I am beginning the year with a long piece on the big picture. What is the state of art at as 2025 kicks off? Where are things headed?

The main issue that will dominate, I believe, is cultural institutions trying, and probably failing, to process the confused splintering of the liberal ideological consensus. A faith in a certain type of cultural politics has fallen apart. What comes after, for the moment, is unclear.

The immediate cause of this splintering is the reelection of Donald Trump. The narrative is still settling, but Democrats clearly lost votes across demographics they expected to gain with, growing support only with highly educated voters. Youth moved right, as did significant blocs of voters of color; women did not surge in support of the female candidate. This has caused a kind of paradigm collapse. These trend lines are hard to explain given how much emphasis has been placed on a certain kind of appeal to identity. (And I did write, after the 2020 election, that liberal cultural politics risked digging deeper and deeper into a bubble that was incomprehensible to anyone outside it.)

It bears stressing: The meltdown of the cultural consensus started well before November 2024. It goes back at least to the late Trump v.1/early Biden years. Media began predicting a “vibe shift” in 2022, while The Economist argues that the U.S. has been “post-woke” since 2021. But the fact that the over-emphasis on cultural-consumption-as-Resistance had created a cloying texture—thus potentially alienating the very audience it was speaking to, rather than winning new converts—was already the subject of Molly Fisher’s New York magazine essay on “Pop Culture’s Great Awokening,” back in 2018.

Setting Terms

A particularly confusing feature of the present—and why it is up for grabs, ideologically—is that the phrase “fracturing of the liberal consensus” might mean different things to different people. One of the qualities of what I’m calling “political fracture” is that language itself has broken internally, and that the same terms are being embraced or derided by quite distinct constituencies on opposed grounds.

Post-election, almost everyone has converged on “wokeness” (a fuzzy term if ever there was one!) as uniquely to blame for the collapse in Democratic support. MAGA enthusiasts and alt-right media entrepreneurs have an interest in this narrative, since “wokeness” to them means speaking to the interests of women and minorities, and they have found a brisk trade in stoking resentment toward these groups. For its part, the corporate-liberal center likes the “wokeness has gone too far” narrative because it exonerates the consultant class, blaming naive college kids and petulant activists for their humiliation, and justifying a tack further to a pro-business center—always their comfort zone anyway.

But then a third camp, which might be defined roughly as the “populist left,” offers something that sounds superficially like a similar critique. “Wokeness,” here, is not just a concern with “identity politics,” but a particular genre of “identity politics” that is specifically counterposed to “class politics.” This genre is associated with the diversity consultant industry, à la the embarrassing White Fragility guru Robin DiAngelo. It has been used, repeatedly, to turn righteous demands for systemic change into purely symbolic and tokenistic gestures. For obvious reasons, this type of politics is particularly dominant in art spaces, which prize symbolism and correctness of cultural consumption very highly and cater to high-status educated people.

It is this third critique of “woke” politics that was voiced, for example, by What’s the Matter With Kansas? author Thomas Frank immediately post-election in a Times op-ed titled “The Elites Had It Coming.” He argued that the Democrats had lost touch with working people, that their orientation on affluent professionals led them to assume that they could browbeat the public into correct thought rather than develop an appealing popular program that a broader coalition could rally around (which would have put them into conflict with wealthy donors). Frank began his broadside with a museum wall label, of all places:

Everyone has a moment when he first realized that Donald Trump might well return, and here is mine. It was back in March, during a visit to the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, when I happened to read the explanatory text beside an old painting. This note described the westward advance of the United States in the 19th century as “settler colonialism.” I read it, and I knew instantly where this nation was going.

My problem with this bit of academic jargon was not that it was wrong, per se, or that President Biden was somehow responsible for putting it there but rather that it offered a glimpse of our poisoned class relations. Some curator at one of our most exalted institutions of public instruction had decided to use a currently fashionable, morally loaded academic keyword to address a visitor to the museum — say, a family from the Midwest, doing the round of national shrines — and teach them a lesson about American wickedness.

I’m not sure I agree with Frank on this point. How, indeed, should museums present this discomfiting history? When should it be invoked, when an artwork is being shown for both historical and aesthetic reasons? I’m more sympathetic to these curators than Frank is.

But what’s clear is that we are all surfing the riptide in 2025. To understand what is unfolding now, we must untangle the various threads: serious criticisms of the more cynical deployments of “identity politics” have been systematically conflated with bigotry or misogyny; reactionary politics has gained a lot of audience because it was able to pose as a kind of popular critique, pointing out the obvious intellectual weakness and double speak of liberal virtue-signaling. It’s a downward spiral.

Politics Ruined Art? 

Which brings me to art critic Dean Kissick’s essay for Harper’s, “The Painted Protest,” the talk of the art world this winter. There are things I don’t hate about the essay: It is a big-picture look at trends in recent art, with a strong polemical thrust. And it is an attempt to make a general statement about the present, which is rare. I agree there is a real malaise around a lot of big shows that it puts its finger on. (I’ve tried to critically parse the weaknesses of the shows that Kissick blasts.) And while the reaction from art professionals has been mainly negative, I believe that Kissick probably speaks for a lot of the more diffuse public as it meets recent art, squints at the wall label, and wonders, “Wait… how is this inscrutable object supposed to bring about the revolution, again?”

Cover of Harper’s, December 2024.

However, what mainly strikes me about the essay is how much is not in it. Its argument might be summed up in a single cliché: “Wokeness has gone too far.” There is little explanation for why this happened, or how. “Faith in the liberal order began to fall apart around 2016,” Kissick writes, describing the flagging “optimism” in art’s ability to deliver cool new stuff… and that’s about it.

Interviewing Kissick for the David Zwirner podcast, Helen Molesworth thanks him for “saying the quiet part out loud.” I do not think he does. He blames politics for having “ruined contemporary art” but barely talks about the actual political pressures on art at all, conflates artists protesting actual censorship of pro-Palestinian speech with art he doesn’t like, and barely addresses the suspicion that there’s an audience that hates themes of “identity” because it wants to put people who actually have those identities in their place. (Harper’s is doing an event with Kissick and the vociferously pro-Trump Red Scare podcast, tonight.)

Let me see if I can better untangle the threads, giving my own interpretation of what happened in the same period Kissick is writing about, when a certain vibe went out of favor and another came in. I’ll tell it, as Kissick tells it, through a series of biennials.

What Happened?

The art world was fairly segregated even in the early 2010s. Artist lists were still disproportionately white and male. This fact, oddly, does not merit a mention in “The Painted Protest,” even as the text hearkens back to those halcyon days. In the early 2010s, it became an increasingly popular gesture for critics to run the numbers on artist rosters as biennials were announced, revealing persistent bias. I wrote an essay called “Diversify or Die,” just after Obama’s reelection in 2012, arguing that the art world was whiter than the Republican Party’s coalition and that this fact undermined its claims to effective progressive messaging.

At the 2014 Whitney Biennial, a collective of Black artists called the Yams spectacularly walked out, partly because of artist Joe Scanlan’s contribution, a set of works attributed to a Black female artist named Donelle Woolford that he fabulated. The Yams called Scanlan’s gesture a “conceptual rape.” Interviewing them was my first encounter with the term “white supremacy” as it came to be used in media circles later—not to mean violent racial chauvinism but to designate the culture of white-dominated institutions. Scanlan’s piece was hard to defend when there were so few actual Black female artists in the show. (Although it’s worth reading Carolina Miranda’s interview with Scanlan’s collaborator, Jenn Kidwell, who played Woolford, before making up your mind.)

A painting by Henry Taylor in the 2017 Whitney Biennial. Photo: Henri Neuendorf.

Three years later, the Whitney returned after its big move downtown with a biennial curated by Christopher Lew and Mia Locks. It was good, and specifically so, I argued, because of its variety: The art did a lot of different things. The gender balance was on the right track, and it went some way towards moving the needle on racial diversity, bringing into the conversation artists who were either due for a big moment or about to have their big moment, such as Lyle Ashton Harris, Raúl de Nieves, rafa esparza, Sky Hopinka, Ajay Kurian, Deana Lawson, An-My Lê, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Pope.L, Postcommodity, puppies puppies, Cameron Rowland, Asad Raza, Cauleen Smith, Henry Taylor, Anicka Yi, and others.

No one remembers that. The 2017 Whitney Biennial was completely dominated by the debate over one painting, Dana Schutz’s Open Casket (2016), detonated by artist Hannah Black’s open letter on Facebook calling for the image of a dead Emmitt Till to be destroyed, because Schutz as a white woman was appropriating an image of Black death. The resulting uproar paralyzed that institution and polarized the art audience.

That shockwave, in turn, is hard to understand without remembering that the show was the first to come after Trump’s 2016 election (though it was planned before), with the accompanying finger-pointing within liberal culture about who was to blame. Even the Women’s March, the first big #Resistance set piece, was riven by denunciations of it for overrepresenting privileged white women.

Uptown from the new Whitney, the Museum of Modern Art briefly flirted with civic-society activism, mounting a selection of works by artists from Arab and Muslim countries to make a statement against Trump’s “Muslim ban.” But by early in the Trump regime, a huge amount of political energy was now turned inward, focused on the vexing project of diversifying prestige cultural spaces and cleansing them of bad associations. It was in this context, for instance, that comedian (and future Brooklyn Museum guest curator!) Hannah Gadsby became a sensation for a Netflix special cancelling Picasso, explicitly framing him as a proxy for Trump.

Video of Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette (2018) playing in “It’s Pablo-matic” at the Brooklyn Museum. Photo by Ben Davis.

“A new set of concerns—a self-conscious moral duty in matters of identity, of inclusion and representation—had come to dominate discussions among creators, critics, and consumers alike,” Fisher wrote in New York. “A fundamental question (perhaps the first question; sometimes the only question) to ask of a work was how well it fulfilled these ideals.”

Twitter and Tear Gas

The Schutz controversy had the effect of placing the emphasis on the racial identity of the artist above all else. (Henry Taylor, a distinguished Black artist, had a painting of the 2016 police murder of Philando Castile in the show, which caused no stir.) When the Whitney Biennial returned in 2019, curated by Jane Panetta and Rujeko Hockley, it wasn’t just a bit more diverse; it was mainly people of color. There were, however, two new developments.

One was that the authenticity critique had rounded back on the art media. When a few early critics from the mainly white press corps said that the show felt safe and did not reflect the severity of the times, they were shredded online and in social media as unable to understand the cultural references.

The second was the activist campaign that broke out over Whitney patron Warren Kanders—a tear gas kingpin and thus someone whom anyone with experience of the crackdown on recent Black Lives Matter protests could viscerally identify as a villain—which used the occasion of the biennial to pressure the museum to shame him and refuse his money. That energy even found its ways into the show itself, as the collective Forensic Architecture pivoted to present the video installation Triple-Chaser (2019), an exposé of Kanders.

Installation view of Forensic Architecture, Triple-Chaser (2019). Image: Ben Davis.

Kanders eventually resigned from the board, after four artists declared that they wanted to be removed from the biennial. Yet the initial anti-Kanders movement had been thrown off balance by the criticism from artists in the show about the whiteness of the show’s critics. The protesters had gone so far as to distribute a statement celebrating the biennial’s “important step in decentering whiteness as an exhibition” and blasting “the condescension of those white art critics who are now lamenting that the artists in the biennial are not properly political, that they ‘play it safe.'”

The anti-Kanders activism found success only after the extraordinary force of a letter from three Black art critics unconnected to the original anti-Kanders formation, who took the opposite tack: Tobi Haslett, Ciarán Finlayson, and, once again, Hannah Black. Their text, “The Tear Gas Biennial,” explicitly denounced the use of “identity politics” in art, how “the art world imagines itself as a limited sphere of intellectual and aesthetic inquiry, where what matters, first and foremost, are inclusion, representation, and discussion.” They mocked artists who refused to sign on to the campaign against Kanders yet were “nevertheless outraged when the ‘radicality’ of their work was questioned in reviews” (a dig at Simone Leigh).

I think alarmed curators and museum directors looking on noticed as much who didn’t drop out of the Whitney Biennial as who did, saving the event, narrowly, from full-spectrum meltdown. The protests had explicitly questioned the morality of all the patrons of the Whitney, thereby threatening a complete wipeout of museums’ basic model of operation. Clearly, the moral righteousness of “decentering whiteness” was all that was standing between the museum and the anger in the streets.

Going forward, everywhere, focusing on celebrating marginalized identities and reckoning with history became the primary themes for big survey shows, even as a current of submerged cynicism about this rhetoric grew and grew—though it wasn’t considered polite to air it in public.

White Male Tears

The new discourse of “inclusion” presented itself not just as a rebalancing but as a reversal of perceived hierarchies. From 2016 to 2024, white male artists went from being dramatically overrepresented to being underrepresented in big survey shows—and people hardly commented on it directly. Adrian Searle, reviewing the almost all-woman Venice Biennale in 2022, noted that “one critic complained to me that he felt excluded.” That was as open an acknowledgement of the sentiment as I can remember, and Searle aired it to refute it: “cis-gendered white men have dominated the biennale for over a century.”

Simone Leigh’s Brick House greets visitors in the opening gallery. Photo by Ben Davis.

Personally, I agree that curators should follow their interests, that no show can include everyone, and that all kinds of art histories deserve to be shown, particularly ones that have gone unheard. But over time, it came to appear that the focus on “marginality,” painted with a very broad brush, was not about individual curatorial projects, but an institutional consensus.

The 2022 Venice Biennale—a show, I should say, that I think was pretty great—had the collateral virtue of making visible this ideology. Writing in the catalogue, philosopher Rosi Braidotti stated plainly (as plainly as a “posthuman” philosopher can) that the new ethical imperative of culture was to form “an assemblage between women and LGBTQ+ as the others of ‘Man,’ and the other ‘others’ in the form of non-whites (postcolonial, Black, Jewish, Indigenous, and hybrid subjects), non-anthropomorphic organisms (animals, insects, plants, trees, viruses and bacteria), and so forth—a colossal hybridization of species.”

The exhibition was thus framed not just as a collection of excellent women and trans artists; it offered itself as a model of a new political alignment of everything that was not “straight white men” with all that was good and redeeming. As the art critic Chloe Wyma (full disclosure: my wife) noted in her review of that show:

It remains to be seen what power this imagined community—comprising, I suppose, all sentient and nonsentient matter excluding straight white shkotzim—might flex in the electoral sphere, at the point of production, or in the streets. But if one takes even a quarter-step outside the art world’s magic circle, one can grasp how such rhetoric might serve a revanchist Right that is building terrifying momentum off its own folk demons: in this case, a loony Left elite that has more to say about making common cause with mushrooms than about the rise of rural “deaths of despair.”

Perhaps this current of ideology has had that kind of bigger political effect, as art diffuses into the larger cultural conversation. I don’t know. What’s definitively true is that, within the art audience, this implicit consensus has produced alienation from institutions that has gone almost unnoticed within them—preoccupied as they are with heading off protest over racism and patronage.

Tellingly, the last essay to go viral like Kissick’s Harper’s piece also spoke to this feeling: artist Andrew Norman Wilson’s “It’s Not What the World Needs Right Now” for The Baffler, this past April. It described in rollicking detail the particularly shitty rung of the industry where artists are asked to self-fund projects for visibility and invited to exhibit in glamorous places, even as they can barely feed themselves, stuck in orbit around an art world that seems impossible to land upon. This passage about the decline in Norman Wilson’s once-promising career after 2016 complements Kissick’s account in particular:

Trump is in office, and my work is deemed less “urgent”—“irresponsible,” even. A curator who selected me for an Art Basel commission ghosts me. A gallerist who wants to work with me says she can’t add a white man to her roster. An esteemed curator from the Middle East tells me I should probably get a day job for a while because my career outlook in the art world is bleak. It becomes trendy to believe that images within contemporary art contexts can directly achieve the goals of political struggle. The proliferation of bad faith gestures toward political change and the aestheticized consumption of other people’s suffering sickens me, especially when these expressions still play into the financial objectives of oil barons, arms dealers, and other vampires.

You see here a smudging together of resentment at personal exclusion—being casually dismissed for one’s assumed identity privileges—with an articulation of an economic precarity that is much more general, with a hunger for less-instrumental pressures on art, with a keen awareness about how a certain kind of rhetoric about marginalized voices is used to shield nefarious actors from criticism. A lot to untangle!

Andrew Norman Wilson, Workers Leaving the Googleplex (2011), on view at MoMA. Photo by Ben Davis.

And all the more striking because back in 2011, Norman Wilson produced a video essay called Workers Leaving the Googleplex that laconically details how he got himself fired from a job at Google after he tried to do a project investigating the second-class citizen status of the a group of workers of color on the tech giant’s campus (currently on view in MoMA’s permanent-collection galleries). He even uses the words “interested in issues of class, class, and labor” in his voiceover. But a decade of post-Trump social justice rhetoric has strained the sense of art as a space for possible solidarities. All that remains is a view of it as a zero-sum game.

I’m not implying that Norman Wilson’s essay is Trumpian. What I am saying is that the sense of exclusion and loss of faith in liberal institutions that it spoke to parallels the wider post-election conversation. Trump’s gains with young men suddenly have pundits haplessly noting the obvious: liberal culture had all but stopped trying to address the frustrations of struggling young men, allowing “economic” and “identity” issues to be played against one another.

A Dynamic as Old as Patronage Itself

But you cannot just attribute the turning tide to white male resentment. The 2024 election showed liberalism losing appeal everywhere—including with the women Democrats were counting on to save their bacon. Including with minorities. And that, too, is echoed in a current of the recent discussion around the politics of art.

As marginal identity became spoken of as the currency of inclusion, certain demands followed about what art did and how it was talked about. “The leading exhibition and publishing paradigms reduce everything to one-note,” the art historian Darby English told this magazine in an outspoken interview in 2021. He decried “a situation where the range of subjects Black artists can speak to is shockingly narrow—far narrower than their actual engagements indicate—and we discuss practitioners as though they were interchangeable with one another.”

There was good art that emerged in this moment—does that need to be said? Does it need also to be said that women and minorities still face plenty of strife in the arts? But given that this “one-note” paradigm served a gatekeeping function in elite spaces, it’s not surprising that all kinds of artists could come to find it constraining. A greater number of people will always be excluded rather than raised up within the winner-take-all art industry. And as the currents of political and economic fragmentation swept across art institutions in the cataclysmic recent past, there were some weird eddies of cultural energy, strange new alignments.

I think of Joseph Bernstein’s 2022 article on the “anti-woke film festival” in Downtown New York, supposedly funded by Peter Thiel, the tech tycoon otherwise best known for obliterating Gawker Media and bankrolling the rise of neo-reactionary politician JD Vance. Bernstein gives a taste of a motley post-woke cultural sensibility that grew under the radar after 2020. “There’s a diverse coalition of Americans who resent the progressive flank of contemporary culture,” Bernstein wrote. “It includes disgruntled liberals who think aspects of #MeToo and the racial justice movement are excessive or cynically self-promotional, media figures who have built lucrative careers banging on about ‘cancel culture,’ and artists and writers of previous generations who find the current cultural constraints intolerable.”

The festival Bernstein described, the New People’s Cinema Club, had been helmed by Trevor Bazile, a queer Black filmmaker from a poor Haitian immigrant family, seemingly regarded by most who met him as a magnetic talent with a bright future. Bazile was prone to shocking work about the “performance and consumption of Black identity” (a video where a Black clown strangled himself to death in front of a guffawing white audience, for instance). In Bernstein’s account, when the Miami art nonprofit Bazile had been a member of, the Borscht Corporation, fell apart over a #MeToo scandal and the more moneyed members distanced themselves from it because they didn’t truly need its support, the young artist found himself even more repelled by the phoniness of social justice rhetoric. Here’s Bernstein:

During the George Floyd protests, as Instagram filled up with black squares and calls for donations to racial justice causes of varying seriousness, Bazile told friends that he was overcome by cynicism. With his “royal flush” of identities, cancel culture should work for him, he said to a friend. But here he was without prospects, all because of Borscht being canceled. Meanwhile, wealthy people he knew, people who didn’t care about him or Black people in general, were making symbolic gestures—chasing clout—on social media.

With no IRL outlet, Bazile leaned into online outrage, now posting willfully offensive and incoherent political content, thereby getting algorithmically boosted by negative attention and connecting with an audience starved for impiety. Eventually his reputation as a shit-stirrer led him to the role of leader of the self-styled “anti-woke” Thiel-fest, because it was open to his sensibilities and because his loathing for liberal doublespeak made the transactional nature of the alliance refreshingly honest: “Bazile knew he had been cast for a part in someone else’s vision of the future. But he accepted the role because he saw in it the chance to pursue his own radical creative agenda—a dynamic nearly as old as art patronage itself.” (Bazile died in 2021, possibly of some kind of overdose; possibly, Bernstein seems to suggest, struggling with this fraught terrain.)

Even if the Downtown post-liberal scene is too small to warrant the outsized media attention it gets, the splintering of culture is a dynamic that has repeated across any number of communities nationwide—look at those election returns. Or look at the podcast charts or at social media: The audiences for conservative-coded media products now stomp on traditional “mainstream” media, just as Fox News dominates cable. However one wants to assess eight years of liberal “culture war,” the fact is that Donald Trump went from losing the popular vote to being unexpectedly popular with demographics that liberals thought were theirs by birthright.

Whither Contemporary Art?

And so the question at the start of 2025 is: “Is the art world going to go post-woke?”

Probably no.

While some social-justice non-profits are backing off more “confrontational” activist language and Hollywood is supposedly abandoning its “awkward ‘diversity era,'” museum culture is much closer to academia, the symbolic headwaters of political correctness. A kind of liberal politics based on high-minded platitudes may have hit the limits of its mass appeal. But the audience that it most appeals to—educated, affluent professionals—is the bedrock of the museum audience, even if parts of it are splintering off in chaotic directions. (Prediction: museum wall labels will still use the term “Latinx,” despite the—overblown—scapegoating of the term for alienating voters from Democrats.)

As for what we’ll get from the post-woke/anti-woke/whatever-you-want-to-call-it New Vibe, I’ll quote myself, from almost two years ago now:

. . . the depth of a subculture is determined by what it is defining itself against. The reigning virtue-signal-y vibe of the #Resistance era was so shallow, indiscriminate, and brittle that you didn’t have to do too much in this time period to seem like you were part of some taboo intellectual subculture. You could get a lot of mileage, and attract a lot of attention, just by being irreverent about liberal pieties. And a number of trend-conscious cultural operators replaced “triggering the libs” with any sort of creative personality or conviction.

If the mainstream vibe does truly shift, and the dominant culture stops being so earnest and irony-averse denying the anti-woke posturing its foil, I’m guessing that most of the jokes produced in this discursive hot house won’t be that funny, and most of the art won’t seem that interesting.

Balancing the competing pressures of this moment of disillusion and confusion like this would be painful—but we’re not starting off from a place of particular intellectual clarity.

Back in 2017, the furor over Hannah Black’s open letter reoriented the museum conversation, inaugurating a series of conversations about race, authenticity, and representation that were worth having. But one reason that reaction was so outsized was the polarizing nature of that text, garnering the sharply divided reaction that drives engagement. And that made it impossible to have a truly constructive discussion, leaving behind lots of unresolved problems.

If you want to think of the back-and-forth over the Kissick piece as a similar potential pivot point, the dynamic is basically the same. The Harper’s essay gives an account of recent art history so strategically incomplete that some people read it as absolutely right-on, and others as absolutely reactionary. Irreconcilable camps yelling at each are a driver of virality, but not a great way to solve problems. I would expect whatever new climate emerges to be just as unsatisfying, just as brittle. And the downward spiral to continue.

Lessons Not Learned

I was going to write, “It didn’t have to be like this.” But it probably did.

When Trump was first elected in 2016, it was a shock. Many people went from relative optimism to absolute anguish about the evil of their country very fast. In lefty circles, you sometimes hear the derisive term “radlib” (“radical liberal”) to describe a certain kind of character who appeared on the stage at this moment: People who used revolutionary or quasi-spiritual language, and who talked about “burning it all down” and the need for a “moral cleansing” of America, but who actually just wanted slightly left-of-center policies and more diverse entertainment.

The shallowness of the “radlib” era of culture is inseparable from the suddenness of that first shock. With no real grounding in the history of artists who faced down sustained political challenges, the newly electrified cultural environment latched onto radical-sounding stuff that ended up weakening potential solidarities and making unsustainable demands on art. As Lucy Lippard once recounted, the failure to know this past meant that new generations were set back in developing their own “ideological debates and strategic aesthetics,” not knowing what had worked and what didn’t before them. In her time and ours, “lessons weren’t learned and the same mistakes continued to be made over and over.”

I guess I’m saying: If we had read Olufemi O. Taiwo, Astra Taylor, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor instead of Rosi Braidotti, Robin DiAngelo, and half-understood bits of Fred Moten, we might be in a better place now.

Expect lots more shocks in a society whose institutions are wobbling, their supports rotted out by a rapacious hyper-capitalist culture, their parts being stripped by oligarchs. Expect a lot of bitter, fractured, irresolvable arguments. It’s going to be that way until the institutions stop failing, which means until we have a better politics.

And God knows what that will happen before that. I expect the worst. But if you want something concrete: Get a study group going of Olufemi Taiwo’s Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (and Everything Else). It’s short. And get the group going in a space where the meet-up is not all about people’s art careers, so some authentic fellowship can be built. Those relationships are going to be important to holding it together.