What young Republicans are telling us Racial language-policing has failed

Last week, Politico reported on a 2,900-page document-dump of chats among young Republican leaders in several states. It turned up shocking use of N-words and rape jokes and gleeful gas-chamber language. It looked bad in print, of course, and it was. But there’s an argument to be made that it’s the new normal, and represents a social force that isn’t quite what it seems. This force is one that we — especially the media — would benefit from treating more honestly.  

The young Republicans aren’t alone. A subsequent Politico story exposed racial animus in chat by Paul Ingrassia, President Trump’s nominee to lead the Office of Special Counsel (Ingrassia has since withdrawn). On the other side of the aisle, Graham Platner, a Left-populist Democrat and former Marine running for the Senate in Maine, has been exposed for having an SS tattoo on his chest, and making obnoxious comments on Reddit a decade ago (blacks “don’t tip,” rural whites are racist and stupid).

We can and should take this stuff less seriously. 

Yes, the suggestion is horrifying to the olds — which includes you, Millennial readers. But we don’t live in the Civil Rights Era, or the Jim Crow South, or even within their recent memory, whose traumas and reconstructions created the language regime most of us are used to. America has a legacy of slavery and segregation, but America’s racial demographics and multi-ethnic makeup have also been explosively evolving. Zoomers and Alphas are growing up in a world that’s unrecognizable from the one in which our sensibilities were formed.  

First, the obvious: The young Republicans are edgelording and joking. Common sense employed by anyone who has ever been in a group chat knows that this is deliberately provocative anti-woke signaling. Chats make dumb jokes; every person among us could be condemned if the contents of their phone were made public by a hostile media outlet. We’ve had too many scandals and cancellations in which normal human behavior — and humor — have been taken out of context and made to look terrible to continue like this, tempting as it is to declare some things inexcusable.

It’s unfortunate that the repressive language policing and obsessive hammering on race of the past 15 years have given rise to this problem, but here we are. I have personally seen this play out in city schools, to distressing effect for a person raised on liberal codes of speech. The progressive Brooklyn private school that my two children attended (they now go to public school) taught anti-racism and social justice, and focused every year anew on slavery and black history. The result of its well-meaning efforts was to create a hysterical focus on naughty race talk among the school’s little-boy population, and to resurrect antique slurs like “monkey” and “watermelon eater” for blacks and “rice-eater” for Asians. By middle-school standards, the number of slurs found in the 2,900 pages of chat documentation turned over to Politico — a mere 251 — is very low.  

On the surface, this might seem less forgivable in adults, but a closer look at the dynamic complicates the picture. Our private school had little class diversity but was highly racially diverse, and my son and the children around him played basketball on city playgrounds, took fashion cues from the young black guys who worked in the deli next door, and hung out with racially diverse kids from all over the city. While they were being subjected to a relentless narrative of racial animus and remedial propriety at school, the culture all around them was giving different messages. 

For one thing, there wasn’t actually much meaningful difference — or racism — between the white kids, on one hand, and a “waysian” (mixed-race white-Asian) private-school kid, or the half-black son of scientists, on the other. All hailed from similar class backgrounds. How does a kid account for that, given that it’s utterly forbidden to say so? You surely can’t ask questions in the designated forum of class discussion. As for the legendary N-word: At school, the word was grounds for expulsion; yet on the street and in the culture the kids consumed and admired, it was an honorific.

This confusing state of affairs led to a situation where the N-word became every day’s biggest entertainment and hottest sensation for a certain type of little boy — the good kind, I’d posit, who thinks for himself and whose masculinity hasn’t been completely crushed by the Nurse Ratched types who lord over much of his life. They talked about who used it, who didn’t, who whispered it to himself in the bathroom, if the “r” was hard or soft, and so on. 

They wrote it on their scientific calculators by using numbers and letters and turning the calculator upside down. They “tricked” each other into saying it. (Wondering how anyone would do that? Say “Monica” three times fast.) The black kids declared white friends “honorary N-words,” and “gave passes” to use the word, or in some cases sold the passes for things like a haul of Halloween candy. I’ve heard of nearly Talmudic debate on what the protocol is for using your pass. (Only with the person who gave the pass? In the hearing of another black person?)

I mentioned this state of affairs once to a school administrator, who looked utterly crestfallen and said, Well, then nothing we’re doing is working. But he was wrong. The little boys really did take the words seriously — a mis-deployed N-word is a firebomb of transgression. In the absence of sensible adult guidance on the matter, however, they were taking a complicated, divisive, and scary topic and working it out among themselves, inter-racially and un-fragilely — with roasting and insults, passes and upside-down calculators.

Much of this is the insult-and-razzing culture of boys and men. It is a traditional method of blowing off steam, navigating tension, and building mutual tolerance. And even in its current racially offensive formation, it represents a vastly more diverse and tolerant world than the polite, supposedly race-blind one I grew up in.

There were issues, however. The school prosecuted speech crimes because it had to — as we all feel we have to, even in situations where the speaker is probably or definitely joking and no one has been “harmed.” I felt this undermined the kids’ respect for authority, and confused them about what might actually be hurtful or offensive. It also created an economy for tattling on others’ speech violations by way of prosecuting social grievances, which was vigorously taken up — almost universally by girls.  

The analog to the current adult world is pretty sound. The woke Leftist definition of racism has far outstripped the social realities, and our silent-majority fed-up-ness with the state of affairs has played a large part in the rise of Trump. In America, racism doesn’t exist structurally, as any fair reading of our distributive systems will conclude. It doesn’t exist unconsciously, as we’ve seen with the debunking of the great “unconscious-bias” studies. And though it is often defined as such, it rarely exists openly, overtly, or in a self-identified fashion. How many people are really white nationalists, versus guys who say they’re not a racist but feel threatened by immigration? Bad, maybe, but dogwhistle-bad, and people are tired of having their speech decoded by others and turned against them. 

In many senses, generations of race-sensitive education have won. The responses to Ingrassia’s offensive comments — which included the use of an Italian N-word slur — are telling: his Republican peers censured him. The story on the Republican chats bleeps out the words used (at least, it appears to be doing so; it doesn’t explicitly say so, leaving open the possibility that the transgressive Republicans themselves were writing “n—guh”) but it’s worth noting that even in this bastion of edgelords, we’ve got obedient soft r’s. Platner, meanwhile, says he got the tattoo one evening while drunk in the Marines, had no idea of its SS affiliation, and plans to remove it. Fellow Marines have found this credible. 

And yet, we do have problems. Our school, for example, despite its commitment to anti-racism, told a very different racial story in its demographics than it did in its classrooms. Despite the careful, boutique diversity among students, teachers, and administrators, the service personnel were overwhelmingly black and brown, and from the lower economic classes. Such “members of our community” — the bus drivers, the bus monitors, the recess monitors, the guards, the weekend guards, the women who work for the cafeteria service, the cleaners — were mostly lower-paid contract workers employed by outside organizations, who came and went. What, really, does this teach the kids? 

One year as a parent coordinator in charge of collecting money for holiday teacher-and-staff gifts, I tried to include everyone who worked at the school. This quickly became difficult. Our school didn’t employ the lower-level workers directly; in some cases, the outside contracting agencies, when contacted, didn’t seem to know or care whom they’d sent to us. And then the more people were included, the smaller the slices of parent-giving pie became. Suddenly our inclusive rhetoric changed to pious suggestions that we really should be offering larger gifts “for our teachers.” The next year, the initiative was dropped. 

Generations of race-sensitive education have done absolutely nothing to change the second-class treatment of less-paid workers. And credible cases have been made, most notably by sociologist Musa al-Gharbi in his brilliant book, We Have Never Been Woke, published last year, that accusations of “racism” are more of a cudgel for in-group status warfare, than they are a route to equality. Woke Leftist rhetoric, in al-Gharbi’s telling, is little more than the shameless scramble of elites to cloak themselves in virtue while pursuing personal wealth and power, a process that allows them to fool themselves about the economic circumstances of the mostly black and brown people whose underpaid labor they’re benefiting from, one DoorDash order at at time.

So it’s no surprise that some conservative figures, now in power, are picking up the cudgel and using it: firing staffers for chats, rescinding jobs, and hand-wringing in op-eds. What better way to secure our in-group status than to declare our worth in the same old lingua franca of the elite? What better way to dispatch our enemies than to make these popular, incendiary, and high-traffic allegations? Peter Giunta, a now-disgraced figure who was formerly the chair of the New York State Young Republicans organization, claims that his chats were released as part of a “coordinated character assassination” by a fellow Republican. All the dirt on Platner was dug up by opposition research. This is corrupt, and it’s time to end it. 

Many Americans of the populist, Trumpian bent identify much more with the economically disadvantaged contract worker than they do with the virtue-pushing elites. They understand that all the politically correct language in the world is meaningless when it’s papering over the ugly divide between the private-school parents and the people who drive their kids’ buses. In the rowdy online forums, and among ordinary people confronting street-level conflicts between blacks and whites, people are working it out for themselves, or trying to. If we don’t like each other, why? If someone is to blame for our misfortune, who? If this kind of speech makes elites uncomfortable, that just might mean it’s working. 

To “allow” this kind of speech, of course, raises the specter of a world where we haven’t taken into account the American legacy of slavery, or where open racial hatred is encouraged. This is legitimately alarming and extremely undesirable. However, by not allowing it in the current heavy-handed and distorted fashion, we are draining education and the media of their moral authority, shutting off healthy avenues of negotiation, and empowering legitimately unsavory figures like Ingrassia. The only thing scarier than realizing — to put it in middle-school parlance — that much so-called forbidden speech “is not that deep,” is not realizing it. 

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