Fatherhood Quote by Stanley Crouch

Crouch opens with a jab dressed as a shrug: "You'd never know that listening to people in the UN..". It’s the sound of an insider rolling his eyes at the polished language of international virtue. The UN, in this framing, becomes less a forum for solving human conflict than a stage where conflict’s oldest engine is politely edited out. Diplomatic speech loves abstractions - tolerance, harmony, global community - because naming the primitive sources of hatred is impolite and politically inconvenient. Crouch’s aside implies a kind of institutional make-believe: if you talk about racism only as an aberration or a policy failure, you can avoid confronting the uglier anthropology underneath.

Then comes the blunt causal claim: "tribalism is the father of racism". He’s not letting racism hide behind modern alibis like "misunderstanding" or "ignorance". He’s tracing it to a deeper reflex: the in-group/out-group instinct that predates modern race categories and can recruit anything - skin color, religion, language, neighborhood - to justify hierarchy. The provocation is that racism isn’t merely an idea that can be debated away; it’s an inheritance from social survival strategies that institutions prefer to pretend we’ve outgrown.

As a critic who spent decades skewering sanctimony across politics and culture, Crouch is also warning against a comforting narrative: that enlightened bodies can legislate away the problem by adopting better rhetoric. His subtext is grimly pragmatic. If tribalism is the root, anti-racism requires more than declarations; it requires a sustained fight against the pleasures of belonging that depend on someone else not belonging.