Two Kinds of Anti-racists: Identitarian and Universalist

One school of anti-racism has this creation myth: Derrick Bell, father of Critical Race Theory, picked up the flag of anti-racism from the bodies of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, so now his crusading heirs are The One True Anti-racists. Bell’s school sees all other anti-racists as racists and can never admit to themselves that their claim on King and Malcolm X is only appropriation of the dead.

Now, when I talk about different kinds of anti-racism, I am using the term in its general sense — the Oxford Dictionary’s definition is “the policy or practice of opposing racism and promoting racial tolerance”. The word was rarely used before 1980. Bell’s students adopted it, which is why his school was simply referred to as Anti-racism in two classic essays, Rev. Thandeka’s Why Anti-racism Will Fail (1999) and Adolph Reed’s The Limits of Anti-racism (2009). Now that the word’s generic meaning is common, Thandeka and Reed are properly seen as socialist anti-racists who criticized Bell’s school.

If you imagine anti-racism is a tree, it has two trunks and many branches. The trunks represent ways of understanding humanity that are older than the idea of race: identitarians divide us by social identities like tribe and gender while universalists believe we are all equal members of the human family. The identitarian trunk bears…