An Anti-racist Professor Faces ‘Toxicity on the Left Today’
Vincent Lloyd is a Black professor at Villanova University, where he directed the Black-studies program, leads workshops on anti-racism and transformative justice, and has published books on anti-Black racism, including Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination. Until recently, he was dismissive of criticism of the way that the left talks about race in America. Then he had an unsettling experience while teaching a group of high-school students as part of a highly selective summer program that is convened and sponsored annually by the Telluride Association.
[Read: Why not take a Black studies class?]
The students began the summer excited about the six-week seminar, called “Race and the Limits of Law.” But soon, they moved to expel two of their classmates from the program amid political disagreements. Then, as Lloyd later recounted in an essay for Compact Magazine, the remaining students read a prepared statement about “how the seminar perpetuated anti-black violence in its content and form, how the black students had been harmed, how I was guilty of countless microaggressions, including through my body language, and how students didn’t feel safe because I didn’t immediately correct views that failed to treat anti-blackness as the cause of all the world’s ills.”
Before, he had quickly rejected the linguist and social commentator John McWhorter’s argument that anti-racism is a new religion. “Last summer,” Lloyd wrote, “I found anti-racism to be a perversion of religion: I found a cult.”
When I read Lloyd’s essay, I valued the distinct ideological perspective that grounds his critique of how anti-racism could improve. I wanted to converse with him about his experience, the lessons he took from it, and ascendant social movements on the left, in the hopes that our very different perspectives might help solve problems that worry us both.
Below is a lightly edited version of our correspondence.
Early on, you distinguish your essay from other “laments about ‘woke’ campus culture, and the loss of traditional educational virtues.” Given your academic scholarship and varied work on behalf of social justice, no one