In an article published a couple of days ago, he excoriates contemporary anti-racism and DEI training as cult-like and damaging. It's a fascinating article, and I'm curious about your reactions to it. It's hard to summarize all of his points, but I'll try to quote some of the more important sections below.

The article relates his experience leading an academic seminar on race for a group of high school seniors who were also receiving anti-racism training at the same time. His central argument is that contemporary anti-racism focuses too heavily on silencing the voices of dissenters or even people who are open to questioning the anti-racist orthodoxy. And that his own voice ended up being one of those censored because of his willingness to ask probing questions and listen to/consider dissenting opinions:

On the sunny first day of seminar, I sat at the end of a pair of picnic tables with nervous, excited 17-year-olds... Four weeks later, I again sat in front of the gathered students. Now, their faces were cold, their eyes down. Since the first week, I had not spotted one smile. Their number was reduced by two: The previous week, they had voted two classmates out of the house. And I was next.

Each student read from a prepared statement about how the seminar perpetuated anti-black violence in its content and form, how the black students had been harmed, how I was guilty of countless microaggressions, including through my body language, and how students didn’t feel safe because I didn’t immediately correct views that failed to treat anti-blackness as the cause of all the world’s ills.

This might be just another lament about “woke” campus culture, and the loss of traditional educational virtues. But the seminar topic was “Race and the Limits of Law in America.” Four of the 6 weeks were focused on anti-black racism (the other two were on anti-immigrant and anti-indigenous racism). I am a black professor, I directed my university’s black-studies program, I lead anti-racism and transformative-justice workshops, and I have published books on anti-black racism and prison abolition. I live in a predominantly black neighborhood of Philadelphia, my daughter went to an Afrocentric school, and I am on the board of our local black cultural organization.

Like others on the left, I had been dismissive of criticisms of the current discourse on race in the United States. But now my thoughts turned to that moment in the 1970s when leftist organizations imploded, the need to match and raise the militancy of one’s comrades leading to a toxic culture filled with dogmatism and disillusion. How did this happen to a group of bright-eyed high school students?

...

In the 2022 anti-racism workshops, the non-black students learned that they needed to center black voices—and to shut up. Keisha [the TA for seminar Lloyd was leading] reported that this was particularly difficult for the Asian-American students, but they were working on it. (Eventually, two of the Asian-American students would be expelled from the program for reasons that, Keisha said, couldn’t be shared with me.) The effects on the seminar were quick and dramatic. During the first week, participation was as you would expect: There were two or three shy students who only spoke in partner or small-group work, two or three outspoken students, and the rest in the middle. One of the black students was outspoken, one was in the middle, and one was shy. By the second week of the seminar, the two white students were effectively silent. Two of the Asian-American students remained active (the ones who would soon be expelled), but the vast majority of interventions were from the three black students. The two queer students, one Asian and one white, were entirely silent. The black students certainly had interesting things to say and important connections to make with their experiences and those of their family members, but a seminar succeeds when multiple perspectives clash into each other, grapple with each other, and develop—and that became impossible...

During our discussion of incarceration, an Asian-American student cited federal inmate demographics: About 60 percent of those incarcerated are white. The black students said they were harmed. They had learned, in one of their workshops, that objective facts are a tool of white supremacy... Similarly, after a week focused on the horrific violence, death, and dispossession inflicted on Native Americans, Keisha reported to me that the black students and their allies were harmed because we hadn’t focused sufficiently on anti-blackness...

In a recent book, John McWhorter asserts that anti-racism is a new religion. It was an idea I quickly dismissed. Last summer, I found anti-racism to be a perversion of religion: I found a cult.