As a former university professor and diversity officer, I once asked a black-student union if their goal was to become obsolete. While most students didn’t understand the question, one student, the group’s leader, replied that the group would continue to exist even if racism were eradicated. Today, I’m more concerned about the creation of seemingly permanent organizations and protocols that suggest racism is here to stay. This contradicts the traditional civil rights discourse that aimed to end racial discrimination. The ultimate goal of contemporary anti-racism activism, unlike civil rights activism, is not to end racism but to perpetuate it.
I belong to Free Black Thought, an organization that values viewpoint diversity within the black community and aims to overcome race essentialism. If we succeed in creating a world where people are judged as individuals, our mission would be outdated. Our mission would either change, or we would fold. However, many organizations dealing with race relations seem to misunderstand their missions. For instance, Ibram X. Kendi’s Boston University Center for Antiracist Research aims to build an antiracist society, but what would happen if inequality and injustice were eradicated? A new constitutional amendment to establish and permanently fund the Department of Anti-racism, as Kendi suggests, could easily perpetuate racism.
Similarly, many universities have created graduate programs in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), and administrative positions in DEI have exploded. While these jobs depend on fighting racism, they could become irrelevant if racism were eliminated. Maintaining vigilance could be a new mission, but this could lead to the creation of implicit biases and thought police. Therefore, people in such positions should aim for a sacrificial telos that would eventually render their jobs unnecessary. If not, they would be enacting the very definition of a grift.
