With anti-racism politics flaring up on the left, too many are making it personal -- when it's really about policy
BRITTNEY COOPER

In her recent post at the Nation, Michelle Goldberg attempts to place the dust-up over #CancelColbert into a broader frame of what she calls “radical anti-liberalism.” She writes:



She concludes that this most recent rise of anti-liberal sentiment on the left will lead to a situation in which “politics contract.”

I want to respond to Goldberg’s arguments as part of the broader set of debates that have been taking place between Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jonathan Chait in the pages of the Atlantic and New York magazine, respectively. Those debates — while mainly about the role, if any, that black culture plays in explaining widespread and continued poverty within black communities — have as an additional and important thread the role of liberal values in contemporary anti-racism politics on the left.

There are more than a few problems with Goldberg’s analysis, not the least of which is that nothing about her view seems even remotely expansive or visionary enough to halt the contracting or retrenchment of leftist politics. As noted in the excerpt above, Goldberg tellingly reduces legitimate objections to endless war (which we find ourselves in yet again) and to conservative welfare reform like that of the Clinton era, to indictments not of liberalism but rather of white liberals themselves. She makes it personal, when the arguments are clearly about policy.

http://www.salon.com/2014/04/08/its_not_about_you_white_liberals_why_attacks_on_radical_people_of_color_are_so_misguided/