Remember the summer of 2020? Across the country, people protested the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. What came next, however, became the stuff of parody: Corporations put out bland statements like “Gushers wouldn’t be Gushers without the Black community" and “Speaking out is worth it." Democrats kneeled while dressed in kente stoles. Anti-racist reading lists made the rounds. In his new book, Summer of Our Discontent, Thomas Chatterton Williams takes aim at that time, lamenting the rise of a “social justice orthodoxy” that, in his view, has put a stranglehold on free thought and expression that continues today. What’s more, he goes on, what was there really to complain about anyway? “Discontent has exploded even as life in the United States in real terms has never been better — or fairer — for black people and other historically disadvantaged minority communities,” Williams writes. What the protesters were really after, he continues, was status and power.
The same could be said of Williams, New York’s Andrea Long Chu argues in her review of his book. “Critics of social justice tend to inhabit the exact professional milieu where social justice has been most thoroughly integrated with the endless pursuit of profit,” she writes. “Liberal intellectuals like Williams have thus experienced the rise of DEI less as a generalized threat to the democratic order and more as a personal betrayal by the institutions that they had, until recently, believed it was their job to defend.” Like all of Andrea’s writing, this essay is not just a review of a book, but a deep, expansive engagement with the ideas that came out of that summer — ones that remain hotly contested today.
—Gazelle Emami, editorial director, New York
