On moral theater – Tyler Austin Harper in NYT:

‘I didn’t know what to make of the dolls. There were a half-dozen Black Barbies, Bratz and more arranged neatly on a windowsill. My wife and I were moving to coastal Maine, and as we walked through an open house, the toys in the child's room bothered me in a way that wasn’t rational but visceral. I couldn’t escape the feeling that in this ritzy corner of New England, these were not only a child’s playthings but also props in her parents’ moral theater, an attempt to compensate for the homogeneous whiteness of their upwardly mobile suburb.

This cynicism was probably unfair. As my wife very reasonably reminded me, they were just toys. But as a Black guy who tends to have little patience for the performative signaling of rich white progressives, the dolls felt like yet another eye-roll-worthy gesture. And this irritation was no doubt related to my own anxiety that a similar fate awaited me: filling a playroom with multiracial toys and books in a desperate attempt to introduce diversity into a place that has everything except people with different skin tones. Now that I have a child on the way, this anxiety has real stakes. As Thomas Chatterton Williams has observed, perhaps nothing helps one see the tortuous logic of race in America like the prospect of raising a biracial child.’

(…)

‘Social justice parenting starts from evidence-based foundations. But as with other offshoots of antiracism, it has increasingly devolved into a self-help program for wealthy white progressives. The discourse has become a grab bag — and, one suspects, a cash grab — where serious research mingles with New Age sloganeering and self-care practices designed to soothe the troubled souls of guilty liberals.’

(…)

‘As an academic with expertise in the history of science, I am struck by just how much overlap there is between social justice parenting’s fixation on phenotypes and that found in 19th- and early-20th-century race science, lending credence to John McWhorter’s observation that antiracism might be better understood as a kind of “neoracism” that peddles new forms of race essentialism under the guise of liberation.’

(…)

‘So until then I’ll buy some Black toys and some white ones. I’ll explain that people come in different colors and that they’re not always treated the same. I’ll try not to be weird about it. In the absence of an alternative, I’ll settle for doing my best.’

Read the article here.

Moral theater is the right term for the performance that is meant to show your moral capital. Because after cultural capital and educational capital and esthetic capital (beauty, sort of), there is moral capital and this currency has increased in value the last decades.

That this currency also can save the troubled souls of certain liberals must be the reason for the increase.

Improvements in the real world are merely an afterthought, as this article states. Or less than an improvement, antiracism turned out to be a kind of 'neoracism'.