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A graduate of Stanford and Yale Law, Carter was a proud beneficiary of affirmative action. Yet he acknowledged the personal toll it took (“a decidedly mixed blessing”) as well as affirmative action’s sometimes troubling effects on Black people as the programs evolved.

The diversity argument holds that people of different races benefit from one another’s presence, which sounds desirable on its face

The demise of affirmative action, in Carter’s view, was both necessary and inevitable. “We must reject the common claim that an end to preferences ‘would be a disastrous situation, amounting to a virtual nullification of the 1954 desegregation ruling,’” he wrote, quoting the activist and academic Robert Allen. “The prospect of its end should be a challenge and a chance.”

Like many people today — both proponents and opponents of affirmative action — he expressed reservations about relying on diversity as the constitutional basis for racial preferences.

What immediately struck me on rereading it was how prescient Carter was about these debates 32 years ago. What role affirmative action should take was playing out then in ways that continue to reverberate.

But the implication of recruiting for diversity, Carter explained, had less to do with admitting Black students to redress past discrimination and more to do with supporting and reinforcing essentialist notions about Black people.

An early critic of groupthink, Carter warned against “the idea that Black people who gain positions of authority or influence are vested a special responsibility to articulate the presumed views of other people who are Black — in effect, to think and act and speak in a particular way, the Black way — and that there is something peculiar about Black people who insist on doing anything else.”

Carter took issue with the belief, now practically gospel in academic, cultural and media circles, that heightened race consciousness would be central to overcoming racism

, it’s hard to imagine Carter welcoming the current vogue for white allyship, with its reductive assumption that all Black people have the same interests and values

He disparaged what he called “the peculiar relationship between Black intellectuals and the white ones who seem loath to criticize us for fear of being branded racists — which is itself a mark of racism of a sort.”

Carter bristled at the judgment of many of his Black peers, describing several situations in which he found himself accused of being “inauthentically” Black, as if people of a particular race were a monolith and that those who deviated from it were somehow shirking their duty. He said he didn’t want to be limited in what he was allowed to say by “an old and vicious form of silencing.”

In the past, such ideas might have been seen as “frankly racist,” Carter noted. “Now, however, they are almost a gospel for people who want to show their commitment to equality.”

However well intentioned you may be, when you reduce people to their race-based identity rather than view them as individuals in their full, complex humanity, you risk making sweeping assumptions about who they are. This used to be called stereotyping or racism.

he rejected all efforts to label him, insisting that intellectuals should be “politically unpredictable.

“Critics who attempt to push (or pull) Carter into the ranks of the Black right wing will be making a mistake. He is not a conservative, neo- or otherwise. He is an honest Black scholar — the product of the pre-politically correct era — who abhors the stifling of debate by either wing or by people of any hue.”

This strikes me as the greatest difference between reading the book today and reading it as an undergrad at a liberal Ivy League college: the attitude toward debating controversial views. “Reflections” offers a vigorous and unflinching examination of ideas, something academia, media and the arts still prized in 1991.

Today, a kind of magical thinking has seized ideologues on both the left and the right, who seem to believe that stifling debate on difficult questions will make them go away

An early critic of groupthink, Carter warned against “the idea that Black people who gain positions of authority or influence are vested a special responsibility to articulate the presumed views of other people who are Black — in effect, to think and act and speak in a particular way, the Black way — and that there is something peculiar about Black people who insist on doing anything else.”

In the past, such ideas might have been seen as “frankly racist,” Carter noted. “Now, however, they are almost a gospel for people who want to show their commitment to equality.” This belies the reality that Black people, he said, “fairly sparkle with diversity of outlook.”

He disparaged what he called “the peculiar relationship between Black intellectuals and the white ones who seem loath to criticize us for fear of being branded racists — which is itself a mark of racism of a sort.”

At the same time, Carter bristled at the judgment of many of his Black peers, describing several situations in which he found himself accused of being “inauthentically” Black, as if people of a particular race were a monolith and that those who deviated from it were somehow shirking their duty. He said he didn’t want to be limited in what he was allowed to say by “an old and vicious form of silencing.”

“No weight is added to a position because somebody is Black. One has to evaluate an argument on its own merits, not on the race of the person making it.”

Carter took issue with the belief, now practically gospel in academic, cultural and media circles, that heightened race consciousness would be central to overcoming racism. However well intentioned you may be, when you reduce people to their race-based identity rather than view them as individuals in their full, complex humanity, you risk making sweeping assumptions about who they are.

“There has always been something unsettling about the advocacy of a continuation of racial consciousness in the name of eradicating it.”

In a cover review in The New York Times Book Review, David J. Garrow, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of the civil rights movement, called “Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby” “powerfully written and persuasive.” The Los Angeles Times said it was “an essential text in the public debate over racial preferences.” The New Yorker called Carter “shrewd, subtle and funny.”

defenders of affirmative action too often dismiss those beneficiaries of affirmative action who publicly express reservations about the policy. These defenders often make knee-jerk assumptions about the political agendas of liberal Black writers like Thomas Chatterton Williams and my colleague at The Times John McWhorter, falsely casting them as conservatives or traitors to their race.

he rejected all efforts to label him, insisting that intellectuals should be “politically unpredictable.” As Washington Monthly noted: “Critics who attempt to push (or pull) Carter into the ranks of the Black right wing will be making a mistake. He is not a conservative, neo- or otherwise. He is an honest Black scholar — the product of the pre-politically correct era — who abhors the stifling of debate by either wing or by people of any hue.”

“Reflections” offers a vigorous and unflinching examination of ideas, something academia, media and the arts still prized in 1991. Carter’s arguments were considered worthy of discussion, however misguided his critics took them to be

Today, a kind of magical thinking has seized ideologues on both the left and the right, who seem to believe that stifling debate on difficult questions will make them go away. But if affirmative action itself goes away, America — which Carter deemed “a society that prefers its racial justice cheap” — will no longer be able to avoid grappling with the real and persistent inequalities that necessitated it in the first place.

In 2008, Asian Americans composed 27 percent of Harvard’s applicant pool, 46 percent of applicants who earned above 2200 on the SAT and 55 percent of those students who earned about 2300 and sent scores to Harvard. … “In light of Harvard’s discriminatory admissions policies, [Asian Americans] are competing only against each other, and all other racial and ethnic groups are insulated from competing against high-achieving Asian Americans,”

It may well be salutary for universities to experiment with different means of achieving a diverse student body. At least some may find formally race-neutral means that work well. What these lawsuits seek, however, is not merely to encourage experimentation but to forbid taking race into account altogether. That is a different story.

the argument that affirmative action is categorically illegal under the Fourteenth Amendment or the Civil Rights Act is simply wrong. Neither text explicitly forbids affirmative action. And it is illogical — not to mention ahistorical — to argue that racial classifications intended to promote diversity are the legal equivalent of racial classifications that sought to uphold a white supremacist caste system. Opponents of affirmative action are hardly underrepresented in the ordinary political process, and this is where they should make their case.

Yes, the suits seek an end to all affirmative action. But the courts could provide a less extreme remedy that both gave Asian-American candidates a fair shake and kept a race-neutral way of encouraging diversity.

The way Jeff Yang sees it, this lawsuit isn’t really about helping Asians in the first place. After all, “Jane Dou” – as he calls the rejected Harvard hopeful – “didn’t end up at the center of the Harvard suit accidentally”: She was discovered through a broad-based campaign conducted by SFFA founder Edward Blum — a frustrated Republican congressional candidate who has chosen to make a career out of waging war on laws and policies that give “special privileges” to minorities.

What this lawsuit is really is just the latest attempt to derail an apparatus that has given hundreds of thousands of blacks, Hispanics and, yes, Asians a means to climb out of circumstances defined by our society’s historical racism.

People could no longer say, ‘I don’t see color. We’re post-racial.’ People went, ‘No, systemic racism is here.’ Eva Paterson, Yes on Prop 16 co-chair

For years, the group didn’t see the numbers it needed to overturn it. But the pandemic’s outsized effect on people of color and the police killing of George Floyd, Paterson believes, helped tip the scales for the first time. 

“People could no longer say, ‘I don’t see color. We’re post-racial,’” she said. “People went, ‘No, systemic racism is here.’”

Polls earlier this month showed it trailing badly, fighting an uphill battle with conservative white and Asian Americans who believed it would hurt them in university admissions, even though its proponents say no quotas will be established. 

He recently praised President Donald Trump as the nation’s first truly “color-blind” president. The campaign’s biggest donation came from an Austin, Texas, group, called Students for Fair Admissions, which gave $50,000.

“One thing Prop. 16 has done, even before people vote yes or no on it, is reveal California’s true face. It’s not one we should be proud of,”

Paterson isn’t too fazed by those polls. She said the campaign always knew it wouldn’t get a majority of support on the measure without helping people see through the confusing ballot language.

Sens. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the Golden State Warriors and other cultural icons in the Black community, from Tracee Ellis Ross to Dwayne Wade. It’s also racked up endorsements from nearly every major newspaper in the state and The New York Times. 

A new poll by David Binder Research found that it’s currently tied at 45% yes and 45% no, with 10% undecided. The campaign also pointed to a new Capitol Weekly poll showing it ahead 53-47.

“I was a part of 30 Black students admitted in my class in 1972 at Berkeley Law,” Paterson recalled. “The year after affirmative action was eliminated, there was not one Black student admitted to Berkeley Law. Not one.”

One of the biggest misconceptions with affirmative action, Paterson said, is that it gives employment or educational opportunities to people who are under-qualified. In reality, she argued, there are discriminatory factors at play that make some candidates simply appear more qualified than others.

White students at well-funded high schools, for example, have more access to Advanced Placement courses than Black students at schools with less funding.

While the ban on affirmative action is often discussed in the context of school admissions, it has left its mark elsewhere, too. 

Students from both schools could get an A grade in every class, but the students with access to AP courses will have an inflated grade point average because of the way those grades are weighted.

Before 1996, the California government used to award nearly a quarter of its public contracts to minority- and women-owned businesses. When Prop 209 disbanded that program, those businesses lost out on around $825 million a year, according to a study from the Equal Justice Society.

“If you’re not forced to look beyond your comfort zone,” she said, “then people of color and women don’t get in the door.”

“There are some who contend it does not benefit African Americans to get them into the University of Texas, where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less advanced school, a slower-track school, where they do well,” he said.

Washington attorney Gregory Garre, the lawyer for the university, who served as solicitor general, the government's top appellate lawyer, under President George W. Bush, said the court had rejected that thinking when it upheld limited use of affirmative action in a case from Michigan in 2003.

"We're just arguing the same case again," Kennedy said at one point, referring to the fact that the court had heard the same case two years ago and sent it back to a lower court for closer review.

The Texas case is complicated because the state has a law guaranteeing admission to the top 10% of students in each of its more than 1,000 high schools based on their grades only, with no consideration to race. Under that policy — which now accounts for about 75% of all admissions to the Austin campus — about one-third were Latino or African American in recent years.

A decade ago, when the top-10% policy was providing far fewer minority admissions than it is today, the university decided to use race as one of several factors to choose additional freshmen for the class. It's this policy that was challenged in a lawsuit by Abigail Fisher, a white applicant who was turned down in 2008.

The Texas case looks unlikely to yield a broad ruling for or against affirmative action because of the unique nature of the state's top-10% law.

Education experts point to UCLA, UC Berkeley and the University of Michigan as three premier state universities where the enrollment of minority students went down and stayed down after affirmative action policies were repealed by voters.

Since 1978, the high court has been closely split on whether colleges and universities may use race as a factor in deciding who is admitted. That year, in the famous Bakke case, the court struck down a quota at the University of California Medical School, but said in a separate opinion by Justice Lewis Powell that colleges and universities could use a race as a “plus factor” in order to achieve a diverse class of students.

n the wake of the 2003 decision, the University of Texas adopted the “holistic review” policy that is at issue now. The state’s top 10% law was slowly increasing the numbers of Latino and black students at Austin, but university officials said they needed to give an extra edge to other minority students to achieve diversity on campus.

He argued that the university’s affirmative action policy should be upheld because it was small and carefully targeted — and nearly identical to what the high court had approved in 2003

The outcome almost certainly turns on Kennedy’s vote. Because the Obama administration filed an early brief on the university’s side when Elena Kagan was the U.S. solicitor general, now-Justice Kagan sat out the case. If Kennedy votes with the three liberals, the court will be split 4-4, which would affirm the lower court’s ruling although without a majority opinion.

If the court writes an opinion in Fisher vs. University of Texas, it is not likely to be handed down until the late spring

it does seem plausible: If you think it’s wrong to discriminate against minority applicants, shouldn’t you also think it’s wrong to discriminate against majority (white) applicants? If so, you shouldn’t support affirmative action, since it allows admitting minorities rather than whites precisely because of their race.

So the question becomes, what purpose justifies preferring minority applicants? What problem do we need affirmative action to solve?

The straightforward answer is the underrepresentation of minorities in elite colleges and universities, where the percentage of minorities is far below their percentage of the population. So, for example, blacks make up 15 percent of the college-age population but only 6 percent of those enrolled at the top 100 private and public schools. There’s little hope of improvement without further action, since the figures have scarcely changed since 1980

The underrepresentation does not seem due to admissions committees’ prejudices, conscious or unconscious, that blind them to the objective credentials of minority applicants. Those rejected have lower test scores and less impressive academic and extracurricular achievements.

Some argue that these standard criteria are themselves unfair and that other factors, such as strength of character, are at least as important. Writing at The Washington Post, the Stanford education professor Linda Darling-Hammond and the venture capitalist Ted Dintersmith suggest that it may be “more about grit than GPAs.” But judgment about moral and emotional qualities can be highly subjective, and there’s no reason to think that over all, minority students are superior in these qualities.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor suggests an answer in her response to Chief Justice Roberts’s famous comment: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race, and to apply the Constitution with eyes open to the unfortunate effects of centuries of racial discrimination.

The last step, then, in the defense of affirmation action in college admissions is an appeal to the moral demand to compensate for the damage done to by minorities by a long history of racial discrimination. Sotomayor elaborates: “Race matters in part because of the long history of racial minorities being denied access to the political process. … Race also matters because of persistent racial inequality in society — inequality that cannot be ignored and that has produced stark socioeconomic disparities …. Race matters because of the slights, the snickers, the silent judgments that reinforce that most crippling of thoughts: ‘I do not belong here.’”

he connection would have to lie, as Sotomayor suggests, in the present-day residues, the stubborn structural effects of centuries of mistreatment, gradually diminishing but still an undeserved burden.

The burden shows up in both economic and social terms. The wealth (total value of home, savings, investments, etc.) of middle-class white families is about four times that of middle-class black families. This gives white families a decided edge in their ability to survive financial setbacks and resources to provide a better education for their children

Similarly, due to restrictive real estate practices, wealthier blacks still often live in poorer neighborhoods than comparable whites do, reducing educational and cultural opportunities

There are also psychological effects: Black children live in a world where their very appearance presents them as “others,” often objects of either uneasy suspicion or patronizing sympathy.

So it’s hard to deny that blacks as a whole face a distinctive set of disadvantages that are primarily due to the still effective legacy of slavery.

But why think affirmative action will be an appropriate remedy?

Chief Justice Roberts and others suggest that simply knowing that they are at an elite school in large part because of their race will increase minority students’ alienation and self-doubt. To this, one common response is that athletes and legacy admissions don’t seem bothered by such concerns. But they at least can see their admission as due to their own or their families’ distinctive achievements.

why shouldn’t black students be proud to see themselves as very talented people who are a vanguard in one small effort to undo the evils of their history? And shouldn’t they expect that their children and grandchildren will move further and further toward a world where that history will eventually become truly past?

As The New Yorker’s Jay Caspian Kang writes, elite colleges’ affirmative action programs seemed “designed for a racially binary America” and “never got meaningfully updated for today’s multiracial democracy.” He argues that much of the public debate about the court’s decision seems stuck in that binary, too.

As Roberts and Gorsuch observe, these categories are in some ways too broad and in other ways too narrow

Perhaps the fundamental problem with these schools’ policies is their limited conception of the capacious and fluid nature of racial identity.

at Harvard, U.N.C. and other colleges that use the common admissions application, applicants are asked to choose one or more options from a list “to explain ‘how you identify yourself.’ The available choices are American Indian or Alaska Native; Asian; Black or African American; Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander; Hispanic or Latino; or White,” adding, “Applicants can write in further details if they choose.”

He’s right. As I followed the case, it was this outdatedness that stuck in my craw

I will note a couple of points to undercut the liberal justices’ worry: First, it’s worth remembering that the decision’s impact is limited — as the sociologists Richard Arum and Mitchell Stevens argued recently in The Times, affirmative action mattered most for only a small group of the most selective colleges

Where do these categories come from? Gorsuch puts it pithily: “Bureaucrats.

Another instance of confusion came during oral argument, when U.N.C.’s attorney was asked which box a person from Jordan, Iraq, Iran or Egypt should check. He said he didn’t know, which seemed a pretty revealing answer: If U.N.C. doesn’t know what race a person of Middle Eastern descent is, should it really be making decisions based on race?

according to the American government, there is a correct answer to this question: Although some Arab American groups have lobbied to change the designation, people of Middle Eastern descent are officially classified as white.

the records suggests that Harvard also treated racial categories quite like stereotypes: Applicants of Asian descent were more likely than members of other racial categories to be labeled “standard strong,” meaning that admissions personnel determined they were academically qualified but otherwise unremarkable

Asian Americans scored better than other groups on academic and extracurricular measures, but Harvard’s admissions officers consistently gave Asians lower “personal” ratings than members of other groups. Harvard’s use of such subjective criteria to curb the number of Asian students admitted smacked of its efforts a century ago to keep out Jewish applicants it deemed unworthy of its “character and fitness” standards.

In dissent, the three liberal justices argued persuasively that the court’s ruling might significantly reduce enrollment of Black and Hispanic students at elite colleges. I agree this is a serious concern

Ignore if you can the ugly stereotyping — how the perfect SAT score would have been more impressive if the student had been “brown,” how “of course” it was an Asian kid who did so well, even if “still” impressive — and note the racial confusion: According to the colleges’ own categories, Asian includes brown people from, or whose forebears hailed from, the Indian subcontinent. But apparently U.N.C.’s officers’ mental picture didn’t match their official racial boxes.

The ruling presents us with another opportunity, too: To think about race more realistically, with far more specificity and precision. The 2020 census showed that America is growing more multiracial and more ethnically and racially diverse. We are far more than six categories on a demographic form — we contain multitudes, and we should recognize them.

“The ruling provides America with an opportunity to redirect the conversation from a relatively small number of schools and instead direct urgently needed attention to the vast middle and lower tiers of postsecondary education,” they wrote.

In the Court’s majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts held that “eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it”—a new version of his old affront that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

This glib framing, and the school of thinking it represents, established a pernicious, false moral equivalence. Those who preserved and protected Jim Crow — the institution that defended America’s old racial hierarchy — were and are something altogether different from those who fought and who continue fighting for a more just America.

Those uprooting affirmative action seem content to leave intact systems that compound privilege, exacerbating inequality — like legacy admissions policies that disproportionately favor wealthy, white applicants — resulting in lower-income students and families of all races losing out.

I find it regrettable that, over 40 years ago, Justice Lewis Powell introduced the American public to the imperative of diversity in the shallow manner that he did.

I was a freshman in college when his seminal opinion in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978) invited some to equate the benefits of diversity with unfairness

the idea that necessary diversity initiatives are somehow reverse discrimination or that they correlate with lower standards or lesser outcomes.

The data suggests exactly the opposite. Study after study demonstrates that, across organizations, diversity enhances critical thinking, creativity and collaboration, as well as productivity, profitability and performance.

we should tell the truth about why diversity is now controversial: Opponents of diversity are opponents of any racial consciousness. They want to prevent us from understanding the ways that the past informs the present, from wrestling with the fullness and richness and complexity of our history.

When the conversation is approached from what is commonly considered to be "discrimination," as opposed to outcomes, the framing is totally different.

The term "racial capitalism" — which is essentially this fusion of racism and capitalism — is a more effective way for us to understand those dynamics, those forces of history. I think the term "conjoined twins" allows for the recognition of racism and capitalism essentially being so closely tied together, No. 1 and No. 2.

The history of capitalism cannot be properly understood without understanding the history of racism. Racism and capitalism emerged simultaneously, they have grown together, they have ravaged together — and one day they'll ultimately die together.

 In terms of principles, antiracism is the recognition that there is nothing wrong or right with any racial group

what if we had a conversation that is rooted in inequities and then we assess policies based on those criteria? From that premise and framework, a reasonable person cannot look at affirmative action programs and say that they are racist because the goal of such programs is to reduce racial inequity.

We should actually rethink the term "discrimination" itself. Instead of using the term "racial discrimination" and saying that that is fundamentally bad, we should actually use the terms "racist" and "antiracist discrimination."

For example, let's say you have a lily-white classroom and the policies allowing that lily-white classroom to stay lily-white involves continuously barring black people at the door. We should call that policy and discriminatory action "racist."

By comparison, when you have a lily-white classroom with a fixed number of seats and you have a policy that effectively bars or reduces the number of white people entering the room until you get to a more equitable and representative number of people in that room, to me that's antiracist. That is a policy that leads to equity.

For example, consider affirmative action policies. Detractors begin with how admissions factors are "race neutral." Then affirmative action is depicted as somehow unfairly benefiting people of color. That formulation would lead many people to believe that affirmative action is discriminating against white people. Why? Because it is commonly thought that racial discrimination is a pejorative thing. It is bad. Essentially affirmative action is "reverse racism" or "discrimination," from that point of view.

And because there's nothing inferior or superior about any racial group, inequities in our society must be the result of racist policies that are being supported by racist power structures and institutions or racist policymakers.

What's absolutely critical is that we should stop using the phrase and broader language of "not racist." We should stop saying, "I'm not racist," because when you use that term as someone who is opposed to Trump, and as someone who is opposed to white supremacy, you are opening the door to allowing them to use that term.

Instead of using the language of "I'm not a racist" the framing should be about antiracism. None of these real racists are saying that they are antiracists. That is how they should be challenged.

when a well-intentioned white person asks a black person for guidance about fighting racism, how do you suggest we as black folks should respond?

One of the reasons why I wrote "How to Be an Antiracist" is so I can just refer them to the book or some other expert on the topic.

I specifically refer people to the work of people who are writing on these issues because there needs to be a recognition that there are such things as experts, that there are people where these questions about racism and politics and power are their primary areas of study.

That is not the expertise of every individual black person

Now, if a black person chooses to do that work based on their knowledge, I suggest that they focus on those white people who are open-minded, who are not going to cause us to have a very difficult experience when we're essentially trying to talk to them about these issues. These white folks should also not be resistant. They should also not be defensive. They should be open-minded. Once they start being defensive, resisting or being argumentative, that is the time for us to walk away

My hope is that the antiracist movement in this country will help Trump's people and others to see what is really happening which is how the public policies they support — and not nonwhite people — are actually causing them harm.

I also hope that people who are antiracist will get into positions of power at a federal level, and also at the local level, and then put into place policies that allow democracy to exist and thrive.

"Reverse racism" is another nonsense term in post-civil rights-era America.

I’ve described it as a romantic narrative, one that’s about unities in the process of becoming, a calling together of Americans to transcend racial division and come together in a unifying way, a more perfect union, as a transcendence of essential American goodness over transitory American evils.

when we tell the story that way, unfortunately, not only is it mythic, but it trains us to treat King as the kind of person who’s not doing any original political thinking. What he’s doing is calling us to be true to who we always already were

And when you treat him like that, the thing that becomes most interesting about him is not his thought. It’s not the way he challenged us to think about violence. It’s not the way he challenges us to think about segregation, both de facto and de jure. It’s not how he challenges us to think about economic justice.

The thing that’s interesting about him starts to be his rhetoric or his tactics, the way in which he pushes people or frames arguments to call us to be true to who we always already were. That’s a real problem because it evades the most incisive, challenging and generative contributions that his public philosophy makes for our era.

it gets conscripted into a story that’s ultimately affirming about the adequacy of our constitutional order, the trajectory of our institutions, the essential goodness of our national character. You often hear politicians use this rhetoric of, this is not who we are.

it’s partly related to how we tell the story of the civil rights movement and particularly, how we tell King’s role in the civil rights movement.

There’s a way in which the philosophy of nonviolence gets painted, even in King’s time, as a kind of extreme, purist pacifism. And part of that is the connection with Gandhi, although I think it’s a radical misunderstanding of Gandhi, as well.

it’s a way of imagining the commitment to nonviolence as related to passivity, as related to the performance of suffering for pity. These are things that King never endures. For him, the idea of passive resistance was a misnomer. He helped coin the phrase “direct action” — he and other members of the civil-rights generation — that nonviolence is aggressive.

It’s an aggressive attack on injustice, an aggressive form of noncooperation with domination. It’s about trying to wedge yourself into the machinery of domination, to prevent its adequate functioning, to try to force or coerce your fellow citizens to stop and take stock of what kind of injustices are being unfurled in their name.

And it does so on the presumption that politics involves coercion, especially for King, who had a pretty tragic sense of human nature, that politics is going to involve confrontation with great evil, that it’s not a Pollyannaish view about what we’re all capable of if we just turn our eye toward God in the right way.

We’re owe it to them to live with evil. And we always are going to be called to confront it. We just need to do it in ways that won’t unleash a further chain of social evil and bitterness and revenge and retaliation. And King thought nonviolence was the only weapon that could cut and heal at the same time.

So when you hear King talk about love, when you hear King talk about nonviolence, these things actually require not just an enormous discipline around the acceptance of suffering, as if it’s some kind of passive practice, but they require really creative, dedicated thinking around how exactly to push and prod your neighbors into addressing the forms of injustice that structure the polity and how to do it in a way that doesn’t leave a perpetual midnight of bitterness when the conflict is done.

He says that the really interesting question, however, is how to organize a sustained, successful challenge to structural injustice. And for King, that requires something that blends militant resistance and a higher-order ethical practice that can point the way toward peaceful reconciliation over the long term.

Gandhi has this line where he says, if you can’t practice nonviolence, it quote, “retaliation or resistance unto death is the second best, though a long way off from the first. Cowardice is impotence, worse than violence.” So this idea that if you can’t be nonviolent, it’s better to be violent than to be a coward, doing nothing — I think gets at something important. Can you help unpack that?

to raise the question of strategy, as if we can evaluate means without some kind of ethical reflection or without some kind of underlying ethical commitments, for King, is already a confusion. He thinks that the ends are prefigured in any means.

Gandhi, in “Hind Swaraj,” has this great passage where he talks about how could come to acquire a piece of property. You could buy it. You could steal it. You could kill somebody in pursuit of it. You could ask for it as a gift.At the end of the day, you still have the same property. But the thing, itself, has changed. In one scenario, it’s a piece of stolen property. It’s a theft. In another, it’s a gift, which is different than something you’ve purchased.

So in the course of acquiring the thing, even though the thing is the same, the means have transformed it in a really, really important way. And King wants to say something similar — that in all political practice, the ends are prefigured in the means

nonviolence has to be — if it’s going to be true nonviolence for King — informed by a philosophy of love that really wants and desires and wills goodwill for the enemy at present and is committed, at the fundamental level, to going on together in peace, going on together, sharing the polity in perpetuity.

I think for King, imperative to nonviolent resistance turns, in large part, on the question of your own dignity and self-respect. So it is a justice question. He’s concerned with structural justice as a matter of the kinds of arrangements that prevail in the larger American society. That’s obviously true.

So there’s the person or group you’re in conversation or conflict with. I’m a liberal, and I’m arguing with a conservative. And I think that’s the most common target to think about: How do I beat or convince this person or group on the other side?

Then there’s the broader community polity — the voters, of the country, people who are bystanders, maybe interested, maybe not, but a broader community that is in some way watching or can be brought in to watch. And then there’s you, the person taking the action, and how it affects you and your group to take a particular action.

something that seems present in King’s thought is much, much, much, much more concern and focus than I think most political thinkers have today on how political action affects you, the person taking it, and affects the broader community that might be watching it

— that ends up with you being turned away from the good and toward things like hatred, resentment, violence, which he thinks, ultimately, will corrode your soul and take you further away from flourishing.

But he’s also concerned with how you relate to your own sense of equality, equal standing, worth, as he would say, somebodiness, we might say dignity — he also says that a lot — and that for King, to acquiesce in the face of oppression and domination, without protest, is to abdicate your own self-respect and dignity.

for him, dignity also required a certain kind of excellence of character, a certain kind of comportment and practice toward others.

So it is about trying to defend your dignity, defend yourself respect against insult and humiliation, oppression. But it’s also about doing so in a way that doesn’t degrade your character in the long term, that doesn’t cause you to end up being turned away from the good, which, again, for him, is going to be a religiously-inflected category

When you think about somebody’s political philosophy or their theory of political action, you can maybe think of there being a couple agents they’re thinking about.

It has fallen out of favor to say that there are certain ways of acting, politically, that are better and worse, from a virtue perspective, because it often is seen not as really a question of you and your relationship to some baseline or ideal but is some kind of concession you’re making to people who don’t deserve

I am a person who believes those questions are still legitimate, that they can’t all be reduced to strategy or will to power or psychic drives. I think that there’s something like an ethical life that requires us to argue about it and requires us to think really hard about how we discipline ourselves to achieve it.

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, wrote a phenomenal book, many years ago, called “Righteous Discontent.” And that’s what introduces the phrase, “the politics of respectability.” It’s a study of turn of the century Black Baptist women and their organizing efforts through the church.

It’s this idea that, in confronting a system of social stigma, the response that you need to have to it is to try to adjust your behavior, comportment, your self fashioning, in line with the dominant norms so that you can, over time, undermine the stigma and become a full participant in society.

there are all sorts of questions, legitimate questions, that are raised against that. Are we losing something valuable about alternative forms of life, about alternative cultural practices, when we take the existing, dominant norms as unassailable or something to aspire to?

what’s really fascinating is that he talks a lot about how he sympathizes with all those criticisms. He agrees with them

here’s the other part of Evelyn Higginbotham’s formulation — there’s a deeper question, one with thousands of years of moral reflection built up into it, which is about virtue ethics — that there are some things that people are appealing to you about that aren’t about their effect in the polity that aren’t about trying to manipulate white, racial attitudes. They’re about your own flourishing and character. They’re deep questions about how to live a good life, how to achieve excellence and the crafting of your soul.

as King would say, our reason sometimes can become subordinate to our passions. It can just be a legitimizing power or rationalizing power to the point where we lose track of what we really want to achieve, the kind of character we really want to have.

And for King, many of the appeals he made in that vocabulary are really about that. They’re really about virtue. They’re really about what hatred does to your life, what anger does to your life, what violence does to your life

there is a question for him, at the core of his life, which is, what makes this worth doing? That’s a virtue question. It’s not just a strategic or tactical one, in the narrow sense.

he describes nonviolence, I think really importantly, as also being about a nonviolence of spirit.

the example that he often gives is about humiliation — that there’s a way in which the desire to humiliate others, to diminish their status in front of other people for your own pleasure, the desire to subject them to standards of evaluation that they probably themselves don’t hold or don’t understand, in order to enable mockery. There’s a way in which, if we’re reflexive about where that desire comes from, we will find that it comes from a place that’s irrational, indefensible and, likely, cruel, and that if we were to imagine a way of life built around those feelings, those desires, those practices, it would be one that would make it really hard for us to have healthy social ties, stable institutions, flourishing social relationships.

So part of what he’s up to is asking us, at all times, to be self-reflexive about the desires and needs and fantasies that drive us in politics

the concession.

So what nonviolence does is, it builds in a check on those kinds of rationalizations, those kinds of emotional drives, by teaching us to avoid forms of humiliation and forms of physical violence that make it hard to come back from. So that’s the first point.

The second point — and it goes more to your sense of revenge and retaliation — is again, forcing us to acknowledge the legitimacy of anger.

He uses the phrase, “legitimate anger” in the late ’60s — but to be reflective about it and understand that, even in a case where someone kills a loved one of yours, revenge, violence, retaliation, that doesn’t bring back the loved one that you’ve lost.

The only thing that can do that is a kind of forward-looking, constructive practice of politics and social ethics.

so what he’s trying to do is raise the question of, can we channel our legitimate rage, our legitimate anger, into a practice that allows us to maintain our self respect?

here’s this man who is both making this public argument and trying to get people to follow him in it and put themselves at risk over it, and is also living it himself, and talks about this unbelievably difficult thing, which is not feel righteous anger, but to not feel hatred, to internally reflect the world you want externally.

he does falter. He does fail. And I think when we read biographies of King, when you read the last parts of David Garrow’s biography, when you read Cornel West’s essay, from “To Shape a New World,” which talks a lot about the despair at the end of King’s life, if you watch HBO’S great documentary, “King in the Wilderness,” you see a person faltering and failing under the pressure.

He’s not able, for example, to bring himself to a kind of reconciliation with Malcolm X

How imaginable is King’s philosophy, is this practice, without his deep Christianity, without a belief in redemption, in salvation, in the possibility of a next life?

I think King, himself, thinks that the practice of nonviolent politics does the kind of work that you’re describing. And I think he would be worried about the fact that, in our time, so much of these questions about the management of emotion, the building of character, has become a privatized practice.

So I think he does think that that’s one way that this really does happen. And we have lots of evidence from the Civil Rights Movement, personal testimony, and personal reflection, where this seems to be the case.

the last thing I’ll say is that in order to do that work, in order to do some of the work you’re describing, he also is building an alternative community

So one way that I read that famous final speech, “I’ve seen the promised land” — there’s obviously a prophetic reading of it, but there’s also one where he’s describing the prefiguration of the promised land in the kind of politics and social life he’s participated in over his career, that the promised land is seen in the union politics in Memphis, it’s seen in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, gathering to do Mississippi Freedom Summer. It’s seen in the people walking for 350-plus days in Montgomery, Alabama, and banding together to help each other out, that is the promised land.

And when you are in a community that’s constantly talking with each other and lifting each other up and engaging in practices like song, prayer, other communal rituals, to try to affirm this alternative set of ethical and political commitments against the whole rest of the culture, that’s the only way it can be done, is that you have to have an alternative form of social life that can sustain you in that work. The private practice isn’t going to do it.

When you look at the principles of nonviolence on Stanford’s King Institute, I think a bunch of them would be familiar to people. You can resist evil without resorting to violence. You seek to win the friendship and understanding of the opponent, not to humiliate.

He thinks that we learn a lot about how to love other people by confronting them in public, by forcing ourselves into uncomfortable situations where we have to endure the look of the other, back and forth, where we train ourselves to extend these interactions of contentious politics until they can alter or change the people that we’ve put our bodies in close contact with on the field of politics.

I go back to the sermon he gave — and it’s collected in “Strength to Love,” and it’s called shattered dreams — where he confronts a problem that is all over the Black tradition, which is that the struggle we’re engaged in has gone on, in some form or another, for hundreds of years. At the moments of its greatest promise, you can look over the course of history and see, just years later, we find ourselves in situations that are unimaginably awful.

King is not naive. He’s a student of history. He’s somebody who asks himself hard questions like this. And he gives two different kinds of answers. And one is the answer that you’ve mentioned here, which is a theological answer. It’s conventional theodicy story, that look, at the end of the day, God is at work in the world. And God is on the side of justice.

There’s another way that he goes at it, however. And for me, I read it as rooted in a different kind of project, one that combines what used to be called philosophical anthropology, which is just a way of saying philosophical reflections on what kind of beings we are. It’s rooted in that, and it’s rooted in politics. And I think those things can find lots of overlapping consensus from people outside of the Christian tradition.

What you have to be committed to, in the last instance, is that evil is not the totality of who we are as persons, that people have the capacity, emotionally and rationally, to reflect on their life plans, their practices, their commitments, and change them, maybe not all of them, maybe not all at once, but that those things can be changed, and that politics is really a field where contingency is the key word, that although there are structural constraints and everything can’t be done at every moment, that the unprecedented, the new, the unexpected, happens in this realm.

And the only way that we can confirm that nothing new will happen, that oppression will last forever, that the future bears no hope, is if we don’t act. That’s the only way we can confirm that it’s true for all time, is by failing to act in pursuit of justice.

that’s King’s view, I think. And to me, that’s the persuasive one, that in our action, we might be able to see some measure of justice from a complicated, complex swirl of contingencies, and to move the ball forward — we will inevitably fail — but to look back on that failure with maturity and try to do better the next time.

How do you think about the question of the weaponization of nonviolence and then the applicability of its principles to the powerful and to what they might, we might, the state might learn from it.

there were many people — Harold Cruse famously wrote this, but others even closer to King — who said, you’re not the leader of Vietnam. You’re the leader of the African American civil rights movement. You should not speak out on this war because you’ll lose your relationship with Johnson.

King says that the people who are advising him in this way, they just don’t know him, his commitment or his calling. They don’t understand that if he’s going to raise his voice against violence in Watts or Detroit, that he’s got to raise it against what he called, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” his own government.

for him, the question was really one about militarism and the way that gets imagined as this hardheaded, realistic, hyper-rational response to international disputes and social problems abroad, when in actuality, if we take stock of what he called the casualties of war, the spiritual ones and the material ones, we would realize that most of the violence we engage in at the foreign-policy level is counterproductive. It’s created more problems and more harms than it ever has seemed to solve.

This is one of the powerful interventions that you see in Lionel McPherson’s essay, in “To Shape a New World.” It’s just this idea that this is about hardheaded realism is mythic. King says it’s about an immature image that we are nurturing for ourselves, that we’re trying to shore up this idea of ourselves as some kind of crusading hero or all-powerful world power, while not taking stock of all of the things about our freedoms, about our way of life, about our connectedness as a society, about our social divisions, that war has exacerbated, not to mention the violence that’s prosecuted abroad.

And he says similar things about domestic policy, the ways in which our politics toward poor families, single-parent households, is punitive for reasons that aren’t justified, that our response to what he calls “the derivative crimes of the ghetto” are wildly out of proportion and unjust compared to how we treat the systematic crimes of exploitation, segregation, disenfranchisement, that structure much of ghetto life.

So I’m in total agreement with Coates on that question

it just seems — I don’t want to call it axiomatic, but a repeated d that the more willing you become to use violence as a state, the more it corrupts you, and the more violent you become as a state, and to some degree, the more violent the people you are policing, the people you are occupying, become.

I’m not a pacifist. I don’t believe you can fully eradicate violence. But we don’t weigh how violent we make others, in our actions, very well, and then how violent we become in response, how much we enter into that escalatory dynamic.

But then the other thing is this question of this broader community, of changing hearts, of changing minds, of acting upon people, not through punishment, but through our belief that they can alter. And I’d be curious to hear you reflect on that question of community a little bit, because I think one of the central debates of our time is who’s actually in the community.

What would it mean to have a bit more of King’s view, of trying to create community at the center of what the state is attempting to do, as it fashions and helps govern the country?

BRANDON TERRY: So one underappreciated feature from King’s famous Riverside Church speech against Vietnam, is he goes on this whole riff about America lacking maturity. And it’s a weird thing to have in a foreign-policy speech. You’re used to — you’re a policy person. You don’t usually hear the word “maturity” bandied about in these kinds of debates.

But what he’s getting at is that something really tightly linked to violence, that violence always exceeds the original justification you have for it. It’s not precise. It’s not able to be easily targeted, as we think. It spirals out. It produces retaliation. And then we retaliate again.

And all the while, it’s expanding its justifications to the point of absurdity. And King describes that as adding cynicism to the process of death. And he says that maturity is one of the only ways out here, that the maturity to be able to stand up and say, we were wrong, we want to make amends, we want to repair evils committed in our name, those are questions that are essentially nonstarters in American politics right now, certainly about foreign policy, but even in some places in domestic policy.

that feature of King’s thinking is something that I always want to draw attention to because I think it’s something we ignore. So that’s the first point I want to make.

The second thing — and this is also really deeply-seeded in that Vietnam speech — one of the reasons that people hated it so much — he was attacked in The New York Times, basically every editorial page in the country — one of the reasons people hated that speech so much is that he spent so much time expressing solidarity and sympathy with Ho Chi Minh and the North Vietnamese forces.

How could you express sympathy or some kind of solidarity with the enemy? And it’s very instructive, how King went about it. He wasn’t one of these people — you’ve seen these images of people waving the North Vietnamese flag at counterculture protests. It wasn’t like that.

It was him really spending a lot of time meditating on the reasons why we had ended up in this conflict, narrating the whole history of our failure to support Ho Chi Minh and the struggle against French colonialism, against Chinese colonialism, and how that had led to the situation we were in by 1967. King is narrating this history. He’s also trying to get people to think about what it must feel like to be on the ground in Vietnam and witness these bombings, witnessed this imposition of terror.

And he’s doing that because at bottom, he’s inspired by a vision really rooted in a parable the Good Samaritan, from the Bible, that everyone is our neighbor, that there are no sectional loyalties that should eviscerate our moral obligations to others, our obligation to show them respect, to go on in community with them, and that most of what goes on in foreign policy and particularly war making, is a bad-faith evasion of the fact that we’re all interconnected.

he understood that there’s a fundamental interconnectedness amongst humanity at the ethical level and at the material, structural level, and that war making is an evasion of that fact. We’re going to have to live together. So the chief question that should organize it is, how can we do so in peace?

He has a line where he says, quote, “the dignity of the individual will flourish when the decisions concerning his life are in his own hands, when he has the assurance that his income is stable and certain and when he knows that he has a means to seek self-improvement. Personal conflicts between husband, wife and children will diminish when the unjust measurement of human worth, on a scale of dollars, is eliminated.” Tell me a bit about the spiritual and psychological dimensions of King’s economic philosophy and organizing.

BRANDON TERRY: Well, for King, the question of poverty and the question of economic inequality are both questions of dignity and democracy, and the questions of dignity because when you live without the adequate means to really enjoy the fair value of your basic rights, when you live in a society — and this is a really important point for King — when you live in a society of profound affluence, like the United States, and you live in severe poverty, it expresses a kind of contempt from your fellow citizens about your standing as an equal member of the polity.

So separate from the plain, material fact of hunger or health care, there’s this additional spiritual concern with the way in which living with nothing, living on a lonely island amidst an ocean of prosperity, as he would put it, diminishes your dignity.

then another piece — this is bridging of the dignity and democracy question — is that when people don’t have a say in the core, vital interest of their life, when they have no decision-making power over the processes which determine how their life is going to go, that too is a diminishment of their dignity. And King, who was operating in a long tradition of social democracy, wants to expand democratic practices to the broader economic realm.

Without expanding democracy into that economic realm, for King, we’re both making a mockery of democracy and we’re diminishing the dignity of citizens who live in search of a real standing as free and equal.

as somebody who spends a lot of my time in debates about economic policy, I think it is fair to say that the ends of economics are taken as the economy, typically. People hopefully shouldn’t starve. But a lot of debates about what we should do, even for the poor, become these recursive, well, how can they better participate in the economy and how are they going to be able to invest in themselves and how they’ll be economic opportunity for their children.

And the idea that the economy is subservient to the community, that the point of the economy is the community, that it should be measured— our policy should be measured by what they do for democratic participation, for the dignity of individuals, is pretty lost. If anything, I see it more now, on the post-liberal right, as people call it, than I even do among mainline Democrats.

it has fallen out of favor as a way to frame and think about these conversations.

BRANDON TERRY: Yeah, I think it’s rooted in some really complicated things. I think there’s a kind of liberal anxiety about speaking forthrightly about the fact that living in areas of severe, concentrated disadvantage and racial segregation that we call ghettos, diminishes the dignity of the people who live there.

That feels uncomfortable for people to say forthrightly, in the way that King would.

so we try to get around it by speaking about opportunity and the wealth gap and unemployment statistics. But really what people are feeling is an existential assault on dignity.

one way to read that book is to say that she’s telling a tragic story about the loss of a particular ideal that guided great society politics. And that’s the principle of maximum feasible participation.

That was a really social-democratic idea, this idea that, well, we need to empower all sorts of people to participate in policy making and democratic deliberation, and that part of where people will find self-respect and dignity is through engagement in politics and their community

I think it gets to something that is very present, towards the end of King’s life, which is his sense that there is something important for the civil rights movement in the labor movement. And unions, on some level, they are mechanisms of democracy. One of the most important functions they have is workplace democracy

King is, in this tradition, in many ways inspired by a mentor of his. And one of the most important figures in American history but one of the most severely neglected was A. Philip Randolph, the great labor leader, former organizer of the Pullman Porters, the architect of both the March on Washington that gets canceled, which was going to target the Roosevelt administration during World War II, and the 1963 famous March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

they’ve got a certain set of commitments. So one is the idea that because most African Americans are working class or poor, anything that advances the interests of working-class people and their ability to exercise democratic control over the economy is going to advance the interests of African Americans.

for King labor unions are also, as you described, important laboratories of democracy. So they’re one of the few places where people from all walks of life can get together, deliberate about strategy, deliberate about social ends, social goods, put money behind things that they value, that aren’t only their own material interest.

today, of course, there’s this ongoing — always is this ongoing argument — of should you have race-based politics or is that unusable, doesn’t work, creates too much backlash? Or you should have class-based politics that are looking for commonalities, and because you’ve had so much economic disadvantage for Black Americans, that’ll work through the mechanism of class just fine.

BRANDON TERRY: So King often invokes the philosopher Hegel, because he’s constantly describing his mode of thinking as a dialectical one, where he’s trying to reconcile seeming opposites and produce a new synthesis, which helps you transcend certain intractable problems.

Now as a reading of Hegel, that has much to be desired. But as a description of Martin Luther King’s thought, I think that’s always a good way to understand what he’s up to. And so I think what he’s always trying to do is transcend that opposition.

there’s a way in which we sometimes will say class-based politics works to lift African Americans because they’re disproportionately poor. And what’s tricky about that is that it doesn’t really theorize what to do about the African American middle class and the African American elite.

So a thing that King was thinking a lot about when he wrote “Stride Toward Freedom” and the Montgomery bus boycott, is there are areas where racial solidarity is going to be really effective and probably indispensable.

where questions of anti-Black racism emerge, where questions of racial humiliation, stigma that really affects the larger group, things that all Black people feel vulnerable to, those are going to be areas — like the segregation laws on the buses — those are going to be areas where you actually can generate a lot of racial solidarity and do a lot of important work with it, especially as a defensive posture.

When you start to get into questions of political economy, however, you have to be careful because the appeal of racial solidarity can actually obscure the fact that Black people don’t all share the same material interest in lots of ways.

King’s primary principle always is, is that he’s dedicated to the group that William Julius Wilson called the truly disadvantaged, the least of these, that at the end of the day, he’s going to give everything to the people who are in the most desperate situation, the poor. And that’s going to guide his politics.

where that is enabled by a race-based solidarity, so in questions of policing, perhaps, or questions of social stigma and media discourse, that’s where he’ll turn. But in other cases, I think he’d really be trying to experiment with a form of politics that empowers the poor to take leadership on their ow

How does being more aware of the distinctions he drew and the decisions he made help you look at some of the paths we should be walking down today and are not, in these conversations, or are walking down and shouldn’t be?

n order for us to understand why so many African Americans are located in the realm of the most disadvantaged, in the strata of the most disadvantaged, you have to understand the history of racial domination in this country. You have to understand the persistence of racial discrimination, especially in labor markets. And you have to understand the ways that racial ideology allows us to obscure the nature of our economy.

So the most classic example is that structural unemployment gets reframed, in part by racism, as questions of laziness or pathology or criminality instead of as a feature of the economy as such. So King always talks about the critique of racism as part of the diagnosis of the disease in order to cure it.

So even in the privileging the least well off and being concerned with poor people of all races, he wants to say that the critique of racism helps us see through the kinds of blindnesses that obscure the nature of our economy and the commonalities across race and the things that we need to address the questions of economic justice precisely

The second thing is that, in his critique of Black power, one of the things he says is that he worries that Black power gives priority to the question of race in a way that confuses our analysis of social reality. So what does he mean by that?

if you think that all Black disadvantage is primarily about anti-Black racism, you can start to miss the fact that there are broader economic dislocations that need to be addressed, that there are structural features of the American constitutional order, the ways in which municipal boundaries are structured, ways that funding decisions are made, that aren’t primarily driven by racial animus, that need to be addressed.

You can lose sight of those things and start to think that the real battle is in something like a totality of anti-Black racial ideology that can be battled in Hollywood movies and comic books and school curricula and legislation and political rhetoric

it’s not to say that those things don’t exist. It’s just to say that there’s a confusion about what’s going to make the biggest impact in improving the life circumstances of the least well off.

King really calls us to constantly be very precise about what the causal mechanisms are for Black disadvantage and to not be confused by the fact that there’s discrimination and injustice and cruelty in these other realms but which might not have as much causal impact as some of these other things.

King was very adamant that Black pride, that a concern with representation, that thinking in expansive ways about how do you affirm the somebodiness of Black youth, that those things are really, really important and that they’re not to be dismissed.

So it is a question of justice if people in Hollywood just constantly demean or diminish the talent of nonwhite actors. That is a question of justice. It’s just that we have to be honest about what the import of those struggles will be for the broader group. And the only way we can do that is by being attentive to the class differences within the group.

there’s a way in which — and King diagnoses this very incisively — there’s a way in which some genres of Black nationalism are so pessimistic about the possibility for multiracial democracy in the United States, for any kind of Black flourishing in the United States that they essentially foreclose real interest in political organizing and social movements

But the energy they still managed to generate — the outrage, the sentiment, the sociality — they find their outlet, instead, in a practice of humiliation, counter humiliation. So that there may not be hope that we can actually change the country, but at the very least, we can enjoy a feeling of retaliation, a kind of self-respecting sense of resistance, by engaging in a practice of trying to humiliate our opponents in the public spher

there’s a titillation to that. There’s a catharsis in watching someone — at that point, it would have been called stick it to whitey. Now it would be stick it to the libs or own the libs.

this is a significant amount of people that could cause real damage in the places where they don’t face many countervailing forms of power. And they can exercise a much more toxic impact on the broader state of American politics in a time where the media environment is way more fragmented

I see those elements. And I think that we need more people operating, in the kind of mode that King did, in his critique of Black power, to try to turn people away from their understandable feelings of hostility and resentment, toward more productive forms of political engagement.

the word, “emotion,” which is a neglected part of politics, maybe of King’s thought in particular is that he understood — I think he understood part of the goal of politics and political action as creating a particular structure of political emotion.

, what structure of emotion, of political emotion, we’re actually living in.

BRANDON TERRY: My mentor and friend, Karuna Mantena, at Columbia, political theorist, a brilliant political theorist working on a book on Gandhi — I learned this from her, thinking a lot about how nonviolence is a kind of realism, in part because it doesn’t engage in of fiction that politics is operating on, in the model of rational discussion. It takes very, very, very seriously the problem of emotion.

for King, thinking about the history of racial oppression in America, they’re key emotions that you have to think about. One of the most important ones is fear

If that fear is a longstanding, deeply-structuring feature of American culture and political life, if it’s something that animates our comedy movies, our stand-up routines, our political discourse, you can’t operate as if it’s not there. You have to do things that will somehow disarm, disrupt, dispel those fears, in order to make progress on the political questions you want to pursue. That was one of King’s deepest, deepest commitments.

He’s thinking a lot about anger, which we’ve talked at great length about. And one of the disappointments I’ve had with radical politics in the present, as sympathetic as I am to most of the aims, is that I just don’t think the emotion question has been adequately considered

people often defend their politics as like, King was unpopular. And the things we’re saying are unpopular. So we’re operating in that tradition.

it’s not enough to just say, I’ve started a conversation, I’ve provoked something toxic in the culture. He’s not trying to do that, necessarily. He’s trying to elicit reactions that bring forward certain emotions but not let those emotions unravel the society itself. He’s trying to channel them into other forms of political affect that are much more congenial to reconciliation and justice.

what we’ve unfortunately ended up with is that the sophistication of mobilization strategists, the depth of the polarization, has made anger the principal affect of American politics at this moment.

a King-inspired political philosophy, both at the state level and the activist level, has to do, is think about how do we transform the recalcitrant nature of today’s political anger and channel it into forms of constructive politics that might point toward a more just future and that might dissolve the forms of anger that are illegitimate and ill founded, in part, by doing the kind of work sometimes described as a moral jujitsu, turning those affects against themselves, in part, to try to transform them into something different.

maybe it’ll be easier to use myself as an example, here.

When I started out in blogging and political writing and journalism, particularly blogging, I think I thought a lot about politics in terms of winning and losing, and in my corner of it, winning and losing intellectually, that I was involved in political arguments, and arguments could be won or lost in front of some kind of audience.

One is having been in a lot of arguments. And I think I’m a reasonably good arguer. And so I’ve done, by my own likes, well, and then noticed it didn’t have it all the effect I wanted it to have, which is, if anything, it usually — if you really beat somebody in an argument and they feel humiliated, they go further into views they already held

And two things have begun to corrode, for me, that sense

so you lose by winning.

then the second is, particularly in the Trump era, the sense that if you met something awful with an equal and opposite energetic force, that in some weird way, you just added energy to what was now an awful system and conversation.

What do you do to not create a sense that this is a right conversation to be having? And I don’t the answers to it. And I’m not saying like I’ve ascended to some higher plane and don’t argue or any of that. I have all the same intuitions and senses I’ve always had.

that’s why I find King so interesting and challenging in this way, because it’s just really, really, really different to ask the question, how do I reshape the emotional politics and the emotional structure of myself, of the people I’m in conflict with and then of the people who are bystanders or watchers of that conflict, for the better

It’s just a really different goal to be targeting, and just unimaginably harder than, can I come up with an argument that I think is a winning argument.

I think you see it — when he’s assassinated, the leading figures of the Black-Power generation, they’re heartbroken. They mourn his loss. They grieve for him, in part because — and you can read any of these memoirs, particularly Stokely Carmichael’s — they felt like he never — that even when he disagreed with them, he loved them, and not just because they were friendly, but because he loved in the sense that he always invoked, of agape love, that he wanted goodwill for them, and that his arguments weren’t from a place of trying to humiliate them or embarrass them or expose them as ridiculous.

He wanted to affirm their right to make the arguments they were making, to affirm their intelligence and judgment and to enter into their mind, to try to reconstruct a position with sympathy, but then show why it falls short for the sake of goals that he was forthright about, about justice, about reconciliation, about love

we are in a moment of extraordinary cynicism. And cynicism can take advantage of your intellectual honesty, your practice of agape love. But I think that’s in the short term.

In my better moments, I’m of the view that the only way to start to turn the tide against the cynicism that has so corroded and corrupted our political culture is to try to have these demonstrations of humility and authenticity that cause us to put ourselves at some risk, the way that King did

So always our final question: What are three books you would recommend to the audience? And if I can put one spin on that, you mentioned the many books King wrote. If people want to start with one thing he actually wrote to read, one book, which one should they start with?

I think you get the best sense of his mature thought from his 1967 book, “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community,” which is still our question. So I would definitely recommend that. I also really love “A Trumpet of Conscience,” his Canadian Broadcasting Corporation lectures that were published posthumously.

I really strongly recommend Peniel Joseph’s, “The Sword and the Shield.” It’s a dual biography of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. I reviewed it for The New York Review of Books and think really highly of it. It’s a great meditation on the ways they influenced each other. And it gives you a good sense of the broader intellectual milieu of the period.

I also really like Jeanne Theoharis’s “A More Beautiful and Terrible History.” I think for people coming to the study of the civil rights movement for the first time are kind of curious about why some of the things that I’ve said don’t sound familiar to them. She writes, in a really accessible and intelligent way, about some of the myths, that structure, how that history is taught and popularly conveyed. We have a lot of agreements there.

And then a where do we go from here question, I want to recommend my colleague, Tommie Shelby’s book, “Dark Ghettos,” which is a King-inspired philosophical reflection on the deep structure of ghetto poverty and what it requires of us, as a society, to do to redress it. It’s a book that’s very demanding on how far we’ve fallen short and questions of justice that pertain to the kind of neighborhoods that we grew up in and around.

“This is a complete misrepresentation of the definition of abuse in the family code,” Christian Menefee, the Harris County attorney, said in an interview.

“We don’t believe that allowing someone to take puberty suppressants constitutes abuse,”

Governor Abbott’s effort to criminalize medical care for transgender youth is a new front in a broadening political drive to deny treatments that help align the adolescents’ bodies with their gender identities and that have been endorsed by major medical groups.

Arkansas passed a law making it illegal for clinicians to offer puberty blockers and hormones to adolescents and banning insurers from covering care. But the law was temporarily blocked by a federal judge in July after the American Civil Liberties Union sued on behalf of four families and two doctors.

Several such bills were also introduced in Texas. None passed.

Professional medical groups and transgender health experts have overwhelmingly condemned legal attempts to limit “gender-affirming” care and contend that they would greatly harm transgender young people.

“Our nation’s leading pediatricians support evidence-based, gender-affirming care for transgender young people.”

A growing number of transgender adolescents have sought medical treatments in recent years. Transgender teenagers are at high risk for attempting suicide, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Preliminary research has suggested that adolescents who receive such medical treatments have improved mental health.

“What is clear is that politicians should not be tearing apart loving families — and sending their kids into the foster care system — when parents provide recommended medical care that they believe is in the best interest of their child.”

“It’s designed to make parents scared,” he said. “It’s designed to make doctors scared for even facilitating gender-affirming health care.”

“Minors are prohibited from purchasing paint, cigarettes, alcohol, or even getting a tattoo,” Jonathan Covey, director of policy for the group Texas Values, said in an emailed statement. “We cannot allow minors or their parents to make life-altering decisions on body-mutilating procedures and irreversible hormonal treatments.”

She said that blocking gender-affirming care and forcing teenagers to go through the physical changes of puberty for a gender they don’t identify with was “inhumane.”

“Gender-affirming care saved my life,” they said in a statement. “Trans kids today deserve the same opportunity by receiving the highest standard of care.”

Favoritism is almost universal in today’s job market. In interviews with hundreds of people on this topic, I found that all but a handful used the help of family and friends to find 70 percent of the jobs they held over their lifetimes; they all used personal networks and insider information if it was available to them.

the idea that there is a job “market” based solely on skills, qualifications and merit is false. Whenever possible, Americans seeking jobs try to avoid market competition: they look for unequal rather than equal opportunity

Inequality reproduces itself because help is typically reserved for people who are “like me”: the people who live in my neighborhood, those who attend my church or school or those with whom I have worked in the past

just as opportunities are unequally distributed, they are also unequally redistributed.

Seeing contemporary labor-market politics through the lens of favoritism, rather than discrimination alone, is revealing. It explains, for example, why even though the majority of all Americans, including whites, support civil rights in principle, there is widespread opposition on the part of many whites to affirmative action policies

my research demonstrated that the real complaint is that affirmative action undermines long-established patterns of favoritism.

The interviewees in my study who were most angry about affirmative action were those who had relatively fewer marketable skills — and were therefore most dependent on getting an inside edge for the best jobs.

whites helping other whites is not the same as discrimination, and it is not illegal. Yet it may have a powerful effect on the access that African-Americans and other minorities have to good jobs, or even to the job market itself.

Jokowi said there were agreements on development of a deep sea port and the Masela gas field in Indonesia, and for preliminary discussions of a Jakarta-Surabaya rail line.

She went on to say that the prestigious and exclusive Penn Law Review had a “diversity mandate,” and that some black students face an “uphill battle” because they aren’t properly matched to the high-level school. “We’re not saying they shouldn’t go to college – we’re not saying that,” she said. “I mean, some of them shouldn’t.”

Wax would not talk with the Forward on the record about the controversy. But she did write an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal last week pointing out that Ruger had not actually released data that would have proved her right or wrong – which the petition itself also asked for – and called on him to do so.

She also claimed in a return appearance to Bloggingheads last week that she was a mentor to black students and had never received a bias complaint until last year, and that Penn’s blind grading process prevents her from knowing which grade she is giving to which students until the semester ends.

She also admitted that she did not have data that could prove her original statement about class rank correct.

In an 2015 article explaining her opposition to affirmative action programs, Wax described her childhood as “part of a close-knit, observant, conservative Jewish family in a predominantly Catholic town….Although it was common in our culture to complain a lot — about friends, relatives, business partners, bad luck, and the general cluelessness of non-Jews—we were not permitted to complain that anti-Semitism and discrimination were standing in our way. We knew discrimination was out there, but the discussion was limited to anti-Semitism as a general social problem rather than as a stumbling block in individual lives.”

Her 2009 book “Race, Wrongs and Remedies” argued that cultural-behavioral issues, not racism, are the most important factors preventing African-American progress. Such statements have garnered criticism from black Penn students as far back as 2005.

Nonetheless, according to RateMyProfessors.com, Wax has received mostly high marks from her students in recent years, though one commenter described her as someone who is “obsessed with her own victimization at the hands of forces she believes deserve blame for being victims themselves” but is nonetheless a “decent instructor when she can just stick to the course content.”

But for Penn students, especially students of color, the decision to remove Wax from her introductory class was the right one. “It’s been incredible to see how black students and alumni came together, grappled with how to handle this, and moved to create a change, and I hope that it continues,” the president of Penn’s Black Law Students Association, Nick Hall, told Philly.com.

Wax, for her part, sees her experience as part of an ominous trend, which could especially affect Jewish students. “Jews have been harmed by the threats to freedom of opinion and debate, the punishments for candor, and the decline in rigorous standards in the academy that have accompanied progressive hegemony, which insists upon the sacrosanct status of affirmative action and other policies favored by the left,” Wax wrote in an email to the Forward. She added that such pressures were especially powerful on female students. “Things were so much better in the 1970s, when I was a young women undergraduate at Yale. I am grateful to have come of age during that period. I wouldn’t want to be an undergraduate at an elite college today.”

If Mr. Kahlenberg had his way, college admissions would be upended.

His basic recipe: Get rid of preferences for alumni children, as well as children of faculty, staff and big donors. Say goodbye to recruited athletes in boutique sports like fencing. Increase community college transfers. Give a break to students who have excelled in struggling schools, who have grown up in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, in families with low income, or better yet, low net worth. Pump up financial aid. Look for applicants in towns that do not normally send students to highly selective colleges.

elite colleges have become fortresses for the rich, he said. Harvard had “23 times as many rich kids as poor kids,” Mr. Kahlenberg testified in 2018 at the federal court trial in the Harvard case, referring to a 2017 paper by Raj Chetty, then a Stanford economist, and colleagues.

his 2012 study that found seven of 10 leading universities were able to return to previous levels of diversity through race-neutral means.

In 2020, Berkeley boasted that it had admitted its most diverse class in 30 years, with offers to African American and Latino students rising to the highest numbers since at least the late-1980s, without sacrificing academic standards.

In a simulation of the class of 2019, he found that the share of Black students at Harvard would drop to 10 percent from 14 percent, but the share of white students would also drop, to 33 percent from percent from 40 percent, mainly because of the elimination of legacy and other preferences. The share of Hispanic students would rise to 19 percent from 14 percent and the Asian American share would rise to 31 percent from 24 percent.

The share of “advantaged” students (parents with a bachelor’s degree, family income over $80,000, living in a neighborhood not burdened by concentrated poverty) would make up about half of the class, from 82 percent. SAT scores would drop to the 98th percentile from the 99th.

In the affirmative action trial, Harvard said that Mr. Kahlenberg’s model would produce too little diversity, and water down academic quality. Its actual class of 2026 is 15.2 percent African American, 12.6 percent Hispanic and 27.9 percent Asian American.

Edward Blum, the conservative activist behind the lawsuits against Harvard and U.N.C., said Mr. Kahlenberg came to his attention when “The Remedy” was published. The focus on class seemed like a powerful bridge between the left and the right, Mr. Blum said

Dr. Laycock, of the University of Virginia, expects that once the Supreme Court rules, conservative groups that are now promoting race-neutral alternatives will claim they are racial proxies and turn against them. “Everybody knows that’s why it’s being used,” he said. (Mr. Blum said his group will not, though other conservative groups could do so.)

There is no “We Believe” sign in the yard. But on the living room wall, a sign says, “Live simply, dream big, be grateful, give love, laugh lots.”

In that spirit, his stubborn campaign might be traced to being the son of a pastor whose family could afford to make him a Harvard graduate, twice over. “I do have some measure of class guilt,” he said. “I wish people who are far richer than I am had more class guilt.”

I’ve seen arguments that it goes back to the 1978 Bakke decision, when the Supreme Court effectively greenlit affirmative action in the name of diversity.

the problem with Bakke isn’t that it allowed diversity to be a consideration in admissions decisions. It’s that university administrators turned an allowance into a requirement, so a kind of racial gerrymander now permeates nearly every aspect of academic life, from admissions decisions to faculty appointments to the racial makeup of contributors to essay collections

If affirmative action had been administered with a lighter hand — more nudge than mandate — it might have survived the court’s scrutiny last year. Instead, it became a pervasive regime that frequently got in the way of the universities’ higher goals, particularly the open exchange of ideas.

skin color was the first thing The Harvard Crimson noted in its story about her taking office, and her missteps and questions about her academic work gave ammunition to detractors who claimed she owed her position solely to her race.

This is the poisoned pool in which Harvard now swims. Whenever it elevates someone like Gay, there’s an assumption by admirers and detractors alike that she’s a political symbol whose performance represents more than who she is as a person

dehumanization is the price any institution pays when considerations of social engineering supplant those of individual achievement.

It may take a generation after the end of affirmative action before someone like Gay can have the opportunity to be judged on her own merits, irrespective of her color.

the damage that the social-justice model has done to higher education will take longer to repair. In 2015, 57 percent of Americans expressed high confidence in higher education, according to a Gallup survey. Last year, the number had fallen to 36 percent, and that was before the wave of antisemitic campus outbursts. At Harvard, early admission applications fell by 17 percent last fall.

Harvard also sets the tone for the rest of American higher ed — and for public attitudes toward it. One of the secrets of America’s postwar success wasn’t simply the caliber of U.S. universities. It was the respect they engendered among ordinary people who aspired to send their children to them.

That respect is now being eroded to the point of being erased. For good reason

People admire, and will strive for, excellence — both for its own sake and for the status it confers. But status without excellence is a rapidly wasting asset, especially when it comes with an exorbitant price. That’s the position of much of American academia today. Two hundred thousand dollars or more is a lot to pay for lessons in how to be an anti-racist.

the intellectual rot is pervasive and won’t stop spreading until universities return to the idea that their central purpose is to identify and nurture and liberate the best minds, not to engineer social utopias.

This is an open assault on the integrity of U.S. elections and the rule of law by the president himself. We need no more investigations or even hearings. We already have irrefutable proof. The suspect has confessed. Some detail and background might be discovered by interviewing witnesses, but the core case is in our hands. An attempt to get a foreign power to intervene in an internal election process is definitionally an impeachable offense. It was precisely the fear of foreign interference that prompted much of the founders’ discussion of impeachment

How wonderful it would be if Harvard’s goal in these discriminatory practices were to get Harvard students to think “beyond race” and to see one another as unique individuals.

It would still be a contradiction, of course — to combat racial discrimination, you need to practice racial discrimination — but as a temporary measure, you can justify it if the goal is eventual color-blindness in admissions.

one of the benefits of subjecting Harvard to discovery in this trial was the revelation that a whopping 43 percent of white students at Harvard are legacy and special admissions, i.e. there because they’re athletes, legacies, Dean’s List, or children of faculty. Of those, 70 percent would not be there on merit alone.

if Harvard has its way, we won’t. Increasingly, the popular rationale for the discrimination is as Murray described it in the New York Times this week, “an appropriate remedy for longtime systemic, state-sanctioned oppression.”

Harvard has long since stopped pretending — at least when it doesn’t have to defend its practices in court — that it believes in bringing about a society “beyond race.

In the last decade, the emphasis is on racial oppression as a permanent structural force built into America’s DNA. Affirmative action is thereby a form of open-ended resistance to “white supremacy.” All students, far from getting beyond race, are required to be constantly conscious of it even in a casual conversation

Diversity programs are increasingly not about getting past race; they are about insisting on its eternal centrality to everything in America.

So in nine years we can get rid of this bias?

If you ended this affirmative action for the super-rich and connected, you’d free up almost a full third of admissions. It’s win-win! More fairness and more racial balance

The Asian-American coalition, by contrast, is demanding policies that in some way address those who are struggling and in need, and who are often people of color.

“Asian-Americans converge in several notable ways, including experiences with discrimination, voting behavior and attitudes on policies ranging from environmental protection to gun control to higher taxation and social service provision.”

The question for the Asian-American coalition, as for the Democratic Party as a whole, is what constitutes economic justice: the Clinton-Obama neoliberalism of favoring Wall Street and trade deals, with insufficient attention paid to the middle and working classes?

Or a more robust form of economic redistribution that would tax the wealthy at a higher rate, eliminate or greatly reduce student and medical debt, expand health insurance and child care, bolster public schools and enhance access to higher education?

As today’s Asian-American coalition sees it, no policy can be carried out effectively without paying attention to identities and differences