Educated, Conservative and Experiencing a Personal Revelation:
A Review of David French’s Epiphany
Yeah, now, I am certain that I can not write fast enough to react to the current events of injustice. I’m overwhelmed. I know, as an anti-racism/pro-humanity educator, I’m not supposed to feel emotional exhaution–because of course, I’m not considered human by millions of European Americans. Somehow, I am so strong, I am not supposed to be “drained” from teaching those who can experience the same national racial moments as me, yet not be transformed, internally, by them.
So, forgive me. Maybe precisely because I am Black, I did not know who New York Times columnist David French was until former ESPN sports commentator Jemele Hill used a clip of him discussing his moment of racial awareness on her Spolitical YouTube channel. That happened last week, on Wednesday, May 6, 2026.
To educate myself, this is what I learned through Google. Born in 1969, David French is a prominent conservative columnist, attorney, and veteran with a career spanning law, military service, and journalism. He earned his B.A. from Lipscomb University in 1991 and his J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1994.
French’s legal career focused on constitutional law and religious liberty–whatever that means.
He served as a senior counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice and later as a senior counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom. (Define “freedom.”)
He also served as the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE.) In 2006, he joined the United States Army Reserve as a judge advocate and deployed to Iraq in 2007, where he was awarded the Bronze Star.
Transitioning into full-time journalism, French became a senior writer for National Review and later a founding senior editor of The Dispatch. In early 2023, he joined The New York Times as an opinion columnist. His work often explores the intersection of law, politics, and faith, frequently advocating for classical liberalism and pluralism.
None of that mattered, in a positive way, to Jemele Hill. Apparently, French is just now processing the fact that he is “a white man having a white experience” and what that truly means outside intellectual acknowledgment that racism exists. She spent most of the 18 minutes on her YouTube, reacting to French’s statements explaining how she learned that European Americans can effectively grow up, and live their entire lives, without being curious about the Black experience or needing any cultural competency to be successful.
Here are some statements he made in a written interview I was able to find on the New York Times website to conceptualize why he was racial blind all these years.
“[One] of the things that aided the rise of the Nazi Party was that it is not as if the Nazis came into power and then everything changed for everybody — most Germans were still living under what he calls the normative state. That would be the normal life and existence that we all enjoy, where you can start a business, you can enter into a contract, you can go to court and enforce your rights against somebody who’s violated your rights. It all is normal. …
In the Jim Crow South, you had a normative state that was enjoyed by white Southerners. They lived in the land of the free and the home of the brave, they had free speech rights and they had free association rights and they had economic opportunity. But then you had a prerogative state that applied to Black Americans in the South, and they lived at the mercy and at the whim of the government — or even just their white neighbors could end their lives at their will and at their whim. …
I used to think: How did Jim Crow happen? How does stuff like that happen? And I don’t wonder anymore. I don’t wonder anymore because as soon as you allow a large segment of the society to live normal lives, even while you oppress others, it takes a lot to rouse the majority to do anything on behalf of the minority.”
That’s a lot. It is insightful–and, a little scary because this man is 57 years old.
In the American concept of personal growth, what he articulated is solely contained within the 15 characteristics of white supremacy culture. It is hyper-individualistic. We are often sold the narrative of the “great awakening”—a specific moment when a well-meaning individual finally has the scales fall from their eyes. French, a man of formidable intellect and deep roots in the conservative evangelical tradition, personifies this archetype.
Given the opportunity, he has written extensively about his shock at the vitriolic racism directed at his adoptive Ethiopian daughter. The white people where he lives did not respond negatively to her immigration status or her foreign-ness, but they did respond vehemently to her Blackness. While the personal defense of his child is noble, a sociological interrogation remains: How does a man of his education and age grow up within the borders of the United States and remain oblivious to the ever-present rot of racism until it touches his own dinner table?
To understand this, we must move beyond the comfort-inducing idea that white supremacy is born of poverty or “ignorance.” Neither is a result of a simple lack of information. In the United States, ignorance is not a void. It is a meticulously constructed state of mind. For millions of European Americans, “not knowing/not seeing/nazing” is a functional requirement for their social standing.
The American racial caste system survives because it is designed to be invisible to those it benefits. When French speaks of his “surprise,” he is inadvertently admitting to the existence of the “white bubble”—a psychological and geographical insulating layer that separates the European American experience from the lived reality of the “other.” He isn’t white: he’s normal.
Growing up in Alabama and Mississippi, French was surrounded by artifacts of Black history. He walked on ground cleared by racial injustice and sat in pews of churches that often provided the moral scaffolding for Jim Crow.
Yet, for the European American majority, history is frequently taught as a series of dates and events detailing inevitable triumphs rather than a sequence of consciously thought out and intentionally implemented exclusions. Teachers, preachers, mayors and parents conspire together to cultivate a necessary “strategic blindness.” To acknowledge the depth of how evil racism is, before it became a personal problem, would have required French to question the very meritocracy that validated his own professional and social success.
The primary tool of this blindness is the reframing of systemic oppression as a collection of “isolated incidents.” By viewing racism as a matter of individual “meanness,” rather than a structural framework involving the conscious consent of “white people,” millions can maintain a sense of personal innocence.
European Americans often view the racial caste system as a historical ghost—something that was–but no longer is! This allows for them to feel comfortable while imagining “I am not a racist” even as they benefit from, and reinforce daily at work, the hierarchies that define the “American” life. When French expresses shock, he is reacting to the sudden collapse of the “everything is set up to produce fairness” world he believed he inhabited. The tragedy is that this world only felt fair because he was never the target of white people’s group behavior.
The most uncomfortable truth, which many avoid, is that the racial caste system is not maintained solely by extremists in white hoods. It is maintained through the mundane, daily behaviors of the “well-meaning.”
Redlining: Supporting “neighborhood character” that effectively bars low-income housing.
Funding schools by using redlining logic: Ensuring one’s own children have every resource while remaining indifferent to the systemic underfunding of schools in neighboring ZIP codes.
Self-segregation: Maintaining social circles that never challenge one’s cultural or racial assumptions.
These, and other, behaviors are the “personal choices” which reinforce the racial caste system. They are the physical acts of a hierarchy that ensures some families are insulated from state and economic violence while others are perpetually exposed to them. French’s epiphany suggests that until a “victim” of the system shared his last name, the system itself was invisible to him. This is the definition of privilege: the ability to choose when racism becomes a “real” problem.
When this epiphany happens so late in life, it often lacks the radical edge necessary for true transformation. If the realization of racism’s “badness” is rooted solely in personal grievance, it risks stopping at the defense of one’s own family rather than demanding the dismantling of the entire apparatus.
As observed by Dr. James P. Comer, a Black psychologist, the millions of European Americans who “do not want to know” are engaged in a form of psychological self-preservation. To truly know the depth of American racism is to realize that the “American Dream” has, for centuries, been subsidized by a nightmare inflicted on others.
The depth of David French’s surprise is a testament to the power of that denial. It is a reminder that in the United States, the truth is not hidden—it is simply ignored until it can no longer be avoided. The challenge now is not just to see the fire when it reaches your door, but to understand who built the house out of tinder in the first place.
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