In Need of a Sister Souljah Moment

Democratic Leaders Need to Call Out Zealotry that Goes Too Far

I just read the most fascinating piece by Vincent Lloyd titled “A Black Professor Trapped in Anti-Racist Hell.”¹ Going just by the title, you may think this is just an article about some establishment professor at an elite college being called out to task by woke students leading a mutiny over the teacher’s irresponsible racial ignorance. Nope.

This might be just another lament about “woke” campus culture, and the loss of traditional educational virtues. But the seminar topic was “Race and the Limits of Law in America.” Four of the 6 weeks were focused on anti-black racism (the other two were on anti-immigrant and anti-indigenous racism). I am a black professor, 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.

What was the result?

In the 2022 anti-racism workshops, the non-black students learned that they needed to center black voices—and to shut up... The effects on the seminar were quick and dramatic. During the first week, participation was as you would expect: There were two or three shy students who only spoke in partner or small-group work, two or three outspoken students, and the rest in the middle. One of the black students was outspoken, one was in the middle, and one was shy. By the second week of the seminar, the two white students were effectively silent. Two of the Asian-American students remained active (the ones who would soon be expelled), but the vast majority of interventions were from the three black students. The two queer students, one Asian and one white, were entirely silent. The black students certainly had interesting things to say and important connections to make with their experiences and those of their family members, but a seminar succeeds when multiple perspectives clash into each other, grapple with each other, and develop—and that became impossible.

In their “transformative-justice” workshop, my students learned to name “harms.” This language, and the framework it expresses, come out of the prison-abolition movement. Instead of matching crimes with punishments, abolitionists encourage us to think about harms and how they can be made right, often through inviting a broader community to discern the impact of harms, the reasons they came about, and paths forward. In the language of the anti-racism workshop, a harm becomes anything that makes you feel not quite right. For a 17-year-old at a highly selective, all-expenses-paid summer program, newly empowered with the language of harm, there are relatively few sites at which to use this framework. My seminar became the site at which to try out—and weaponize—this language...  

Then all nine remaining students entered, each carrying a piece of paper. One by one they read a paragraph. Out of their mouths came everything [the activist teacher's aide] had said to me during the “urgent” meetings she had with me after classes when students had allegedly been harmed. The students had all of the dogma of anti-racism, but no actual racism to call out in their world, and Keisha had channeled all of the students’ desire to combat racism at me.

They alleged: I had used racist language. I had misgendered Brittney Griner. I had repeatedly confused the names of two black students. My body language harmed them. I hadn’t corrected facts that were harmful to hear when the (now-purged) students introduced them in class. I invited them to think about the reasoning of both sides of an argument, when only one side was correct.

It’s a fascinating article. I highly recommend everyone to read it. It underscores how trying to stop racism has evolved and co-opted by a bunch of zealous advocates more interested in subjective, dogmatic ideology and completely divorced from any objectivity. Lloyd name drops James McWhorter’s book, “Woke Racism” in which he points out the language (McWhorter is primarily a linguist) is much more similar to that of a religion than a political issue:

In a recent book, John McWhorter asserts that anti-racism is a new religion. It was an idea I quickly dismissed. Last summer, I found anti-racism to be a perversion of religion: I found a cult. From Wild Wild Country to the Nxivm shows to Scientology exposés, the features of cults have become familiar in popular culture. There is sleep deprivation. Ties to the outside world are severed. The sense of time collapses, with everything cult-related feeling extremely urgent. Participants are emotionally battered. In this weakened state, participants learn about and cling to dogmatic beliefs. Any outsider becomes a threat.

The dozen participants in this summer program were spending almost every hour of every day together, I was almost the only outsider they were encountering, and I was marked as a threat.

The feature of a cult that seems to be missing from this story is a charismatic leader, enforcing the separation of followers from the world, creating emotional vulnerability, and implanting dogma. Enter [the teacher's aide]. A recent graduate of an Ivy League university, mentored by a television-celebrity black intellectual, [She] introduced herself as a black woman who grew up poor and “housing vulnerable,” whose grandmother’s limbs had been broken by white supremacists, and who had just spent four years of college teaching in prisons and advocating for prison abolition. She told the class that she had majored in black studies, had been nurtured by black feminists (though her famous mentor is a man), and she was planning to devote her life to transforming the academy in the direction of black justice.

The result was what you would expect. Bright students who were admitted to an extremely select seminar course on racism, taught by an esteemed member of the faculty, refused to attend the last two weeks except to hear lectures on black oppression led by the zealous teacher’s aide. Only the members that had been expelled sought him out to finish the course through distance study.

Read the article, site included in the footnotes.

We Need a Sister Souljah Moment.

The term “Sister Souljah Moment” has become standard in political discourse. A Sister Souljah moment is a politician's calculated public repudiation of an extremist person, statement, group or position that is perceived to have some association with the politician's own party.²

It has been described as "a key moment when the candidate takes what at least appears to be a bold stand against certain extremes within their party" and as "a calculated denunciation of an extremist position or special interest group." This act is intended to be a signal to centrist voters that the politician is not beholden to those positions or interest groups. However, such a repudiation runs the risk of alienating some of the politician's allies and the party's base voters

The term originated in the 1992 presidential candidacy of Bill Clinton. In a Washington Post interview published on May 13, 1992, the hip hop MC, author, and political activist Sister Souljah was quoted as saying (in response to the question regarding black-on-white violence in the 1992 Los Angeles riots):

Question: Even the people themselves who were perpetrating that violence, did they think that was wise? Was that a wise reasoned action?

Souljah: Yeah, it was wise. I mean, if black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?... White people, this government and that mayor were well aware of the fact that black people were dying every day in Los Angeles under gang violence. So if you're a gang member and you would normally be killing somebody, why not kill a white person? Do you think that somebody thinks that white people are better, are above and beyond dying, when they would kill their own kind?

Speaking to Jesse Jackson Sr.'s Rainbow Coalition in June 1992, Clinton responded both to that quotation and to something Souljah had said in the music video of her song "The Final Solution: Slavery's back in Effect" ("If there are any good white people, I haven't met them"). Clinton said: "If you took the words 'white' and 'black,' and you reversed them, you might think David Duke was giving that speech."

Which connected with voters. Clinton was right— voters didn’t want to see ANY killing, whether it was by black or white on black or white. People dislike racism and the treatment of people differently on account of race. People should be treated equally, and they cringe when one or the other calls out for favoritism or caustic indifference; not to mention the hypocrisy that occurs when one defends favoritism in that regard. When one applies a standard in favor of a marginalized people in such a way so as to be subjective, zealous and inproportionate, it is entirely appropriate to call it out as wrong.

True “Democratic Leadership”

What Professor Lloyd, John McWhorter and a host of smart educated people (including professors at universities big and small) are witnessing and appalled by is how an important movement was hijacked by uncompromising, narrow minded zealots. Any Democrat willing to call this out will get the support of most of the party and a large chunk of the moderate electorate. There is a wide gap to triangulate here. You don’t have to be unhinged and ignorant like a lot of Republicans are, but you can hit the sweet spot by calling out the uber-liberal orthodoxy on how they are also wrong on this.

This is a completely separate issue than whether more black history should be taught or more could be done to futher racial social justice. Both of these can and should be done. But where woke zealotry goes astray is in proclaiming it as the only issue, that everything in American culture originates from this one issue and so everything in society must be ripped out tooth and nail. It goes wrong in extent and degree. It goes wrong in building up a language and organization in which whatever it’s leaders say must be accepted 100% without dissent, or else they will call you racist. It is slowly ruining our educational institutions and online society. It will get worse unabated.

For a politician to become a uniter and heal the country, they need to accept that that worldview is wrong and call it out. Currently, they either side with them, or they are so afraid of the backlash that they stay silent. As a great person once said, “We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”³ Woke ideology has become oppressive and cultish. It needs to be called out. And not by Republicans who could care less about race issues and want to exploit racism as an issue. It needs to be called out by stakeholders who genuinely want to see racial progress.

Thank you Professor Lloyd for doing just that. Its time for a Democratic elected official to do the same.

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I’ve read John McWhorter’s “Woke Racism” book and was a little turned off by it, for many of the reasons Lloyd cites. I sympathize with McWhorter’s position and agree with him on calling out Ibram X. Kendi and the hypocricy of what Kendi describes as “anti-racism” (I don’t view Kendi’s position on this as anti-racist, but rather a hypocritical version of “when whites do it its racist but when other groups, especially african americans, do it, its justified and not racism”), but the “Religious language” McWhorter was mentioning seemed a little over the top to me. I got the point, but I just thought it was a bridge too far.

Based on Professor’s Lloyd’s article I may have misjudged it. I might read it again. A link to it is in the footnotes.⁴

Footnotes and Parting Thoughts

Let me know what you think of the page. Please share and comment!

1. https://compactmag.com/article/a-black-professor-trapped-in-anti-racist-hell

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sister_Souljah_moment

2. https://www.amazon.com/Woke-Racism-Religion-Betrayed-America/dp/0593423062

3. Elie Wiesel, who knew quite a bit about living under oppression.

4.