It’s not racism. It’s anti-antiracism. Paul Waldman

 — Read time: 5 minutes

Democracy Dies in Darkness

Opinion It’s not racism. It’s anti-antiracism.

Columnist|

July 31, 2023 at 6:30 a.m. EDT

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) speaks at the Moms for Liberty summit in Philadelphia on June 30. (Hannah Beier for the Washington Post.)

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When you see some of the positions taken by the Republicans running for president on issues that touch upon race, it can be hard to ascribe to them anything but the ugliest motives.

Why, for instance, would Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former vice president Mike Pence each announce their intention to change the name of an Army post to honor a Confederate general? Why would DeSantis advocate for new school standards in his state that appear to present slavery as a brief and salutary job training program?

Some will simply answer, “Racism.” But there’s a more complicated answer that better explains what’s happening on the right. The true commitment of today’s Republican Party is not to racism (though there are plenty of genuine racists who thrill to what the GOP offers, and especially to former president Donald Trump). It is to what is best described as anti-antiracism.

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In a sense, anti-antiracism is its own ideology. It holds that racism directed at minorities is largely a thing of the past; that whatever racism does exist is a product only of individual hearts and not of institutions and systems; that efforts to ameliorate racism and promote diversity are both counterproductive and morally abhorrent; and, most critically, that those efforts must not only be stopped but also rolled back.

Listen to conservative rhetoric on book banning, affirmative action, teaching history or any of the ways race touches their war on “wokeness,” and you hear this theme repeated: We must stop talking and thinking about racism, and most of all we must stop trying to do anything about racism.

Virtually all racists, of course, would also be anti-antiracists. But there are also millions of people who are not racist yet who are fervent anti-antiracists. That’s the conclusion of some fascinating research from a pair of political scientists, Rachel Wetts and Robb Willer.

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Their research explores people’s agreement with ideas such as “As a country, we have done everything that we should do to equalize wealth and income between Black people and White people,” and “People these days can’t speak their minds without someone accusing them of racism.”

Adherence to these kind of anti-antiracist ideas has become “a matter of partisan identity,” going to the core of “what it means to be a Republican,” Wetts told me. “More than 80 percent of White Republicans endorse these views at very high levels.” In fact, in Wetts and Willer’s analysis, the only variable that predicted support for Trump more strongly than anti-antiracism was whether you identified as a Republican.

That helps explain why Republican candidates are so determined to call attention to their efforts to dictate what can be said about race in classrooms, to punish companies for promoting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), or even to undo attempts to stop honoring the Confederacy.

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Those efforts are happening on both the national and local levels. In Missouri, for instance, a new conservative majority on a suburban school board last week revoked a resolution the board had passed in 2020 to “promote racial healing.” It might not have much practical impact, but they were determined to make a point.

For some people, “opposition to antiracism is a way of expressing racial animus without explicitly endorsing it,” Wetts said. For others it’s about “distaste, anger and frustration with antiracists themselves,” an expression of revulsion against liberals and everything they want to do. Anti-antiracism is one more way to own the libs.

Feelings have become central to the way conservatives think about race; it’s no accident that many of the laws regarding critical race theory passed in conservative states explicitly outlaw discussions in schools that could make students feel “guilt” or “discomfort.” Anti-antiracism is fueled by White people’s unease with the growing diversity of American society, the knowledge that they’ve lost their dominant position — and to boot, liberals keep trying to make them feel bad.

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But most of the anti-antiracism efforts are meant to win the support of people who have little or no personal experience with the supposed excesses of antiracism.

Their primary audience is “people whose life experiences never collide with this kind of antiracism stuff,” says Ashley Jardina, a political scientist and author of “White Identity Politics.” The states that have passed laws limiting discussions of race in the classroom “have long had pretty conservative school boards and state legislatures that dictate what’s being taught” in public schools, Jardina says, so students were already getting an extremely thin education on America’s racial history. The party’s base is White people without college degrees; most of them never took a class on Black history or had to sit through DEI training.

This is a vital part of the anti-antiracism picture: Though anti-antiracists are convinced they are beset on all sides by liberals demanding they atone for racism they believe is an artifact of history, they’re only likely to encounter critical race theory or DEI when watching Fox News or listening to conservative talk radio. Wetts and Willer’s research shows that anti-antiracism is highly correlated with consumption of right-wing media.

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It is easy to see why Republican politicians think anti-antiracism is so potent. It allows people to claim a commitment to equality while opposing policies meant to achieve actual equality. It enables them to proclaim their own victimhood, which has become absolutely central to the conservative worldview. And it reinforces borders of racial identity, which can be a powerful motivating force in politics.

Which is why all the GOP presidential candidates — even the non-White ones — will trumpet their commitment to anti-antiracism, even if they won’t call it by name. By now, the Republican base expects nothing less.