Anti-racist Arguments Are Tearing People Apart
The viral YouTube video was cued to begin at 42:23, the moment most likely to elicit incredulity. A webcam was tight on the face of Robin Broshi, a middle-aged white woman. She was upset. The edge in her voice sought to explain, to emphasize, to insist, that a wrong had been done.
“It hurts people,” she said, “when they see a white man bouncing a brown baby on their lap and they don’t know the context!”
Wait. What?
“That is harmful!” she continued. “That makes people cry! It makes people log out of our meetings.” The video’s description mentions the “NYC Community Education Council for Manhattan District 2,” which serves more than 60,000 students spread across 121 schools.
I made a series of rapid assumptions about what I was watching. I surmised that Broshi was a college-educated, upper-middle-class progressive who sits on some sort of education council in the public-school system and owns copies of White Fragility and How to Be an Antiracist. I surmised that she was calling someone out. And I surmised that her white, male target was offscreen rolling his eyes. All of which turned out to be correct.
But I also felt confused. Why would a New Yorker in 2020 see an adult holding a baby with a different phenotype and presume something nefarious was afoot? Until recently, I would have expected that sort of retrograde attitude from the alt-right. Beleaguered curiosity prompted me to burrow down an unlikely rabbit hole: extended footage from several NYC Community Education Council District 2 meetings. I wanted to understand what seemed to be the latest confounding addition to the rapidly changing code of elite, “anti-racist” manners.
[From the September 2020 issue: Is this the beginning of the end of American racism?]
What I found was more complicated and troubling than one perplexing viral moment. All 11 members of the council are highly educated parents who volunteer time and energy in hopes of improving public schools. Council membership requires lots of tedious, mostly thankless work of a sort that no one undertakes for the power: The resolutions that pass at meetings aren’t even binding on the Department of Education. Yet this advisory body of well-meaning people is plagued by polarizing disagreements about the nature of anti-racism that undermine its ability to effect change. And if this particular incident is exceedingly strange––almost a caricature of how conservatives think identitarian leftists behave––it also illuminates how the fight over anti-racism could roil many other institutions all across the country.
T June 11 online meeting––the meeting where the baby made his appearance, not the subsequent June 29 meeting, and its discussion of the incident, that went viral––focused on one of the most controversial issues in New York City education: When kids finish elementary school, what should determine which middle school they attend? Currently, fourth graders can apply to one of the selective middle schools that “screens” applicants on the basis of standardized-test scores, grades, and attendance records, or attend a non-screening school. In the meeting, which was open to the public, supporters of the screening system variously argued that it allows academically talented students to learn at an accelerated pace, affords kids who learn at a slower pace the extra attention they require, keeps more rich people in the public-school system, and benefits many Asian immigrants, members of one of the poorest demographic groups in Manhattan. They suggested that changing some of the best rather than some of the worst schools in the system is both unwise and unlikely to remedy the factors causing children from poor families to fall behind.
