Totems and Taboos

A review of Taboo: How Making Race Sacred Produced a Cultural Revolution by Eric Kaufmann, 400 pages, Forum (July 2024)

Earlier this year, Eric Kaufmann, a Canadian professor of political science, left Birkbeck College in the University of London where he had taught for twenty years. He was also head of the political science department there, and already had a number of deeply researched books behind him. But neither long service, departmental prominence, nor publishing success offered much of a defence against three separate attempts to cancel him. Indeed, his 2018 book Whiteshift told against him, since it argued, inter alia, that white majorities should have as much right to protect their identity and culture as minorities, a position now perceived by some as evidence of racism. “Repressing white identity as racist,” he wrote, “and demonising the white past, adds insult to the injury of this group’s demographic decline. This way lies growing populist discontent, or even terrorism.”

During the first part of his career, Kaufmann mostly kept his conservative views to himself, and with good reason. When he revealed them in Whiteshift, he became a marked man and spent several years fending off persistent efforts to strip him of his job and livelihood. His academic colleagues were generally unsupportive, and some of them participated in the campaign against him. So, he left Birkbeck for the University of Buckingham, the first of a small clutch of private universities created since the 1970s with the enthusiastic backing of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Buckingham takes pride in rejecting leftist monoculture in favour of an approach that privileges open debate without the risk of career obliteration.

These days, Kaufmann is—as the Scots saying goes—a “bonnie hater” (or what others might call a “happy warrior”). With his new book, he joins the best of those (disproportionately American) writers, journalists, and politicians alarmed by the activities of ideologically motivated individuals and organisations operating under the vague umbrella term “wokeism.” This inchoate movement, Kaufmann maintains, is deeply destructive of freedom (and of freedom of speech in particular), learning, virtue, public morality, patriotism, and emotional continence. It is, Kaufman recently told the Daily Mail, an “Orwellian threat to the [E]nlightenment—free speech, equal treatment, due process, objective scientific truth. I believe this new woke ideology threatens the foundations of our civilisation.” 

Wearying of the years of harassment he received for his views (none of which, he stresses, was ever physical), Kaufmann moved to Buckingham. He wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to establish a Centre for Heterodox Sociology where progressive doctrines could be studied, dissected, and debated, a pursuit he believes would be impossible anywhere else. Buckingham received first prize for free speech in last year’s National Student Survey. It will now be required to live up to that distinction, since Kaufman’s approach—after many years spent avoiding conflict—has become direct and uncompromising. Any determined left-leaning student or scholar would find this an intolerable provocation—a display of prejudice and bigotry meriting expulsion from the scholarly body lest it spread to innocent souls insufficiently prepared to counter it. 

The list of progressive doctrines Kaufmann has compiled to define “wokeism” is probably the most comprehensive assembled to date. Much of what concerns him most relates to education. He believes that higher education, in particular, has become a place of inflexible dogmas on race, gender, emotional fragility, and anti-white bias rather than a home of serious study, reflection, and discussion. But he does not believe—as many other critics of contemporary progressivism do—that this is a kind of warmed-over Marxism, in which the fragile student has taken the place of the exploited proletarian. Instead, progressivism’s concern for the outnumbered, the vulnerable, and the frail can be traced back to Christ’s teachings, and especially to his Sermon on the Mount reported in Matthew 5:5: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” This injunction is now marshalled into a secular hallowing of blacks (above all), Muslims, women, and LGBT individuals.

Kaufmann calls the upshot of this genealogy “cultural socialism”—a movement that privileges equality, but equality of outcome not merely opportunity. He points to a speech that US president Lyndon Johnson delivered to students at the historically black Howard University in 1965, in which Johnson claimed that “we seek not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and equality as a result.” Suddenly, Kaufmann remarks, “the door was open to restricting liberty and equal treatment in the name of achieving ‘equality of result.’” Such a regime, he points out, will inevitably disincentivise effort and excellence. Why forgo pleasure to work hard when the dedicated and indolent alike will all be made equal in the end? It’s worth remarking, however, that socialism does not necessarily provide the low road to unequal equality. Kaufmann quotes the historian Eric Hobsbawm—an unapologetic communist until he died in 2012—who insisted that privileging one group over another will destroy society by breaking it into mutually hostile communities.

Worse than the doctrinaire activists are those who surrender before their attacks. Kaufmann instances the infamous sacking of the New York Times’ opinion-page editor James Bennet in June 2020. Bennet’s sin was to publish an op-ed by the Republican senator Tom Cotton calling for the army to be deployed against looters and rioters after the death of George Floyd. At first, the NYT’s publisher A.G. Sulzberger assured Bennet that the growing protests in the newsroom would be faced down. However, as dissent spread and the paper’s staff began mass-tweeting that running the op-ed “puts black @nytimes staff in danger,” Sulzberger capitulated and Bennet was fired. He subsequently found a home at the British news magazine, the Economist.

It Wasn’t My Cancelation That Bothered Me. It Was the Cowardice of Those Who Let It Happen

Dozens of scholars threatened to resign from the college if my appointment were allowed to stand.

QuilletteMargaret Wente

This wretched episode occurred at a newspaper that takes pride in its editorial and journalistic courage, a fact that makes Bennet’s dismissal more significant than the cancelling of an academic (as bad as that is). It is hard to understand why Sulzberger did not simply tell his staff that publishing a range of opinions is the job of an opinion-page editor, that the NYT does not necessarily endorse the views expressed in every piece it publishes, that an attack on a black reporter by a NYT-reading rioter was vanishingly unlikely, that the paper’s foreign correspondents face much greater danger in some parts of the world, and that the protestors should therefore get back to work or get out of his newsroom. It seems that the fear of being thought racist by refusing to defer to a barrage of unreasonable and hysterical complaints was pressing enough to justify tearing up the paper’s reputation.

Fear of being publicly labelled a racist is the taboo to which the title of Kaufmann’s book refers—and it is a taboo of religious potency. Kaufmann quotes American sociologist Shelby Steele, the son of a black truck-driver and a white social worker, whose 2006 book White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era argues that, by the 1960s...

...the lines of moral power, like the plates on the earth, had shifted. White guilt became so palpable you could see it on people. At the time, what it looked like to my eyes was a remarkable loss of authority. And what whites lost in authority, blacks gained. You cannot feel guilty about anyone without giving away power to them.

Academia, however, incubates a more widespread threat from (and to) scholars. Kaufmann points to a 2020 survey by YouGov that asked academics the following question: “Thinking about political correctness, are you generally in favour of it (it protects against discrimination) or against it (it stifles freedom of speech)?” Sixty-four percent chose the former option, and the percentage rose to 76 percent among those teaching the social sciences or humanities. This is a feature, not a bug, of an academy dominated by people with liberal-left politics. And the more left-wing a person is, the more likely they are to choose political correctness over free expression. This isn’t just a matter of opinion. In a survey of academic psychologists conducted by psychologists Yoel Inbar and Joris Lammers, one respondent claimed that if his department “could figure out who was a conservative they would be sure not to hire them.” In Kaufman’s own academic survey, a Conservative-voting Leave supporter told him, “Yes, indeed, I have lost two senior jobs because I voted Leave.”

The race taboo has found its way into corporations as well, where cancellations have become so familiar that they are almost routine. This is more common in the US, but a 2019 incident at an Asda supermarket in Dewsbury (not mentioned by Kaufmann) provided a particularly atrocious example of this trend. Brian Leach, a disabled worker on the tills with five years of service at the store, re-posted a characteristically profane sketch by the Scots comedian Billy Connolly that attacked religion and Islamist suicide bombing. Six colleagues (“all Asian, as I understand it,” Leach later wrote) protested and Asda fired him on the spot. The story was picked up by the media, and Asda—apparently unable to defend its position—reinstated him.

Happy outcomes like these are rare, though. Kaufmann writes of:

[A] routinised egalitarian-liberal bias in elite workplaces which plays a key role in enforcing cultural socialist orthodoxy. Beyond the culture industries, law, medicine, tech firms and even corporate finance are tilting increasingly leftward over time, and the severity of discrimination against conservative dissenters will increase steadily as a function of this process.

At the same time, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) departments are proliferating and gathering power in schools, universities, corporations, and other institutions, where they provide instruction seminars that are either compulsory or at least felt to be so. These events spread the new gospel of total and enforced racial and gender equality of outcome, explaining that disparities are necessarily a consequence of discrimination rather than differing levels of experience or efficiency. The findings and remedial recommendations of DEI consultants often rely on unsupported allegations of emotional harm (sometimes expressed as “traumas”), claims with which Kaufman has little sympathy or patience. “[E]motional harm claims,” he argues, “are not a valid reason to silence public speech. While physical harm is unequivocal, emotional harm, trauma and safety are often in the eye of the beholder.”

As I was writing this review, the Republican convention in Milwaukee was drawing to a raucous close amid an orgy of adoration for Donald Trump, while President Biden stubbornly refused to yield to calls to end his own pursuit of a second term in office. It was a political split-screen that contrasted super-charged unity with dismal division. Biden later succumbed, and by late July, he had endorsed his Vice President, Kamala Harris, as the Democratic nominee for the presidency. Although the polls have tightened now that Harris looks likely to secure that nomination, November may yet see Trump returned to the White House for MAGA Phase II. Both Trump and his vice presidential pick J.D. Vance detest the Left’s cultural agenda. Vance believes that a future GOP presidency must address the plight of the American working class, and he appears to have Trump’s support to that end. They believe that what Kaufman calls cultural socialism must be rejected in all its forms. If they win, the progressive redoubts in the culture industry, universities, and NGOs can expect to have a thin time—and corporations, the nervous leaders of which are increasingly making nice with the Republican camp, will likely slim down their DEI departments or even dispense with them entirely.

The leader of the UK’s new Labour government, Sir Keir Starmer, signalled a degree of sympathy for “woke” ideology while he was in opposition when he and his deputy Angela Rayner took the knee for the photographic record during the Floyd riots in the Summer of 2020. Yet both he and Rayner are from broadly working-class backgrounds (a fact that Starmer was comically eager to emphasise during the general election campaign) and the British working class is generally no keener on wokeism than Trump or Vance. On the other hand, the Labour Party membership is now largely shorn of its once-large working-class base, and the middle-class graduates who make up much of its activist class will surely press for a softer line on mass immigration, a harsher line on Israel, and even an attempt to rejoin the EU (which is presently not on Starmer’s agenda).

Kaufmann’s explanation of “cultural socialism” largely evades the fact that many of those who regard themselves as either socialists or social democrats are as appalled by progressive overreach on race and gender as conservatives. But his greater achievement is to offer a detailed description of a movement whose moral preening, racial and national guilt, absolutism, and ruthlessness is, as he claims, a threat to civilised community.