A Black Professor Trapped in Anti-Racist Hell
A must-read firsthand account of where DEI orthodoxy leads. Vincent Lloyd, a black professor who “like others on the left…had been dismissive of criticisms of the current discourse on race in the United States,” finds himself the victim of Chinese Cultural Revolution-style attacks and banishment. “Last summer, I found anti-racism to be a perversion of religion: I found a cult.”
“Each student read from 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.”
“I directed my university’s black-studies program, I lead anti-racism and transformative-justice workshops, and I have published books on anti-black racism and prison abolition. I live in a predominantly black neighborhood of Philadelphia, my daughter went to an Afrocentric school, and I am on the board of our local black cultural organization. But now my thoughts turned to that 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 did this happen to a group of bright-eyed high school students?”
Related:
Vincent Lloyd on What Happens When “Antiracism” Goes Wrong (Persuasion podcast, 2/25/23)
The Glenn Show with John McWhorter and Vincent Lloyd (2/24/23)