THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT:

When members of one's own ideological camp act badly, there is a heightened responsibility to speak out. It is thus praiseworthy that a few conservatives--I think here of Princeton professors Robert George and Keith Whittington--have spoken up vigorously against conservative censors. Disgraceful is the silence of so many other conservatives. The sentinels on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal are keenly sensitive to left-wing cancel culture. By contrast, they are deplorably complacent in the face of right-wing abusiveness.

The fact of the matter is that the episodes of overreaching by excessively "woke" educators that the right wing eagerly seizes upon and weaponizes are mainly props in the campaign against racial equity instruction in schools. For the right-wing campaign is not really concerned with improving education. It is, for the most part, a race-baiting ruse to gin up the Trumpian base, to vent the status anxieties of aggrieved whites, and to bait progressives into saying and doing things that alienate potential allies.

Some of the racial equity literature vilified by the right wing does contain errors or misjudgments deserving of criticism and has inspired "sensitivity trainings" and related initiatives that can be tendentious, overbearing, and even coercive. It is a mistake to refrain from publicly criticizing any aspect of the racial equity camp out of a sense of solidarity with those being targeted by the right-wing campaign. Adopting that posture entails accepting indefinite inhibition since the prospect of right-wing attack is always present. It is important for at least two reasons to be willing to share candidly criticism of the racial equity camp even as it faces vilification from the right. The racial crisis is a large, complex, difficult problem that will require for clarification, much less resolution, knowledge and insight coming from all sorts of different vantages. Developing useful thought will almost inevitably entail disagreements. Avoiding friction for the sake of displaying a putative solidarity will come at the price of evading disputes that are essential to confront.

No strain of thought is free of error, weaknesses, missteps. Contrary to what the 1619 Project initially posited, protecting slavery was not a substantial motivation behind the American colonists' move to secede from the British Empire. And, yes, some of the ideas propounded by those who march under the banner of CRT ought to be rejected. The notion that there has been no appreciable advancement by Black people since 1950 is ridiculous. The idea that Black people cannot be racist because they lack power to effectuate their prejudice is misguided for a number of reasons including the obvious empirical point that there are Black people who, as police chiefs, mayors, Cabinet officials, members of Congress, professors, directors of human resources offices, chief executive officers, prison wardens, and president and vice president of the United States, do exercise decisive, often unreviewable, power over whites and others. Another bad idea, popular among some proponents of CRT, is that "racist" speech is a readily identifiable species of worthless expression that individuals and institutions should not hesitate to censor. The irony, of course, is that the right wing, replicating that logic, has now labeled critical race theory as "racist' and demanded that it be suppressed. One hopes that this experience will drive home a point made recently in Dissent magazine by Katha Pollitt in "The Left Needs Free Speech." What gives protesters such as critical race theorists the space to promote unpopular positions in unfriendly places, she observed, "is the respect most Americans give to free speech"--at least for now. (She also archly remarked that while many progressive dissidents spend a lot of time attacking liberalism, they also rely on liberalism to protect them "like children who assume they can say awful things to their parents [but that] their parents will still be there for them.")

There ought to be no airbrushing of the racial equity thinking under right-wing attack. Some of that thinking is radical. So? Some of that thinking is misguided. Again: so? Even if flawed, even if objectionable, even if disturbing, that thinking should nonetheless be allowed to be considered and debated in age-appropriate settings under the superintendence of teachers who are presumably competent. Radical and misguided writings can contain useful information and provide excellent platforms from which to inculcate tastes for complexity, skepticism, and questioning. The arguments of Nikole Hannah-Jones and Kimberlé Crenshaw and Ibram Kendi are part of the cultural inheritance of the country and should be carefully understood, vigorously debated, and conscientiously included in school curriculums without ideological censorship--just as the pro-slavery sentiments of John C. Calhoun, the anti-slavery secessionism of William Lloyd Garrison, the socialist advocacy of Eugene Victor Debs, the patriotic imagery of Martin Luther King, Jr.,  and the reactionary ramblings of Donald Trump ought to be made available for study and discussion. No significant idea that sheds light on the development of the American experiment should be banished in the way that the right wing is seeking to banish CRT and kindred communities of thought.

Preserving credibility is another reason for declining to withhold sincerely held criticism of racial justice talk even when it is under right-wing attack. Good-faith sharing of candid impressions deduced from disciplined study is imperative in an environment in which falsity has been unleashed on a grand scale, in which adherence to principle is scoffed at as sentimental, and in which reason itself is under siege. It is essential to emphasize, moreover, that whatever one's ultimate judgement of the thinking in question--whether one agrees with it or not--a well-organized polity should put firm boundaries around the capacity of people, especially governmental officials, to banish ideas, thereby depriving prospective audiences, including precollegiate pupils, of an opportunity to consider for themselves what guardians have repressed.

Going forward, resistance to right-wing censoriousness should include redoubled efforts to tell the truth about the American story, its triumphs and defeats, its heroes and villains, its complicated mixture of good and bad. 

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