What We're Reading: Antiracism and the Meaning of Freedom
06-09-2019Antiracism
Ibram X. Kendi, who will be speaking at the Hannah Arendt Center Conference on “Racism and Antisemitism” in October suggests that one way to practice anti-racism is by reading books that challenge old ideas about race. In The New York Times, Kendi offers an annotated bibliography of books that he calls “a stepladder to antiracism.”
We learn early the racist notion that white people have more because they are more; that people of color have less because they are less. I had internalized this worldview by my high school graduation, seeing myself and my race as less than other people and blaming other blacks for racial inequities.
To build a nation of equal opportunity for everyone, we need to dismantle this spurious legacy of our common upbringing. One of the best ways to do this is by reading books. Not books that reinforce old ideas about who we think we are, what we think America is, what we think racism is. Instead, we need to read books that are difficult or unorthodox, that don’t go down easily. Books that force us to confront our self-serving beliefs and make us aware that “I’m not racist” is a slogan of denial.
On Freedom
Samuel Moyn reviews Cass Sunstein’s new book On Freedom and finds that Sunstein has not thought through what freedom is.
First and foremost, Sunstein argues that the libertarian sage Friedrich Hayek was fundamentally correct: Government, aside from always courting tyranny, lacks the ability to centralize information so as to plan the best social outcomes (which raises the burning questions of how Waze works and how government could do anything competently). Correspondingly, Sunstein insists that the free market is king, though he does not entirely reject the state. In recent years, he has forcefully criticized the extremist skepticism of government that culminated in the Tea Party movement and its intellectual emanations. But his faith in the market has also made him skeptical of many forms of state intervention, and he tends to panic most of all at the frightful prospect of overregulation, insisting that the primary purpose of rules must be to maximize efficiency.
For Sunstein, the state exists to help citizens achieve their private ends; through its nudging, it can influence and shape, in a paternalistic manner, the attempts by citizens to fulfill these desires, but it should do so only if it respects their need to be “free to choose”—a phrase that Sunstein borrows from the economist Milton Friedman and uses repeatedly in his new book. For example, a law might require that you be shown the calorie counts for the different items listed on a fast-food menu, but this is justifiable, since you already care about your weight—and it is still up to you to order whatever you want on cheat day.
When it comes to government helping people achieve fulfillment, Sunstein insists that technocrats must rule. With a palpable sense of relief, he has confessed that he finds politics mostly a distraction and not so much about contending collective visions of the good life or about calling out the oppression that claims to expertise can mask. “Immersion in the facts made people’s political convictions look a little like background noise,” Sunstein explains, with more than a whiff of condescension, regarding what he learned during his years in the Obama White House.