkable degree, elite institutions remain largely closed to black writers, academics, thinkers and so on—and the whitest bits of those institutions are often the most senior portions of their internal hierarchies.

How did things come to be this way, and why do they remain this way? It would be an enormous relief to many nervous folks atop organizational charts to have an explanation to hand which doesn’t involve racism. But there just isn’t one. It could be that management is just racist. It could be that management isn’t especially racist but also hasn’t taken the time to reform HR processes with a bunch of built-in discriminatory filters. It could be that the hiring process is fine, but management, which isn’t necessarily racist, hasn’t noticed that an institution’s internal culture is a hostile one which makes life miserable for everyone except arrogant white men. It could be that the institution is super enlightened and non-racist and can’t help the fact that centuries of discrimination across society mean that the only capable people worth hiring aren’t black: except that’s bullshit, because some institutions do hire people of color who do exceptional work, and competent managers of elite institutions really ought to be aware of this.

Our society, one is forced to conclude, is one in which powerful institutions systematically exclude people of color. It has been this way for ages, it remains this way now, and if you are a white person working at an elite institution which struggles for one reason or another to hire black people, then you are a beneficiary of this structural racism. Or “beneficiary”, rather, because while it’s nice to have an elite job, it would be even better to know that systemic injustice had nothing to do with your getting it, and better still to know that your institution was functioning as well as it possibly could because it didn’t systematically shut out people who deserve to be there.

Does it matter that these elite institutions look the way they do? It does, for many reasons, but let’s focus on just one. Part of the function of any elite platform is the work of curation. There are only so many people working for an institution or contributing to it or consuming its output, and those people only have so much time, and so elite institutions necessarily play an editorial role. Some views get published and some don’t. Some research questions are deemed worth asking, and others are not. This is as it should be. As a society, we are engaged in a constant, collective conversation; this is the means by which we collectively process what’s happening around us, form an understanding of it, and decide what to do about it. But a conversation with no filters becomes polluted and dysfunctional. A societal conversation in which every outburst, however absurd, is given the same amplification and consideration as every other is not one which will lead anywhere useful. As a society, we could solve this problem by denying some people the right to speak at all, but that creates its own risks: in particular, that dissenting voices which need to be heard won’t be.

The solution isn’t censorship but moderation. The role of elite institutions, one ideally earned by a history of capable public stewardship of the collective conversation, is to help moderate the discussion. To say: here are some ideas which we think are good or interesting or challenging, or some questions we think need answering, or some prospective solutions to problems which seem worth exploring. And maybe the masses will think the ideas are stupid or the questions are pointless or the proposals are asinine, and they have the right to say so and indeed to try to organize competing institutions which can amplify other ideas. But the fact is that there are elite institutions which enjoy a unique and privileged ability to influence the conversation because they are controlled and listened to by powerful people. They should understand the important social role that goes along with their elite status.

The curation undertaken by elite institutions is inevitably influenced by the composition of the people working at such places. It isn’t necessarily the case that a given black academic or journalist or politician will approach a particular subject in a different way than a given white counterpart would. Given the yawning and persistent racial inequalities in America, however, an increase in diversity within elite institutions cannot help but bring to the table experiences and perspectives that are largely absent now. Put it like this: if the members of an elite institution are unable, for years, to see that an absence of black colleagues among their ranks is a sign of deep institutional dysfunction in need of an urgent response, then those members must have a very blinkered view of society and how it works, which cannot help but influence the way they pursue their ends. Fixing that dysfunction and changing the composition of these institutions will change how they see the world, and how they engage with it, and consequently how they go about moderating the collective conversation and influencing public opinion.

We have seen this happen in places which have done more than others to address longstanding problems of racial discrimination. As the composition of the people in the room shifts, the views aired and the questions asked change too. But this makes some members of the old guard within these institutions uncomfortable.

Why is that the case? It is partly a matter of the zero-sum nature of privilege. To be clear, racial justice, broadly considered, is a positive-sum game: removing the social structures that prevent black Americans from enjoying the same opportunities to realize their potential as others will be good for everyone. But in a given institutional context a loss of privilege is a loss of privilege. If new voices in an academic department or a newsroom point out that some ways of characterizing an economy or writing about a political dynamic are blinkered and misleading, society will benefit from this increase in analytical and editorial rigor, but the people within the department or newsroom who made a career for themselves producing the blinkered work will find their status unavoidably diminished within the institution as a result.

But what’s fascinating is that many of the people who feel themselves to be threatened by increased diversity don’t cast their plight in selfish terms. No, they frame this erosion in their privilege as an assault on treasured principles. They feel righteously angry about the changes they see happening within their institution (or the changes they fear will soon occur, in places where very little progress has been made so far).

How is that? To help them do their curatorial work, elite institutions have developed, over long periods of time, sets of guidelines which they use to determine what to study or amplify and what to condemn or ignore. Schools of academic thought, political philosophies, and professional codes of ethics inform the way that elite institutions process information and contribute to the collective conversation. Liberalism, to take one very broad example, is a set of ideals which shapes the curatorial decisions made in some elite academic departments, newsrooms, think tanks and so on. Of course, liberalism is a big, vague thing which has evolved over time and which is understood differently by different people. The particular liberal values held dear by a given institution, though they may seem to some elites to represent some higher or universal truth, are just one of many possible ways of understanding what liberalism is.

Crucially, these ideals, values, principles and so forth reflect the experiences and perspectives of the thinkers that contributed to their development over the years. They are a way of understanding and navigating the world, but “the world” as seen by the leading lights of liberalism is a different thing from “the world” as broadly experienced. It is, again, a matter of privilege to feel as though one’s conception of the world and the philosophies one relies upon in forming it are properly seen as a default and universal thing. 

It’s not particularly surprising that a person, having arrived at this intellectual place, would be incensed when others question these supposedly universal truths and suggest revisions to treasured ideals. But this is what ending white privilege requires. When new voices are allowed—finally, at long last—into these elite rooms, we can’t expect them to be silent. We can’t expect them not to contribute to the curatorial process in the way that white people have blithely done forever. We can’t expect our institutions and our hallowed philosophies to remain unchanged.

And why shouldn’t we want them to change, after all? The ideals at the heart of liberalism are powerful and beautiful. They press us to acknowledge and end racial injustice. But the specifics matter. The practicalities matter. What sort of a liberalism is it whose practical effect is to perpetuate persistent inequalities in wealth, power and status? What sort of a liberalism is it whose practical effect is to excuse old biases, or reinforce them, or justify them?

What does it say about liberalism when the ranks of its flagship institutions do not include any black people?

I am thinking here of the economics department of the University of Chicago, which does not have any black professors, and also of my own employer, The Economist. I understand the perspective of defenders of establishment liberalism: that for all its flaws its elite representatives support policies which promise to reduce racial inequality and address injustice. That a focus on things like representation and language is not much use if it crowds out efforts to achieve meaningful policy change. But look, America hasn’t found itself with militarized and radicalized police forces, or a straightjacket of exclusionary zoning, because one side lost to another in a battle of white papers (as it were). It has those things because of racism. If you want posh white people to send their children to school with black children, or to live in diverse neighborhoods without reserving the right to call down unaccountable force whenever they feel the slightest bit uncomfortable, then you need to eliminate the notion of black people as some alien other. And you simply cannot do that when so many elite spaces are devoid of black faces—or when elites react with hostility when the black voices allowed into the room dare to contribute to the conversation.

Liberal ideals are vital. But they become a poison when we invoke them to preserve an undeserved privilege. They become corrosive when we hide behind them out of a fear that we may suffer a decline in status or influence. Those of us whose way has been made the littlest bit easier because of structural racism should be wise enough and generous enough to accept a loss of privilege with grace, and indeed to do what we can to accelerate the process. This will be hard, at times, for people who have worked all their lives to project their ideas more forcefully to more people with more effect. But demonstrating that one is capable of being a responsible steward of the collective conversation means ceding time and space and power to suppressed voices, and listening when they speak.

That’s perhaps a strange note on which to end a very long dispatch. I should say, once more, that I am only echoing arguments many others have made about these matters. Given the way the conversation has unfolded in recent weeks, I felt it best not to be silent, but to add my voice to others sharing similar thoughts in hopes it will make some impression on those individuals in elite spaces who really ought to be doing more to understand the messy world around them and improve it.