In the past, such ideas might have been seen as “frankly racist,” Carter noted. “Now, however, they are almost a gospel for people who want to show their commitment to equality.” This belies the reality that Black people, he said, “fairly sparkle with diversity of outlook.”
Given statements like this, it’s hard to imagine Carter welcoming the current vogue for white “allyship,” with its reductive assumption that all Black people share the same interests and values. He disparaged what he called “the peculiar relationship between Black intellectuals and the white ones who seem loath to criticize us for fear of being branded racists — which is itself a mark of racism of a sort.”
At the same time, Carter bristled at the judgment of many of his Black peers, describing several situations in which he found himself accused of being “inauthentically” Black, as if people of a particular race were a monolith and that those who deviated from it were somehow shirking their duty. He said he didn’t want to be limited in what he was allowed to say by “an old and vicious form of silencing.”
In an interview with The Times in 1991, Carter emphasized this point: “No weight is added to a position because somebody is Black. One has to evaluate an argument on its own merits, not on the race of the person making it.”
Carter took issue with the belief, now practically gospel in academic, cultural and media circles, that heightened race consciousness would be central to overcoming racism. However well intentioned, when you reduce people to their race-based identity rather than view them as individuals in their full, complex humanity, you risk making sweeping assumptions about who they are. This used to be called stereotyping or racism. As Carter noted, “there has always been something unsettling about the advocacy of a continuation of racial consciousness in the name of eradicating it.”
Carter’s arguments were controversial at the time, but the book nonetheless received widespread praise. In a cover review in The New York Times Book Review, David J. Garrow, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of the civil rights movement, called “Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby” “powerfully written and persuasive.” The Los Angeles Times said it was “an essential text in the public debate over racial preferences.” The New Yorker called Carter “shrewd, subtle and funny.”
Though a consistent majority of Americans today oppose racial preferences in college admissions — including majorities of Black and Hispanic people, as well as majorities of Democrats — defenders of affirmative action too often dismiss those beneficiaries of affirmative action who publicly express reservations about the policy. These defenders often make knee-jerk assumptions about the political agendas of liberal Black writers like Thomas Chatterton Williams and my colleague at The Times, John McWhorter, falsely casting them as conservatives or “traitors” to their race.