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True Empowerment vs. Anti-Racist Rhetoric | Podcast Highlights

Blog Post | Culture & Tolerance

True Empowerment vs. Anti-Racist Rhetoric | Podcast Highlights

Chelsea Follett interviews Erec Smith, a Professor of Rhetoric and the co-founder of Free Black Thought, about the problems with critical social justice and how we can pursue true empowerment through classical liberal ideas.

Listen to the podcast or read the full transcript here. Watch the full interview here. Purchase Erec Smith’s book here.

How has rhetoric about race changed in recent years in the United States? 

I think the biggest difference is our inability to talk across differences. People have stopped even trying these days. You’ll often hear that people with the most radical ideas refuse to explain or debate them. They think it’s a waste of time, and they also think it may be dignifying the other side with a response.

The major players in critical race theory have lost faith in liberal values like reason and dialogue. They argue those values maintain the status quo. And I can sympathize with that; it gets frustrating when changes don’t come quickly enough. At the same time, if you get rid of a belief in deliberation and the primacy of reason, society will devolve into something worse. A lot of people don’t seem to mind that. They think society needs to fall to be rebuilt into something better. But I believe in reform. I believe in the power of civil debate, and that’s why I’m fighting for it.

What are some of the problems with the current rhetoric about race?  

It’s disempowering. Microaggressions are a good example. It’s not empowering to be told that there’s harm around every corner, that words are harmful, and that if somebody asks a question, it’s always already racist.

In critical social justice, the question isn’t “Did racism happen?” It’s “How did it manifest in that situation?” So, racism is always already in the air. Somehow, our conversation right now is racist. That is a problem. But of course, if you’re trying to usurp power by using the evil of racism, then the more racism, the better, which is why you get people making $20,000 to talk for an hour on Zoom. You get Ibram Kendi proposing a department of anti-racism at a government level.

Let’s get into your book, A Critique of Anti-racism in Rhetoric and Composition: The Semblance of Empowerment. What do you mean by the primacy of identity? 

It’s all about me and who I am rather than higher ideals or other people’s experiences. By extension, you can’t ask questions. You have to always believe stories instead of asking for elaboration or clarification. And the more downtrodden you are, the more credibility you have. I am black, which gives me credibility, but I’d have more credibility if I was a black woman or a black woman who was disabled.

Tell me about what you call the sacred victim and the semblance of empowerment.

The sacred victim is this idea that being the victim gives you special status, to the point where being a victim is beneficial. “I’m being victimized, therefore, I’m the protagonist in this story, therefore, you need to listen to me, or else you’re a bad person.” If you can prove your victimization, it gives you a sense of power.

In my field particularly, students are told they’re being oppressed by being taught standard English. But standard English is a valuable tool. You’re not replacing a dialect; you’re adding a dialect you can use if it comes in handy. So, rejecting standard English feels like you’re sticking it to the man, but really, you’re hurting yourself. So it’s a semblance of empowerment.

What is true empowerment? 

I abide by empowerment theory, which defines empowerment as the confluence of three components.

The first is intrapersonal, which is how you talk to yourself, self-regulate, manage your emotions, be mindful, and things like that. The second component is interactive or interactional empowerment, which is knowing your context and acting accordingly. Now, if your intrapersonal empowerment is intact, you’re better able to be interactional because you’re not projecting your anxieties onto the present situation. The third component is behavioral empowerment, which means how do we work together? How do we find common goals, even if we may be different?

According to this theory, you need all three to be truly empowered. And I think that’s missing from a lot of anti-racist pedagogy, especially the intrapersonal component. Even the most well-intentioned diversity trainers skip that one. We need to look at self-awareness first and foremost, and we’re not doing that.

Can you tell me about what you refer to as the soft bigotry of anti-racist pedagogy? 

The most egregious example is the equitable math movement, which states that expecting black students to get the right answer is inherently racist. Teaching, the teacher knowing the knowledge and instilling it into the students, that’s somehow racist as well because it’s paternalistic. Those are just two of the more mind-blowing tenets of equitable math that show the soft bigotry of anti-racist pedagogy. In general, it’s the demonization of rigor and merit when it comes to students of color, but not other students.

Let’s get into solutions. What kind of rhetoric would you like to see more of to promote genuine empowerment and tolerance? 

Two things. One, I want to instill the empowerment theory I was talking about earlier and have people develop heuristics for exploring oneself, exploring one’s environment, and working with others.

Two, we need to reemphasize and make explicit classical liberal values. Classical liberalism is social justice if you do it right. There needs to be an explicit movement reemphasizing the primacy of reason, individuality, free speech, and deliberative democracy. We can’t just assume that these ideas are in the air. We have to assume that people don’t know about them and be upfront and direct about their value, especially individuality and free speech since we’re now steeped in racial essentialism and the idea that words are violence.

If words are harmful, then people will stop communicating because why even risk it? A lot of the implicit bias training makes things worse because people learn that they should just shut up. I think that’s a huge problem in a country that is self-defined as a place of free speech.

You recently wrote: “Happy and successful people don’t revolt, and one’s ability to adapt correlates to one’s ability to be happy and successful.” Can you expand on this idea? 

Adaptation is about gauging a situation and acting accordingly. However, in my field, adaptation is considered a bad thing. It’s looked at as submitting to an audience that expects you to talk in a certain way. To ask a black person to adapt is white supremacy.

Unfortunately, these ideas are picking up speed. Education and rhetoric are a way of helping people navigate through the world and negotiate situations. If you say that negotiation is just succumbing to white supremacy, then you’re disempowering people. And disempowered people are more likely to be unhappy and unsuccessful and, therefore, willing to revolt.

Is that the motivation? Do teachers want to disempower students to persuade them to join their ideological movement? 

Yes. I know that sounds like a conspiracy theory, but there’s a prominent figure in my field who said that black students who want to learn standard English are being selfish and immature because if they learn skills that will help them succeed in the current system, their success will help maintain the status quo, and that’s a bad thing. So yes, it’s real, especially in my field.

How do you find the motivation to pursue classical liberal ideas which, in some circles, have fallen out of favor? 

A few years ago, I was attacked on the prominent listserv in my field for saying we shouldn’t discourage students from learning standard English or say that the very presence of white professors is a problem. I was attacked by people who I thought were my friends and colleagues.

I took that frustration and anger and channeled it into creating all the things I’ve created since, my books, my articles, my work with Free Black Thought, and all kinds of different things. Instead of having all that silence me, which was the point, I became louder. So that’s how I keep going. Whenever I get tired, I just think of all the people who tried to hurt me, and I say, “Well, I’ll show them.”

The Economist | Tolerance & Prejudice

The Stunning Decline of the Preference for Having Boys

“Without fanfare, something remarkable has happened. The noxious practice of aborting girls simply for being girls has become dramatically less common. It first became widespread in the late 1980s, as cheap ultrasound machines made it easy to determine the sex of a fetus. Parents who were desperate for a boy but did not want a large family—or, in China, were not allowed one—started routinely terminating females. Globally, among babies born in 2000, a staggering 1.6m girls were missing from the number you would expect, given the natural sex ratio at birth. This year that number is likely to be 200,000—and it is still falling.

The fading of boy preference in regions where it was strongest has been astonishingly rapid. The natural ratio is about 105 boy babies for every 100 girls; because boys are slightly more likely to die young, this leads to rough parity at reproductive age. The sex ratio at birth, once wildly skewed across Asia, has become more even. In China it fell from a peak of 117.8 boys per 100 girls in 2006 to 109.8 last year, and in India from 109.6 in 2010 to 106.8. In South Korea it is now completely back to normal, having been a shocking 115.7 in 1990.”

From The Economist.

Blog Post | Communications

We’re Living in a Split-Screen America

The evolution from broadcast news to personalized feeds has fractured how we see the world, but progress is possible.

Summary: Americans once shared a common media landscape, but the rise of personalized digital feeds has splintered that reality into partisan echo chambers. Social platforms now amplify outrage, reinforce tribal instincts, and erode agreement on basic facts. While there is no easy fix, reforms in design, digital literacy, and cultural norms offer hope for a more truthful and united public discourse.


“And that’s the way it is.” At least, that’s the way it was. When Walter Cronkite closed his nightly broadcasts with those words, America was a foreign country. At the height of broadcast news, Americans had differences of opinion but agreed on a basic set of facts about what was going on in the country and the world. Anchors like Cronkite, voted in 1972 by Democrats and Republicans alike as the most trusted man in America, aimed to be impartial and to win bipartisan credibility. But as partisan cable news and talk radio came to prominence in the 1990s, basic agreement on the facts began to erode. And with the rise of social media, it splintered entirely.

Platforms like Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and Twitter personalize content to maximize engagement (time spent on an app, posts liked and shared), showing you what you want to see. That reinforces users’ existing beliefs and limits exposure to opposing views. Strikingly, a Meta-commissioned study of 208 million users during the 2020 U.S. election cycle showed that liberals and conservatives on Facebook encountered almost entirely non-overlapping news sources. Once a social media user spends time looking at political content on one of these platforms, he or she is fed more and more of the same. Far from the broadcasts of the mid-century, modern news is delivered via increasingly bespoke “narrowcast.”

This political siloing is not trivial. Americans now inhabit split-screen realities. In one 2023 Gallup poll, 90 percent of Republicans believed crime was rising, while 60 percent of Democrats believed it was falling. On climate change, a 2021 survey showed a 56-point partisan gap in beliefs about whether humans have a serious impact on the climate system (compared to a 16-point gap in 2001). In 2024, 44 percent of Democrats rated the national economy as “excellent or good,” compared to only 13 percent of Republicans, despite the same underlying economic conditions. The gap wasn’t driven by personal finances, but by partisan interpretations of identical economic indicators. These are not differences of opinion; they are incommensurable beliefs about the state of the world.

But platforms don’t just feed us headlines that align with our politics. They also bait our strongest emotions. In 2017, Facebook began weighting “angry” reactions five times more heavily than “likes” when floating posts to the top of our feeds. That same year, a study found that each additional moral-emotional word in a tweet (think “shameful,” “detestable”, “evil”) significantly increased the likelihood of it being shared and reshared.

This platform design calls up ancient instincts. Humans evolved to detect threats to the coalition, to signal our group loyalty, and to rally allies against rivals. A tweet calling someone “abhorrent” isn’t just an opinion; it’s a tribal call to action. And because these platforms so reliably elicit our ire and impel us to spread it to others, they’ve become outrage engines.

They create sealed chambers that echo our anger, where contrary evidence is unlikely to penetrate. Carl Sagan now sounds prescient when he warned in 1995 of a future where Americans, embedded in an information economy, would become “unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true,” leaving society vulnerable to illusion and manipulation.

And the consequences of the outrage engines don’t stop at our borders. In 2016, Russian operatives used fake personas on Facebook and Twitter to spread inflammatory memes targeting both liberals and conservatives. They didn’t need to hack anything. They simply exploited an information ecosystem already optimized for spreading partisan outrage.

What can be done? There is no single fix, but meaningful improvements are possible.

In a randomized study, older adults who received just one hour of digital literacy training from MediaWise improved their ability to tell false headlines from real ones by 21 percentage points. When Twitter added a prompt asking users if they wanted to read an article before retweeting it, people were 40 percent more likely to click through to the article before sharing it impulsively.

Choice helps too. In one study, switching users from a feed that had been personalized by the algorithm to one that showed posts in chronological order measurably increased their exposure to content across the political aisle. While it may not be a silver bullet, giving users the ability to choose their feed structure, including which algorithm to use, allows for opportunities to be exposed to contrary opinions and to peer outside the echo chamber.

But deeper change is cultural. A compelling case has been made that human reasoning evolved not to uncover objective truth, but to persuade others, to justify our own ideas, and to win arguments. That is why the habits of sound reasoning must be cultivated through norms that prize truth over tribal loyalty, deliberation over impulsivity, and the ability to make the best case for opposing views in order to oppose them on their merits.

This isn’t a call for censorship or government control of the news, nor is it a plea to go back to three-network broadcasting. The democratization of media has brought real benefits, including broader participation in public discourse and greater scrutiny of powerful institutions. But it has also made public life more combustible and has manufactured disagreements about factual questions. In a competition for attention, platforms are designed to maximize time spent on them. That means elevating content that provokes strong emotional responses, especially outrage, and targeting it toward the users most likely to react. The more incendiary the content, the more likely it is to hold us captivated.

What we are witnessing is not a failure of the market, but a particularly efficient version of it, albeit one that optimizes for attention, not accuracy. Personalized feeds, algorithmic curation, and viral content are giving people more of what they want. And yet, many Americans say they are dissatisfied with the result. In a 2023 Pew survey, 86 percent of U.S. adults said they believe Democrats and Republicans are more focused on fighting each other than solving real problems, and respondents across party lines cited political polarization as the biggest problem with the political system.

While online outrage bubbles may not qualify as a market failure in the technical sense, they are clearly a civic problem worth confronting. An information ecosystem optimized for attention rather than accuracy will reliably amplify division and distrust, even while giving users more of what they like to see and share. The incentives are working as designed, but the outcome is a fragmented public unable to agree on the real state of the world. If democracy depends on a shared understanding of basic facts of the matter, then reckoning with these tradeoffs is well worth our much-demanded attention.

CNN | LGBT

Same-Sex Couples Wed as Thailand’s Marriage Bill Takes Effect

“Hundreds of same-sex couples are tying the knot across Thailand on Thursday as the country becomes the first in Southeast Asia to recognize marriage equality…

Under the legislation, passed by Thailand’s parliament and endorsed by the king last year, same-sex couples are able to register their marriages with full legal, financial, and medical rights, as well as adoption and inheritance rights.”

From CNN.

Washington Blade | LGBT

Liechtenstein Marriage Equality Law Takes Effect

“A law that extends marriage rights to same-sex couples in Liechtenstein took effect on Wednesday.

Lawmakers in the small European country that borders Switzerland and Austria approved a marriage equality bill in May 2024. Liechtenstein is the last country in which German is the primary language to extend marriage rights to same-sex couples.”

From Washington Blade.