In his quest to see how Democrats might attract more white working-class voters, he poses these three questions:
- Should Democrats support and defend gender- and race-based affirmative action policies?
- If asked in a debate, what should a Democrat say about Ibram X. Kendi's claim that "standardized tests have become the most effective racist weapon ever devised to objectively degrade Black and brown minds and legally exclude their bodies from prestigious schools"?
- How should a Democrat respond to questions concerning intergenerational poverty, nonmarital births and the issue of fatherlessness?
Affirmative action has been an issue since the Nixon Administration, which first started using an "affirmative action" approach to enforcing federal anti-discrimination laws and then campaigned against "quotas," which immediately became the polemical conservative label for affirmative action. Affirmative action essentially means that employers and institutions must be able to show that they are making a serious attempt to comply with anti-discrimination laws. (The term "affirmative action" is an old common law term.)
The third question is just repeating tropes that Republicans have been using for years and poor people and minorities. Politicians have been making those charges and responding to them for decades.
But I was particularly struck by Edsall's second question, which seemed to be referring to someone (Ibram X. Kendi) who is a household name. Here Edsall is trolling with the anti-critical-race-theory theme, and specifically with a propagandistic claim involving Kendi - who of course is not at all a household name.
David Goldberg gives some context in The War on Critical Race Theory Boston Review 05/07/2021:
The attacks [against "critical race theory"] have also made their way to my office doorstep, probably due to my small contribution to the body of scholarship to which “critical race theory” actually refers—scholarship that first emerged several decades ago, not in the last few years, as a critical response to what was then known as “critical legal studies.” When I picked up my mail a few weeks ago, I found a thick hand-addressed envelope with no return address; the contents included an eight-page-long screed denouncing CRT as “hateful fraud.” The documents are copies of resources prepared by the Chinese American Citizens Alliance Greater New York (CACAGNY), which filed an amicus brief in the failed Supreme Court case challenging what the group characterized as discrimination by Harvard University against Asian American applicants. The materials echo essays sponsored by the Heritage Foundation, which calls CRT “the new intolerance” and “the rejection of the underpinnings of Western civilization.” The materials suggest a more coordinated campaign than many seem to have realized; I am surely not the only one who received this package.In other words, Edsall there is just repeating a stock conservative propaganda talking point against "CRT". And the cherry-picked quote from Kendi about the very legitimate concerns about racial and class biases in standardized tests is presumably meant to offer some academic jargon that might sound like some kind of ethnocentric special pleading to someone who has paid no attention to the standardized-test arguments.
In conservative accounts, the two authors most commonly cited as CRT’s principal exemplars are Ibram X. Kendi, who trained not in law but in African American Studies (he is CRT’s “New Age guru,” according to the Heritage Foundation), and Robin DiAngelo, a professor of education. Neither is a critical race theorist in the traditional legal sense, and Kendi’s popularizing of some work on race shares little with DiAngelo’s reductive account of what she calls “white fragility.” Other screeds also dismiss philosophers Angela Davis and Achille Mbembe as “scholar-activists” (as if there is something damning about the title). Of course, there is no evidence anywhere of either ever claiming anything resembling that “everyone and everything White is complicit” in racial oppression, or that “all unequal outcomes by race . . . is the result of racial oppression,” as the CACAGNY documents put it. [my emphasis]
Edsall quotes Ruy Teixeira, currently listed as a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, who seems to have adopted some fairly rigid views of what he calls the "cultural left" within the Democratic Party. For instance, he makes that argument in this piece, The Cultural Left Puts a Ceiling on Democratic Support The Liberal Patriot 09/23/2021. I'll just say here it looks like an unsettling turn on Texeira's part. He certainly seems to be pessimistic about the possibilities for any kind of significant left politics, and actually seems to view it as generally undesirable. (The Five Deadly Sins of the Left American Compass 10/13/2020) He also advocates a "liberal nationalism" and accuses the Democratic Party left of "encouraging identity-based segregation." (Peter Juul and Ruy Teixeira, Toward the Next Frontier: The Case for a New Liberal Nationalism American Affairs 4:3 Fall 2020)
