But will Kamala Harris show how all that can be overcome?
“Oh, the white folks hate the black folks
And the black folks hate the white folks
To hate all but the right folks
Is an old established rule …
“Oh, the poor folks hate the rich folks
And the rich folks hate the poor folks
All of my folks hate all of your folks
It’s American as apple pie”
In the mid-1960s, the brilliant Tom Lehrer wrote “National Brotherhood Week,” his insightful riff on the hypocrisy about race in America. How can it be that nearly 60 years later, the satirical lyrics above still speak to us?
And yet they do. Race remains our country’s unfinished business, and reminders of it abound — sometimes in peculiar ways.
Take, for instance, Kamala Harris’s refusal to be drawn into a discussion of race in her conversation with CNN’s Dana Bash. The anchor asked about Donald J. Trump’s bizarre claim that Harris had only recently “happened to turn Black.”
Harris’s response was terse: “Same old, tired playbook. Next question, please.”
Of course, she was declining to rise to the bait Trump had set out for her. By getting her to focus on race, he hopes to carve off voters who might take exception to such an emphasis. Instead, Harris wants people to focus on her ample professional strengths and by implication to see Trump’s yawning depth of shortcomings.
Harris is a former prosecutor, state attorney general, senator and vice president. Trump’s resume, though it includes the title “president,” is far thinner and includes the titles “felon” and “failed businessman.”
Harris’s approach was entirely reasonable. A short interview on TV is not the best forum for a discussion of race, much less one during a heated presidential campaign. And voters should see her, first and foremost, for her professional qualifications.
But that doesn’t mean that we as a country are not in sad need of such discussions.
Indeed, aside from Trump’s foul bid to inject the issue into this campaign, racial matters have flared up in prior presidential contests. Recall Trump’s “birtherism” efforts against Barack Obama. Some astute observers say the 2016 election of Trump, in fact, was a predictable reaction to the two prior elections of President Obama.
“There were so many Black journalists who saw exactly what was coming in 2016,” Errin Haines said during a panel discussion at the International Symposium on Online Journalism last May in Austin, Texas.
“I remember after Barack Obama was elected in 2008, the conversation was about the myth that we were finally post-racial in this country, which I knew could not have been further from the truth,” the editor at large for The 19th said. “A lot of Black people in this country, a lot of Black journalists, understood that, if anything, we were about to be hyper-racial.”
In other words, as relayed by writer James Breiner in a smart discussion of the subject, white voters were going to express their dissatisfaction with having a Black president by choosing his opposite.
“If you know anything about the history of race in this country, there is no racial progress without racial backlash; 2016 was the logical destination after a Barack Obama presidency,” Haines added. “A lot of Black journalists saw it coming.”
Just as slavery remains our nation’s original sin, so our inability to deal with its ongoing effects – our racial polarization – remains an unmet challenge. Some tip-toe around the issue, contending, for instance, that it’s obvious that Harris is Black so there’s no need to discuss that.
Others, such as Republicans who’ve been extraordinarily successful in destroying Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives at universities, would ignore the topic altogether. The Chronicle of Higher Education is monitoring attacks on DEI at 196 colleges in 29 states so far, and they’ve ranged from complete legislatively mandated shutdowns of DEI offices and mergers of such offices with other functions to the elimination of diversity statements in hiring and to simple renamings.
At the campus where I taught for 14 years, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Chancellor Rodney D. Bennett recently marked his first anniversary in the job by announcing he will shut down the Office of Diversity and Inclusion and fire the vice chancellor heading it. He cited his “considerable reflection and a thorough review of both the national landscape and the specific needs of our institution” in ordering the closure.
Of course, what Bennett could have cited was pressure from political overseers such as Gov. Jim Pillen. The move was baked in the cake from the time the university regents hired Bennett, ironically a Black man, from the University of Southern Mississippi.
Pillen, as a regent and gubernatorial candidate in 2021, sought unsuccessfully to ban any curricular use of critical race theory from the campus. And his predecessor and mentor, former Gov. Pete Ricketts, had driven out Bennett’s predecessor, Ronnie D. Green, a white man, over an anti-racism plan UNL adopted.
Nationally, anti-CRT efforts were a warm-up for anti-DEI assaults. As analysts for The Brookings Institution reported, “critical race theory (CRT) has become a new bogeyman for people unwilling to acknowledge our country’s racist history and how it impacts the present.” CRT, a theory dating back to the late 1970s, holds that racism is not merely a matter of individual prejudice, but is embedded in legal systems and policies.
Not surprisingly, Pillen is now happy to see DEI disappear at UNL.
“Although that office should never have been established in the first place, it takes courage for a leader to recognize a mistake and chart a new direction,” Pillen said. “The work of eliminating DEI and critical race theory from our public institutions is not complete with the elimination of one bureaucratic office, though. We must continue the work of keeping our university curriculum, programming and its mission free of discrimination or racial preferences in any form.”
Perhaps hypocritically, that view is a new stance for Pillen, though. He became a convert to the nationwide anti-CRT and anti-DEI effort only in recent years, as the GOP rallied nationwide against such initiatives. As a Nebraska regent in 2018, Pillen had supported the DEI office, voting to hire its vice chancellor.
Does his flip-flop reek just a bit of political opportunism? Well, when the bandwagon is rolling their way, politicians often find it convenient to hop on board.
To be sure, some criticisms of DEI programs have merit. A recent piece by a couple Stanford academics in The New York Times notes that such programs sometimes consist of “online or off-the-shelf trainings that are more suitable for airline safety briefings than exploring the complexities of interracial relations, and ideological workshops that inculcate theories of social justice as if there were no plausible alternatives.”
The Stanford academics, who were appointed to the school’s Subcommittee on Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks, were especially troubled about how Jews had been treated in DEI programming. Jewish staff members a few years ago had been assigned to a “whiteness accountability” group, and some later complained that they were shot down when they tried to raise concerns about antisemitism, the academics wrote.
“The former D.E.I. director at a Bay Area community college described D.E.I. as based on the premises ‘that the world is divided into two groups of people: the oppressors and the oppressed,’” they wrote. “She was also told by colleagues and campus leaders that “Jews are ‘white oppressors,’” and her task was to ‘decenter whiteness.’”
As it happens, the program now slated to be axed at UNL includes 27 “learning groups,” places for “students, staff, faculty, alumni, and community members to engage in dynamic dialogue, reflection, and offer support to one another.” One such group focuses on antisemitism and Islamophobia on college campuses.
The Stanford academics don’t call for eliminating DEI programs, but rather providing an alternative to the ones they call “ideological.” They argue that campuses, in fact, need programs that foster a sense of belonging and engagement for students of diverse backgrounds, religious beliefs and political views.
They call for a “pluralistic vision.” This would involve “facilitated conversations among participants with diverse identities, religious beliefs and political ideologies, but without a predetermined list of favored identities or a preconceived framework of power, privilege and oppression.” Students would learn how to tell stories about their own identities, values and experiences, while listening to others, acknowledging differences and looking for commonalities.
Though such dialoguing may not be what DEI opponents have in mind, that seems like a useful approach. In our college DEI efforts, I found the most compelling part was an atiracism book club in which we read interesting work and discussed it. Along the way, we discussed our prejudices and backgrounds, sharing things that wouldn’t have come up in other settings.
Also, I found another prong of DEI efforts on campus useful. I served on hiring committees in which we reviewed candidates for various faculty and administrative posts. Being mindful of the need for a diverse faculty – something that is helpful to students, faculty and staff alike – at times meant giving an edge to qualified minority applicants. That’s not a bad thing in an overwhelmingly white faculty group.
We don’t have many places to discuss race in our society. But, for students and faculty alike, universities should be safe spaces for that. Conversations in them can break down walls and educate us. Education, after all, is what universities are about.
Whether folks in the GOP believe it or not, we don’t live in a “post-racial” society. We are not color-blind and, in some respects, should not be, at least not if we want to assure diversity in our schools and workplaces.
Indeed, that diversity is in grave danger in some places now. Declines in Black new-student enrollment at such schools as MIT, Amherst, Tufts and the University of Virginia — perhaps a result of the Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action in admissions — may just be straws in the wind. Or they could portend problems for minority social mobility and opportunity.
As for the coming election, Harris is wise to stay clear of the topic now. Let her appearance and, for that matter, her gender, speak for themselves. Despite, the racist bait Trump is tossing out, she should stay well clear of his bottom-fishing.
Harris, of course, is eminently qualified for another four years in the White House, this time behind the Resolute Desk. Her multi-racial background and gender should be pluses and, to thoughtful and reasonable voters, they will be. Will there be enough such voters? November 5 will tell.
