What's Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies

by Tim Urban

Recall these two quotes from Kendi’s book How to Be an Antiracist: A racist policy is any measure that produces or sustains inequity between racial groups. An antiracist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial equity between racial groups. The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. In 2020, The New York Times published an article arguing that orchestras should end blind auditions, because they produced orchestras that were not diverse enough, with too many Asian and white musicians. The writer was adhering to Kendi’s definition of an antiracist. The policy of auditioning musicians without seeing who they were was producing an outcome with a racial disparity—and was therefore a racist policy. The proposed solution—to get rid of blind auditions to ensure proportional racial representation among orchestra musicians—would inherently discriminate against some Asian and white musicians who would have made the cut under blind auditions. This is, according to SJF, the antiracist way. This was just an op-ed, and it was just about orchestras. But the same logic has in recent years informed actual government policy.