The Racialized Industrial Complex

Ezra Klein recently rebroadcast one of his “Best Of” podcasts, featuring Ta-Nehisi Coates and Nikole Hannah-Jones.

Both recently took faculty positions at Howard University, and both have served as acolytes of what we can call the Racialized Industrial Complex. This group of journalistic, academic, political and influencer activists has taken their identitarian leftist ideas, which lean on poetic truth, and poured them into the mainstream in an attempt to alter social norms.

And while this has drawn widespread backlash, including from an array of black intellectuals,^[1]For a range of views start with any of the following: Thomas Chatterton Williams, Thomas Sowell, John McWhorter, Shelby Steele and Coleman Hughes. it still takes many forms: President Biden pandering, Ibram X. Kendi^[2]How telling is it that Kendi, despite numerous invitations, has engaged in no apparent public debates about his anti-racist ideas? writing an antiracist book for babies and Klein hosting the conversation here with his guests.

Produced by the New York Times, which employs Klein and Hannah-Jones, the podcast episode stands out not for the mettle of its ideas, but for its lack of rigor and self-reflection. The best way to understand this is to take them at their own word.

Choosing words carefully

Throughout the interview words like “hypocrisy” and “skepticism” and “power” are used. It’s worth our while to apply them to the content of the speakers themselves.

Of her position at Howard University,^[3]Hannah-Jones is the inaugural Knight Chair in Race and Journalism. She has also founded the Center for Journalism and Democracy at Howard, which hopes to work with other HBCUs. Coates holds the … Continue reading Hannah-Jones, sounding less like a teacher and more like a Marxist organizer, says it is her mission to “to train up” the next generation of journalists.

And what will this entail?

“I don’t think,” she says, “we are nearly as skeptical of whether or not our democratic institutions will hold as we should be. In fact I think that most of the people who are covering politics in this country right now actually believe that in the end everything will work out. I don’t think that’s true, and I think we should not have a political reporting class that thinks that that’s true.”

This last statement should give us pause. Never mind for a moment that her tendentious reading here is more unsubstantiated wish than a factual engagement. She is going to use her own newfound position of power—and Hannah-Jones is preoccupied with power, especially for those she assumes not to have it—to indoctrinate aspiring, malleable journalists to adopt her beliefs.

So much for embodying skepticism.

And speaking of that, little to none is brought to bear on this or any part of the conversation. Klein, who loves to use the phrase “push back” when he wishes to challenge someone, does it not once in over an hour of stale and predictable woke talking points.

Those talking points include statements from Hannah-Jones  like “race is the primary organizing factor in American political life.”

Either all involved here agree, or they lack the courage to question it. A discerning listener of course would demand more from the dialogue.

Willful incredulity

Klein and Coates each provides their own moments of seeming incredulity. But are they genuine in this?

Klein has trouble understanding why people have focused their ire on Hannah-Jones’s historical 1619 Project instead of her takes on more contemporary issues, such as education.

“Why,” Klein asks her, “do you think the fury over critique of the past, over this question of the American story biography, proved so much stronger than critique of the American present, which implicates people here and around right now?”

What proves impossible to understand is how Klein could sincerely ask this question.

Hannah-Jones says at one point our “whole idea about democracy actually comes from black resistance.” She adds that The 1619 Project “actually displaces white people from the center of American greatness and places black people there.”^[4]The Project itself originally announced its aim was “to reframe the country’s history” around the year “1619 as our true founding.” Hannah-Jones would later be less than forthright about … Continue reading (One wonders about her views about where to place the countless indigenous North Americans who suffered ongoing subjugation and genocide.)

And Klein can’t conceive of a reason why people might home in on such claims and take issue with this portrayal of the past?

Coates on the surface seems to steer clear of the traps of hypocrisy that both Klein and Hannah-Jones fall into. Yet there’s some serious willful ignorance at work here too. At one point he gushes over Hannah-Jones’s many awards, as if to overlook the credible objections to her 1619 Project. (Among the objections would be the Project’s claim that the American Revolution was conducted to perpetuate slavery, and that historical oppression has caused most contemporary racial disparities.)

He also seems incredulous by a “push for the state — and I just I really, really have to emphasize it’s the state — to ban certain things on certain ways of looking at history.” Might that have something to do with teaching the Project in public schools and having it trickle down to very young readers?

The consistent ethic of this conversation, from all involved, seems to be: Don’t ask, but do tell.

What it means to have a conversation

There are many good conversations to be had about race in America—even as there are calls to “retire from race” or “unlearn race.”

Either way, the Klein/Hannah-Jones/Coates conversation serves as a guide—both of what not to do, and to improve the conversations we wish and need to have.

In the ’90s I would listen to Rush Limbaugh not because I liked him but because I wanted to understand him and his outlandish positions. Sadly, a new group, part of the Racialized Industrial Complex, has also broken my trust. I now read or listen to people like Hanna-Jones and Michael Eric Dyson and Michelle Goldberg (not to mention toxic mainstays on the other side like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity) for the same reasons.