What Is The True 'Racial Essentialism'? A David French Reprise
Race vs Racism
Last week, when I wrote about David French and his late-life realization that racism actually exists, I was not surprised that certain folks were desperate to allow him grace for his cultural “oopsies,” no matter how damaging they were (and still are) for his Black daughter. For them, it is sufficient that French now acknowledges “racism,” even if he doesn’t yet acknowledge “race.” There is a difference that too many people refuse to see.
Someone had remarked that the very idea that French should raise his Black daughter as if she’s “Black” was a form of “racial essentialism” that they reject, which mirrors French’s own expressed position prior to his “epiphany” after his daughter experienced racism even within his well-off, all-white community. Of course, French — like many others who’ve commented on this piece — only really concede that his “color-blind” views were “super naive” in so far as they relate to racism, not race itself.
I’ve long rejected racial and gender essentialism, which has often put me at odds with mainstream liberalism. However, I define racial and gender “essentialism” as the idea that there are good or bad traits that are inherent to a particular identity group. The “Vote Like Black Women” slogan promotes racial essentialism while also imposing liberal restrictions on what “real” Black women believe. For instance, the liberals with “Vote Like Black Women” in their social media account bios rarely include Black women like Winsome Earle-Sears, Mia Love, or even Cori Bush.
Liberalism is better off rejecting racial essentialism but that doesn’t mean we should reject racial identity entirely. That’s an insidious form of cultural erasure. It’s the seemingly benign racism of defining “Blackness” as merely something that white people impose on us through racist action. It doesn’t acknowledge the positive aspects of Black culture and community.
After the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act and Tennessee Republicans carved up Memphis like a Jim Crow-seasoned turkey, many liberals demanded brutal economic sanctions on the state and blithely suggested that Black residents just … move, as if Tennessee or any other Republican-run Southern state is not their actual home. These liberals ironically view the South as “belonging” to white conservatives, and the Black people there are just prisoners who don’t have the sense to escape, even when liberals graciously point to a crack in the fence. It’s a view of Southern culture that fundamentally doesn’t see Black culture.
When I lived in Seattle and even now in Portland, liberals would often treat me as if I were an escaped refugee from the South and spoke about the region as if I shared their contempt for where I grew up. (I don’t.) It was quite revealing. There was this very twisted vision of what the South was like. A white colleague had Black kids but boasted about how she’d “never” visit the South. They were teenagers who had been to Stockholm but never Savannah. They’d been to Amsterdam but never Atlanta. She seemed to think the entire South was a giant Klan rally. She had no concept about the thriving Black communities in the South. (I think Stacey Abrams helped make Georgia politically tolerable for many liberals but not enough to visit — definitely not outside the major cities.)
People originally defined their heritage through their nationally, but over time “whiteness” became the common identity, one rooted in racial supremacy. Even now Eurocentric “whiteness” remains a compelling safe space. It’s why white liberals who are repulsed by Trump and the MAGA domination of the U.S. feel comfortable settling in European nations. There is arguably far less culture shock for the white liberal who leaves the U.S. for England, Ireland, or Germany than there is for a Southern Black person who leaves the only home they ever knew for a supposed “liberal” utopia that is predominately white, like Oregon or Vermont.
When “whiteness” is viewed, even covertly, as “aspirational” and “Blackness” is merely the burdensome cloak of marginalization, then it’s not a surprise that people believed “whiteness” is a gift that they can bestow to someone they’ve “saved” from marginalization. French discovered that “whiteness” is non-transferable, but despite the protestations from his defenders, there’s no evidence that he views cultural Blackness as a gift in its own right.
David French’s daughter was born in Ethiopia. It’s her heritage, not a curiosity of her birth. When French argued against South Carolina removing the Confederate flag from the state capitol building in 2015, he wrote:
It’s simply undeniable that the Confederate battle flag is a painful symbol to our African-American fellow citizens, especially given its recent history as a chosen totem of segregationists. So it’s critical to respond to the argument in good faith. And just as the history of the Civil War is personal to me, so is America’s present racial reality. As I’ve mentioned before, my youngest daughter is quite literally African-American (born in Ethiopia and now as American as apple pie), and when she’s a little bit older, we’ll no doubt have many tough conversations about history and race. If the goal of our shared civic experience was the avoidance of pain, then we’d take down that flag. But that’s of course not the goal.
I’m not interested in engaging with his Confederate flag position. What’s more relevant to my larger point is that French describes his daughter as “born in Ethiopia and now as American as apple pie.” This once again separates Blackness from the true American experience and suggests that she’s become wholly American through her proximity to an idealized whiteness.
The Ethiopian American population was estimated at 386,534 in 2024, and the largest community by far is in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area with at least 200,000 people. It’s a steadily growing population. That’s what freaks out Tucker Carlson, Stephen Miller, and other proponents of the Great Replacement Theory.
America is a distillation of different heritages and backgrounds that are all uniquely American. That is perhaps never more true than for descendants from Africa, who greatly influenced American culture in ways that are too often ignored or minimized. Collard greens and peach cobbler are also as “American as apple pie.”
I’ll reject any suggestion that someone is superior or inferior simply because of their Ethiopian heritage. However, I think that heritage itself is essential to what makes America great. Reducing racial heritage to a cosmetic difference to ignore or a political issue to resolve is a form of racial essentialism I’ll always oppose.
This is a lot of food for thought and a very nuanced take on that. And it does remind me about the people who like to cut off entire states or tell them to secede. There's people trapped in those places. This is exactly why I use the term "unreconstructed state-based regimes of terror" because they don't just apply in one region. They apply in any place where racist, sexist repressive laws are used in the American context to suppress a minority.
This is such a great essay, thank you.
I feel like some other very powerful threads intertwine with this. For example, Black dominance in certain areas of culture and sports is often presented as "essentialist" with an implicit framing that draws from early 20th century tropes of racial determinism (see also positivism & eugenics). I feel like this sleight-of-hand very conveniently papers over the contribution of Black culture in shaping both individuals and society.
The other vital thread I see (also commonly papered over), is how Black American emerged from violence in the broadest sense, and continues to evolve against a backdrop of violence. Recent discussion of repatriations, for example, made people *reaaaal* uncomfortable, and not just conservatives. And now this discomfort has been weaponized by Trump 2.0.
I do appreciate how some activists have started calling out lack of distress tolerance on the left. And folks like Resmaa Menakem and Thomas Hübl have done a great job teaching the mechanics of intergenerational trauma. But it seems like few white Americans really appreciate either the lived experience of existing in a de facto apartheid state or how that history of experience is, in some sense, deeply "essential" to Black culture.