In his recent article in the Wall Street Journal, How Not to Be an Antiracist” (Wall Street Journal, Aug. 24, 2020), Brandeis Center Founder and Chairman, Kenneth Marcus, offers a sharp and timely rebuke of the “new antiracism” agenda. “The problem with much of today’s antiracism,” writes Marcus, “is that it doesn’t really oppose invidious discrimination and may even foment it.” The reason for this, is that “the new antiracism requires that we take our eyes off what antidiscrimination work is all about—combating invidious discrimination—and focus instead on social outcomes that arise in the absence of racial preferences.” Marcus, who formerly headed the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, points out that when civil rights enforcement agencies aligned with the antiracism approach in the past, the consequences were devastating for individual victims of discrimination. As Marcus explains: It turns out there is a price to be paid when we take our eyes off racial (or sex) discrimination. The price, which victims paid during earlier years, is that enforcement agencies were unable to resolve discrimination cases because they were too focused on statistical disparities and social change. Civil-rights enforcers should address systemic problems where appropriate, as in major sexual-violence investigations that I oversaw at Michigan State University and in the Chicago Public Schools. When we resolve such systemic failures, however, we are addressing a large number of individual claims, rather than looking at statistical disparities and presuming structural problems. The primary focus of antidiscrimination, however, must be on mistreatment of individuals. Marcus cautions that, “[t]he new antiracism’s failures run deeper,” as illustrated by recent events involving University of Southern California student Rose Ritch. Marcus writes: Ms. Ritch was harassed by “antiracist” students because she is a self-proclaimed Zionist. She was told that her support for Israel made her complicit in racism, and that by association she is racist. Students launched an aggressive social-media campaign to “impeach her Zionist a—.” This harassment revived anti-Semitic stereotypes and created precisely the sort of harm that antiracism should fight. Last week, USC’s Black Student Assembly condemned university president Carol Folt for supporting Ms. Ritch. The BSA argued that it was antiblack to denounce anti-Zionism, ignore Ms. Ritch’s “white privilege” and “disregard” the black students who had opposed her. Indeed, Marcus observes, “[t]he new antiracism provides all the wrong answers” in response to discrimination that African Americans and other minorities are facing. Therefore, Marcus concludes, “to defeat racism, we must turn away from the new antiracism.” Wall Street Journal subscribers can access the entire article here. A full-text, non-paywall-protected version of the article will be posted on the Brandeis Center website next month.