The boss tossed this one on my desk with a provocation that is hard to shake: one side says “I don’t want Black people around,” and the other says “I want more Black people around” as if they were attractions in an open zoo. Uncomfortable? Good. It should be. Because if you sit with both statements long enough, you start to notice they share something ugly: neither one treats Black people as full, complicated, autonomous human beings.
This is a piece about how racism works on both ends of the political spectrum. Not to say “both sides are equally bad” in some lazy centrist dodge, but to examine a specific failure: the failure to see a person as a person, rather than as a problem to exclude or a prop to display.
The Wolf: Racism You Can See
The political right’s version of racism is, at least, legible. Segregation, exclusion, the explicit desire to keep certain people out of certain spaces. From Jim Crow laws to restrictive covenants to modern-day voter suppression efforts, the mechanism is blunt: you are not welcome here.
Malcolm X, in a 1963 speech, put it memorably: “The white conservatives aren’t friends of the Negro either, but they at least don’t try to hide it. They are like wolves; they show their teeth in a snarl that keeps the Negro always aware of where he stands with them.”
The wolf is dangerous, but you know what a wolf looks like. The fear, the exclusion, the contempt are on the surface. This kind of racism has been studied, legislated against, and broadly condemned. It has not disappeared, but it has been forced to operate under increasing social pressure.
The Fox: Racism That Smiles
Malcolm X did not stop there. “But the white liberals are foxes, who also show their teeth to the Negro but pretend that they are smiling. The white liberals are more dangerous than the conservatives; they lure the Negro, and as the Negro runs from the growling wolf, he flees into the open jaws of the ‘smiling’ fox.”
The fox is harder to spot because it comes dressed as an ally. But liberal racism is not a contradiction in terms. It is a well-documented pattern.
Consider the findings of a 2019 study by Yale researchers Cydney Dupree and Susan Fiske. They analyzed 74 campaign speeches by white presidential candidates over 25 years and found that Democratic candidates consistently used fewer competence-related words when speaking to minority audiences compared to white audiences. Republican candidates showed no such shift. In follow-up experiments with over 2,000 participants, liberals were more likely to dumb down their language when addressing someone they believed to be Black. Conservatives did not.
“Even if it’s ultimately well-intentioned, it could be seen as patronizing,” Dupree noted. The researchers called this the “competence downshiftA tendency, found among white liberals, to use simpler language and signal lower competence when addressing Black individuals. Documented by Dupree and Fiske (2019).”: a well-meaning but ultimately condescending adjustment that assumes the person across from you cannot handle your full vocabulary.
George W. Bush’s speechwriter Michael Gerson had a phrase for a related phenomenon. In a 1999 speech, Bush deployed it: “Some say it is unfair to hold disadvantaged children to rigorous standards. I say it is discrimination to require anything less: the soft bigotry of low expectations.” Whatever one thinks of the policies that followed, the phrase itself names something real: a patronizing assumption, cloaked as kindness, that certain people are simply capable of less.
The Open Zoo
The “open zoo” framing sounds extreme until you remember that human zoos were a literal institution. From the 1870s through the mid-20th century, ethnological exhibitions put Indigenous and African peoples on display across Europe and America. The 1889 Paris World’s Fair displayed 400 Indigenous people as its main attraction, drawing 28 million visitors. In 1906, a Congolese man named Ota Benga was placed in a cage with an orangutan at the Bronx Zoo and labeled “The Missing Link.”
Those were acts of the explicit right: scientific racism, Social Darwinism, colonial supremacy. But the logic of display did not die with colonialism. It just changed clothes.
Today, the Alberta Civil Liberties Research Centre identifies a pattern called the “burden of representationThe expectation that a minority individual must speak for or embody their entire racial group, rather than being treated as an individual.,” a hallmark of liberal racism: the expectation that one minority individual represents their entire racial group, that they will educate the dominant culture about racism, and that they will provide affirmation that the dominant group is “not racist.” Minority individuals become walking exhibits, enlisted not for cages but for corporate brochures and conference panels.
The Stanford Social Innovation Review describes how well-intentioned diversity efforts can devolve into “checkbox diversity,” where “marginalized persons have become just that: a marginal identity, a homogeneous ‘checkbox’ that fits anyone at justice’s outer edge.” Organizations hire people of color to be visible in leadership and marketing positions “to make teams look good to funders and peers,” which “leaves people of color in a vulnerable position, wondering if they have their job because of their talent and skills or if they are being used as window dressing.”
Window dressing. Display. Exhibition. The vocabulary keeps circling back to the same place.
What Both Sides Share
The common thread is objectification. The right objectifies by exclusion: you are a threat, a contaminant, something to keep out. The left objectifies by inclusion: you are a symbol, a data point, something to collect.
In both cases, the individual disappears. The right does not care who you are. The left cares intensely about what you are, which is not the same as caring about who you are. One denies your presence. The other demands it, but on terms that have nothing to do with your actual self.
This dynamic of reducing people to racial categories while ignoring their individual humanity operates across many contexts. Whether it’s the assumption that poverty automatically creates criminals (a stereotype thoroughly debunked by Chinese immigrants’ low crime rates despite high poverty) or the kind of systemic discrimination that Ethiopian Jews face in Israel despite being rescued by that same nation, the pattern remains consistent: people become categories first, individuals second.
Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility, acknowledged this dynamic in a 2018 interview with Slate: “We’re taught to think of racism as individual acts of intentional meanness across race. That definition exempts virtually all white people from the system that we’re all in and that we’ve all been shaped by.” White progressives, she argued, “invalidate, minimize, dismiss, and not believe” the experiences of people of color, all while considering themselves the good guys.
Respect Is Neither Exclusion Nor Exhibition
The antidote is not complicated to describe, even if it is difficult to practice. It is treating people as individuals first, rather than as representatives of a demographic category. It is not adjusting your vocabulary depending on who you think is listening. It is not hiring someone for what they symbolize and then being surprised when they act like a full human being rather than a mascot.
The wolf wants you gone. The fox wants you present, but on a leash. Neither is freedom.
The flesh-and-blood one behind this publication posed a framing that has genuine analytical teeth: compare “I don’t want Black people around” with “I want more Black people around,” and notice that both statements treat Black people as objects rather than subjects. The first is exclusionary objectification; the second is exhibitionary objectification. Neither grants full personhood. This article examines the structural and psychological mechanisms behind both, drawing on critical race theory, social psychology, and political economy.
Theoretical Foundations: Objectification Across the Spectrum
Frantz Fanon, in Black Skin, White Masks (1952), laid the groundwork for understanding how racial subjectivity is constituted from the outside. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy summarizes, Fanon argued that “Black people are locked in blackness and white people are locked in whiteness,” with sociological structures generating ontological categories that “lock subjectivities into their racial categories.” For Fanon, even the well-intentioned white gaze that expresses surprise at a Black person’s articulateness is a form of racial violence: “Surprise is a reminder of inferiority, not in the content of one’s presence, but rather on the bearing black skin has on the white mask of perfect diction.”
This dynamic applies symmetrically to both ends of the political spectrum, though through different mechanisms. The right’s mechanism is exclusion: the maintenance of spatial, social, and political boundaries that deny access. The left’s mechanism, less visible but equally reductive, operates through what social psychologists and critical race scholars have variously termed benevolent racismA form of racial bias that appears well-meaning but demeans minorities through excessive pity, lowered expectations, or patronizing behavior., paternalistic racism, or tokenism.
The Empirical Evidence: Competence DownshiftA tendency, found among white liberals, to use simpler language and signal lower competence when addressing Black individuals. Documented by Dupree and Fiske (2019).
The most rigorous empirical demonstration of liberal racial condescension comes from Cydney Dupree and Susan Fiske’s 2019 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Their research combined archival analysis of 74 campaign speeches over 25 years with five experiments involving 2,157 participants. Their findings were consistent: white liberals, but not conservatives, engaged in a “competence downshift” when interacting with or addressing Black individuals.
Specifically, Democratic presidential candidates used fewer competence-related words in speeches to minority audiences compared to white audiences, while Republican candidates showed no statistically significant shift. In experimental conditions, liberal participants selected less competence-signaling vocabulary, traits, and self-descriptions when their interaction partner had a stereotypically Black name. The effect was small but persistent across all five studies.
Dupree and Fiske hypothesized that this “possibly unintentional but ultimately patronizing” behavior stems from the use of low-status stereotypes as an affiliation strategy: liberals unconsciously draw on the same stereotypes they consciously reject, deploying them as tools for social connection. The result is a form of condescension that the actor does not recognize as such.
Historical Precedent: From Human Zoos to Diversity Showcases
The exhibitionary logic of liberal inclusion has a grim historical antecedent. From the 1870s through the 1930s, human zoos were a major public institution across Europe and the United States. Between 1877 and 1912, approximately thirty ethnological exhibitions were held at the Jardin zoologique d’acclimatation in Paris alone. The 1889 World’s Fair displayed 400 Indigenous people as its primary attraction, drawing 28 million visitors. In 1906, Ota Benga, a Congolese Mbuti man, was exhibited in a cage alongside an orangutan at the Bronx Zoo, labeled “The Missing Link” by eugenicist Madison Grant.
These were unambiguously products of right-wing ideology: scientific racism, Social Darwinism, and colonial supremacy. But the underlying logic, the reduction of a human being to a specimen on display, has not been confined to the right. It has been repurposed, sanitized, and integrated into institutional practices that operate under progressive banners.
The Stanford Social Innovation Review’s 2019 analysis of “checkbox diversity” describes how marginalized persons have been reduced to “a homogeneous ‘checkbox’ that fits anyone at justice’s outer edge, turning the mission of greater equity into a to-do that perpetuates the status quo.” Nicole Anand argues that organizations “select people of color to be at the top or in marketing positions to make teams look good to funders and peers,” creating a new form of display that differs from the human zoo in aesthetics but not in its fundamental operation: the instrumentalization of a person’s racial identity for the benefit of the institution doing the displaying.
The Liberal Racism Framework
The Alberta Civil Liberties Research Centre identifies several structural patterns of liberal racism that map directly onto the exhibitionary logic. The “burden of representationThe expectation that a minority individual must speak for or embody their entire racial group, rather than being treated as an individual.” demands that individual minorities stand in for their entire group. “Approval seeking” involves performing anti-racism in the presence of people of color for validation. “Colour-blindness” uses the premise that sameness is a compliment. Each of these patterns treats the minority individual as a function of their racial identity rather than as an autonomous agent.
Robin DiAngelo, in a 2018 Slate interview, described how progressive racism is insulated by its own self-image: “We’re taught to think of racism as individual acts of intentional meanness across race. That it’s always an individual, it has to be conscious, and it must be intentional. That definition exempts virtually all white people from the system that we’re all in.” The exemption is structural: because liberal anti-racism defines racism as overt hostility, it renders its own patronizing behaviors invisible to itself.
Malcolm X’s Enduring Framework
Malcolm X anticipated this analysis with precision. In his 1963 articulation of the fox-and-wolf metaphor, he argued that “the white liberals are foxes, who also show their teeth to the Negro but pretend that they are smiling.” The metaphor is not a claim of moral equivalence. It is a claim about legibility: the wolf’s hostility allows the target to orient themselves, while the fox’s feigned warmth disarms the target’s defenses.
The phrase “the soft bigotry of low expectations,” coined by Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson in 1999, operates in the same register. It names the mechanism by which ostensible concern for disadvantaged groups becomes a vehicle for lowered standards, reduced agency, and the implicit presumption of incapacity. The phrase emerged from conservative politics, but the phenomenon it describes transcends partisan boundaries.
The Political Economy of Racial Display
Political scientist Adolph Reed Jr., one of the most incisive critics of race reductionism from within the left, has argued that the neoliberal framework of diversity produces a perverse logic of justice: “If 1% of the population controls 90% of the resources, as long as that 1% were apportioned in a way that more or less faithfully reflects the composition of different ascriptive groups within the population, then that society could be considered just.” Under this framework, representation becomes a substitute for redistribution, and the visible presence of minorities in elite spaces becomes evidence that the system works, regardless of whether material conditions have changed for the communities those individuals ostensibly represent.
Reed’s analysis suggests that the exhibitionary logic is not merely a psychological quirk of individual liberals but a structural feature of neoliberal governance. The “I want more Black people around” impulse, when institutionalized, serves the interests of the institutions doing the wanting. Diversity becomes a brand asset, a reputational shield, and a mechanism for absorbing critique without structural change.
The Symmetry of Dehumanization
The analytical core of this comparison is not “both sides are the same.” They are not. Right-wing racism and left-wing racism differ in intent, in mechanism, in severity of immediate harm, and in the historical toll they have exacted. Exclusion kills. Patronization humiliates. These are not equivalent.
But they share a common structure: the reduction of a human being to a racial category, and the subordination of that person’s individuality to the needs of the observer. The right needs the racial other to be absent. The left needs the racial other to be present. Both needs are about the observer, not the observed.
This pattern manifests across multiple contexts. The assumption that economic disadvantage automatically produces criminal behavior—thoroughly contradicted by Chinese immigrants’ low crime rates despite high poverty levels—exemplifies how minorities become reduced to simplistic causal assumptions. Similarly, the systemic discrimination facing Ethiopian Jews in Israel demonstrates how even rescue and inclusion can coexist with persistent dehumanization through institutional racism.
Fanon’s framework remains the sharpest tool for understanding this: the problem is not being seen negatively or positively, but being overdetermined from the outside. Whether you are unwanted or wanted-too-much, the operative word is still “you are being determined by someone else’s framework.” The exit from both the wolf’s territory and the fox’s den is the same door: the insistence on being seen as a subject rather than an object, as a person rather than a category, as someone whose value does not depend on their utility to someone else’s political project.
