Why Do I Write? (Part 1: Taking Aim at the Illiberal Left)

What's behind my criticism of Social Justice Fundamentalism?

In Say It Well, Terry Szuplat (Obama's longest-running speechwriter) recommends that we speak up not only about what we care about, but also about why we care. To that end, I'm going to be doing something a little bit different in this series, and laying out the reasons why I care strongly about the issues I write about. I'll try to skip the "naive realism" ("the belief that you perceive the world as it truly is, free from assumption, interpretation, bias, or the limitations of your senses") and get to the soul-deep stuff. 

I write about a lot of different topics, and while they all seem very much of a piece to me, I realize they don't necessarily look that way from the outside. So this may end up being a few posts. This first post will focus on why my writing so often takes aim at the ideas of the illiberal left.

Social Justice Fundamentalism

One of the reasons that I write so critically about the illiberal left (the ideology that Tim Urban calls "Social Justice Fundamentalism," which includes antiracism like that espoused by Ibram X Kendi, Critical Race Theory, illiberal DEI attitudes, etc) is that I was lucky enough to live in Nairobi, Kenya for a year. Nairobi is a cosmopolitan city, and I quickly became part of a friend group comprised of folks from all over the world. In our small Bible study, we had people from Colorado and Texas, from South Africa and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, from the Netherlands and from Nigeria. We had people of all different races, backgrounds, and walks of life. And we got along beautifully. We recognized each others' differences, but our friendship and love was built on a deep foundation of our shared humanity.

Of course, Nairobi wasn't perfect. No human society is, and there was intense tribalism in some parts of the city. But in many ways the friend group that I found in Nairobi represented the kind of racial harmony that I think we're all striving for.

After a year in Kenya, I came back to the United States. And it was jarring. I saw signs at my local elementary school offering different back to school nights for white parents and parents of color. I saw graduation ceremonies segregated by skin color. Two of my close friends are a woman from the Philippines and a man from Kenya. When they started dating, none of us thought anything of the fact that their skin colors were different. They're happily married now and trying to have what I have no doubt will be a beautiful baby. But in the US, I saw Social Justice Fundamentalist commentators casting suspicion on the whole idea of interracial marriage. As an article in Vice put it, "If you’re trying to start a mixed raced family, sit down and deeply interrogate your intentions."

Around the same time, I started reading Social Justice Fundamentalists in their own words; and in their books and articles, I saw the seeds that had flowered into racial animus. I saw Ijeoma Oluo suggest that white people and black people had such different experiences that we could never truly understand each other. I saw Washington Post op-eds that criticized the whole idea of interracial friendship (as one op-ed put it, "Generally speaking, it’s not that I dislike white women. Generally speaking, it’s that I do not trust them. Generally speaking, most black women don’t"). I saw Robin DiAngelo and Ozlem Sensoy endorsing old-school racial stereotypes (for instance, that members of minority groups "lack initiative") under the guise of progressivism.

I saw books and videos suggesting that any kind of interracial interaction must be inherently fraught. I read scholars who advocated that white folks should tiptoe on eggshells in every single interaction with a minority. I concluded from my own experience that not only would that be exhausting for all concerned, but it would be unlikely to foster real human connection (plus, I read a lot of black authors telling folks of all ethnicities to please not do this).

I never doubted the good intentions of the Social Justice Fundamentalist folks who I read and talked to, but my time in Nairobi left me with the opinion that they had a glaring blind spot. Somehow, they seemed not to see the shared humanity that connects every single human being regardless of immutable characteristics. In their attempts to bring to light and avoid every single interaction that could possibly be interpreted as problematic, they seemed to be doing substantial damage to the very cause of racial harmony that they most cared about advancing. If I wanted to move the US more towards the vision of racial harmony that I experienced in my friend group in Nairobi, then I figured I had to speak up.

Cancel Culture

When I started to speak up, though, I discovered something: not every Social Justice Fundamentalist was open to a good-faith discussion about the potential downsides of their ideology. In fact, some could be downright hostile. When I told a friend that I had some concerns about Ibram X Kendi's How to Be An Antiracist, they blew up at me. They attacked my character and tried to lecture me into silence. They told me that I had a moral obligation to not speak up.

This backfired tremendously.

As many readers may know, the truth is that I've dealt with a fair amount of abuse in my past. I know what it's like to be attacked for the crime of saying the wrong thing. I know what it's like to hide in a corner, to sit down and shut up, because you're scared of the tide of vitriol that will come your way if you don't.

I don't mean to suggest that my friend's response to me was in any way comparable to the abuse I received when I was younger. I've long since forgiven them, and we're still friends. But their actions opened my eyes. Suddenly I started seeing intimidation tactics everywhere. I read Emma Camp's New York Times op-ed about how students were walking on eggshells on campus, terrifying of saying the wrong thing lest the Social Justice Fundamentalist mob come for them. I heard stories of people being canceled, their livelihoods destroyed, for minor or even imagined thought-crimes. I heard stories of even influential professors tiptoeing around certain subjects, scared to say what they really thought lest the sky fall down on them.

These stories resonated with me. In their victims, I could see my abused younger self: terrified, huddled in the corner, trying to avoid saying the wrong thing. I don't want anyone to feel that way, ever. And so I decided here too that I had to speak up. If I wanted to build the kind of society in which everyone feels safe and secure, then I had to take aim at the ideology that said it was okay to bully and intimidate people who held the wrong opinions into silence.

So that's, broadly speaking, why I stand up and oppose Social Justice Fundamentalism. I don't doubt the good intentions of many SJFs; but I worry that, left unchecked, they would build a world that none of us really want to live in.

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