The New "Black Scare"

Critical Race Theory, the paradox of J. William Fulbright’s progressive internationalism and racist domestic policy, and working and eating during another COVID-19 summer.

We have seen the rise of a manufactured controversy regarding a field of study called “Critical Race Theory” during the past few weeks. Much of this has been stirred by Chris Rufo, a right-wing activist who claims that educational materials focusing on anti-racism are actually a vessel for “reverse racism” against whites. It’s telling that Rufo’s assault comes after a moment of reckoning with the history of slavery and its legacy of structural racism in the United States. From Black Lives Matter to the 1619 Project, African Americans have once again reasserted their centrality to American history. And once again they have encountered potent resistance—from Nikole Hannah-Jones’s unusual (and political) tenure denial at the University of North Carolina to Rufo’s shady antics.

Now, Critical Race Theory is a sophisticated field of study first developed by legal scholars invested in civil rights issues and interested in unpacking how race and law intersect in American society. Remember, the U.S. is a country founded on the “Three-fifths compromise.” Plessy v. Fergusson was the law of the land until the 1950s. And as Ava DuVernay’s powerful documentary 13th argues, legislation following emancipation helped entrench continuities between the slavery-plantation complex and the prison-industrial complex (38.3 of all inmates are Black—a demographic that makes up only 13.4 percent of the country’s population).

So there’s more than enough evidence to justify the need for Critical Race Theory.

The current controversy, however, has transformed Critical Race Theory into a kind of boogeyman (here’s a brief primer on what CRT is and what it isn’t). In short, Rufo and co. have emptied CRT of any significant meaning and reframed it into a catch-all for anything and everything they find objectionable. As Rufo himself put it, they want to “eventually turn [CRT] toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category. The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.'" The Washington Post has a good report on how Rufo is a master at distorting material for ideological gains. His technique is basically to cherry pick decontextualized passages from diversity workshops (many of which have little to no relation to CRT) and hold them up as representative of a general assault against white people that is in and of itself part of a grander strategy to destroy the United States from within. Ironically, the very premise of his strategy reveals his worldview that America = Whiteness, thus justifying the necessity of CRT.

Rufo’s assault on Critical Race Theory is eons away from being a compelling and substantial critique. It wouldn’t be that big of an issue if it had just been kept to Twitter feeds. But Rufo wants to squash any kind of (necessary) discussion about race and racism in schools. He has been vigorously lobbying for authoritarian legislation that infringes on the ideal of educational spaces as arenas for critical dialogue. In other words, the assault on CRT is an assault on free speech, and we can see that with how numerous states have recently enacted anti-CRT laws that will have a chilling effect in educational settings.

For instance, legislation in Texas now requires teachers to “give deference to both sides” when discussing current events, thus enshrining into law Donald Trump’s position that there were “very fine people on both sides” during the 2017 white supremacist riot in Charlottesville. Meanwhile, Republicans in Pennsylvania are trying to pass a blatantly unconstitutional law that would prohibit instructors to assign readings that include “a racist or sexist concept.” As Jeffrey Sachs explains, if this bill were to pass students could no longer be assigned the Bible or even the Constitution (although I’m some of Rufo’s acolytes would take on the fool’s errand of arguing that the Three-fifths Compromise wasn’t racist…).

The situation has gotten so absurd that none other than the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, has had to push back against this manufactured controversy and make the case for engaging with Critical Race Theory (watch the linked video, it is worth it). Milley, of course, is anything but Rufo’s caricature of a woke social-justice warrior (unless we are to believe that a four-star general secretly wants to subvert and destroy the country he has sworn to defend).

As I mentioned earlier, there’s a reason we are seeing this manufactured backlash against Critical Race Theory right now. The New Yorker recently published a profile on how Rufo went about in manufacturing this moral panic. It includes an enlightening passage with Kimberlé Crenshaw, one of the leading CRT scholars, which I’ll quote verbatim:

“Reform itself creates its own backlash, which reconstitutes the problem in the first place,” Crenshaw said, noting that she’d made this argument in her first law-review article, in 1988. George Floyd’s murder had led to “so many corporations and opinion-shaping institutions making statements about structural racism”—creating a new, broader anti-racist alignment, or at least the potential for one. “This is a post-George Floyd backlash,” Crenshaw said. “The reason why we’re having this conversation is that the line of scrimmage has moved.”

Here we might find a parallel with the building of Confederate monuments that are now also a source controversy. As the historian Kevin Kruse pointed out, the overwhelming majority of monuments went up during the depths of Jim Crow. But there was a second peak—in the midst of the Civil Rights era. To repeat what Crenshaw stated, “[r]eform itself creates its own backlash.” And backlash can come in the form of statues and moral panics.

I can’t help but associate these developments to the “Red Scare” that took over the country during the Cold War. The strategy and tactics developed by Rufo and his supporters share remarkable resemblances to Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunt against the “commies.” I’d even venture to say that we are seeing a “Black Scare,” and it’s become painfully clear that Rufo has no sense of decency…

“The Fulbright Paradox”

Let me piggyback on that reference to McCarthy.

On the thorny question of race in American society, Charles King, Professor of International Affairs and Government at Georgetown University, published a fascinating essay on J. William Fulbright in Foreign Affairs.

Fulbright was the junior Democrat senator from Arkansas who organized the opposition that put an end to Joseph McCarthy’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in the 1950s. He was also one of the most influential American internationalists of the twentieth century. In fact, he was the mastermind behind the prestigious Fulbright Program, which since 1946 has provided funding to send thousands of Americans abroad and bring thousands of foreigners to the U.S. to promote cultural and intellectual exchanges (since 1946, more 400,000 people from more than 160 countries have participated in Fulbright programs).

Seems like quite the progressive icon, right? Well, turns out he also opposed school integration following the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Then, in the 1960s, he filibustered and voted against the civil rights legislation that Democrats pushed forward in Congress. In other words, Fulbright was a racist.

As King explains, this apparent paradox tells us a lot about the blind spots in American society. “The combination of open-mindedness abroad and bigotry at home was not unique to [Fulbright].” Actually, they are only paradoxical when we ignore the fact that American foreign policy has always been inextricably connected to the slaveholding society that was hegemonic in the South and the legacy of racism that persisted after emancipation. “The South didn’t so much lose the Civil War as outsource it,” King explains, “spreading new theories and techniques of segregation beyond the region itself.” These included the expansion of Jim Crow westward and the brutalities of U.S. racial imperialism in the Caribbean and Pacific.

With the outbreak of the Cold War, it became increasingly untenable to project the ideal of the United States as a “shinning city on a hill.” The Soviets did not miss out on the opportunity to point out the hypocrisy of that vision when much of the United States still lived under apartheid. King makes the compelling argument that these contradictions encouraged politicians to create an artificial divide between domestic issues and foreign affairs—a kind of psychological mechanism that allowed “enlightened” figures like Fulbright to turn toward foreign policy as that which really mattered while trivializing injustices at home. “Regardless of how persuasive my colleagues or the national press may be about the evils of the poll tax, I do not see its fundamental importance,” Fulbright wrote. What really mattered was American leadership on the global scale, even though the U.S. hardly had the moral high ground to lay claim to that role.

Give the whole thing a read. It’s definitely worth it.

COVID-19 Summer, Part 2.

Before discussing some of my experience during the past couple of months, I want to acknowledge how privileged Emily and I are to be in Singapore right now—a country that has managed this pandemic much better than the United States or Brazil.

Thankfully, things seem to be getting better in the U.S. (at least in certain regions where people are getting vaccinated). Meanwhile, the situation in Brazil is catastrophic, and what the Bolsonaro government has done in terms of ignoring vaccines and trivializing the pandemic is criminal. I don’t have the mental space to get into it right now, but this offers some info in English if you want to get an idea of how Bolsonaro and his team have the blood of 500,000 Brazilians on their hands. It’s not just a matter of gross incompetence. There’s compelling evidence being produced that thousands of Brazilians have died because people in the Bolsonaro government were part of a corruption scheme involving vaccines that Brazilians have been desperate for…

Now, to get back to our experience. This has been an interesting summer. It’s the second one under COVID-19. Like many of you, we thought things would be much closer to normal by now, but they aren’t. Actually, for much of the spring life was kind of back to normal. We couldn’t travel, and we were wearing masks EVERYWHERE (it’s not that difficult, folks). But we were also grabbing drinks at bars, going to the movies, and meeting up with people. I even taught in person, which was amazing!

But then, just as the summer started, cases in Singapore started going up again because of the new variants (for much of the spring we were having something like 3-4 cases a day, which then ballooned to around 20-30). So, reasonably enough, the government re-established tighter restrictions—work from home, no more group meetings, take-out dining only, etc. So, after a few months of relative normalcy, we returned to the COVID-19 regime, including its weird relationship with time and space.

Now, over the past month and a half I’ve managed to put the finishing touches on several publications—an article on the celebrity acquired by the Brazilian aeronaut Alberto Santos-Dumont and technological cosmopolitanism, another on how utopian artisans in the mid-nineteenth century created some fascinating dirigible designs to imagine new societies, and a long encyclopedia article that addresses recent scholarship on the history of flight. If you’re interested in the proofs for any of them, let me know, but I’ll also send out references once they are out. All of this makes it seem like the summer has been really productive, right? Maybe it has, but it doesn’t feel that way. Honestly, finishing those articles has taken much longer than I expected. And it’s not for a want of time. Because of the restrictions, we’ve been mostly stuck at home with very empty social calendars.

But I’m one of those people who needs different environments to be productive. I can’t spend the whole day reading and writing in the same space—especially if that space is a 500-square-foot apartment that is also Emily’s workspace. So I’ve ended up with a lot of time, but a lot of it feels like empty time. Time spent trying to concentrate… Time spent trying to achieve some level of distraction so that my brain can relax and engage in another task...

In other words, anxious time… The COVID-19 time many of us have struggled with…

Thankfully, the outbreaks have been largely controlled and vaccination is speeding up, so the restrictions were eased last week. I still can’t work in the office, but we’ve been able to move around the city more, eat at hawker centers, and even work in cafés, which has certainly helped my productivity (and mental health). I still have about a month and a half before classes start again, and I’m hoping I can take advantage of this improved context to churn out a substantial portion of the book manuscript. Currently finishing up a chapter on Jules Verne, real-life efforts to use balloons in Africa and Indochina, and the invention of colonial airspace in the late nineteenth century. This has become a critical piece of the book that was not part of the original dissertation, so it’s been an exciting challenge to figure out how it fits together with the rest.

Meanwhile, over the weekend Emily and I treated ourselves to some epicurean delights. On Friday night we went to the Newton Food Centre (the hawker center featured in Crazy Rich Asians), where we had some delicious chicken wings and barbecued sambal stingray.

On Sunday we decided to use some coupons we had stacked up and try out some black pepper crab, the lesser-known cousin of Singapore’s famed chilli crab. Emily has yet to try the staple, but given her reaction I think she’ll be getting to it sooner rather than later.