Vincent Lloyd is a Black professor at Villanova University, where he directed the Black-studies program, leads workshops on anti-racism and transformative justice, and has published books on anti-Black racism, including Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination. Until recently, he was dismissive of criticism of the way that the left talks about race in America. Then he had an unsettling experience while teaching a group of high-school students as part of a highly selective summer program that is convened and sponsored annually by the Telluride Association.

[Read: Why not take a Black studies class?]

The students began the summer excited about the six-week seminar, called “Race and the Limits of Law.” But soon, they moved to expel two of their classmates from the program amid political disagreements. Then, as Lloyd later recounted in an essay for Compact Magazine, the remaining students read a prepared statement about “how the seminar perpetuated anti-black violence in its content and form, how the black students had been harmed, how I was guilty of countless microaggressions, including through my body language, and how students didn’t feel safe because I didn’t immediately correct views that failed to treat anti-blackness as the cause of all the world’s ills.”

Before, he had quickly rejected the linguist and social commentator John McWhorter’s argument that anti-racism is a new religion. “Last summer,” Lloyd wrote, “I found anti-racism to be a perversion of religion: I found a cult.”

When I read Lloyd’s essay, I valued the distinct ideological perspective that grounds his critique of how anti-racism could improve. I wanted to converse with him about his experience, the lessons he took from it, and ascendant social movements on the left, in the hopes that our very different perspectives might help solve problems that worry us both.

Below is a lightly edited version of our correspondence.

Conor Friedersdorf: Early on, you distinguish your essay from other “laments about ‘woke’ campus culture, and the loss of traditional educational virtues.” Given your academic scholarship and varied work on behalf of social justice, no one can credibly claim that you’re reflexively hostile to efforts that get coded as “woke.” Yet you believe that something went terribly wrong in your seminar. I hope we can drill down on what specifically went wrong and why.

But first, for any readers who come to anything coded as “woke” with skepticism, or who want to understand where you are coming from a bit better, could you explain why you’ve dedicated so much time and effort to Black-studies programs, anti-racism workshops, and transformative-justice workshops?

Vincent Lloyd: In our lives, we all encounter a deeply human problem: domination. Some have the capacity to arbitrarily assert their will over others. We find this in our families, with bosses at work, with politicians, and systemically: Patriarchy, racism, and colonialism are all systems of domination. Anti-Black racism is the closest we get to a paradigm of domination. Even a century and a half after slavery, the master-slave dynamic, dominator and dominated, fuels anti-Black racism, which is now incorporated into laws and institutions as well as personal vices.

I want a world free of domination. I think we all do. That requires working together to root out systems of domination, some on the surface but many deeply ingrained in our world. Black studies aims to root out domination, in the university and in the world. It grew out of Black-student struggles in the late 1960s and early 1970s, themselves born of the civil-rights movement and anti-war protests. It aims to draw attention to the forms of anti-Black racism that infect each of us and the institutions we inhabit, and to catalyze justice movements today. Behind the “woke” label are powerful new visions of justice, new ways of imagining a world free of domination. Instead of politely requesting incorporation into unjust institutions, today’s justice movements rightly demand new institutions that are more responsive to human needs.

Friedersdorf: On a bunch of contested questions, you’ve sketched relatively radical positions: for example, that forms of anti-Blackness “infect each of us”; that anti-Black domination endures in the university; that those who seek justice are called not just to eschew dominating others but to root out domination; and that succeeding requires demanding new institutions, not just reforming old ones. As your radical students saw it, their peers, their teacher, and the format of their seminar was infected with racism, thus the call to end the seminar and demand a new approach.

You reject their radicalism and lovingly defend the seminar format, where “specific words, phrases, arguments, and images from a text offer essential friction for conversation,” even as you grant that it is time-consuming and frustrating, and that participants inevitably get a lot wrong along the way.

“Day by day, one intervention builds on another, as one student notices what another overlooked,” you write, because “the seminar assumes that each student has innate intelligence.” Ultimately, you go so far as to liken the format to democratic life itself, insofar as “we each have different, partial knowledge. We each get things wrong, over and over. At our best, we enter the fray by listening to each other and complementing and challenging the insights of our fellows. In the process, over years, decades, we are oriented toward justice and truth.”

I’m with you—conserve the seminar! (I would very much like to be a participant in a seminar that you lead.) But how, exactly? To the question “How do we know which institutions and norms to conserve and which are better abolished and replaced?” the conservative answers, “We usually cannot know. To pick and choose is to err in ways that do more harm than good. So change should proceed slowly: better to steadily conserve small gains than risk huge losses.” You are not a conservative. Still, this episode caused you to recall a moment in the 1970s “when leftist organizations imploded, the need to match and raise the militancy of one’s comrades leading to a toxic culture filled with dogmatism and disillusion.” How do you propose that justice seekers best avoid or guard against toxicity, dogmatism, excess, and disillusion?

Lloyd: The students and I agreed about political principles. We disagreed about political judgment and political strategy. How do we get from our world, full of anti-Black racism, full of interlocking systems of domination, to a world free of domination? We need to feel the urgency of this question, but we also need to develop the sensibilities and virtues that can allow us to suitably respond.

The seminar is a training ground. It requires patience, enduring frustration, attending carefully to others, making distinctions, drawing on personal experience and applying it to the world of ideas. The seminar is not a pure space; there are no pure spaces. But, in contrast to the lecture, the seminar demonstrates to students that they already have knowledge and that, collectively, they can produce knowledge.

The seminar format itself is changing in positive ways. When I was an undergraduate two decades ago, we all sat around a table, the professor would say “What did you think of the reading?,” and there would be open discussion. Because of my background (I came to Princeton from a public high school in southern Minnesota) and race, I was not practiced in this format, and I rarely spoke. Today, we start with activities to prime the pump, as it were: For example, we have students talk to their neighbor about a question for a few minutes, or each share a question that sets the seminar’s agenda, or divide the seminar into groups of three for a while. Such practices mitigate the effects of the inequalities that necessarily enter the seminar space.

Even in its updated format, a seminar requires risk. People, and especially institutions, don’t like risk. Presumably to reduce that risk, the Telluride Association inserted teachers’ assistants into seminars in what was effectively a layer of anti-racist managers between teachers and students. But that destroys the political potential of the seminar: It can no longer cultivate the sensibilities and virtues needed to combat systems of domination. In the context I write about, because the seminar is a space where the professor and the students are required to restrain themselves, the only figure who was unrestrained was the charismatic teaching assistant (who also, uniquely in this situation, managed the students’ lives for the 21 hours a day they were not in seminar).

One factor contributing to toxicity on the left today is a failure to recognize that different modes of engagement are appropriate to different sorts of spaces. Some spaces, like seminars and reading groups, are training grounds. Others are sites of political action which require deferring to authority and exercising discipline. Still others are sites of storytelling and imagination.

Right now, there is a deep, understandable suspicion of authority that pervades all left spaces and has the effect of reducing discourse to retweets of charismatic personalities—and charisma is the twin of abuse.

Friedersdorf: Many readers will agree (as I do) that we live in a world of domination; that among the forms it takes is anti-Black racism; that we ought to root out systems of domination; that “different modes of engagement are appropriate to different sorts of spaces”; and that positive change is most likely to succeed when its champions develop certain sensibilities and virtues.

[Ibram X. Kendhi: The book that exposed anti-Black racism in the classroom]

In the experience your essay recounts, I see evidence for some additional propositions.

First, it seems to me that a healthy anti-racism movement cannot simply presume that anti-Black racism is or is not a feature of a given institution or space, or to what degree. Without claims that are particular and falsifiable, and rigorous attempts among people with diverse viewpoints to prove or disprove them, the inevitable result is dogmatism and disillusion––and calls to disrupt and transform things that are no more racist or harmful than your seminar. But in many leftist spaces, rigor of that sort is itself seen as harmful and destructive, rather than a constructive necessity for any movement that seeks to focus its efforts appropriately.

Second, I think too many elite academic institutions treat Black students as if they are fragile, undifferentiated victims so lacking in resilience that even a small, unintentional slight from a white or Asian classmate will result in significant harm, acculturating many students to engage Black classmates not as peers but as pitiable others best patronized as “allies” while walking on eggshells. Students ought to regard one another as equals––they are equals and deserve the equal dignity of being treated that way. The alternative constitutes an implicit white and Asian supremacy and an attendant denial of Black equality as disempowering and dispiriting as any other.  

As you wrote:

Saddest of all, for me, was hearing what the black students said. They needed extra help, they were struggling to understand anything from the readings, and they couldn’t even know what questions to ask unless they had guidance—first Keisha said this, then the black students said it, then their “allies” repeated it in solidarity with them. But I witnessed them learning. I heard them ask critical questions about difficult texts. I saw their writing improve. I saw them use complex concepts in thoughtful ways. They just didn’t believe in themselves.

You went on to hypothesize that while the Telluride program has been ahead of its time (in a good sense) in many of the ways it has evolved on race over the years, “perhaps the implosion of my Telluride seminar suggests that this final step, centering blackness, tempts the US elite, and particularly US elite educational institutions, to take a step too far, a step into incoherence—or worse.”

But were your seminar participants centering “Blackness” or false stereotypes of Blackness that reduce it to victimhood? Truly centering Blackness would at least require acknowledging the singular individuality, staggering diversity, and resilience of Black people.

Lloyd: There is, indeed, an important question about how we can sharpen our perception of specific wrongs, especially around racism. But there is a deeper question involved too: whether we are approaching justice with a tragic sensibility—in religious terms, appreciating that the world is fallen. Even if, today, we could come up with a list of wrongs needing attention, we would certainly be missing some and misperceiving others; more generally, there are systems of domination affecting us that we haven’t even noticed yet. In the mid-20th century, there was little awareness of homophobia, for example. Who knows what new forms of domination we will have identified a few decades in the future.

At its best, talk of the pervasiveness of anti-Black racism is pointing toward that tragic sensibility. There are forms of anti-Black racism of which we are not aware circulating around people and institutions. That is why we need to cultivate humility, but we need active humility, not the sort that allows us to wallow. We need spaces where we can practice articulating our commitments, having them challenged, and revising them. We also need spaces where we analyze precisely what wrongs we can identify and respond to here and now, given our imperfect capacities.

The seminar form promises to be a space where we can do both.

In the wake of Black Lives Matter protests, and especially since the murder of George Floyd, Blackness has floated so widely and loosely in our discourse that the diversity of Black experience and even the humanity of particular Black folks starts to be lost. Institutions know they have racist habits and know they need to change, but they are very awkward in formulating responses—and they are always looking for shortcuts. In cases like anti-Black racism, we do need policy fixes that are overbroad to correct for past wrongs, but we also need to put particular emphasis on attending to the diversity and complexity of Black experience.

The seminar I wrote about was attempting to do just this: leverage the students’ interest in questions of racial justice to examine how different racial categories change over time and how they are inhabited differently by different people—and how the law struggles to make sense of this complexity. Each week we read one court decision, one literary text (a novel, memoir, or short-story collection), and three pieces of historical and cultural analysis, with each genre adding new layers and complications to our understanding of race in general, and Blackness in particular.

In the U.S. and probably beyond, we are at a turning point in how we understand racial diversity. For a half century, we were comfortably multiculturalists, celebrating the variety of peoples, each with their own tasty food and colorful clothes, each facing their own sorts of struggles which we can support, but ultimately all part of the shared life of a community, institution, or nation. The justice claims coming out of social movements in the last decade reject this framework. Anti-Black racism, they charge, is qualitatively different from other forms of racism (though similar claims are made around Indigeneity and other categories as well). Black justice requires interrupting both habits and institutions, and beginning again in new ways.

I don’t think Telluride and other sorts of institutions know what to do with these claims; adding an extra staff person at the multicultural student office or a diversity manager in a seminar is not genuinely responsive. I can’t predict what new frameworks around racial diversity will come after multiculturalism. I trust the energy and creativity of young people leading social movements to imagine a more just future. But I distrust the efforts of institutions to manage that justice-seeking spirit in ways that are convenient and financially expedient, and those efforts are muddying the waters. Young activists who have the capacity to dream a world without domination are instead, at times, demanding more diversity bureaucrats, more diversity trainings, and more ideological policing.

[Conor Friedersdorf: The paradox of diversity training]

Friedersdorf: I share the hope that young people will imagine and help bring about a future with less domination. But I fear the social movements that you allude to have become more authoritarian in the past decade. I frequently see self-proclaimed adherents of those movements seeking to dominate others. More puzzlingly, I see them denouncing institutions and authority figures as racist one moment, then demanding in the next moment that those same institutions or leaders start marshaling their authority more coercively (much as your students denounced your supposed racism, then insisted that you assert more control over their discussions).

“The students wanted freedom, for themselves and for all,” you wrote, “but they started to say that the only route to freedom is indoctrination: having me tell them what to think.” Are you sure that it’s “freedom for all” that they wanted? As you note, “Young activists who have the capacity to dream a world without domination are instead, at times, demanding more diversity bureaucrats, more diversity trainings, and more ideological policing.” Why are such approaches wrong turns? And by way of wrapping up our back-and-forth, could you suggest a better alternative?

Lloyd: Social movements are messy, and this is especially true for those movements led by youth and those led by people who have suffered a great deal. Social movements are also the best place we can turn to for insights into the nature of justice. Those struggling against domination have unique expertise on domination itself, and how we can free ourselves from it. And that’s the tricky part: We need to take seriously the insights of social movements, but those insights are not self-evident—not to movement participants and not to outsiders. It is difficult and sometimes painful to sort through the varied rhetorics and practices of a movement and to see what hews most closely to the struggle against domination that is a movement’s foundation. Furthermore, no matter our distance from a movement, no matter how closely we attend to it, we have to remind ourselves that we’re going to get some of its insights wrong.

I worry that left political discourse today takes social movements, or even just an individual who has suffered, as conversation stoppers rather than conversation starters. That frustrates me because I firmly believe these movements are the key to our collective liberation. Justice struggles always involve a back-and-forth between movement participants making demands for radical transformation and those in power trying to manage those demands so that they can keep their grip on power. Sometimes that management involves co-opting movements themselves, effectively getting activists to make demands that serve the interests of the status quo. Those of us who care about justice have to be willing to ask critical questions about these dynamics rather than blindly deferring to the activist language.

In an academic context, Black student organizing has long made the claim that interrogating domination is at the heart of the academic mission of the university: domination that starts with the paradigm of the Middle Passage but proceeds to all the forms domination takes, around race, gender, economics, and personal relationships. In other words, the core claim growing out of Black student movements is that the founding principles of educational institutions have to change, and that will call for a radical restructuring of what those institutions look like. I worry about the growth of diversity bureaucracies whose mission is, effectively, to shield institutions from that radical critique, and to redirect activist energy toward goals that entrench the powers that be. There is no tension between the academic mission of a university and the claims being made by student activists: Those activists are demanding more rigor, better history, sharper analysis, because they are demanding that the struggle against domination, a fundamental concern of humanity, ought to be at the root of all intellectual work.

Regarding the current discourse on race, I think we need to appreciate what an important moment we are in, and how much Black organizing has achieved. We are talking about anti-Black racism in a much more sophisticated way today than we were even 10 years ago. We are noticing and responding to anti-Black racism in health care, the economy, real estate, the prison system, policing, and in many other domains. We have broken the hold that the framework of multiculturalism had on discussions of race. Now the forces of white supremacy are realizing they are vulnerable and responding forcefully, and they are attempting to sow discord and defensiveness among justice seekers.

Those of us committed to justice movements need to redouble our commitment to the sensibilities and virtues that are the prerequisite for successful struggles in difficult times: humility, receptivity, charity, faith in the struggle, and hope for a world without domination.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

Young women are struggling. “Nearly 1 in 3 high school girls reported in 2021 that they seriously considered suicide—up nearly 60 percent from a decade ago—according to new findings from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,” The Washington Post reports. Drawing on the same study, Axios notes, “About 30 percent of teen girls said they had seriously considered attempting suicide, up from 19 percent in 2011.” What is going on? Whether you have young women in your life who have shaped your perspective or other experiences with this topic, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com.

Conversations of Note

When Jon Ronson published So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed in 2015, I hoped his numerous illustrations of online mobs meting out cruelty in the guise of holding others accountable would persuade the masses that joining digital pile-ons does more harm than not––both because the facts of various matters so often prove different, or more complicated, than they at first seemed and because even in cases where an individual deserves some punishment or sanction, zealous hordes are incapable of proportion. The hate of uncoordinated vigilantes who purport to hold others accountable can add up to so much punishment that their targets wind up pondering suicide.

For individuals, “let he who is without sin cast the first stone” is an undervalued rule. For media institutions, who purport to act in the public interest and rightly consider accountability in their ambit, I‘d posit a special responsibility to refrain from initiating or amplifying false or misleading stories––and where coverage is later proved to be misleading, to revise unjustly unflattering portraits of individuals as prominently as they published them.

Alas, even in cases where targets of public opprobrium are especially rich and famous––which is to say, possessed of more ability than most of us to counter false or misleadingly one-sided information––coverage that seems likely to tarnish a person’s reputation is too often far more prominent than coverage that seems likely to burnish or revive it.

For example, in “Armie Hammer Breaks His Silence,” the journalist James Kirchick revisits the case of an actor whose career was destroyed when he faced accusations of extreme sexual misconduct. Although Kirchick’s reporting doesn’t resolve anything definitively, it includes significant facts that readers of the original coverage ought to know as updates, as they give very different impressions of what might have happened. As yet, however, publishers of bygone coverage have not updated their articles. (Kirchick has expounded on his reporting process for Meghan Daum and The Fifth Column.)

And at The Free Press, Megan Phelps-Roper is launching a series, “The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling,” that will probe the vilification of the famous author of the Harry Potter books. Rowling is portrayed by some as a transphobic bigot whose views are egregiously beyond the pale––and were that true, opprobrium would be appropriate. Bigotry against trans people is indeed odious. But do Rowling’s actual words validate the ways that she has been characterized? Cathy Young, Kat Rosenfield, Brendan Morrow, and the Blocked and Reported podcast have all found significant evidence of dubious attacks––and at least one Rowling attacker retracted his claims rather than defend them in court.

Less famous subjects of vilification are far less likely to have anyone following up to vindicate them (commentators on the populist right are throwing around accusations of “grooming” children as widely and frivolously as any character assassins in American life). However, Nicole Carr of ProPublica proved an exception to that rule last year, telling the story of Cecelia Lewis, an educator wrongly hounded out of a job and followed to another during a moral panic about what participants erroneously thought of as critical race theory.

Whether a person is famous or obscure, blameworthy or blameless, they deserve, at the very least, scrupulous accuracy when their behavior is described to mass audiences. Folks on the right and left who fall short of that mark are more alike than they think. As long as their carelessness is so frequent, the case against pile-ons is airtight.

Joe Biden’s Criminal-Justice-Reform Failures

At The Marshall Project, Jamiles Lartey argues that the administration has failed to clear a low bar that it set:

Last May, President Joe Biden sat with family members of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in the White House as he signed an executive order he called the “most significant police reform in decades.”

One of the more notable promises in the order was setting up a “National Law Enforcement Accountability Database,” that would collect detailed information about officers who committed misconduct. The deadline to launch it was Jan. 20, the same day that five Memphis police officers were fired for the beating death of Tyre Nichols—a killing that has once more ignited national debate about policing. The Department of Justice has yet to announce the database, and did not respond to multiple requests for comment on its status.

Deadlines for other initiatives in Biden’s order, like new standards for credentialing police departments, appear to have also come and gone without acknowledgement or public results.

On Art and Supposed Harm

In a New York Times column about the censorship of art and “the anxious philistinism that can result when bureaucratic cowardice meets maximalist ideas about safety,” Michelle Goldberg writes:

I’m not naïve enough to believe that if the left rediscovered a passionate commitment to free speech, the right would give up its furious campaign against what it calls wokeness. But I do think that if the left is to mount a convincing response to what has become a wholesale assault on intellectual liberty and free expression, it needs to be able to defend challenging and provocative work.

A Business Contagion

In The Atlantic, Annie Lowrey argues that layoffs at one company tend to spur layoffs at other companies for various reasons that may have nothing to do with a financial imperative to carry them out:

When executives see their corporate competitors letting go of workers, they seize what they see as an opportunity to reduce their workforce, rather than having no choice but to do so.

Shedding employees when everybody else is doing it avoids drawing public scrutiny to or creating reputational damage for a given firm, for one. A lone business announcing that it is downsizing is likely to be described as mismanaged or troubled, and may well be mismanaged or troubled. However merited, that kind of reputation tends to hinder a company from attracting investment, workers, and customers. But if a firm downsizes when everyone else is doing it, the public seldom notices and investors seldom care.

Copycat layoffs also let executives cite challenging business conditions as a justification for cuts, rather than their own boneheaded strategic decisions. In this scenario, the problem isn’t that corporate leadership poured billions of dollars into a quixotic new venture or hired hundreds of what ended up being redundant employees. It’s not that the C-suite misunderstood the competitive environment, necessitating a costly and painful readjustment. It’s Jay Powell! It’s a COVID-related reversion to the mean! Who could have known?

In addition to being simpler for executives to explain to their shareholders or the board, large-scale copycat layoffs are easier to carry out and better received by employees than selective or strategic layoffs. Managers let staffers go instead of firing them, blaming economic conditions rather than detailing their direct reports’ shortcomings. Morale might take less of a hit if the remaining workers fault the broader business environment instead of their bosses.

Another possible reason layoffs are contagious is that executives might take other firms’ hiring and firing decisions as a kind of market intelligence. Even when a company’s own financials appear sound, it may interpret a competitor’s layoff announcement as a sign of worsening conditions.

Provocation of the Week

In Unherd, Thomas Fazi explains why he is worried about World War III:

By providing increasingly powerful military equipment as well as financial, technical, logistical and training support to one of the warring factions, including for offensive operations (even within Russian territory), the West is engaged in a de facto military confrontation with Russia, regardless of what our leaders may claim.

Western citizens deserve to be told what is going on in Ukraine—and what the stakes are. Perhaps the wildest claim being made is that “if we deliver all the weapons Ukraine needs, they can win,” as former Nato Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen recently asserted. For Rasmussen, and other Western hawks, this includes retaking Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014 and which it considers of the utmost strategic importance. Many Western allies still consider this an uncrossable red line. But for how long? Just last month, the New York Times reported that the Biden administration is warming up to the idea of backing a Ukrainian offensive on Crimea.

This strategy is based on the assumption that Russia will accept a military defeat and the loss of the territories it controls without resorting to the unthinkable—the use of nuclear weapons. But this is a massive assumption on which to gamble the future of humanity, especially coming from the very Western strategists who disastrously botched every major military forecast over the past 20 years, from Iraq to Afghanistan. The truth is that, from Russia’s perspective, it is fighting against what it perceives to be an existential threat in Ukraine, and there is no reason to believe that, with its back against the wall, it won’t go to extreme measures to guarantee its survival. As Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, put it: “The loss of a nuclear power in a conventional war can provoke the outbreak of a nuclear war. Nuclear powers do not lose major conflicts on which their fate depends.”

During the Cold War, this was widely understood by Western leaders. But today, by constantly escalating their support for Ukraine’s military, the United States and Nato appear to have forgotten it, and are instead inching closer to a catastrophic scenario.

That’s all for this week––see you on Monday.

MEMPHIS, Tenn.—If the summer of 2020 was, for many Americans, a breaking point, then the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd presented the nation’s leadership class with a crossroads. Would they radically rethink American policing, or would they retreat to the safety of piecemeal reform, earnestly applying Band-Aids over bullet wounds? Two and a half years later, Tyre Nichols is dead, and the choice they made is clear.

It’s not that nothing was done. Some departments vowed to make more data available, and others launched exploratory efforts to let specialists respond to mental-health emergencies. Activists in a handful of cities succeeded in securing cuts to their police budgets. Some cities proposed ending armed traffic enforcement.

But there was no Great Reckoning in American policing. No sweeping act of atonement. No radical reordering. Not even, at scale, the “reimagining” championed by the moderates. In many cases, reactionary backlash has outpaced the changes that prompted it. Society’s moral vacuum had been laid open before us. Rather than plug it, the most powerful among us watched as we were sucked further into the abyss.

On January 7, the Memphis Police Department announced that during a traffic stop for “reckless driving” the night prior, “a confrontation occurred, and the suspect fled the scene on foot.” When officers caught up with the suspect, the department claimed, “another confrontation occurred” before the man was finally taken into custody. Complaining of “shortness of breath,” the 29-year-old was brought to a nearby hospital. Three days later, Tyre Nichols was dead, and a grotesque spectacle of Black death began.

[David A. Graham: How did it come to this?]

Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn “C. J.” Davis would later say that she immediately recognized the urgency of the situation. Within days, five officers were fired, and a federal probe was launched. Officials allowed Nichols’s family and their lawyers to watch the videos of what had happened, which they described afterward as “far worse than Rodney King.” Nichols, they said, had been savaged like “a human piñata.” The officers were charged with second-degree murder. Television journalists, some of whom had been granted an early viewing of the videos, counted down to the public release as if it were a sporting event. What we were about to witness, they warned, was disturbing.

At 7 p.m. ET on Friday, January 27, the Memphis Police Department released four video clips. Two, from body cameras, depict behavior both concerning and commonplace. Officers immediately escalate, shouting contradictory commands without considering Nichols’s attempts to comply. They deploy violence—pepper spray, a baton, a stun gun—far exceeding any threat posed to them or the public.

A third video captured the crime. The officers catch Nichols in Brandywine, a sprawling subdivision where brick houses sit clustered around cul-de-sacs. They tackle him to the ground. They pepper-spray his eyes. They strike him with fists and a baton. Two officers hold Nichols down as a third unleashes winding kicks to his head. Writhing in pain, Nichols screams for his mother. A handcuffed Nichols is held upright as an officer delivers punches to his face. A dazed and dying Nichols is propped against a car as officers gather around him and coordinate their stories.

This all happened in one of the spots where Memphis has spent millions on surveillance. Just a few steps away, a camera was affixed on a light pole. Its flashing blue light would have been impossible to miss, had any of the officers ever looked up.

Public commentary quickly converged around three points. The first was that Nichols’s death was as disgusting a display of police violence as could be remembered. Second: The race of the offending officers—all five initially charged with murder were Black—was in some way significant. Third, ongoing attempts to rid policing of wanton violence have clearly failed.

Much has been made of the whiteness of the officers involved in prior such incidents. Now the seemingly new dimension offered by the involvement of Black officers required explanation. To some commentators, the officers’ skin tone validated what they had been insisting all along: that America’s policing problems are not about race. On a single morning after the videos’ release, National Review featured three articles on its homepage declaring that Nichols’s death was not about racism. Even to some on the left, the fact that mass protests had not erupted could be explained at least in part by the officers’ race.

Based on my experience covering policing and unrest, I’d proffer a more straightforward explanation: the timely release of information and forthright steps to hold the officers accountable. Civil unrest arrives most often in response to cryptic, protracted sagas.

Los Angeles burned only after the officers who brutalized Rodney King were acquitted, the final insult in a year-long saga. Ferguson became the site of mass protests when police refused to explain why there was a dead teenager lying in the street, and again when, after three months, residents learned that the officer who shot him would walk free. City officials in Baltimore remained tight-lipped after the rough ride that resulted in Freddie Gray’s death; more than two weeks later, police had still not offered a coherent explanation. Parts of the city burned. By the time George Floyd was killed, Minneapolis and the nation were fed up with more than five fruitless years of protests about policing. After spending months of 2020 holed up in their homes, everyone was desperate to come outside, activists and arsonists alike.

Police and prosecutors across the country—who routinely put on public display guns, drugs, and money seized as evidence in criminal cases—typically insist that releasing basic details about incidents in which officers kill people will irrevocably damage their investigations. They hem and haw about why they can’t release videos, fire killer cops, or secure criminal indictments. Officials in Memphis managed all of it in just 20 days.

[Read: The problem with police shooting videos]

Yet as much as the Memphis Police Department is an example of a newfound transparency that has taken root in the decade since Ferguson, the city has also provided a reminder of the limitations of reform.

Here is a department with a Black woman police chief, a majority-Black workforce, body cameras, de-escalation training, and a duty-to-intervene policy. And Tyre Nichols is still dead: beaten by Black officers in violent scenes captured on the officers’ body cameras after they themselves escalated the interaction. No officers intervened. For all of her clarity and grace, Chief Davis is a breathing reminder that systemic problems will not be solved by representational victories. The solution to police violence is no more the hiring of Black cops than the solution to mass incarceration is gender diversity among prison guards.

Memphis is a city that drips with history. You can almost hear Isaac Hayes behind a piano at Stax as you walk Beale Street. And you can almost see Ernest Withers, twin-reflex camera around his neck, setting up the perfect shot, and Ida B. Wells furiously clacking at her typewriter as she prepares the next edition of her newspaper The Free Speech and Headlight. There’s Martin Luther King Jr. leading the marching sanitation workers—his final campaign.

As I landed in Memphis last week, thick balls of ice began falling from the sky, the start of a days-long freeze that paralyzed the city. Still, the usual cast of characters braved the cold to pay their respects. Family members of George Floyd, Eric Garner, and Stephon Clark made the trip. The Reverend Al Sharpton took a private plane. The Nichols family’s lead attorney, Ben Crump, drove several hours after getting stranded at the Atlanta airport. Vice President Kamala Harris represented the White House at Nichols’s funeral—a short, solemn service in which everyone sang from a familiar songbook. “The only thing keeping me going right now is that I really, truly believe that my son was sent here on an assignment from God,” Nichols’s mother, RowVaughn Wells, told the assembled mourners. “I guess his assignment is done.”

After nearly a decade of writing about police violence, I no longer travel to every city that has just experienced a brutal killing. But it had been almost three years since a case like this had forced its way to the front of the nation’s consciousness, even for a moment. It felt important to be in Memphis and witness, with my own eyes, this chapter of our never-ending story. And so I sat, in a chilly overflow room set up in Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church, looking up at a television monitor as Tiffany Rachal—whose oldest son, Jalen Randle, was killed by police in Houston last year and who was one of many mothers of the movement in attendance—sang the gospel staple “Total Praise.”

In Memphis, Davis herself commissioned the team that killed Nichols: the Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods. The task force of 40 officers would be deposited in the city’s most violent areas and told, as Davis put it, to “be tough on tough people.” Referred to as the SCORPION unit, the team was part of the city’s response to a record-high 342 murders in 2021. As The New York Times reported, Mayor Jim Strickland bragged in his 2022 State of the City address about the hundreds of arrests made by the unit. Meanwhile, Black Memphis was being terrorized.

Such units are known for “weak supervision, a high degree of independence, no accountability, [an internal] feedback loop,” and they are “encouraged to be aggressive,” says Walter Katz, a vice president at the criminal-justice philanthropy Arnold Ventures, who has worked in police oversight since the 1990s. “They have this mandate to stop street crime, and then the mandate tends to be far broader than the actual problem.”

The expansion of these units has mirrored the rise of “hot-spot policing,” in which departments analyze which neighborhoods have the most frequent crime and then send resources and man power. But each department chooses its remedy from a long menu of options. Hot-spot policing is a principle. What matters is the practice. Police could deploy officers determined to build trust in these “hot spots.” Instead, they tend to dispatch men in tactical gear driving unmarked Dodge Chargers, instructing them to make stops until they’ve got guns and drugs to put out on the table.

Since Nichols’s death, Memphis has disbanded SCORPION and announced a review of other specialty task forces. But these teams—described by police public relations as “elite,” known in the streets as “jump-out boys”—exist in cities across America and in some cases have been in place for decades. Many are havens for troubled officers.

“In every city in America, they have got one of these organized-crime units that trample on the constitutional rights of Black and brown communities,” Crump, whose work on these cases has earned him the nickname “Black America’s Attorney General,” told me after Nichols’s funeral. “I have never heard of an organized-crime unit going to brutalize our white brothers and sisters in their neighborhood. Show us that video.”

As Black America pleaded for safety, elected officials in Memphis and across the country provided them instead with police. If the dream is a world in which a 29-year-old Black man can safely complete a drive home unmolested by those who would do him harm, civilian or police, the nightmare in which we reside is one in which Tyre Nichols is pulled from his car and pummeled to death just minutes from his family’s house.

Moments after first watching the video footage of Tyre Nichols being beaten to death, I turned to The Evidence of Things Not Seen, James Baldwin’s 1985 essay about what was then the country’s most perplexing true-crime story.

The terror in Atlanta stretched 22 months from 1979 to 1981 and resulted in more than two dozen corpses—all of them Black, most of them children. Nearly everyone assumed that the slayings were the work of a single perpetrator. Many, perhaps especially in Black Atlanta, took as a given that the killer was white, probably a Klan member. Then officials announced the arrest of a Black man named Wayne Williams, who was charged with two of the killings but, authorities tenuously insisted, could be tied to the rest as well. This news unleashed, as Baldwin writes, “the instinctive attempt to calculate the meaning of the new dimension suddenly given to an old dilemma.”

[Eve Fairbanks: White supremacy is a script]

Speculation swirled about whether the murders were an act of self-hatred. It’s true, Baldwin concedes, that there are self-hating Black Americans, especially among police forces. But inasmuch as race was a factor here, Baldwin observes, it was in the way Black Atlantans had been left abused and abandoned by their nation. Descendents of those enslaved in America had been forced into crowded ghettos and kept out of quality schools; degraded by a criminal legal system that sought to scapegoat them for society’s ills; denied jobs and wages, the opportunity and means for the socioeconomic advancement also known as the American dream.

Baldwin understood then what many still fail to see now: Racism can reside not just in the heart of a killer but also within the skeleton of the system that produces him. “The moral vacuum of any society,” Baldwin wrote two years before his death, “immediately creates an actual social chaos.”

My copy of Evidence lived for years on my father’s bookshelf before being clandestinely expatriated to my own. It has a fading black-and-white spine, and its cover features a close-up of Baldwin’s face cropped so tightly that all you see is his right eye. The forward to the paperback, issued in 1996, was written by Derrick Bell, who was Harvard Law’s first Black tenured professor.

“James Baldwin was not a lawyer, yet his commentary on the Atlanta trial is enlightened by his astute assumption that racism in American law cannot be understood by reading statutes and legal decisions removed from the context of the political, economic, and social concerns that gave rise to them,” Bell writes. “Deeply embedded racial beliefs and presumptions doomed the Atlanta children to an environment where all manner of predicaments and perils haunted their days and threatened their lives.”

Bell began his legal career in the 1950s as a civil-rights attorney and later worked under Thurgood Marshall, but his best-known legacy is the early inspiration for what became known as “critical race theory,” or CRT—a discipline that applies a critical lens to legal statutes and precedents, considering not just the words on the page but the context in which they were drafted.  

“From the perspective of critical race theory, some positions have historically been oppressed, distorted, ignored, silenced, destroyed, appropriated, commodified, and marginalized—and all of this, not accidentally. Conversely, the law simultaneously and systematically privileges subjects who are white,” Bell said during a 1995 speech at the University of Illinois in which he said CRT’s aim is “to empower and include traditionally excluded views and see all-inclusiveness as the ideal because of our belief in collective wisdom.”

In the decade or so since his death, Bell’s work has been subject to a steady stream of histrionics. The term critical race theory is now applied to any teaching on race that conservatives believe will upset white Americans. Critics claim that critical race theory is a form of “racial essentialism,” although it is, in fact, the opposite. CRT seeks to understand how intersecting identities factor into someone’s experience with our legal edicts and societal norms. It does not suppose that individuals can be defined solely by those identities. The aim is a country in which humans equally created are actually treated as such; that’s only achievable by understanding how the social concept of race continues to shape the American experience.

Some see an act of police violence involving Black officers and are quick to dismiss racism as a factor. A critical race theorist would argue that it is impossible to understand a killing by an institution that descends, in part, from slave patrols without considering the racist bias ingrained over time.

None of this controversy would have surprised Bell. After decades of scholarship, he developed a theory called “interest convergence,” which posits that America’s white majority takes strides toward racial equality only when white people see doing so as in their own best interest. Ultimately, Bell concluded, racism is a permanent feature of our society, unvanquished not because white Americans are inherently incapable of doing so, but because they are persistently unwilling to.

On the eve of Tyre Nichols’s funeral, his family gathered at the Mason Temple Sanctuary, in the pulpit where, 55 years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. gave his final speech. Nichols’s parents and siblings fanned out along the stage, flanked by local ministers and activists, many holding signs featuring one of the final photos of Nichols, which depicted him bruised and bloated in a hospital bed.

Sharpton introduced Amber Sherman, a 22-year-old activist among those leading the local protests. She outlined the family’s demands. They want accountability for all of the officers involved that night, she said. They want to improve police-data transparency, end the use of armed officers for traffic enforcement, abandon pretextual stops, and disband all specialty task forces.

When the floor was opened for questions, a Black activist who had been seated near the front of the sanctuary spoke up. He told Sharpton that he was a decorated Vietnam veteran and a member of the New Black Panther Party, a small militant group that has appropriated the name of the 1970s organization. Clearly, he said, all of the chanting and marching had failed to liberate Black men and women from the perils that haunt their days and threaten their lives. “My experiences teach me, if you want to stop somebody from striking you, you’ve got to strike back,” he said, before looking up at Sharpton and asking, “Do you think it’s time?”

Sharpton demurred. “I’ll let you speak for yourself,” he responded as the press corps in the pews and activists on the stage let out a chuckle. Then Nichols’s older brother, Jamal Dupree, wearing a white-and-black starter jacket and a red flat-brim, approached the microphones.

“My brother was the most peaceful person I’ve ever met in my life. He never lifted a finger to nobody, never raised his voice to nobody,” he told the man. “If my brother was here today, and he had to say something, he would tell us to do this peacefully.”

“Trust me. Me personally, sir? I would love to get busy,” Dupree continued. “But I’m stepping for my brother, not for myself.”

I locked eyes with Sharpton and raised a finger to let him know I had a question.

“What will be different this time?” I asked after he called on me. Sharpton has been an activist for more than half a century, and for as long as I’ve been alive, he has specifically championed Black families whose loved ones have been killed by police. The year I was born, in 1990, he marched for Phillip Pannell in Teaneck, New Jersey, the town to which my family moved the summer before kindergarten. During my grade-school years, he’d been across the Hudson, demanding justice for Abner Louima and Amadou Diallo. As I finished high school in suburban Cleveland, he was back east in Queens, chanting the name Sean Bell.

Since the mid-2010s, I’ve followed him and other activists as they’ve hopscotched across the country, answering questions at gatherings like this one—the only real difference between one case and another being, seemingly, the name on the cardboard signs. What if, as Derrick Bell theorized, American racism is truly intractable?

It was a layup of a question for an activist as seasoned as Sharpton. But it felt right for the venue. The probing and layered inquiries happen behind the scenes. Press conferences are theater in which we all play a part. And besides, it had been a while, and I wanted to watch him work. Sharpton typically begins small and then goes big. He starts in the contemporary then traces his way through history.

At the federal level, he said, this must prompt the passage of legislation ending qualified immunity—the provision that shields police officers from civil liability. At the state level, Nichols’s death must result in the passage of a law to make it a crime for a cop to stand by and watch another officer brutalize a civilian.

“They never even asked him for his license and registration; they grabbed him out of the car,” Sharpton riffed. “Until they understand it’s going to cost them personally, it won’t stop.”

Sharpton likes to draw a distinction between lifelong activists like himself and social-justice celebrities who vanish between the hashtags, gone just as suddenly as they came. Say what you will about Jheri curls, gold chains, and Tawana Brawley: No other person this side of King has as consistently decried the unchecked police abuse of Black Americans, and he knows it.

He is right when he says that movements take time. It was nine years from the Montgomery bus boycott to the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Today’s discussions of ending armed traffic enforcement and shutting down specialty task forces would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Where might we be a decade from now? Faith, the Book of Hebrews instructs, is the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen.

“How long is it going to take?” Sharpton asked, looking back down at me from his perch in the pulpit. “Well, however long it takes, we gon’ be there.”

It took me a moment to register the sound of scattered hissing at the Tocqueville Conversations—a two-day “taboo-free discussion” among public intellectuals about the crisis of Western democracies. More than 100 of us had gathered in a large tent set up beneath the window of Alexis de Tocqueville’s study, on the grounds of the 16th-century Château de Tocqueville, in coastal Normandy. I couldn’t remember hearing an audience react like this in such a forum.

The democratic crisis that the conference sought to address has many facets: the rise of the authoritarian right, metastasizing economic inequality, the pressures of climate change, and more. But the conference, held in September 2021, had mostly narrowed its focus to the American social-justice ideology that’s commonly referred to as “wokeness.” The person being hissed at that afternoon was Rokhaya Diallo, a French West African journalist, social-justice activist, and media personality in her mid-40s. (In America, she writes for The Washington Post.) Besides me, she was one of just a handful of nonwhite speakers and, to my knowledge, the sole practicing Muslim.

For many of us who had come to exchange ideas, the venue felt significant. The château, with its ivy-covered walls and swan-filled pond, lies far away from the intricacies of multicultural life in modern democracies. But Tocqueville was, of course, one of the world’s keenest interpreters of the American experiment. His classic two-volume text, Democracy in America, published in 1835 and 1840, explored the paradoxical nature of a vibrant new multiethnic society, founded on the principles of liberty and equality but compromised from the start by African slave labor and the theft of Indigenous land. Its author, while finding much to admire, remained skeptical that such powerful divisions could ever be transcended, because unlike in Europe, social rank was written into the physical features of the nation’s inhabitants.

Many who claim social justice as their ultimate goal insist that America has done little to challenge Tocqueville’s grim appraisal. In their view, some of the country’s cherished ideals—individualism, freedom of speech, even the Protestant work ethic—are in fact obstacles to equity, illusions spun by those who have power in order to keep it and hold the marginalized in their place. The woke left’s approach to addressing historical oppression—namely, prioritizing race and other categories of identity in a wide variety of political and institutional decisions—has stirred anxieties in the United States. But the concerns expressed at the Tocqueville estate were less about what this phenomenon means for America than what it might mean for France. As the saying goes, when America sneezes, Europe catches a cold.

The French have long prided themselves on having a system of government that doesn’t recognize racial or ethnic designations. The idea is to uphold a universal vision of what it means to be French, independent of race, ethnicity, and religion. Even keeping official statistics on race has, since the Holocaust, been impermissible. Recently, however, and to the alarm of many in the traditional French commentariat, American-style identity politics has piqued the interest of a new and more diverse generation.

And so I’d come to witness an extraordinary exchange—one that would not happen in the U.S. mainstream. Over the course of the conference, speakers had repeatedly debated whether what the French have termed le wokisme is a serious concern. A majority of the panelists and audience members, myself included, had answered more or less in the affirmative. Political organization around identity rather than ideology is one of the best predictors of civil strife and even civil war, according to an analysis of violent conflicts by the political scientist Barbara F. Walter. By pitting groups against one another in a zero-sum power struggle—and sorting them on a scale of virtue based on privilege and oppression—wokeness can’t help but elevate race and ethnicity to an extent that expands prejudice rather than reducing it, in the process fueling or, at minimum, providing cover for a violent and dangerous majoritarian reaction. That, at least, was the prevailing sense of the group.

As the last panel, “Media and Universities: In Need of Reform and Reassessment?,” got under way, Diallo took the opportunity to argue the opposite position. Onstage with her were a political scientist and two philosophy professors, one of whom was the moderator, Perrine Simon-Nahum. Diallo is a well-known and polarizing figure in France, a telegenic proponent of identity politics with a large social-media following. She draws parallels between the French and American criminal-justice systems (one of her documentaries is called From Paris to Ferguson), making the case that institutional racism afflicts her nation just as it does the U.S., most notably in discriminatory stop-and-frisk policing. Her views would hardly be considered extreme in America, but here she is seen in some quarters as a genuinely subversive agent.

Simon-Nahum opened the conversation with the question “How can we shape citizens in a democracy?” And what role should educational institutions and the media play? Were woke forces in universities and media striving to delegitimize elites, she continued, and to undermine the institutions of knowledge production? Were they “building a new totalitarianism of thought?” The woke ideal of disseminating knowledge “on an egalitarian platform,” she suggested, was neither possible nor even desirable.

“The circulation of knowledge is also the circulation of experiences,” Diallo responded. “Some minority experiences may be more visible” now thanks to social media. That poses a much-needed challenge to traditional “elite” knowledge production, which, she said, had “filtered out” certain perspectives in the past. This claim was indisputable. A few weeks after this conference, Emmanuel Macron would become the first French president to participate in commemorations of the 1961 massacre of Algerian protesters by police in Paris. Most French people I know had never encountered this event either in school or in traditional media.

[Read: A Macron victory isn’t enough]

The woke “have discovered new epistemologies,” Jean-François Braunstein, a philosophy professor at Panthéon-Sorbonne University, nonetheless retorted—theories of knowledge that validate feelings over facts. He called Diallo’s position “a staunch attack against science and against truth.” He appeared to want to expand the conversation’s scope beyond racial identity to encompass the dissolution of the gender binary, which was not a subject Diallo had been addressing. Simon-Nahum demurred but suggested that the larger disagreement about “the conception of knowledge” was still worrying; it justified fears that the French discourse was becoming Americanized.

Diallo replied that most people in attendance were likely “privileged,” and as such, disproportionately fearful of the “emergence of minority speech [from] people who indeed didn’t have access to certain clubs … and are questioning things that were considered” unquestionable.

“Of course we cannot experience what others experience,” Simon-Nahum responded, with seeming irritation—no longer moderating but fully entering the debate. And yet, we can understand it: “It’s called empathy,” she said, before sharply taking issue with Diallo’s point about privilege.

It was around that time, with Diallo isolated from the rest of the panel, that I started to notice the hissing, coming from the audience when she spoke. As the moderator refused to concede even the theoretical possibility that any knowledge can be derived from identity, I noticed Diallo’s expression growing distant. Simon-Nahum pressed on, referring to Diallo’s appeal to lived experience as not only misguided but a kind of “domination.” “This intellectual war that’s being waged is a threat to democracy,” she said. “I feel threatened … first and foremost [as] a citizen.”

Braunstein chimed in to say that Diallo’s argument reminded him of a quote by the extravagantly racist writer and Nazi collaborator Charles Maurras: “A Jew can never understand [Jean] Racine, because he’s not French!” (When Diallo objected, Braunstein said that he was not comparing her to Maurras.)

It went on like that. By the end of the discussion, I was somewhat shaken. On many discrete points, I tended to agree with the philosophers on the panel. I have made Paris my home for the past 11 years and have been raising French children there for nine of them, which is to say I feel a genuine stake in the culture. I am convinced that it would be a terrible, perhaps even insurmountable, loss to abandon the universalist, color-blind French ideal to the fractured landscape of American tribal identity.

And yet I also felt that something fundamentally unfair had just transpired. France, like America, is constantly evolving. Any attempt to make sense of it will have to take Diallo’s arguments seriously. She had tried to share an understanding of French life—one in which growing segments of the French population feel excluded and censured—that her interlocutors could not or would not accept, but that their behavior seemed to confirm.

Ben Hickey

I had until that point considered Diallo an ideological opponent. She had likewise regarded me warily—as a privileged, nonwhite, non-French spokesperson for a universalism that masks white prerogatives. Her personal credo of sorts, “Kiffe ta race” (“Love your race”), which is the title of her podcast and her most recent book, directly contradicts my own writing against the reinforcement of racial identity. And yet, when she walked offstage alone, I found myself rushing to catch up with her. As we spoke, to my surprise, my eyes became teary. I wanted her to know that I had seen what she’d experienced, even if no one else had. “That happens all the time here,” she told me. “It happens all the time.”

The French reaction to le wokisme has been revelatory for me. I am working on a book about the ways American culture and institutions changed after the summer of 2020, and how that transformation has, to an unusual degree, reverberated internationally, and particularly in France. The incident at the Tocqueville conference caused me to recalibrate some of my assumptions—and to appreciate more keenly just how easily anti-wokeness can succumb to a dogmatism as rigid as the one it seeks to oppose. Many of the debates here take place as if in a parallel universe, eerily familiar but with several illuminating differences. They are a useful prism for contemplating the excesses and limitations, as well as the merits, of the social-justice fervor that has gripped the United States.

The French left exerts far less power than American progressives do over the media, academia, culture, and elite corporations. Diversity as an end in itself, and minority representation in particular, is still far from a mainstream preoccupation here. Outside one prestigious school—Sciences Po, in Paris—affirmative action scarcely exists. Perhaps because of comparatively muscular labor laws (which Macron has sought to weaken), people do not fear being canceled for controversial speech, either in universities or in the workplace. The #MeToo movement could not gain much traction in a country whose major left-leaning intellectuals and at least one newspaper published unequivocal defenses of pedophilia as recently as the 1970s. France has little patience for American culture-war staples such as genderless pronouns and bathrooms. Even the relatively modest, gender-neutral iel was forcefully dismissed by the first lady, Brigitte Macron: “Our language is beautiful. And two pronouns is enough,” she has said, to practically no pushback at all.

So why has the reaction to American-style identity politics become so heated within the French intellectual sphere?

One reason lies in a crucial distinction between the political realities of France and the United States. In France, the controversy over le wokisme is almost always a proxy for a deeper concern about Islam and terror on the European continent. Those seen as permissive of wokeness are presumed to be indulging not merely a victim complex, but something far more sinister: islamo-gauchisme, what the far-right former presidential candidate Marine Le Pen has described as the alliance between Islamist fanatics and the French left. My friend Pascal Bruckner, a traditionally liberal philosopher, describes it in his book The Tyranny of Guilt as “the fusion between the atheist far Left and religious radicalism.” This is understood as a marriage of convenience: The anti-capitalist left sees Islam’s potential for fomenting unrest as a tool to discredit the center and radically remake bourgeois society; reactionary Muslim parties, in turn, pretend to join the left in opposing racism and globalization as a means of amassing power.

Thus, in the French racial imagination, it is the potentially violent Muslim—not simply the man with dark skin—who represents the ultimate “other.” But even if France didn’t experience violence, an identity politics that would give cover to separatism is seen as unacceptable. This is what Simon-Nahum seems to have meant when she said she felt “threatened” as a citizen. And it’s why, for some, matters as trivial as halal-food aisles in the supermarket take on an existential quality that has no real equivalent in 21st-century America.

But France’s vehement reaction to wokeism has another cause, which is barely discernible in the U.S. It has to do with France’s complex relationship with America itself.

On September 13, 2001, beside an image of the Statue of Liberty shrouded in blooming clouds of smoke, the front page of Le Monde proudly declared, “Nous sommes tous Américains.” It was a grand and heartfelt gesture of solidarity in the face of incomprehensible hatred and barbarity, one that was returned in 2015 when a spasm of terror swept over France. That extraordinary year began with the massacre by al-Qaeda-affiliated militants of 12 people in the Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which had republished caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. It concluded with a citywide rampage in November, in which 130 were slain and hundreds more were injured in cafés, restaurants, and the Bataclan concert hall—most of them by homegrown radicals declaring allegiance to the Islamic State. The immediate outpouring of grief in the American press, and the millions of Facebook profile pictures filtered with the tricolor, was as moving as it was justified.

Over the next five years, the U.S. could no longer muster such empathy. By the fall of 2020, America had fully turned its gaze inward. The police killings of George Floyd and others directed America’s attention to its own legacy of slavery and racism. These were the conditions in which a new and at times totalizing ideology, organized around a racial binary, gained traction. And practically overnight, the mainstream American press became reluctant to view what had been happening in France (namely, a spree of machete attacks, decapitations, and stabbings, from Paris down to the Riviera) through the lens of individual agency, ideology, religious radicalism, terrorism, or even plain old good and evil. Suddenly, it was all about identity and systems of oppression. Through the lens of racial reckoning, fanatically secular and color-blind France had, in a sense, brought this grief upon itself.

For many in France, a headline in The New York Times crystallized this new attitude of reproach. Following the beheading of a middle-school teacher named Samuel Paty in October 2020—for the transgression of showing those Charlie Hebdo cartoons in the classroom—the American newspaper of record’s first encapsulation of the attack focused not on Paty but on his assailant: “French Police Shoot and Kill Man After a Fatal Knife Attack on the Street.” The headline was subsequently changed, and the article itself was relatively balanced. But when it described Paty as having “incited anger among some Muslim families,” the implication to many French readers was unambiguous: Teaching the universal value of free speech to all students, regardless of ethnic affiliation, was what had really led to Paty’s murder. French audiences took this idea—which was echoed throughout much of the American media—as an exoneration of Paty’s assassin, an 18-year-old Chechen asylum recipient with extremist beliefs who had hunted down his victim only after learning of his existence from a social-media mob.

Reading such coverage in the American press was painful for many French people of all ethnicities and religious affiliations. For months, the perceived abandonment by an admired and influential ally was the subject of constant conversation. Why were American commentators using Paty’s killing to score points on Twitter by condemning a society they did not know? Why had the Times framed this act of savagery as a simple—and, one might infer, possibly excessive—police shooting? Why were journalists at other outlets, including The Washington Post, reinforcing a narrative that reduced complex issues of secularism, republicanism, and immigration to broad allegations of Islamophobia? Why were critics on social media resorting to the blunt racial catchall of whiteness? Did they not understand that French citizens of African or Arab descent were also appalled by such violence?

Many French people began to see their nation as a pivotal theater of resistance to woke orthodoxy. Macron himself became a determined critic, insisting that his country follow its own path to achieve a multiethnic democracy, without mimicking the identity-obsessed American model. “We have left the intellectual debate to … Anglo-Saxon traditions based on a different history, which is not ours,” he argued just before Paty’s killing, in his October 2020 speech against “Islamist separatism.” Macron’s minister of national education at the time, Jean-Michel Blanquer, spoke of the need to wage “a battle” against the woke ideas being promulgated by American universities.

[Pamela Druckerman: Why the French want to stop working]

The unease with le wokisme in France, then, is shaped and heightened by the country’s distinctive history and self-perception—its legitimate fears of homegrown jihad and its concerns about domineering Yankee influence. You can’t understand the French reaction to wokeness without understanding these domestic preoccupations. But at the same time, you can’t dismiss France’s more philosophical—and universalist—critiques of wokeism simply because of them. The battle against wokeness that Blanquer described has been joined on both sides of the Atlantic. Last spring, I visited him at his offices to get his perspective on it.

Blanquer, the minister of national education from 2017 until May 2022, has been one of France’s most consistent, controversial, and powerful opponents of woke ideology. (He once filed a suit—later dismissed—against a French teachers’ union for using the term institutional racism in a description of its workshops.) In January 2022, he spoke at—and, by his presence, lent the state’s imprimatur to—a colloquium at the Sorbonne titled “After Deconstruction,” which brought together an array of critics of the new social-justice orthodoxy.

Blanquer is matter-of-fact and unsparing. While studying at Harvard in the ’90s, he told me, he first became aware of PC culture, the precursor to what he sees as today’s crisis. He sympathized with many of the aims of political correctness but grew wary of its application: Treating women and minority groups as different and special, he began to think, was ultimately antithetical to equality. “In the history of ideas, it’s not the first time that, when you push an idea to the extreme, it becomes the contrary,” he said.

He has a point. Especially when turbocharged by social media, wokeness tends to fetishize identity and bestow moral authority on whole groups by dint of historical oppression. Of the many reasonable concerns one might have with this approach, most are dismissed by its proponents as brute racism, undeserving of serious engagement. But in the Ministry of National Education’s lobby sat a large school portrait of the late Samuel Paty—a literal martyr to the consequences of zealous group identification.

The key to healthy and sustainable social progress is understanding to what extent a potentially useful idea can be pursued before tipping over into self-defeating extremism. A constant trap for would-be guardians of the liberal order is a reaction that itself becomes extreme. As Mathieu Lefevre of More in Common, a nonprofit working in France and elsewhere to reunite divided societies, explained to me, wokeness “rearranges [all] the chairs at the ideological dinner party.” On the one side, it fosters a kind of leftist illiberalism that is almost religious in nature, in that it brooks no dissent—the sort of ideology that center-left liberals have historically opposed. And on the other side, “being anti-woke allows a proximity between the center and the far right. You start with a [colloquium] about le wokisme, and you end up questioning foundational liberal principles like freedom of expression.” You end up banning terms such as institutional racism.

This isn’t merely a theoretical pitfall for the French center-left and center-right. In 2021, then–Minister of Higher Education Frédérique Vidal ordered a government investigation into public-university research that sought “to divide and fracture”—in other words, research focusing on colonialism and racial difference. The institution tasked with carrying out the investigation ultimately refused to do so, but as the sociologist François Dubet wrote in Le Monde, “How can we think that it is up to the State to say which currents of thought are acceptable and which are not?”

What’s more, a critic might note, Blanquer’s rigid devotion to the principle of universalism entails a certain blindness to often valid minority concerns—about a lack of recognition, inclusion, and dignity. Though there are no official statistics on the matter, according to a 2016 French study, young people who are perceived as Black and Arab are 20 times more likely than everyone else to be stopped by the cops. In November 2020, a video went viral showing the unprovoked pummeling of a Black music producer by armed police in Paris. I, too, ultimately believe in universalism, and I worry that obsessively tracking demographic differences can lead us to ascribe nearly anything to racism. But events like this have lent credence to the identitarian left’s argument that addressing unequal treatment is nearly impossible when you can’t measure it.

And so the activists and those listening to them have looked to America for a vocabulary to express what is happening in their own country, whether or not that vocabulary fully makes sense here. Wokeism’s perpetual, often performative outrage; its lack of nuance; its reflexive inclination to silence dissent—these are serious flaws for those who care about liberal democracy. And yet these same qualities have attracted good-faith attention to issues too long neglected in America, and often still unmentionable in Europe.

When I asked Blanquer why he had suggested in the past that the battle against wokeness was already lost, he admitted that it was only “a provocation—I never think we’ll lose.” And when I asked him whether there are specific cases of cancel culture in France that compare to the most egregious cases in the U.S., he paused. Eventually, he mentioned a production of The Suppliants, by Aeschylus. In 2019, there were protests over the cast’s use of dark makeup. But these protests were relatively small and ultimately unsuccessful. When I attended the opening-night performance, the minister of culture was there to show solidarity against the attempted censorship. In a typical debate in America, this would be the moment when the claim is made—falsely—that cancel culture doesn’t exist.

In 2010, the U.S. State Department invited French politicians and activists to a leadership program to help them strengthen the voice and representation of ethnic groups that have been excluded from government. Rokhaya Diallo attended, which many of her critics still use as evidence that she is a trained proselytizer of American social-justice propaganda. (In 2017, under pressure from both the left and the right, Macron’s government asked for her removal—as Diallo put it to me, it “canceled” her—from a government advisory council, seemingly on the grounds that race- and religious-based political organizing contradicts key principles of French republicanism and secularism, or laïcité.)

But in a classified memo published on WikiLeaks, former U.S. Ambassador Charles H. Rivkin laid out the pragmatic, self-interested rationale for the program, part of what was called a “Minority Engagement Strategy”:

French institutions have not proven themselves flexible enough to adjust to an increasingly heterodox demography. We believe that if France, over the long run, does not successfully increase opportunity and provide genuine political representation for its minority populations, France could become a weaker, more divided country, perhaps more crisis-prone and inward-looking, and consequently a less capable ally.

Today, in a post-Trump America, it’s impossible to read such an assessment without a sense of deep embarrassment. Still, I was haunted by these words as I watched the French elections last spring. Macron was reelected, but the results clearly showed that an identity-driven illiberalism long active on the right is gaining force on the left: Both the far left and far right gained seats in Parliament. Significant numbers of minority voters—feeling ignored and misunderstood—have grown sufficiently demoralized to give up on the center. After being replaced in May as minister of national education, Blanquer ran for Parliament and did not even survive the first round of elections last June—coming in third behind candidates at each extreme.

Many in the French mainstream are correct to note that wokeness is philosophically incoherent—trying to end racism by elevating race—and, if taken far enough, dangerous. The politics of identity that undergirds the obsession with social justice obliterates individuality. It subordinates human psychology—always an ambiguous terrain—to sweeping platitudes and self-certain dictates; it boxes all of us in. Worst of all, it smacks of determinism, trapping the present in a never-ending past that steals the innocence from any collective future.

Le wokisme has not gone well in America. Cancel culture is quite real in the U.S., and its effects have been toxic to debate and, in many cases, to institutional decision making. Resistance to wokeism’s more ambitious designs—the elimination of merit-based screening at elite public high schools; the “defunding” or even abolition of the police—has been widespread and, to many progressives’ surprise, ethnically diverse. Yet its outright suppression in France has not gone well either. Ambassador Rivkin’s assessment is applicable to both societies: America and France are simultaneously becoming weaker, less capable, each undermined by growing internal divisions—the one by overemphasizing them, the other by denying them altogether.

I remain convinced that an authentically color-blind society—one that recognizes histories of difference but refuses to fetishize or reproduce them—is the destination we must aim for. Either we achieve genuine universalism or we destroy ourselves as a consequence of our mutual resentment and suspicion.

Attempting this will be painful and, at times, feel counterintuitive. Woke impulses are irrepressible today, and they will likely remain so as the grand global project of building multicultural democracies continues. The question, then, is not how to stamp out these impulses, but how to channel them responsibly, while refusing to succumb to the myopia of group identity. A riff on the apocryphal Winston Churchill quip about liberal ideology describes the challenge aptly: You have no head if you wholly embrace it, but if you categorically reject it, you have no heart.

In principle, it is hard to deny the superiority of the French model of universal citizenship—liberté, égalité, fraternité. Yet in practice, the exhausting and sometimes disingenuous American reflex to interpret social life through imperfect notions of identity nonetheless manages to perceive real experiences that otherwise get dismissed and, when suppressed long enough, put us all in peril. It would be a mistake for either culture to remake itself entirely in the image of the other. The future belongs to the multiethnic society that finds a way to synthesize them.

This article appears in the March 2023 print edition with the headline “The French Are in a Panic Over le Wokisme.”

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

In “The Weight-Loss-Drug Revolution Is a Miracle—And a Menace,” my colleague Derek Thompson grappled with the rise of the drug Ozempic, the latest in a long line of much-hyped ways to lose weight and perhaps the most effective yet. My first encounter with the weight-loss industry, as a kid, was the cultural phenomenon of Jane Fonda’s VHS workout tapes. By the time I was in college, the weight-loss industry was as strong as ever––but so was a countervailing cultural critique of unrealistic beauty standards. Later, public-health concerns about obesity were ascendant. What are your thoughts, cultural memories, or personal experiences about weight gain, the weight-loss industry, diet, exercise, beauty standards, diabetes, medical treatments for obesity, or anything related?

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.

Conversations of Note

There is near consensus in America that the five police officers who brutally beat Tyre Nichols in Memphis, Tennessee, leading to the 29-year-old’s death in the hospital days later, perpetrated a horrific injustice. In that sense, the Nichols killing is more like, say, the widely condemned 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, than the more contested 2014 shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. But a detail of the Nichols killing has fueled a polarizing debate about why it happened: All five cops facing murder charges in the case are Black.

Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn Davis, who is also Black, argued in an interview with CNN’s Don Lemon that the racial identity of officers undermines the narrative “that issues and problems in law enforcement” are about race. It doesn’t matter who's wearing the uniform, she said, “we all have that same responsibility. So, it takes race off the table, but it does indicate to me that bias might be a factor also, you know, and the manner in which we engage the community.” The New York Times quoted Robert M. Sausedo, who leads a nonprofit organization formed after the 1991 Rodney King beating: “It’s not racism driving this, it’s culturism. It’s a culture in law enforcement where it’s OK to be aggressive to those they’re supposed to serve.”

But many on the left insisted that white supremacy or institutional racism were to blame. As Shaun Harper, identified in Forbes as a diversity, equity, and inclusion expert, put it in an analysis:

Institutional racism explains how five Black men could engage in police brutality, leading to the death of another Black man. They participated in the same trainings as white cops. They entered a profession that was born of anti-Blackness ... They worked in a place where decades of anti-black policies and tactics were created. How a police department behaves, thinks about Black communities, and mistreats Black people informs how its employees engage with the Black citizens they were hired to protect and serve—even when they’re Black.

This debate sometimes frustrates me. Say that two people who want to reduce police killings and misconduct both believe bad training in police academies is one significant contributor to unjust policing––but one characterizes the training regime’s flaws as “toxic police culture” and the other attributes them to “white supremacy.” I think they should focus on identifying and implementing best practices at the training academy rather than debate the best abstract characterization of the problem. But so many of our debates happen at the highest possible levels of ideological abstraction.

A Case Against Special Units

Here’s an account of how the Memphis police unit whose members beat Nichols came about, told from 50 feet rather than 50,000 feet:

Chief Cerelyn Davis of the Memphis Police had been on the job for only a few months in 2021 when she saw that homicide numbers were rising toward a record. Near her new home downtown, drivers were buzzing wildly through the streets, often late at night. She had a plan to confront the mayhem. For reckless drivers, she told her team, officers were to focus less on writing tickets and more on an all-out strategy of seizing cars from the most dangerous drivers. Violent offenders needed to be targeted with new urgency. If the state could not take a case to court, she determined, her agency should ask federal prosecutors to take the case instead. “We all have that understanding about being tough on tough people,” she said at a community event in November of that year.

Two days later, Chief Davis, the first African American woman to lead the department, launched her most ambitious strategy: a new police unit named Scorpion — or Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods — would deploy some 40 officers as a strike team in some of the most volatile corners of the city. Before long, some residents complained of heavy-handed tactics, of officers from the new Scorpion team employing punitive policing in response to relatively minor offenses.

I suspect that a DOJ investigation into the Nichols case and the murder trials of the officers who were involved will provide support for the argument, made most skillfully this week by Radley Balko, that in Memphis and beyond, special units of under-supervised, supposedly elite police officers are prone to horrific abuses and are therefore bad responses to rising crime, however tempting they apparently are. (Watch the TV series The Shield for a dramatization of how and why).

But maybe that’s not what the facts of this case will show.

Whatever your theory on why Nichols was killed, I submit that the root causes will be more constructively debated after more details are probed, documented, and released. We need more evidence before assuming we know what caused any specific killing. This newsletter will revisit the case.

The Policing-Reform Debate With Sherilyn Ifill

In last week’s newsletter (published prior to the release of video in the Nichols case), I wrote about the various reasons the American public’s response to police killings is more muted now than it was in 2020, and went on to lament that in the years since 2015, when The Washington Post began its project tracking all police shootings in the United States, the number of Americans killed by the cops hasn’t meaningfully decreased, despite all the attention paid to the issue:

Long before Black Lives Matter’s ascent, I was among those inveighing against policing injustices and America’s catastrophic War on Drugs, and trying and failing to significantly reduce police misconduct. Black Lives Matter arose in part because most of us who came before it largely failed. When it did, I hoped it would succeed spectacularly in reducing police killings and agreed with at least its premise that the issue warranted attention.

But it is now clear that the Black Lives Matter approach has largely failed too.

Despite an awareness-raising campaign as successful as any in my lifetime, untold millions of dollars in donations, and a position of influence within the progressive criminal-justice-reform coalition, there are just as many police killings as before Black Lives Matter began.

Sherrilyn Ifill, a civil-rights attorney and the former president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, posted a response to my piece on her Substack after footage of the Nichols killing was released. I appreciate the knowledge and passion she brings to the issue and hope to engage her perspective, but first I need to clarify one aspect of my argument that her rendering of it misunderstands.

In her telling, the central premise of my piece is captured by the question “Where should we assign blame for continued police violence?” In fact, my piece did not even attempt to assign blame. Instead, it focused on how best to reduce police violence. And I think this distinction is too often missed when evaluating all sorts of public policy and activism.

To probe whether a tactic or strategy for reducing police violence succeeds or fails is not the same as probing whether advocates of that tactic or strategy are to blame for the underlying ill. For example, if a civil-rights lawyer successfully pressures a police department to adopt body cameras for all of its police officers, but their presence does not deter excessive use of force, the lawyer is not to blame for the brutality. Nevertheless, their body-camera initiative failed, in this hypothetical, to reduce brutality, which anyone who is interested in actually solving the problem had better face squarely.

When I noted in passing that my writing against police abuses in the aughts failed to reduce them, I was not implying that I am to blame for continued police abuses or killings. Likewise, when I wrote that the Black Lives Matter approach to reducing police killings has failed, I was neither asserting nor implying that BLM is to blame for police killings—just that its attempts to reduce them have failed. The coalition to reduce police killings won’t succeed until it reduces police killings!

A Point of Substantive Disagreement

In Ifill’s telling, Black Lives Matter has made some important progress with its approach––indeed, she and I agree that it called for and achieved “greater awareness and confrontation with the truth of police violence.” I think that she is also correct to point out that it played a role in increasing the number of cases in which bad cops are criminally charged and helped elect some reform-minded district attorneys. As yet, it’s too early to judge the ultimate effects of those changes, but it’s certainly possible that they will reduce police killings in the future.

But I disagree with another of Ifill’s claims:

What has been most successful is the building of a movement of people who work every day to reimagine a new kind of public safety. Most people who are not afraid to imagine that our lives could really matter, now agree that the current system cannot be reformed and must be made over. Indeed it seems inevitable. The under-staffing and recruiting failures of police departments around the country demonstrate that no matter how much money is thrown at policing, the work itself has lost its appeal to a significant number of young people and is unlikely to reconstitute itself in the same form.

In 2014, I wrote about how “video killed trust in police officers.” In my lifetime, I would say that that process began with the beating of Rodney King and concluded with the George Floyd video––at this point, very few Americans remain unexposed to horrific footage of police atrocities.

Last year, Gallup found that half of Americans support “major changes” to policing. But there isn’t anything close to majority support for abolishing or defunding the police. Such proposals are reliably underwater among all Americans, among white Americans, and among people of color. So although it is true that policing is less appealing today to young people and that there are recruitment problems, I regard those labor shortages as an alarming portent of falling quality at policing institutions that will continue to exist in much the same form, not a hopeful sign of progress. I’d much rather that reform-minded young people intent on improving criminal justice were signing up to professionalize police ranks and leave no place for bad cops to hide.

There is so much more to talk about in Ifill’s piece––and I wonder if she might like to do a written back-and-forth on the subject to take some of them up?

Reform California’s Most Abused Environmental Law

The Los Angeles Times is editorializing on a court case that illustrates how NIMBYs are exploiting the California Environmental Quality Act:

A California appellate court is considering whether noisy college students are an environmental impact, akin to pollution or habitat loss, that should be addressed before UC Berkeley can build a new dormitory to ease its student housing shortage. The case involves the university’s plan to develop People’s Park, a swath of open space owned by the university and claimed by protesters in 1969, with housing for 1,100 students and supportive housing for 125 homeless people, along with a clinic, public market and landscaped open space.

Neighborhood groups sued to block the project, arguing the university violated CEQA. In a tentative ruling issued in December, the 1st District Court of Appeal in San Francisco agreed the university failed to adequately study certain impacts, including noise. The ruling said that because college kids can be loud when talking, drinking and partying, the university should have studied and sought to reduce the “social noise” from future student residents.

Berkeley’s lawyers argue that noise from humans socializing shouldn’t be considered an environmental impact, and it’s a dangerous precedent to require additional environmental analysis based on who is going to live in a housing development. Would housing for the elderly prompt the same analysis? Some CEQA experts warned the decision, if finalized, could give Not-in-My-Backyard litigants a powerful new tool to block housing and other development projects.

Provocation of the Week

Writing at The Permanent Problem, Brink Lindsey continues to advance one of the most interesting theories about capitalism in today’s America, how to improve it, and the barriers in the way:

Changing laws to solve real-world problems is no longer the primary focus of politics in the rich democracies. Politics today has elevated the performative over the practical: eschewing the “slow boring of hard boards” as too slow, boring, and hard, it embraces spectacle and self-expression as ends in themselves. The shift to “identity politics,” in the full sense of that term, thus goes beyond a reorientation of political divisions from economic to demographic cleavages. As the larger culture has shifted from materialism, or the quest for tangible gains in the real world, to self-expression, political conflict likewise has moved away from a focus on the tangible actions taken by government and instead concentrates more on disputes over the relative status of clashing political identities. The demographic groupings arrayed on the left and right all have legitimate grievances with how government currently operates, and there are policy changes that could address those grievances and deliver concrete benefits. But seeking substantive redress is not where the real action in politics is these days. Rather, what truly motivates and energizes are symbolic clashes that raise the status of one’s own chosen political identity—and, more importantly, lower the status of one’s opponents.

In “The Retreat from Reality,” I discussed the rise of the new cognitive style associated with the turn toward the performative: what Yale law professor Dan Kahan calls “expressive rationality.” The performative political style, with its unshakeable confirmation bias and heightened susceptibility to conspiracy theories and other mass delusions, is often depicted as a triumph of unreason. But Kahan argues convincingly that what’s really going on is a shift from one kind of rationality to another—from “instrumental rationality,” focused on matching means to ends for practical action in the real world, to “expressive rationality,” focused on constructing and maintaining rationalizations that confirm the righteousness and superiority of one’s chosen identity. In other words, a shift from doing good in the real world to feeling good about yourself.

… While ordinary instrumental rationality in politics focuses on achieving outcomes—influencing government action in this or that direction—expressive rationality focuses on taking stands. So long as you subscribe to the appropriate views and defend them with sufficient vigor, you can rest safe as a member in good standing of your chosen political tribe. Assuming any responsibility for actually moving public policy into closer accord with those appropriate views isn’t necessary; on the contrary, doing so can actually be hazardous to the effective maintenance of your tribal identity. After all, effecting real policy change requires sustained, constructive encounters with people who disagree with you—searching for common ground and building consensus around it, understanding and relating to where the other side is coming from and then making judicious compromises in pursuit of half a loaf. Do any of that long enough and you can be sure that true believers on your side will start calling you out as a turncoat …

Thanks for your contributions. I read every one that you send. By submitting an email, you’ve agreed to let us use it—in part or in full—in the newsletter and on our website. Published feedback may include a writer’s full name, city, and state, unless otherwise requested in your initial note.

On Friday, Memphis police released body- and street-cam video of five officers beating Tyre Nichols, an unarmed civilian who later died of his injuries. Unlike many recent notorious examples of police brutality, in this instance the victim and perpetrators were all Black, leading to confusion and distress. The basketball star LeBron James tweeted, “WE ARE OUR OWN WORSE ENEMY!” This kind of self-directed criticism is familiar to anyone who has had their hair trimmed in a Black barbershop. What is novel today is the amount of anger and the specific form of critique that James’s tweet, for one prominent example, engendered. One of the more polite and re-printable responses: “i’d say white supremacy was our worse enemy but okay lebron.”

White supremacy used to refer to the belief, encoded in both custom and law, that white people sit at the top of a biological racial hierarchy and that they must remain there. But in the past decade or so, it has become a much vaguer and more totalizing concept, denoting invisible structures, latent beliefs, and even innocuous practices, such as punctuality, that supposedly maintain the comparative advantage of white people at the expense of everyone else. After the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and the period of racial reckoning that followed, all manner of experience was probed for evidence of “white supremacy.” Some on the left have adopted the term as a sort of shorthand for the the invisible hand of all American social and political life.

This understanding of white supremacy has led progressive journalists and activists to bring attention to (some might say obsess over) racial background in lethal encounters involving white and nonwhite people. George Zimmerman, who killed Trayvon Martin, was a white Hispanic. Darren Wilson, who killed Michael Brown, was not merely an agent of the state but specifically a white police officer. Derek Chauvin, a white man in a multiracial group of officers responding to the scene, was the one to kneel on George Floyd. When Robert Aaron Long, a white man, murdered eight mostly Asian workers in three massage parlors in Atlanta in 2021, he said he was a sex addict and suggested he was driven by shame. But some community leaders insisted that anti-Asian animus was the X factor. According to one media narrative, repeating Long’s professed motive amounted to making “excuses” for “white male murderers.”

[Conor Friedersdorf: Unraveling race]

For some on the left, whiteness and white supremacy retain their explanatory power even when white people are nowhere to be seen. The same year as the spa shootings, when Americans were bristling against school and business shutdowns and crime rates were spiking, nationwide hate crimes against Asian Americans surged by 339 percent. Anti-Asian violence in America has always been “a diverse and majority-minority affair,” as Wilfred Reilly wrote in 2021. “The 2019 Bureau of Justice Statistics report [found] that 27.5 percent of violent criminals targeting an Asian victim are black and only 24.1 percent are white.” Yet as video and anecdotal evidence emerged of vicious Black-on-Asian assaults and homicides, progressives wouldn’t let go of their hobbyhorse.

“Ultimately, there is a failure to remember what got America to this place of racial hierarchies and lingering Black-Asian tensions: white supremacy,” a 2021 Vox article explains. “White supremacy is what created segregation, policing, and scarcity of resources in low-income neighborhoods, as well as the creation of the ‘model minority’ myth—all of which has driven a wedge between Black and Asian communities. In fact, it is white Christian nationalism, more than any other ideology, that has shaped xenophobic and racist views around Covid-19.”

Like everyone I have spoken with, I was sickened and saddened by the killing of Tyre Nichols. When the videos were released, I was visiting my parents, and the footage was all any of us could talk about. Any attempt to make sense of the atrocity felt insufficient. My mother, an observant Christian, pointed to the existence of evil. My father, a sociologist by training, noted how power dynamics can affect, or corrupt, encounters between strangers. I stressed the role of ego and general incompetence—these officers were young, granted far too much authority, and grossly inexperienced.  

Writing at CNN on Friday, Van Jones offered another explanation under the headline “The police who killed Tyre Nichols were Black. But they might still have been driven by racism.” It is certainly possible that the five young, dark-skinned men who beat Nichols so mercilessly had each internalized a poisonous self-hatred. (On Monday, the Memphis police department revealed that two other officers had been disciplined as part of the investigation, at least one of whom is white.) And there is also a serious argument to be made that racism does not require interpersonal malice but may be understood as the limited and limiting system in which individuals make free but constrained decisions. In the latter telling, the institution of American policing is foundationally derived from southern slave patrols and now operates as a disciplining force to protect capital and hold the poor and marginalized in place—all of which makes it an inherently anti-Black enterprise, regardless of the racial or ethnic makeup of the individual officers in its employ.

[David A. Graham: Inhumanity in Memphis]

I am, to a degree, sympathetic to these views. I will never forget the day my brother had his front teeth separated from his mouth by the cold flashlight of a cop whose skin was darker than his own. But I am deeply skeptical of the reflex to attribute all violence and misconduct to structural racism, to impose that smooth framework on every atrocity no matter its jagged grain. I tweeted in response to Jones’s headline that we ought to at least consider the possibility that these five officers’ reprehensible actions fall on them alone.

By the next morning, that tweet had gone viral. I attempted to extend the thought further, writing, “Twitter is an amazing prism because you can watch fringe epistemologies congeal into orthodoxy in real time. A view that still strikes most as an enormous stretch—that white supremacist racism explains bad actions of non-whites even where no whites are present—is one example.”

This statement drew support as well as ire. The writer Joyce Carol Oates quoted it with a rebuttal: “yours is a somewhat disingenuous interpretation of a simple theory: that the race of the victim may determine the punishment, regardless of the race of the perpetrators. (in which case, if the victim had been white, the Black officers might have treated him less brutally.)” That tweet went viral, too, generating millions of views. Soon, my notifications were flooded with responses making a similar point, many of them quoting a specific passage from James Baldwin’s 1985 book, The Evidence of Things Not Seen:

Black policemen were another matter. We used to say, “If you just must call a policeman”—for we hardly ever did—“for God’s sake, try to make sure it’s a White one.” A Black policeman could completely demolish you. He knew far more about you than a White policeman could and you were without defenses before this Black brother in uniform whose entire reason for breathing seemed to be his hope to offer proof that, though he was Black, he was not Black like you.

Baldwin made this point with psychological acuity throughout his career. In his 1955 debut, Notes of a Native Son, he writes—eerily, in light of Memphis—“There were, incidentally, according to my brother, five Negro policemen in Atlanta at this time, who, though they were not allowed to arrest whites, would, of course, be willing, indeed, in their position, anxious, to arrest any Negro who seemed to need it. In Harlem, Negro policemen are feared even more than whites, for they have more to prove and fewer ways to prove it.”

Those were Baldwin’s insights some 40 and nearly 80 years ago, respectively, and they say something historically true with ramifications for the present. I erred on Twitter in dismissing as merely “fringe” this position—that even nonwhite actors can buy into notions of their own personal or group inferiority, and also contribute to their own structural disadvantage. And yet, is even Baldwin’s exquisite articulation really the last or even the most compelling word on what is happening between and within groups in 2023?

Americans hardly have a monopoly on brutality, or state-sanctioned brutality, such that only peculiarities of American history can explain violence in the present. We have spent the past year observing groups of white-skinned Russian men do unspeakable things to the white-skinned Ukrainians at their mercy—things most of these same men would never do by themselves—simply because they were together and they could. Strength is provocative; weakness is too. I believe that this is what my father means when he invokes power dynamics (it may also be what my mother means by evil), and it cuts across every ethnic line.

[Franklin Foer: The horror of Bucha]

In the case of Tyre Nichols, in particular, the offending officers are Black, but so is the city’s chief of police, the majority of the force she oversees, and the community at large. The notion that the most likely explanation for this specific horror in this specific locality at this specific time ought to be reduced to a permanent, invisible, and unfalsifiable force called white supremacy veers dangerously close to determinism. Perversely, this infantilizing logic can’t help but absolve the five officers of responsibility for a heinous crime that most people and most police officers of any background do not commit.

Such moral reasoning has become conventional wisdom, embraced vocally by white liberals, among others. But white and nonwhite people alike should be wary of forfeiting their agency so easily. We should always remain skeptical of systems-level thinking that reduces the complexity and unpredictability of human action to a simple formula.

Why did those officers kill Tyre Nichols? I don’t know, and I’m wary of anyone who says they do.

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Most Americans want to see the police reformed. A Gallup poll conducted in May, two years after the murder of George Floyd, found that 50 percent of adults favored “major changes” to policing, 39 percent wanted “minor changes,” and only 11 percent thought no changes were required. Despite this general consensus and a patchwork of recent policy shifts in communities across the country, injustices continue to accumulate, and it would be easy to see the problems with policing as intractable.

Three high-profile deaths just since the start of this year would seem to confirm this feeling. On January 3, Keenan Anderson, a 31-year-old Black high-school teacher (and cousin of Patrisse Cullors, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter), died after Los Angeles police shocked him repeatedly with a Taser. The next day, cops in Cambridge, Massachusetts, shot and killed Sayed Faisal, a 20-year-old Bangladeshi American college student who allegedly approached them with a knife. And less than a week after that, another Black man, 29-year-old Tyre Nichols, died following a beating by Memphis police officers. Video footage of the incident, released this past Friday, led to mass protest in many cities and an anguished response to yet another senseless death. Nothing we’re doing to fix policing seems to be working—or so it might appear.

Against this backdrop, two new books chronicle horrific incidents of police abuse, cover-ups, and intransigence. But they also offer something else: light pouring through the cracks, concrete evidence that police departments can change for the better.

In The Riders Come Out at Night: Brutality, Corruption, and Cover-Up in Oakland, the journalists Ali Winston and Darwin BondGraham tell the story of Oakland, California’s police department. The title refers to a small group of officers who allegedly brutalized residents of impoverished, high-crime, largely Black West Oakland starting in the late 1990s. The actions of these cops became known only because a rookie named Keith Batt was assigned to train with one of them. Batt was deeply troubled by what he observed—behavior that Batt said included kidnapping, assault, and filing false police reports. He contacted internal-affairs investigators and became the main witness in a criminal case against the officers (three of whom stood trial; none was convicted).

[Read: No such thing as a bad apple]

In harrowing detail, Winston and BondGraham describe the terror that Batt said Oaklanders endured at the hands of the Riders, as well as the ostracism Batt faced when he refused to honor the “blue wall of silence” that has long characterized cop culture.

While the Riders’ actions may have been extreme, Winston and BondGraham view them as symptomatic of larger issues. As Oakland underwent deindustrialization in the 1970s and ’80s, poverty and crime rose. Turning away from local jobs initiatives, city leaders embraced ill-fated redevelopment efforts and pressed their often-racist police department to “clean up the streets.” When rogue cops took things too far, their supervisors looked the other way, knowing perfectly well what their marching orders were.

The Riders were significant in another respect: A lawsuit brought by the group’s alleged victims became the catalyst for a consent decree, a potentially powerful weapon for effecting change within police departments. Consent decrees are legally binding settlement agreements. In the usual course of affairs, after the Department of Justice has investigated a police agency and found that it has systematically violated people’s rights, the feds spell out changes in policy and procedure that the agency must undertake, changes that would bring it into line with established best practices. An independent monitor reports periodically to a judge on whether the department is meeting its marks.

Although the DOJ never investigated Oakland, the consent-decree model appealed to the civil-rights attorneys John Burris and Jim Chanin. In 2003, representing victims in the Riders case, they were able to maneuver the city into an unusual “negotiated” consent decree, which committed Oakland PD to a range of tasks, from better documenting the use of force to enhanced field training for young officers.

Consent decrees have been used to improve policing in cities such as Detroit and New Orleans, but they are expensive to administer and don’t always work. Winston and BondGraham show how the Oakland police resisted the required reforms at every turn. Top brass, middle management, frontline officers, and the police union displayed an “obstructionist mindset.” Oakland cops continued to shoot people at a furious pace. A poster in the department’s firing range was captioned You shut the fuck up. We’ll protect America. Keep out of our fucking way, liberal pussies.

The Riders Come Out at Night is a longish book, and its story is largely a condemnation of the Oakland police. But readers who stick with it to the end will discover something surprising. Although change was slow to come to Oakland, it did come. The turning point was the ascension of a reform-oriented police chief. Under Sean Whent, a longtime Oakland cop who led the department from 2013 to 2016, internal-affairs complaints dropped dramatically, the police did a better job protecting protesters’ rights, and the agency tackled racial bias.

Winston and BondGraham don’t put it in these terms, but Whent was arguably able to make progress because he helped shift the department’s culture. My own research on other cities suggests that the key to successful police reform is to pair sensible legal and policy restrictions on police behavior with new models of what it means to be a good cop, so that the hyperaggressive, “us versus them” culture of the profession bends in a different direction.

Whent believed not only that Oakland residents had a right to respectful policing, but that such policing would help the department control crime; the resulting trust would lubricate the all-important flow of information between cops and the community. Unlike his predecessors, he leaned into the consent decree (there was also intense legal pressure on him to do so), and enough of his cops followed suit that on the streets, things began to change.  

“The reforms that began in 2003 … have profoundly changed the Oakland police, and the city, for the better,” Winston and BondGraham conclude. “Today OPD officers are involved in far fewer deadly use-of-force incidents.” What’s more, where “Oakland cops were once known for abusive, explicit language,” now “audits of police body camera footage rarely flag instances in which officers curse or show impatience or anger.” The police have also “been able to steadily dial back their most problematic enforcement activities,” so that “Oakland is one of the only law enforcement agencies in America that could actually show (before the George Floyd protests) that it took action to reduce racial profiling.”

A similarly hopeful lesson might be drawn from Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable, by the UCLA law professor Joanna Schwartz. Many cops perform their difficult job admirably, but part of the problem with reforming the police is that when this isn’t the case, officers aren’t always held to account for their misdeeds. Schwartz’s focus is on understanding why this should be, and she lands on 11 areas where law, policy, and politics have converged to make it hard for victims of police abuse to get justice.

Among Schwartz’s insights: There aren’t enough lawyers with the expertise to file federal civil-rights cases against police, especially outside large urban centers. This is partially a function of the fee structure allowed by the courts; only rarely can plaintiffs’ attorneys recoup their full costs, so relatively few lawyers find this kind of work financially viable.  

Schwartz’s special expertise is qualified immunity. This arcane legal doctrine dictates that a public official can’t be held responsible for violating someone’s rights unless the courts have already established that the particular circumstances do in fact constitute a violation. Although that sounds reasonable—you shouldn’t hold an official liable unless they knew that what they were doing was wrong—judges have interpreted this in a bizarro fashion.

Schwartz describes a case from Hawaii. A woman in an argument with her husband asked her daughter to call the cops and was Tasered when she accidentally bumped one of them. The Taser was used in so-called dart mode, where the weapon shoots out electrified probes. Her case against the officer ended up getting dismissed because, according to the appellate court, there had never before been a relevant ruling concerning Tasers, much less Tasers in dart mode, and therefore the officer couldn’t be held liable. Dart mode or not, the officer should have known not to do it.

Schwartz’s research shows that qualified-immunity defenses are raised in about 37 percent of lawsuits against the police. Although they’re successful only about 9 percent of the time, they gum up the litigation process because each qualified-immunity claim must be resolved before a case can proceed. The doctrine is a farce in any event, because police officers aren’t regularly updated on the intricacies of federal case law. Schwartz favors ending qualified immunity and argues that this won’t open the door to endless litigation.

Far more common than plaintiffs winning cases in court is cities settling with the victims of police abuse. (Settlements and legal awards cost Chicago nearly half a billion dollars from 2010 to 2020.) Usually cities pay these settlements out of their general funds. Police-department budgets don’t take the hit, so departments have little reason to retrain their officers and improve operating procedures. Schwartz urges cities to change this budgeting practice, giving police departments a financial incentive to learn from their mistakes.

Where’s the cause for hope? Schwartz observes that several of the changes she favors around qualified immunity were enshrined in state law in Colorado in 2020. It’s too early to tell what the effects of the Colorado law will be, but in theory, greater legal liability should deter police abuse. Other states may soon follow Colorado’s lead.

[Read: The state where protests have already forced major police reforms]

Many more levers need to be pulled to get police accountability to where it should be, but we are seeing progress. Even Schwartz, a fierce critic of law enforcement, acknowledges that over the past half century, “departments as a whole have become more professional and have improved their policies and trainings,” if only “to a degree,” in part because civil-rights attorneys and others in the community have kept the pressure on. The cops who were seen beating Tyre Nichols last month in Memphis? They were promptly fired by Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn Davis. They’ve now been arrested and charged with second-degree murder. There was a time not long ago when neither of those things would have happened so quickly.

The narrative that nothing ever gets better in policing isn’t just wrong; it’s an abdication of responsibility. It’s easier to lose oneself in resignation and despair than to bear down—motivated by a belief in the possibility of change—and put in the hard work of reforming a flawed but essential institution.