Is Sheldon Whitehouse a Racist or an Anti-racist?

This defense of Sheldon Whitehouse’s membership in an all-white beach club is doing the rounds:

Whitehouse’s spokesman has offered a similar line, contending that the senator “has dedicated his entire career to promoting equity and protecting civil rights, as his record shows.”

A good number of people have pushed back against these retorts by pointing out that they are little more than “do as I say not as I do” arguments that give those with the “correct” political beliefs a standing exemption from judgment. And, of course, they are precisely that. What David Cicilline and others are doing for Sheldon Whitehouse here is akin to what feminists did for Bill Clinton back in the 1990s.

But the defenses of Whitehouse are something more than just that: They are neat illustrations of why the Left’s claims about “systemic racism” are likely to collapse into a pile of politically expedient self-contradictions.

I do not believe for a moment that Sheldon Whitehouse is a racist or a white supremacist or an enemy of “people of color.” But the thing is, when considered through the lens popularized by the Ibram X. Kendis of the world (and endorsed by Whitehouse himself), that doesn’t actually matter. What matters, per Kendi, is whether Sheldon Whitehouse is perpetuating racist structures or fighting against racist structures.

Here’s how Kendi sets up his dichotomy:

A racist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity between racial groups. An antiracist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial equity between racial groups.

And, per Kendi, there is nothing in between.

On which side of Kendi’s two-toned line do we think maintaining a membership in an all-white beach club sits? (Whatever he says now, Whitehouse clearly believed until this week that his club was for whites only.) What about keeping that membership for 15 years after first being asked about it? What about promising to leave in 2006 and then declining to do so? What about justifying that membership on the grounds that it’s a “long tradition”? Last year, Sheldon Whitehouse proclaimed that “we can and must do better to root out systemic racism in its many forms and meet America’s full promise of justice for all.” How does his behavior accord with his words?

Again: I do not think that Whitehouse is a bigot. (I think he’s a raving lunatic, but that’s a separate question.) I do not think that Kendi’s framework is a useful one. But, as a classical liberal who loathes this Manichean nonsense, I’m not the one who needs convincing here. Other people are. And if the moment that one of the supposed “good guys” is caught in a trap of his own side’s making, the major players on that side revert to discussion of that good guy’s character . . . well, then the whole Kendiesque framework will fall apart before it has ever really got off the ground.