Much Ado About Critical Race Theory
People seem to be incredibly preoccupied with this theory at the moment. It’s being discussed in much the same way as they used to talk about the Homosexual Agenda.
I happened upon a fascinating counterpoint to the discussion yesterday. These are pictures by the exceptionally talented New Zealand photographer Greg Semu.
Now be honest, what’s your visceral reaction to these images? Images we’ve seen a million times before with different roles assigned to different people.
We are, of course, interpreting images all day long, all our lives. Below is one from a documentary about my grandfather which someone uploaded to Youtube after his death. On the surface innocuous – A man speaks to a reporter, a photographer a couple of steps ahead and an “attendant” a couple of steps behind. What’s the effect of seeing that casting of roles twice? Three times? More?
Coming up in another post soon: the dubious practices of a law firm named Pedreira Franco that handled my grandfather’s “new” will at the age of 88.
My Mazamet 
I can’t see the documentary, Pink??
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Sorry about that! I’d forgotten to upload the picture 😀 It’s up now
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Muchas grassy ass🤓
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The CRT is yet another distraction wrapped in race baiting (we use the metaphor of being a dog whistle, one that humans can’t hear, but dogs can).
I posted something on the CRT today.
The photos you shared are brilliant, and a worst nightmare for US racists!
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It’s frightening how they’re taking something fairly straightforward and transforming it into a red scare sort of situation.
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It’s pretty nasty stuff CRT. Instead of acknowledging the clear racial injustices, it is going to end up turning good people into behaving as racists. It divides and sees only race and it also is highly religious with the good and the bad and the bad are whites who are born with an original sin that cannot be washed away. By saying this one is labelled a white supremacist so you cannot discuss the doctrines.
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I guess my question is: In a philosophical sense, does identity not define perspective and isn’t that a form of original sin? Are there perhaps things that maybe only a woman would know, or only a gay person would know, or only a beautiful person would know?
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But it isn’t everything. I am asked to rate myself as a woman a white woman a cis gendered woman. My humanity cannot be reduced to its parts. I’m much more than someone else’s perceptions of what I should be and where I belong in society. It is the same when women are asked to move seats because religious men don’t want to be next to them. You are reduced to your parts and someone else’s perception of those parts and where they belong vis a vis them. There is no beauty there.
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So your criticism is of the proposed solutions in CRT, not the idea of systemic racism, or are you unhappy with both?
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I’m not entirely sure what is meant by “systemic racism”. I think CRT says that it is the system whites put in place to keep non whites down and it will always be this way. I think that is inaccurate. I think that there are biases everywhere, even ones that are unconscious and therefore difficult to measure and that we should work to reduce these biases. As a woman working in an IT field, I know that I experience biases that men often miss even when they happen in front of them so I can completely accept that there are racial ones that go unnoticed by whites. It is an interesting fact that the men who have been most supportive of me in my career and also notice when there is something a bit sexist going on are so-called “radicalized” men. Ie: non white men. I think it’s because they are used to feeling different biases but biases non the less. My issue with CRT is it is inherently racist (whites are the only ones that can be racist because racism = privilege + power and this of course is very America centric….if you want to see racism among non whites, let me introduce you to Africa), sets up a narrative of low expectations and victimhood (racist) and is religious by nature. You cannot argue against it or you are a white supremacist. It has been brought into work places where whites have had to make statements to a group that go something like “My name is and I am a white supremacist. I will try to do better”. It is a denial of personhood and humanity and our ability to empathize even if we do not share the same experience. I don’t want to be othered or do othering. I happen to enjoy the company of many non whites and white men.
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haha I meant “racialized”, not “radicalized”. Autocorrect got me again. But I do know radicalized men too and try to avoid those ones because they seem really nuts.
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Agree 100% with Diana. Issues with CRT just to name two: Judges people collectively, fosters victimhood among non-whites discouraging them from even trying to succeed.
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Something fairly straightforward? What a pleasant framing.
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Isn’t it? Are there complexities I’m missing?
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Perish the thought.
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If you were to summarise this theory into basic terms, how would you put it?
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CRT is a movement (not a theory) by activists and scholars engaged in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power. To do this, there is a hierarchy of concerns, namely power is more important than what’s true, identity is more important than shared civil rights, equity is more important than equality. It is a racist framework for considering all – and I mean ALL – concerns. It is unquestionably a totalitarian ideology.
Now let’s return to our regular scheduled programming and say how nice it all is and how nasty people must be who criticize it in both theory and practice.
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Interesting. I’ll begin by saying the term is new to me, but from what I read it was simply theories deriving from a central concept that race has been one of the fundamental markers for the establishment of hierarchy. Am I completely off the mark?
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In the same way that a puritan Marxist will see everything in absolute terms of proletariat and bourgeoise, a CRT activist will see everything in terms of race. They call it “anti-racism.” All inequity is evidence of racism and that’s as far as one needs to go to ‘understand’ the entire universe and everything it contains.
You are white and a racist. You can never be anything but. Every opinion you hold is racist. Every action you take is racist. All knowledge you hold is racist. Every value, every opinion, every fact, everything you own, every desire, every interest, every taste and morsel of food you eat, every piece of clothing you wear, every choice you make, everything about you is really about race and power. You are a racist by being born white (or ‘white adjacent). You can try to be less white but you must strive in everything you do to promote CRT in the name of anti-racism if you want to be less white. That’s why even Coca-Cola printed cans saying, “Try to be less white.”
Everything is about race in CRT.
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In the same vein, do you remember people’s faces the first time you were on a plane that the pilot was a woman?
I recall a general reaction of nervous laughter and many, many jokes.
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Sometimes reversing positions is a very effective way of revealing biases and assumptions. For example, there’s the alternative universe comic strip reversing cats and their owners that is not only amusing but reveals attitudes for what they really are.
CRT is not like that.
You’ll notice the huge push to get everybody to admit that racism is ‘systemic’. Well, it isn’t or we wouldn’t have been able to bring in and implement civil rights. This is not to deny racism nor push aside examples of racism practiced within institutions. But by going along with the lie that racism is ‘systemic’ to the liberal democracy is to use people’s ignorance of what actually is ‘systemic’ (and the grounds upon which such changes and corrections have and continue to be made towards what Obama carefully called “a more perfect union” to show the promise of 1776 (which is what King called the Bill of Rights – a promise rather than a hypocritical statement) IS being realized over time. Hence the understanding that achieving full equality for every individual is an arc. No better example is the complete reversal of public opinion over a mere 60 years about gay and interracial marriage: what was condemned by the vast majority across the entire spectrum of political and social metrics (IIRC 94% & 91%) back the late 50s have completely reversed and now only a tiny minority question this ‘systemic’ right at all. Liberal democracy WORKS towards a “more perfect union.” History DEMONSTRATES this fact… even though there are STILL improvements to be made. But systemically the building blocks are already in place to make these kinds of changes and adjustments and corrections AND bring along the public to uphold them.
The activists of CRT are diametrically opposed to this process by claiming any current shortfall is evidence of systemic failure. This is, to be both honest and blunt while respecting what’s true, a lie. It is a faith-based belief statement no different than claiming the earth must be flat because here’s a flat spot. The argument about systemic failure is the diving board needed to plunge us into dismantling our institutions and replacing it with CRT ideology and deeply racist and discriminatory policies, practices, and procedures. And that’s what is happening. Today. While most of us are asleep at the wheel and fearing that to disagree is just too dangerous… so we’ll stay quiet and just go along to get along. Supporting CRT is a moral and ethical failure of the highest degree and, I think, sedition.
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Is this not a debate about definitions rather than occurrences? How would you define systemic racism? And, for example, weren’t Jim Crow laws a fairly straightforward example of it?
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How do you think it was overturned if the legal system itself was systemically racist?
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Are you implying it’s one or the other? American systems were sexist, and are now less sexist. Isn’t that a fair reading?
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Not the system. This is a really central point about the Constitution and BoR: they present a set of enlightenment principles to follow. If sometimes we don’t follow them, then the problems later will NEVER be fixed by tearing down the original principles! In fact, the problems will only get worse.
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But are you referring to “the system” as being limited to the constitution and BoR? Not civil laws and policy as well?
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Civil laws and policy are subject to these, and so are not systemic. They can – and have – been changed IN the system. Get rid of the system or change it into a totalitarian one (as Kendi argues) then there is NO recourse except violent revolution. He argues strenuously for a dictatorship of the ‘racist’ in the name of ‘anti-racism’ using the tool of a public office (the Office of Racial Equity) beholden to no one or any other government branch including the law to impose outcomes chosen by the Elect over the rights and freedoms of all. This IS a totalitarian ideology with this goal in mind. I have no doubt reverse racism to achieve retribution is the real motivator here. And we see this surface all the time when the next victim is loses, when the next riot destroys, when the next cop is charged with ‘murder’, when people are forced by mob violence to ‘take the knee’, when a doctor does anything other than ‘affirm’ a 13 year old to get her on course for a lifetime of significant medical intervention, when another fully intact male sexual predator can go to a women’s prison, when another male can pretend to be a female for gaining an unfair physical advantage in sports over females. The list of retribution and the accompanying glee is hard to miss.
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Are you not mixing up completely separate movements and sets of ideology? It’s a bit like using the term Christian as a catch-all, when in fact each specific ideology has its own set of issues. LDS polygamy, Catholic child abuse, Evangelical kill the gays bill etc. etc.
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No because it’s the identical group-based ideology.
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I don’t see a substantive connection other than the defence of minorities being more often proposed by people on the left of the spectrum
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If by defense of minorities you mean imposing on all certain privileges only on minority representatives.
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Do you feel imposed upon by minorities? I can’t think of a situation where I’ve felt I’ve been pushed aside to make room for someone from another group.
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Lucky you.
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Statistically speaking minority populations in France make up less than 10% of the total. It really doesn’t look like opportunity-wise they have the upper hand.
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More importantly, what do you think it means?
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I was fairly lazy and only went as far as the Britannica entry which doesn’t seem too controversial to me: https://www.brittanica.com/topic/critical-race-theory
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My general take is that systems are conceived by the people who hold power. So it borders on the inevitable that these systems end up being moulded in a way that control is maintained by those who have power and their descendants.
Class, education, gender, race and even sexual orientation have all been factors in the equation (to varying degrees.) In America it’s to be expected that African Americans see race as a major variable because it affects them personally 🙂
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Yes, and so it is quite reasonable to want to address these if it creates problems for equality. The problem with CRT, however, is that problems are defined by inequity; to address it means creating equal outcomes. Because people are not identical, inequity will always be present, so there is always more ‘anti-racist’ work to do. This is why it is an anti-liberal ideology in that that we must ‘do the work’ to tear everything down in the name of ‘anti-racism’ in order to build an equitable world, which is why those who lead this movement – the Elect – require total control.
It is perfectly understandable to think all of this is just some kind of weird rhetoric. But the facts on the ground show it is not. We really do have Zoom meetings about how grad students are to use techniques to dismantle free speech and insert approved ideology. We really do have young elementary school kids apologizing in a teacher-sanctioned confession sessions for their skin colour. We really do have a strong movement towards all kinds of segregation in all kinds of ways euphemistically called ‘affinity’ concerns… based entirely on skin colour. We really do have a bunch of gender studies ‘doctors’ declaring racial concerns about black holes merging, about how we can drop admission standards for BIPOC students while raising subjective standards to keep out more Asians and Jews. In action, CRT is deplorable racism being supported and enabled by many people who think they really are trying to reduce inequalities caused by racially biased policies, programs, and preferences. What we are getting back is the dismantling of the liberal state starting with such basic principles as free speech.
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Is your reading of CRT itself or of some people’s interpretations of it and their attempts to address the issues it identifies?
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From the horse’s mouths: Kendri, diAngelo, Delgado, Thompson, Hill Collins for Intersectionality, Foucault for power and knowledge, Giroux and Gottesman for the theoretical Marxist structure and how it applies to framing how to teach ideology, and Krenshaw for how it piggybacks and can be seamlessly applied to the BLM movement. (Who really cares crime is up over 500% in Portland or that girls under the age of 18 are being surgically altered into pseudo-boys often without ANY countering medical or parental opinion is up over 4400%? Oh, but we have to go along with the ACLU who thinks such information should be banned! Yup, the ACLU is demanding Shrier’s book (Irreversible Damage) must be banned!)
In addition, I’ve read all kinds of critiques and criticisms and commentary from those who have lost not just jobs and friends and family and community but entire professional careers for daring to stand against this wave in media, science, medicine, politics, the arts, anthropology, cultural studies, the humanities, philosophy, and especially teaching public curriculum.
This toxic and malignant ideology presented as something it is not – anti-racist – is both dangerous to each and every one of us who thinks we should have individual rights and freedoms and legal equality but especially alluring and seductive to those who think they are actually helping the downtrodden and victimized by merely demonstrating support and going along with maligning the character of those who disagree…. just throw on the label of ‘Bigot’ and ‘…phobe’ and of course the Gold Standard: Racist!.
Au contraire…
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I thought you were for the free marketplace of ideas where everything is presented?
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Yes, that’s why I’m not advocating for banning anything including CRT. I’m asking people to see it for what it is: building a systemic racist state based on removing individual liberty and replacing it with group identity rights and privileges. I also think it’s a religious movement.
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But isn’t that just one angle or subgroup of CRT? Like the Black Panthers had their own particular position in the Civil Rights Movement?
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That’s what it is in PRACTICE.
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I’ve read through all your comments and I’m a bit surprised you seem to dismiss the concept of bias and how that infiltrates systems. Isn’t bias a natural occurrence linked to a survival instinct? Aren’t we always doing things to increase our chances of survival success?
I don’t see how that process could affect every aspect of life and leave out the many systems we create to organise living. That’s how I see the use of the word systemic in this context. In Brazil, for example, slavery only ended 100 years before my birth; that means the aftermath was still very present in my own lifetime. In the countryside the descendants of slaves were still living in the same shacks, still had no access to education or health care etc. etc. That seems very systemic, doesn’t it?
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There is a clear connection between CRT, transgenderism, and other social justice movements. And it’s not a coincidence that BLM founders claim to be “trained Marxists” or that anarchists in Portland sport hammer and sickle on their outfits. CRT clearly divides people into “oppressors” and “oppressed”. This is traced in every aspect of progressive politics – transgenderism, immigration, even climate change. Good old “class strugle” and “bourgeoisie vs. proletariat” with very minor modifications.
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Is the implication that the power struggle between people who have more control over society and those who have less doesn’t exist?
Feminism was a struggle between oppressor and oppressed, and that doesn’t make it invalid. So was the struggle for the American and French revolutions – or for Ukraine independence. These dynamics exist.
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This is a fairly typical misconstruction of the argument between the left and conservatives that applies to many issues – racism, climate change, vaccines to name a few. (I avoid the term “liberals” because I don’t consider the left upholding individual liberties). The left claim that conservatives deny that the problem exists. They say that people who oppose the “green new deal” are “climate change deniers” or that people who believe that any kind of injections or medical procedures must be consensual are “anti-vaxxers”. This is the same line of thought: “people who oppose CRT deny that racism exists”. This is not true. The opposition is not based on denial of the problem. The opposition exists because the policies pushed by the left are totalitarian, be it CRT, the Green New Deal, or mandatory injections.
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Except that I’ve spent my life hearing in a very parallel form that homophobia didn’t exist and that women suffered no discrimination. I think a better discussion is then on what form does racism take? If CRT is wrong, then what’s the alternative analysis?
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Perhaps we should stop saying that all white people collectively as a group are inherently racist, that the US and European civilizations are founded on racism, and start identifying discriminatory policies, practices, and attitudes and correcting them. Usually, CRT activists cannot answer coherently which exact systems, institutions, or policies they find racist. I.e. what they mean by “systemic racism”. The answers are always general and ambiguous. I’ve heard, for example, a mumbo-jumbo like this: “well, to understand this, we need to look into historical context when institutions were created in early 20th century.” Then references to things like redlining which are long gone, but really nothing specific relevant to nowadays.
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What if I were to tell you that although I believe I’m a fairly decent person (on most days I wouldn’t intentionally drive into a puddle to splash pedestrians), I have ideas that sometimes cross my mind that I know have undertones of racism, sexism and even homophobia. So if that’s true for me, how plausible is it that the entire rest of humanity somehow escaped?
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These are all aspects of your biology. Good luck eliminating them. But you can control them.
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If they’re part of my biology, and the same is true for other people, then the point holds that we create tribal systems to improve our chances of survival, right? So if that’s true we can move to second base and accept that the more powerful the tribe, the more sophisticated the system to ensure survival will be, right? So we move to third base.
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I think you’re talking about bias. And I think it’s human nature and hard to rid ourselves of it but we can recognize it and the fact that you know that those thoughts are wrong are a sign of progress because there was a time when those thoughts were embraced as normal and even celebrated. CRT doesn’t recognize progress, at least in its implementation. It sees whites, and only whites, as inherently and forever racist. Anything a white person touches is tainted with racism. This only happens to whites the world over. All other people are not racist.
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Can we then not single out the specific texts or authors who make these dubious claims?
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No. Because if you do you are told you are a white supremacist who is uncomfortable with your power being questioned (see “white woman’s tears”) and you can lose your job if you say this in the context of a training course at work. The only people who can do this are POC like John McWhorther. This wouldn’t even be a big deal if it were just that CRT were a theory that was studied and discussed but what has gotten everyone’s attention is it is being put into practice.
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I guess I’m surprised as to when or how that corner was turned? It’s not part of the law, right? So we’re talking about people or companies taking it upon themselves to impose it?
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I think it started in academia then over the last couple of years has grown in popularity in corporations from an upswell of those same recent grads wanting it.
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And you’re seeing this in great frequency? From the Pinker group site, unless they’ve only selected a small number of examples to show, the number didn’t seem very large. As compared to, for example, the amount if sexist incidents one will see on the streets of Paris just today – from whistling, to comments, to “accidental” subway groping and so forth.
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I don’t know that frequency is the issue as so much as where and what institutions implement it. For example, when the new math is taught where right answers are “white” and “racist” and that you are a racist to ask people to show their work and that is endorsed by the Gates Foundation and implemented in California school boards that is a pretty big deal. Or if you are seeing these trainings being implemented in institutions (higher ed and corporate) that is also a big deal because it means all of these things are institutionalized.
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And still, when I read about the California decision, it just doesn’t look terrible to me: https://edsource.org/2021/after-8-hours-250-plus-speakers-california-board-adopts-ethnic-studies-model-curriculum/651641
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I don’t know if we are talking about the same thing. I’m talking about the link to the new math. That is ridiculous. To say if you are black it’s racist to show your work or get the answer right. It actually says there are different answers to math and it’s racist to expect otherwise.
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I found this on math on the same site: https://edsource.org/2021/california-math-guidance-sparks-new-curriculum-controversy-among-parents/655272
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I think it’s different then or at least doesn’t report on the curriculum accurately. Read this https://equitablemath.org/ Some things, though falsely attributed to “white supremacy” seemed just like prudent teaching methods (like relating math to every day things). Others seemed completely ridiculous like suggesting that people need to work out problems in groups (sorry, I’m introverted, I can work in a group but I’ll be over stimulated and distracted the whole time and won’t learn well) or that right answers are not good. Moreover, it’s patronizing….black kids can’t show work? Please. Here is John McWhorther’s take as well: https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/is-it-racist-to-expect-black-kids
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I’ll read the whole things tomorrow, then start a new post breaking it all down because the comments here have become too confusing for me to follow. I need to get my ideas in order 🙂
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Okay. I’ve started reading the Tema Okun essay, and I get the basis of your criticism now. It’s highly problematic in structure and, well, everything. I’ll have more to say once I’m done.
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We all have dirty and mean thoughts. I’d leave it to individual consciousness. What matters is whether we act on them. And most people don’t.
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Really? You’ve spent most of your life hearing that homophobia didn’t exist and that women suffered no discrimination? Then how did the laws regarding the discriminatory treatment of gays and women change so profoundly if equality rights weren’t a central part of our legal system?
This answers your question, too; the alternative to CRT is to continue the civil rights movement and establish equality – not equity – rights where they are lacking, to use the law to make sure active discrimination on the basis of race is prohibited and that prohibition enforced.
Today, we have the opposite movement called CRT: an activist movement to base rights not on individual equality in law but on equity of results and, to accomplish this, tear down and remove individual rights in law and replace it with group-based rights based on a racial criteria. This IS ‘systemic’ racism in action and this is exactly what CRT is trying to change. CRT is using our institutions and government to game the system, to make racial discrimination legal in the name of equity, thename of diversity, the name of inclusion. It’s anything but.
Why does this matter? Because I do not think one should be judged on the colour of one’s skin but on the quality of one’s character. CRT is diametrically opposed to this.
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Your first paragraph is a non-sequitur. One can hear about all sorts of things which are later changed in law.
If you want a history of homophobia in the past decades, I put one together here:
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No, it’s absolutely central to this issue. That you discard the fundamental principle of liberalism as a non sequitur reveals the problem here.
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No it isn’t.
You said: “Really? You’ve spent most of your life hearing that homophobia didn’t exist and that women suffered no discrimination? Then how did the laws regarding the discriminatory treatment of gays and women change so profoundly if equality rights weren’t a central part of our legal system?”
Those things are by no means mutually exclusive. I’ve heard arguments against abortion my entire life and yet various countries permit abortion. Hearing arguments for or against something doesn’t result automatically in the socio-political implementation of those ideas.
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I questioned the idea that you have spent much of your life hearing homophobia didn’t exist and women suffered no discrimination. What size of rock do you live under? The point I am making is that many laws have changed (that DO recognize inequality for gays and women) for the simple reason these HAVE been part of the public discussion for many, many decades that has LED to these changes. That couldn’t have happened if everyone was busy, busy, busy denying legal inequalities existed.
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Would you say society is still homophobic today? If anything, I’d say, there is a systemic anti-homophobia, systemic anti-racism and systemic anti-sexism. There are laws prohibiting discrimination based on sex, sexual orientation, disability, age, religion, race, ethnicity, pregnancy status, etc. I know this because I have a mandatory training at my work place about these things with training videos and scenarios explaining what not to say and not to do. By the way, these laws prohibit, among other things, make hiring or promotion decisions based on race. I don’t know how racial quotas and affirmative action pass as legal.
And my workplace doesn’t do it from the goodness of its heart. If it does not have these trainings, the company will be liable for any case of harassment and discrimination brought to court. Having these trainings and “whistle blower hotlines”, and a host of HR personnel to investigate reported cases (i.e. systems to prevent these cases) protects the company from liability.
Every bank who wants to be federally insured must show an “equal opportunity lender” logo or be exposed to huge financial liability. Every employer has anti-discrimination policies posted on the wall in the kitchen.
How did these systemic policies came to be? They were produced by the very political and legal system.
This is the reality I see on the ground every day, not on TV. I can go on and on with specific examples of systemic anti-racism in the U.S. I’m not talking about some Fox News propaganda. I’m talking about things everyone in the U.S. sees every day in workplaces, in banks, in rental offices, on the walls of government buildings, etc. And then some woke professor comes along talking about “systemic racism” and cannot give a single concrete example of it other than babbling about “historic context” and policies that have been illegal for decades. Pathetic.
Do I deny that there was systemic racism or homophobia in this country? I’m just saying that it’s ridiculous to say that the U.S. is systemically homophobic when all the mainstream and social media widely celebrates another athlete “coming out”.
Why should we oppose CRT? For the same reason we should oppose lies, slander, and false witnesses.
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I’d definitely say discrimination is still a major part of society. Being gay is illegal in 71 countries, some with the death penalty as the consequence. A number of American states have don’t say gay bills prohibiting teachers from mentioning the existence of gay people. Russia has overt anti-gay laws and their pet countries like Hungary have followed suit. Brazil is a cesspool of homophobia where LGBT people are murdered on a daily basis.
In the case of racism I think we can build a similar case, certainly as applied to a number of aspects of life. I don’t think the celebration of athletes disproves that. Jesse Owens was highly celebrated and yet —
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No one is saying there’s no discrimination! Goodness, but you’re oblivious to your own word games, your own constant reframing of points raised, your decisions to discard what doesn’t suit you. In effect, if there’s ANY discrimination, we should go along and/or actively support the teaching of children to see themselves as members of some victimized or victimizing group. Good grief. You can think better than this.
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Sorry, but yes, you implied it time and again. The way you formulated the argument was that any difference in results is the fault of the individual and in no way the responsibility of how the system is structured. That’s a denial of racism as a factor in the equation.
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Wow. You’re completely off base. I grow weary of this.
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Really good column: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/06/milley-critical-race-theory-marxism-racism-fox-news/619308/
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Yes, the teaching of critical race theory – or it’s parent, critical social justice – should be taught just like Marxism. That would be grand and we would understand Applebuam’s piece in this framing.
This framing is not what is going on in reality.
In reality, the problem is that CRT is not taught this way – as a theory to compare and contrast with others. It is taught as part of (if not central to) public education as a movement one must participate in, and so it as taught, using Marxism as an analogy here, as if it’s a good idea to reduce the bigotry of economic class by getting 8 years old students to be assigned to the bourgeoisie class by lighter skin colour and should have to apologize and explain their inherited economic privilege to dark skinned proletariat kids who are told they have been victimized by ‘systemic classism’ – because that is what the curriculum has them doing for CRT.
It’s deeply racist because it is taught as if the treatment of students and academic expectations should be based on skin colour. This is what the CRT curriculum is.
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I’m reading about the problematic aspects or currents of CRT, but I still have by no means found any significant evidence of this being the frequent model or pattern in teaching. The California guidance seems much more open and flexible than it was implied.
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CRT is not a means to integrate but segregate. Here’s an example.
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That theory would mean we cannot study and understand the history of any societal relationship where there were imbalances of power. Completely absurd.
Again, you’re reducing the definition and attacking the reduction you created. I can see there are issues which can be argued in CRT. The texts I’ve begun reading on White Supremacy Culture are unusual; but I decided to keep reading anyway and my interpretation now is they work as an allegory. If you read them in that form they become a very interesting perspective. In fact one of the authors says: “this is not ‘the’ way to look at white supremacy it is ‘a’ way.”
The idea we should gloss over the history of race relations and discrimination makes no sense.
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The highly discriminatory and racist actions resulting from implementing CRT are not allegorical. They are widespread, growing, and are all quite real. Ontario, for example, just announced CRT is recommended to be implemented across ALL curriculum for the fall of 2021 (that’s well over 2 million students). So it’s not like these effects are rare.
From FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education):
A biracial high school student in Las Vegas was allegedly singled out in class for his appearance and called derogatory names by his teacher. In a lawsuit, the student’s family alleges he was labelled an oppressor, told denying that status was “internalized privilege,” and told he needed to “unlearn” the Judeo-Christian principles imparted by his mother. When he refused to complete certain “identity confession” assignments, the lawsuit claims, the school gave him a failing grade. He has had to attend counseling.
Third grade students in California were forced to analyze their racial and other “identities,” rank themselves according to their supposed “power and privilege,” and were informed that those in the “dominant” culture categories created and continue to maintain this culture to uphold power.
Parents in North Carolina allege that middle school students were forced to stand up in class and apologize to other students for their “privilege.”
Buffalo public schools teach students that all white people perpetuate systemic racism and are guilty of implicit racial bias.
Elementary children at the Fieldston School in Manhattan were sorted by race for mandatory classroom exercises.
A head teacher in Manhattan was caught on tape acknowledging that the curriculum at his school teaches white students that they’re inherently “evil” and saying, “we’re demonizing white people for being born.”
All of these are quite well documented by FIRE (because of the lawsuits they undertook) and links are available for each.
This is not teaching the theory of CRT; these are a tiny part of the growing list of complaints about ENACTING critical race ‘theory’ in public education, in government, in law, in business practices, in entertainment, in media, in publishing, and so on. It’s so far removed from allegory that pretending the pernicious racism that IS CRT is something minor or overblown or not worth severe criticism is more akin to the three monkeys (see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil).
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You’re talking about all this like the concept of privilege is some sort of far fetched idea. Does Canada not still have a titled aristocracy? I remember in Marbella I met a Canadian baron who had restored the Monda Castle and made it into a hotel. In France people distinguished the ancien-regime aristocracy from the Empire aristocracy, from the Roman nobility who bought their titles. All of these are systems of privilege. Systems that we Europeans invented and used to our advantage, with race often being a characteristic used to exclude. There are even rankings amongst Europeans, right?
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Must the Canuck baron not have gotten his title from the Brits?
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And if so he would have had to renounce his Canadian citizenship like Conrad Black had to.
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That’s what I thought. Thankfully we haven’t heard much from old Conrad B. Recently.
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Yes he blabs on sometimes but is mostly ignored now.
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I don’t know the details. Were there not hereditary titles?
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No, I don’t think so. See Diana’s comment,
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We have no structure like that. My example of Conrad Black occurred when he went to England and wanted to be a Lord so he could be in the House of Lords. This to us is repugnant and completely foreign. The House of Lords required that he renounce his Canadian citizenship, which he did readily because he’s an unmitigated snob. This is all repugnant to Canadians and Black is seen as an arrogant villain here.
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There is no such thing as “landed aristocracy” in Canada. There could be people with land but we don’t have lords and ladies and such. Egalitarianism is something we cherish here even if it’s not always easy to do.
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How is society structured? America doesn’t have titles but there’s certainly a class structure.
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There is no formal class structure. People try to fit themselves into a “class” based on income so you often hear of what I would call the “working class” – people who work in factories for example – as being in the “middle class”. Unlike the US, in Canada you don’t go to interviews and get special consideration for the amount of money you have to get into university….it’s all merit based and our university system is mostly public and run completely differently. There is a lot of upward mobility if you can call it that because all people notice is income as classes don’t really exist.
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Interesting. I could be wrong, but I’d be surprised if Canada didn’t have some form of Social Register during the 20th century (and before). A who’s who sort of publication. All Western societies that I know of were organised based on a model of aristocracy in which there was an equation which added wealth by years in control of wealth by lineage.
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I don’t think so. I’m sure there is the primate organization of who’s who but nothing formal. The colonies wanted to escape that. You won’t find that I. Australia or NZ either.
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You’ve led me into a tangent and this afternoon I started reading about class structures in CA, AU and NZ. Fascinating! It must make it very difficult to know you’re better than other people! 😀 How does the police choose who they can beat more forcefully? Do they have to go on colour alone? 😀
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They must have color strips, like for paint.
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They are systemically confused.
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They beat anyone they want to. 😉
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Excellent indeed! She’s almost always brilliant.
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Agree about Anne Applebaum.
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“Wildman and Davis (Edit: Understanding Race and Privilege), for instance, contend that white supremacy is a system of oppression and privilege that all white people benefit from. Therefore, all white people “…are racist in this use of the term, because we benefit from systemic white privilege. Generally whites think of racism as voluntary, intentional conduct done by horrible others. Whites spend a lot of time trying to convince ourselves and each other that we are not racist. A big step would be for whites to admit that we are racist and then to consider what to do about it.”” From Being White, Being Good: White Complicity, White Moral Responsibility, and Social Justice Pedagogy, by Barbara Applebaum, p. 15.
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And you don’t see that in some contexts all of that is verifiably true?
Consider the case of the Belgian Congo and King Leopold. Many of the countries institutions, roads, schools, universities and so forth were built on forms of exploitation so extreme that it resulted in something like 10 million deaths.
The second part of what you cited reflects what you and I were discussing the other day when we were talking about biology and tribalism.
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Some contexts? Are you kidding me? So it’s fine and dandy in – not racist at all but ‘anti-racist’ – to call someone racist on the basis of an immutable characteristic of skin pigmentation?
And you want to defend that? Seriously?
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It’s fine and dandy to explain the factual historical racial context. The same way it’s fine to explain how voting evolved. At first it was an act reserved for few and that slowly expanded, right? Not necessarily because of the good will of those who had the rights to begin with. Civilisation is this process of creating better lives for the group as a whole, that can only be done once we fully understand the processes that went wrong and what the abuses were.
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Here is what I think. That’s why I am a member.
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My view is there will always be sexism and racism and other bigotry. I especially see sexism as never going away given our primate culture. We can work against those impulses but there will always be elements of society that believe certain stupid things. It’s like when I had an Indonesian friend that couldn’t understand why she was witnessing shady behaviour at our work because she was in Canada that was supposed to be free of corruption. I had to explain that there were laws against corruption, and as a society the people had embraced this way of thinking but there will always be corrupt people who do shady things and some will not be caught for them. This was a big eye opener for her.
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I’ve been particularly bemused reading about the recent abuse cases (dead bodies etc) in Canada – thinking to myself, “Ha-ha, they’re as bad as we are in Eu-rope, ha-ha!”
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To many Canadians this is not a surprise. The Residential School System has been in our consciousness for a while but the difference is we were already doing something about it. What people don’t realize is that we have put real government money and action into Reconciliation (https://reconciliationcanada.ca/). Yes, it moves slowly (it’s government) and it probably isn’t enough but it’s more than a lot of countries bother doing and I strongly suspect the US is no better than Canada in atrocities committed against the Indigenous but they don’t talk about it or try to move past it. It’s why I don’t get why people rage against Land Recognitions. They often do not understand the broader cultural context and don’t get that this isn’t a pet project among activists but something worked out in partnership with indigenous people. Someone snakily said to me “what do the indigenous people think of land acknowledgements or has Canada killed all of them” to which I replied 1) there are more indigenous in Canada then any other time so no we didn’t kill them all and you’ve really missed what has happened 2) the indigenous wrote those land acknowledgments because it is what they have done when meeting with one another forever not something whitey came up with. It’s interesting when I attend an international conference that you hear land acknowledgements from Canadians and Australians but nothing from the US.
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“Recent abuse”?
No. Not recent at all. Historical. The inevitable consequences of creating a policy trying to impose forced assimilation on indigenous people using the Church as the overseer for over 150 years. Some success stories, but mostly appalling results. So the policy was completely lifted 50 years ago in the last of them and most closed down prior to that… even though the communal inherited guilt relabeled as a ‘genocide’ is widely championed as still existing today. It’s not. This is a false narrative although some racism still surfaces and is widely distributed as if indicative of ‘systemic’ racism.
But notice not a peep about the same kind of unmarked graves on the properties of Catholic orphanages and Catholic psychiatric ‘hospitals’. Not a peep about the reclassification of orphans into psychiatric patients in Quebec (this happened in the 50s and 60s because the government of Quebec would pay a lower daily amount for orphans than they would for psych patients – a policy later dropped because of harmful consequences), treating over 35,000 children this way and as child labour, providing little if any education, and consequentially producing a generation of children with almost no preparation for adulthood but saddled with all the accompanying and lasting trauma such treatment would cause. This doesn’t fit nearly as neatly into the ‘systemic racism’ narrative as the residential schools do, so no media seems to care about it. At all. It’s much better to continue to sell the ‘systemic racism’ narrative. That has resonance. And it comes with a handy dandy group victimizer – those nasty white Canadians and their colonizing ways. No recognition whatsoever that anything has changed. Nope. A country of racists. That sells.
Funny that.
Yet there is a common thread that produced a common result – something about the Catholic and Anglican Church charged with providing social oversight. Maybe not such a good idea.
So there’s a lesson we should learn that is as applicable today as it was then that reliably produced these consequences. Maybe, just maybe, we should stop imposing public policies that treats people as a group in need of social engineering , a group in need of special reeducation, from those who Know Better. Turns out… not so much.
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I’d argue that a lot is recent – the last residential school was operating in 1996.
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Also, I think he knows that by recent I meant in the news recently rather than bodies still being warm.
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Yeah and I think the international community sees it as recent but for Canada we have been talking about residential schools for years. What bothers a lot of us is that we didn’t even know about these schools and if we did know about them I think we would have been rightly outraged. And why didn’t we know about them? I think because people just didn’t care to report it and those suffering didn’t feel empowered to do so. What bothers me most about those dead kids, besides the obvious (that they are dead kids) is that someone missed those kids. Someone complained and asked after them. And no one listened. And someone abused those kids and no one listened. And the abusers were most lilkely the sort who knew if they got to look after those kids their abuses would go unheard so it attracted abusers (I can say my grandmother was abused by nuns so I suspect people who are nasty tend to go into those positions) and they were confident they could bury these kids (even if they died from causes other than abuse) in unmarked graves, even if the kids were baptized/christened and therefore Christians because in their minds they weren’t Christian humans but animals.
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Most recent closings, true (actually Grollier?) but it’s my understanding that it stopped being a ‘residential’ school – in the sense of where so much abuse took place under Church authority (Anglican in this case) – in 1969 when it was taken over by Ottawa directly (education, like health care, in Canada is a provincial responsibility except for all things indigenous, which is federal for those not in the know). So these graves are not evidence for recent abuse.
What would surprise me is if long used residential schools (where students were in full time ‘residence’ like a boarding school) had no graves of children. My point is that it would be equally surprising to me if none were found at century long operated orphanages and psych hospitals, too, but I have serious doubts anyone would call these bodies ‘evidence’ of recent abuse.
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I think the idea of residential schools was abusive in that many of those who attended them felt they were damaging to them as I think anyone would being ripped from your home at the age of 5 or so and taken somewhere to go to school without even having a say in the matter. So at a minimum that concept to me is abusive.
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Of course and absolutely. That’s why to understand – not approve or excuse) how this could ever happen is to understand that the assumption was that if Indians (that was the term at the time) who, by Treaty with the Crown, were to be cared for like children, they should be treated as such. (I know, I know, the whole Indian Act has been a gong show from the start. But that’s what the courts insist we must have respected in all treaty negotiations.) And children need education to fit into the wider society, in this sense to ‘grow up’. So the policy for assimilation was founded on this misguided idea. Of course it would be a disaster.
To carry out this policy meant the intentional separation of Indian children from native languages and culture and submerged in the dominant culture. To carry out this task was left to those who had some experience doing this: the largest church organizations. This just keeps getting better and better.
Because most Indians lived in wildly remote and nomadic communities, the children were not sent willingly by most parents (Gosh, I wonder why…) and so had to be rounded up and herded to centralized schools by federal authority, meaning the RCMP, where the children would live for much of the year. The idea was that they could return periodically to their homes and parents when and where appropriate but distance and means made this notion laughable. (Just grab the local canoe and head into the bush for a 1000 mile journey.) So kids often stayed in these schools for years and years and years without informing the parents or seeking any kind of permission.
I cannot think of a less qualified cohort of people to raise children then nuns and priests. Yet that is (mostly) what happened. As you know, it was tragic. I cannot think of a single Canadian who judges this entire policy as idiotic, brutal, and disastrous. In fact, I remember some interview I listened to (I seem to recall Barbra Frum, David’s mother) decades ago where one of the reasons why Pierre Elliot Trudeau (the Prime Minister at the time for those who might not know) said he wanted multiculturalism brought into federal legislation (late 70s) was to make sure this kind of misguided policy could never happen again.
The ground radar results of how many bodies have been buried on residential school grounds raises this specter once again. But the people responsible are long dead and the policies completely removed and, where possible, reversed. By that, I mean the schools have been closed. New facilities built in native communities. Land claims settled. Billions transferred to tribes (Canada has some 450 recognized tribes). Last time I checked, the federal government spends through the Ministry of Indian Affairs (I’m sure it has a sparkling new name these days) in excess of over a million dollars a year per capita on indigenous, Metis, and Inuit people and there are still ongoing problems, not least of which is that no amount of money, no amount of services, no amount of caring, is going to change this history. But it did have a life span that has come to an end. That’s the part that seems to go unrecognized.
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Indians or Amerindians to be more specific, is still the correct term in French
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Officially, we recognize Indigenous, Metis and Inuit.
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I think it goes on because 1) finding the graves 2) people are finally listening to what the indigenous have been saying. And you’re right about treating as children. Awful and preposterous and you said it in the most Canadian way, “a gong show”.
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Discrimination exists. If it didn’t, the laws would not be necessary. My point is specific to the United States: racism and homophobia are “embedded” into the U.S. system as much as viruses are “embedded” into our bodies. They are in the system, but the system itself is set up to expel them. Getting rid of the justice system to fight racism and homophobia makes as much sense as getting rid of immune system to get rid of a disease. Calling the system in the U.S. intrinsically racist is simply nonsense.
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Again, I think we’re talking at cross purposes. Viruses are good example because they’re recurrent. Every year people get the flu. It’s part of the structure of life. We treat symptoms, we have vaccines, but it’s a part of life and being able to deal with it means understanding it as well as we can.
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Yes, but blaming the immune system for the viruses and proposing to get rid of it because it’s “broken” doesn’t make sense, does it?
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I think that’s a semantic discussion on the definition of system more than anything else. Could we break it down to something like:
-are there are racist aspects to the way policing is carried out?
-are there racist aspects to the way convictions are given by judges
and so on and so forth.
Specificity goes a long way to de-personalising blame.
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Very few people ask specific questions like this. I think, there may be racist aspects in both cases, but they are not “systemic”. If anything, police is now avoiding blacks rather than actively chasing them. I don’t believe they are stopping and arresting people just because they are black.
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We know what happens when police officers (and especially in the higher ranks) understand their actions will be framed first and foremost by racial considerations: Rochdale and Rotherham. Police non-action became somehow more acceptable to have tens of thousands of English girls groomed for sex rings than risk enforcing the law against the organizers who were people of colour. That’s the power of calling people ‘racist’ and fomenting twitter mobs to get leadership fired on the basis of that accusation alone.
Just look at police retirement and recruitment stats: who in their right mind would want to be a police officer and automatically become a racist by doing so? And the result? Just look at the staggering rises in the murder rate, the violent crime rate, the rate of criminal activity in places where police forces are shrinking, specifically Portland and Chicago and Minneapolis. And for the truly Woke, just look racially at who is being most victimized. That’s what such virtue of name-calling earns: increases in suffering by people of colour. Oh, well done! Anti-racism writ large.
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I live in Portland. Here is an article about police leaving in droves. 50 more officers resigned in June. Funding for police recruitment and training has been cut. Not only there are fewer of them, but they are overstressed, overworked, and undertrained. Guess what that will do to police shooting statistics. Meanwhile, here are the shootings numbers in Portland from a government web site. Just official numbers. To be clear, “North” is predominantly black neighborhoods. Black lives matter. (-:
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In the same way that Muslims are the most victimized people by other Muslims, so too are blacks the most victimized by other blacks. But as long as we frame this as systemic racism, improvements are going to be more and not less difficult to achieve.
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Sadly, this is the case with most of the left policies.
Immigration… Remember the outrage of the left about “children in cages” and “inhumane” treatment of the immigrants by the Trump administration? Well, due to Biden’s implicit invitation for everyone to come to the U.S. through the southern border, now there are more “children in cages” than ever because people send their unaccompanied children across the border in droves or simply drop 4-year olds over the wall. The videos of 10-year olds lost in the desert are heartbreaking.
Climate change… they put restrictions on industries in the U.S. where energy is cleaner than in most places in the world and cause manufacturing to go to China where they burn coal to make stuff for Americans and don’t give a hoot. Not to mention that stuff needs to get sent across the Pacific in ships burning oil. Net impact on climate is negative, but we can pat ourselves on the back and be proud of our environmental consciousness.
Minimum wage… “If business cannot afford to pay a living wage, it does not have the right to exist.” So, businesses lay off workers and close, and instead of making some money, the workers make zero. Of course, suffer the most vulnerable – young people and people without education, but the rest of us can feel so progressive for “caring about working class”.
It goes on and on.
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It was funny to watch a few weeks ago how the “stop anti-Asian hate” movement played out in the U.S. The media reported some brutal attacks on Asians only to find out hours later that these attacks were committed by … blacks. Then Twitter got flooded with the videos of blacks attacking Asians, and the whole “stop anti-Asian hate” thing quickly deflated. Not to say that Asians are more successful in the U.S. than whites which doesn’t fit well into the “white privilege” and “white supremacy” narrative.
It’s also very hard to explain why the “racist” and “hateful” United States have trouble dealing with the influx of immigrants, mostly people of color, who risk their lives to get into this “hateful” place and become more successful in this country than many whites.
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I think you need to make more room for ambiguity. I loved living in Spain except I hated many parts of living in Spain 🙂
In the end we’re discussing pattern recognition and/or frequency, so if we want to move forward successfully we need to first decide what our parameters are.
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I was more drawn to the girls boots.
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Did you just misspell boobs?
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No, but now you have me intrigued {he says as he scampers back to You Tube…}
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LOL! Picture 2 in the post
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Oooh, not that — The Brazilian journalist.
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Not to sound immature or off topic but, BOOBIES!!!! HURRAY!!!! I likes boobies!!!
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I’m shocked!
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Blue-footed boobies??
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Those photos are incredible. You’re right about what constitutes critical race theory.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter.
Practically, critical race theory, like the “homosexual agenda”, is just another rickety platform upon which the burdened may unload their baggage.
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I got those pictures in an email with the explanation in another that came later. The first thing that popped into my mind when I saw the pictures was “outrageous abuse”. So for a millisecond I grasped what it must be like to live with that as one’s reality.
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I would concede that there are roots of white supremacy and subjugation of minorities and women in the founding of US and how Americans capitalism has operated. But the CRT’s forget that the alleged white supremacists incorporated the means to change the system and promote equality inherently as part of the system.
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The two things can exist side by side, can’t they?
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Not in CRT. In this theory whites are always racist. Nothing will change and things are worse than they have ever been. It’s a very confused interpretation.
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Hmmm – interesting. I tend to trust your judgment as extremely impartial, so I suppose I have to read more about this to understand your analysis.
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If someone criticizes CRT he is failing to be anti-racist and is therefore racist. It makes itself immune from criticism by invalidating the motives of the critic, distracting the true believer from what the critic is actually saying.
That is how cults and commies operate.
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Interestingly I’ve been “caught” twice recently in a similar debate regarding French society. My opinion of the French police is positive – and it was put to me that that is in itself the position of someone who’s not part of the groups that feel targeted by the police. Could there be some truth to that?
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Here in the U.S. criminologists have studied disparate impact of policing for 60 years and they always come up with the same conclusion: blacks have more negative encounters with the police because they commit more crime. (Specifically black males 15-25.) We are not talking junk sociology, this has been studied to death.
Confronted with that CRT advocates will either change the subject or say that the lived experience of blacks trumps criminology.
I would say that lived experience isn’t worthless but it is also very subject to heuristic bias. The only way to make any sense of it is within the confines of what we know the statistics tell us.
IMO the main theoretical problem with CRT is that it turns bias into an epistemology. Bias is all pervasive and inescapable, so your science or your forensics are racist, just another aspect of white supremacy.
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But aren’t we looking at a systemic problem if a particular group is at the bottom of the social structure?
In Spain the same discourse exists but the group in question is Gypsies who are not black.
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Whatever the problem is, it isn’t that the police are racist.
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How would you describe the problem more accurately and does race play no role?
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See my response to keithnoback below.
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DP, how does any of that speak against the existence of systemic racism? Or was that not your point (non-snarky version of the question)?
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Of itself it doesn’t.
There are non-native blacks and other minorities who do just fine in America and there are white communities who show many of the same social pathologies as urban blacks. The barriers to success for these groups are most likely internal.
That doesn’t mean those groups should be ignored. Personally I lean towards more economic protectionism: fewer low-skilled immigrants and more tariffs on manufactured goods to force employers to hire more undesirables, even if they are bad workers.
More controversially, I also think there needs to be family policy: link welfare to intact families instead of to single women, and get rid of no-fault divorce. That is harsh but the defacto matriarchies that dominate the lower classes are social poison.
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That word, “internal” is problematic. I think the problem with it gets at the root of this whole argument regarding systemic racism. I already feel like I’ve been speaking out of turn, so I’m going to give an example that I am firmly familiar with. When the Navajo were consigned to their reservation in the 4 corners, there was an active effort to purge their culture. You might recall the famous “kill the Indian, save the man” statement. This included traditional foods. The reservation bound people were supplied by the United States government with staple provisions like white flour and lard. They were given development assistance along the lines of the assistance given to Anglo farmers, which the Navajo were not prepared to assimilate.
Nevertheless, they made the best that they could of what they had. So, they lived sparsely which included sparse physical activity, and instead of blue corn and Juniper ash mash for breakfast, they made fry bread. Soon, fry bread became their own food tradition. Little did they know, but they had a genetic predisposition to develop insulin resistance and type II diabetes, and a high calorie, high carbohydrate, limited fiber diet combined with relative physical inactivity provided the perfect trigger for insulin resistance.
Presently, there is a very high rate of type II diabetes in the population. No one is telling the Navajo people to eat fry bread anymore. It has become part of their culture. Has it therefore become internal; do they wholly own that problem now? Or is their treatment by the larger society on the basis of their racial/cultural identity to blame? If it is the former, it seems that there might not be much that anybody can do about the problem. The Navajo just have to up and change their habits. If it is the latter, then the larger society may be able to help change the situation by identifying its missteps in this process and correcting remnants of the original errors.
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I agree that suggesting the problems are internal is complicated. I also agree that assimilating into the broader American culture isn’t necessarily an attractive goal if it means losing what makes you distinctive.
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That seems like a very Catholic response, but did the Catholic method work historically? Or did countries which imposed Catholic norms simply end up with a different sort of underclass?
It’s not like there was no criminality in Naples, or in Southern Spain or in Ireland. Or for that matter now in Mexico where Catholicism runs deep and still it’s one of the murder capitals of the world.
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I don’t know if is specifically Catholic.
The countries you mention seem to combine agricultural poverty with insufficient industrialization: people can’t earn surplus money from sustenance farming and end up having to scrape by in cities without steady work. Probably very similar to the black and Appalachian migrations of the early 20th century.
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Catholic response? Umm… you’ve never been to West Virginia and part of Tennessee/Kentucky off the main highways I have to presume. DP’s comment in this regard is not religious in the slightest.
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I was referring to “I also think there needs to be family policy: link welfare to intact families instead of to single women, and get rid of no-fault divorce. That is harsh but the defacto matriarchies that dominate the lower classes are social poison.” – that was/is the position of the Church. Is it a surprise I’m not an habitué of the Tennessee Kentucky highway societies 🙂
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That was the position of everyone up until a couple of generations ago.
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Well, protestants allowed divorce. In Spain divorce was illegal until the 1980’s.
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I’m referring to no-fault divorce that was accepted in the U.S. state by state during the 70s. It destroys the finances of working-class men and removes their incentives to marry or increase their income.
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This is pointless, but I can’t help myself. Does anybody really think that there is not systemic racism in the United States? Freeway construction, redlining, health disparities, mass incarceration… Need I go on?
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That’s why I’m asking if this is a debate on definitions, because it seems to me we can find endless examples of systems that are in place that disadvantage certain groups.
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Yes there is racism but it’s not systemic. In other words, the system can be used to correct and change as the attitudes – including racist and sexist attitudes – most popular.
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Then I’m right, we’re discussing the use of the word systemic.
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Yeah well, the answers to questions like why are black people disproportionately incarcerated, why do black people have a significantly shorter life expectancy than white people and why is there such a disparity in family wealth between white and black families, won’t be found at the neighbors house down the street with the big Confederate flag in the yard. The answers to those questions lie in the cultural, economic, and political traditions of the nation. I don’t think anybody wants to simply scrap all of those traditions, but they certainly could use some cleaning up. And they can be cleaned up without a proper examination.
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White Appalachians show almost identical social pathologies except for murder, which is probably attributable to urban gangs.
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Of the nation? Bullshit. If this were the case, then please explain how Caribbean blacks have a higher per capita income than whites, a higher post secondary achievement per capita than only Jews? Obviously there are certain effects that influence outcomes not least of which is family. No amount of ‘systemic’ intervention and self writhing in racial guilt has shifted the reduced results for blacks one iota when ‘education’ and ‘scholastic achievement’ is not valued in the wider racial community. When 97 blacks are killed in Chicago in one weekend and 1 is shot and killed by a cop, guess what hits the news? In fact, when asked what percentage of black youth are killed by police, it seemed quite surprising to most that it was a tiny fraction of less than one percent when estimates ranged between 10% and 50%. But add in how many were killed by other blacks, and this was only the second leading cause of death.
Unless and until we can put aside the focus on race and start concentrating on real solutions for real problems in the real world, none of this will improve. The focus on race is racist to its core.
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Well, thanks for the supporting example. At least we agree that high levels of melanin in the epidermis are not the cause of all these problems. But you really didn’t answer my questions, and I asked first. Got anything better than the rest of that bullshit in your response?
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I did, Keith. I said it was more likely the family – and not the nation held in some measure of never-ending blame – where things like education were actually valued. I’m not alone in pointing this out, either. (You’re welcome to take it up with John McWhorter or Obama). And the rest of my bullshit comment pertained to actual data supporting exactly this point.
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What you have offered is a few factoids tied to some assertions with thin strands of speculation. The pew research Center has published a statistical analysis on the subject. Their analysis shows that in 2013, the median income of black immigrant households, from the Caribbean and from Africa, was $8000 less than the median income of all American households, and $10,000 higher than the median income of African-American households. At any rate, any of these differences in income between groups seem to indicate a disparity based on exposure to social circumstances.
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The point is that these Caribbean blacks should be ‘suffering’ from the same ‘national’ constraints that you propose adversely and supposedly holds back people with more melatonin. Yet they’re not. That fact (love how you call it a ‘factoid’) presents a problem for the explanatory model you offer, which is why I called bullshit on it.
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Do you mean there’s no intersection between race and circumstances?
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What do you mean by intersections? ‘Cause it sure ain’t causal.
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I mean the associations I explained before, such as that in parts of Brazil, Black and poor are synonyms. Not too long ago colour was also equated to honesty/criminality. Not too long ago a Brazilian minister was caught on tape saying dark people are inclined to commit crime.
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In embryology, the pathology related to toxic exposures is cumulative, and particularly consequential when it occurs during critical phases of development. An apt analogy here I think.
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So everything cultural and social is toxic, eh?
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This may help explain why claiming ‘the nation’ is largely responsible for disparity misses the opportunity to find out what factors are quite important.
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Let me throw an interesting spoke in that wheel. The children of homeowners have better home environments, high(er) cognitive test scores, and fewer behaviour problems than do children of renters (The Impact of Homeownership on Child Outcomes by Donald R. Haurin, Toby L. Parcel, and R. Jean Haurin, Harvard University Study). I believe I’ve also read that one of the most important factors in determining if a child will go on to higher education is if a parent did. As Macron said in the last election, the French system has evolved into a form of educational aristocracy where access to the best schools is kept within the circle of a small sector of society. Variations of this apply all around the world.
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And those problems are rooted in their own, somewhat related history, and so require their own remedies on that basis. You won’t fix health disparities in Appalachia by addressing the consequences of redlining. You might by addressing the consequences of an economy based on extractive industries tenant farming.
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I think the issue is CRT is not how you change things. It also depends how you define “systemic racism”. Does it mean that the society creates all it’s institutions with the end goal of maintaining power for whites and whites only? Or does it mean there is bias against certain groups that needs to be corrected because those are two different things.
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Per my encyclopedia Britannica type understanding, (good one) the idea is that a lot of our institutions got launched under the influence of racial bias. Some of that bias led to intentional structures which disadvantaged former slaves and their descendents. Some of that bias influenced our institutions unintentionally. In any case, the trajectory from those initial pushes has influenced the subsequent course of the institutions, whether or not they got subsequent boosts from overt racism along the way.
There are obviously a lot of subtleties and qualifications here. This is the stuff of university level course work, and not so much a high school or below subject.
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The debate is about causation.
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In what form?
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Pity if we go along with the tearing down of the one system that could correct for it, donchathink?
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It is about causation, and therefore history. It’s tricky, because a lot of these structural inequities are salable as practical measures. It made sense to build a freeway through a “blighted” neighborhood because real estate prices were cheaper there. And, of course, the real estate prices were cheaper there because the real estate industry and a few politicians had jimmied the rules to corral a particular racial group into the area. Contemporary politicians and engineers may not even have been aware of the reasons why the property was a bargain in the first place. Yet they went ahead with the road projects, and so perpetuated, unwittingly or not, what the realtors and politicians started.
And what was perpetuated was not just the housing inequity, but the mechanism by which the inequity was established. Because history was disregarded and the circumstances leading to the inequity were tactly affirmed as a natural occurrence.
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Look at the areas of London ‘cleared’ to build the railways and their termini in the 19th C.
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It is important to not that CRT is also taught in schools to children. It’s bad enough teaching the children to separate according to race but math is taught with this theory as well. It purposes things like math: https://equitablemath.org
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Oops I fell off the keyboard or something….it opposes things like not showing your work in math because doing so is somehow a white concept. Some of the ideas in that document are good like relating math to every day life but others are nuts and to link it to race I think it racist and patronizing but by saying so I am a white supremacist.
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Tyranny of low expectations.
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Yes! I also needed you when I was struggling with math in my school days, Merilee!
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😻
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I had a million arguments about math at school – in particular about “showing the work” which I still insist is no one’s business if I have the correct answer 😛 I’d have nothing against the educational system making allowances for methods which are more accommodating of strange people, like me.
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But remember the system would. It recognize your distinct humanity and learning requirements. It would look at your race and decide that because you are if a certain race you must be taught one way. This is a superficial method that denies personhood.
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CRT? Yet another ploy to obfuscate class discrimination.
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I find the intersection fascinating. In North-eastern Brazil which is where I’ve had most experience with race relations, poor and black are essentially synonyms.
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Please correct me if I am making an assumption, but if a black group had been brought to the country to labour, then its poverty would reproduce itself, given no outside stimulus.
Check the Irish in lowland Scotland for a similar phenomenon.
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In America the Scotch-Irish are famous. The Hatfield and McCoy feud being a prime example.
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I’ll have to look that up!
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I think a lot of poor whites working in an open hearth of a steel mill (I come from such people) would find someone in Harvard telling them they have privilege as whites and are trying to suppress other races to maintain power, pretty laughable.
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I am just here for the comments.
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LOL, you can still probably get hit by a stray bullet 😀
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Hope it only strikes me once and fatally. Imagine walking with a bullet lodged on the ass or jawbone
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And the BOOBIES, man! Don’t forget about the boobies!!! 🙂
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It is the legs that interest me more.
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I thought the thing in Kenya was the rear end!
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You are right on that but they don’t interest me as much. Rumours has it that appearances can be deceiving
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I like your thinking – ass or jaw being the most foremost bullet lodgings to come to mind.
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I’m with makagutu – the comments are fascinating.
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Behavior is based in DNA and people from different parts of the world have different DNA. The longed the separation lasts the greater the difference in the DNA and as a result, the more different the behavior. Exceptions of behavior and reactions to behavior change. One group expects one behavior and the other wants something else. Includes the type of government, rules for police behavior and how math is taught. Progress will be slow. Result will be merging and blending of population of DNA or separation.
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Expectations of behavior – not exceptions of behavior. Typo.
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Use of fossil fuels, plastic, fertilizer, pesticides and climate change will probably wipe us all out before this debate is settled.
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That’s something to look forward to then 😀
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The more I read and study climate change the more pessimistic I get. Rough times ahead for next few generations.
You sure stirred up a hornet’s nest with this post Their behavior is also based on their DN, so don’t get mad at the hornets.
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I don’t mind 🙂 I put the post up in part to see who might be able to convince me with their arguments as I don’t feel strongly about this. Thus far I still don’t see the reason for the drama.
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Then you can no doubt effortlessly explain to an 8 years old child with a white mom and a black dad why he has to choose which ‘affinity’ group to attend at his public elementary school in Chicago and why if he chooses ‘white’ has has to apologize for his inherited privilege or, if he attends the black group, why he’s such a victim of systemic white racism. I mean, seriously Pink… it’s beyond satire but official policy in more and more places. Yet you think all this stuff is innocuous? That you’re just another kind of heterosexual?
The bottom line is that ANYONE who believes framing everything about power and hierarchy is going to reduce discrimination rather than make it front and center forever is in desperate need of serious psychological intervention and counselling. The idea we can get rid of racism by making everything about race is not coherent. But that’s the weaponization of language so that up magically becomes another kind of down, racism magically becomes another kind of anti-racism, intolerance another kind of tolerance, equity another kind of equality, diversity another kind of inclusion that will tolerate no differences, biological sex becomes a social construct while gender is inherited but fluid so that biological males can Poof! themselves into females by declaration alone, and we force every licensed medical doctor only to affirm any young girl’s claim to be the ‘wrong’ gender and start the puberty blockers. You’re fine with all this, because you must admit that in today’s world reality is just another kind of belief and that truth is just another kind of opinion. It’s all good.
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Isn’t what’s going to decide his affinity group how he’s perceived in society?
And wasn’t understanding power structures and hierarchy essential to the enlightenment and the revolutions that followed?
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It’s hard to say….but I think there could be confusion in CRT about general populations and individuals. In the general population of women, it may say on average women tend to like professions that are nurturing. But I’m not one of those women because I’m not reflective of the average but instead fall along the curve somewhere. So I don’t want to be treated and have affinity with what the average says I’m to be treated as and have affinity with. I want to be treated as an individual and if society sees me the wrong way, we have to work to change that.
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I think it’s important to clarify for our host that there’s no such recognition in CRT for individuals. We are assigned to a group based on that most important feature: race. Everything else follows.
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Do you think perhaps your view is somewhat limited to an American perspective? The world and race relations don’t begin and end within that bubble.
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I laughed out loud at that, Pink! It’s far worse in Canada where we recently had the Bar Association of BC rule on demanding compelled speech for its members! Throw in First Nations and, Voila! Group ideology well on its way to its logical conclusion (Oath of Citizenship was just changed to include ‘respect’ for Treaty Rights – agreements made between Hudson Bay agents and some local Indian leaders 350 years ago so that we have different legal rights depending on percentage blood contact and one ancestral chief among many overriding election results and imposing what he thinks). We just a Syrian female professor fired from a tenured job for daring to say we don’t have system racism. The list is longer each day.
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You mean Canada is a sort of Gilead where people have no rights? And white people are the persecuted class? That sounds somewhat implausible.
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No but there are incidents of regular people who don’t seem racist at all being fired for saying the wrong things. It isn’t as prevalent in Canada but it’s here. In higher ed, professors are encouraged to not allow “problematic” speech in the US. I don’t know how bad it is in Canada yet but it used to be all speech was possible and counter speech was meant to expose bad ideas….now you are not allowed to speak of those things and you will find yourself fired if you do. The case of Jodi Shaw at Smith College is an example: https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/whistleblower-at-smith-college-resigns Canadians hopefully don’t do something like this. I know I will refuse to attend a course where I tell everyone that I’m a white supremacist because I’m simply not and I’m not going to accept someone telling me that that is what I am for simply being born white.
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Again, you are welcome to explain this to a classroom of 8 years old who are told to form in to these groups now. Right now.
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This was certainly a hot topic…
Human’s and their tribes. Any luck and all these UAP sightings will show us how pathetic we really are (in the galaxy/universe).
I think it was a Neal Asher scifi novel where he had a race of crab-people who loved the taste of rotting human flesh. https://aliens.fandom.com/wiki/Prador How’d we like to see that in the grocery store?
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It was. I can understand why Black people find it emotional since they’re at constant risk of being profiled and worst – but I really don’t get why some white people seem so furious at the idea of an academic theory/school of thought. As all this is going on there are children being taught they’re going to hell for eternity. Being taught gays should die and women are second class citizens. Mormons are teaching about gold tablets and magic underwear, others that evolution is a myth or that dinosaurs are a conspiracy theory. There are even people teaching holocaust denial. Comparatively, the little I know about CRT doesn’t seem too extreme.
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I think that if that is happening it’s not sanctioned by governments and public institutions. So if the mormons teach women are second class citizens, they don’t do so in public schools and the public are outraged at such teachings. However CRT has infiltrated public schools and governments and even higher ed (or especially higher ed) and people have been fired for refusing to go to training sessions where they must confess their white supremacy. It’s very maoist. There are mandatory courses in workplaces about “whiteness” that teaches the most ridiculous things. Besides othering it teaches things like it is “white” to expect that employees are on time, or it is “white” to expect people to perform at certain standard. The whole thing is racist, ridiculous, and othering. People are afraid to speak up for fear of being fired and prevented from working anywhere else.
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The other day I read that in Oklahoma: Directly teaching biological evolution is optional; creationism may also be taught. Tennessee has a similar directive. A number of other states allow the teaching of creationism and the critique of evolution.
And don’t religious schools in America sort of have a blank check to teach strange things?
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I don’t know how that works in America. I think that if they want to teach CRT that is fine but they aren’t really teaching CRT are they? They are indoctrinating students. They aren’t saying ‘this is CRT and this is what it says, let’s discuss”. They are saying some of you are privileged and white and some of you are not white and are oppressed. it does not matter what your background or your social standing or your economic background. All that matters is the colour of your skin. The whites in the class, you must confess to being white supremacists to the non whites in the class.
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You’re right, that sounds absurdly simplistic. It seems there should be an easy way to fix it by presenting it along with a critique because it is a topic people should examine to better understand the world.
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It is the difference between teaching Marxism and training people to become Marxists.
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I think I am furious because I will not be told or forced to confess that I am a white surpramacist. I am not. I will not be judged by the colour of my skin just as I will not judge others by the colour of their skin.
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I get that much; but I guess I’m very inclined to the bias explanation. I think I have racist reactions/thoughts/instincts, and I do because I grew up in a world where that was normal. I have a hard time believing other people have been wholly unaffected by these messages we receive so often. But of course that’s a biased opinion because I’m judging from my experience 😀
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Yes but that isn’t what CRT says. According to CRT you are irredeemable. You are simply racist. In everything you think and do you are oppressing and the only thing to help you is to “do the work” but you will never stop being racist no matter what.
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I’ve started reading, and came across this from the American Bar Association. I’d love to know your thoughts: https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/civil-rights-reimagining-policing/a-lesson-on-critical-race-theory/
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Notice all the quoted names? These are the high priests of CRT. I would expect nothing less.
It reminds me of Marxists insisting that every case of implemented Marxism (one can also substitute just about any religious dogma) isn’t the real Marxism that they so fervently support but ‘misunderstandings’ of the scripture.
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Interesting comparison! I think that’s probably the focus that may clarify what I’m thinking. Marxist theory as a whole has many areas where the analysis is and dissection of structures is extremely accurate; especially as applied to the societies of the time. But then of course his predictions and as you put it “implemented” theory didn’t pan out. So shouldn’t we be breaking up study/analysis from the conclusions/solutions? I imagine you’d agree the teaching and study o Marxism, including its failures is tremendously important in the process of finding policies that work?
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By all means teach about CRT; just don’t impose CRT on everyone.
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Don’t you think that position might get a lot more traction?
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Heavens no. It’s FAR more exciting to be part of the righteous revolution, donchaknow. Remember, CRT is movement and not a theory.
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I think that it glosses over how CRT is taught and what the books actually say vis a vis whites and their “whiteness” and how racism is power vs privilege so whites are always in power and always racist. It ignores all other oppression. I’ve been in a good diversity and inclusion session that ignores CRT and instead focuses on seeking out diversity of ideas, cultures etc. It understands how easy we can devolve into tokenism and seeks to understand not punish and condemn.
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And remember only whites are racist so bias, according to CRT, does not exist for any other race on earth. It is a white person’s affliction.
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That’s interesting, I had no idea that was such a strong factor in the theory.
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Yes it’s a large part of it. It would be like us admitting there is sexism. We both agree because we know of incidents where we have witnessed it or experienced it and woman have provided insight where we didn’t witness things and we think it’s terrible and we want to fix it we see ourselves as feminists who want to support women but then a theory is embraces and it says you as a man are a rapist. You use rape to keep women down in a sexist society and you need to confess to women that you are a rapist. And you say “but I haven’t raped anyone and I abhor take and I support equality of women” and you are told “well that’s nice but you’re a man so no matter what you do you are a rapist”. I think I’ve even heard of silly ideas like this and they are rightly laughed at but with race and CRT they are going main stream. I think it’s psychologically damaging to a whole generation.
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Diane, blacks have their culture, whites have theirs. Society can’t do both at once. If whites insist or believe that shite culture should be used, they want their culture to be supreme. That is white supremacy. That is the way some blacks think today. They will not conform to white culture. What we have is a battle to see which culture wins out and prevails. Cannot have both. Culture is based and produced by DNA resulting and evolving to work best in the environment. Both keep changing. Generally tge cjlture with the largest numbers wins out.Where Iu live numbers ate about 50-50. Interesting times
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Sorry I misspelled your name. Bad spelling, getting names wrong, forgetting faces and typos are all in my DNA
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I don’t think I understand your point. Culture transcends race and geography. My grandparents were born in different countries, my parents have different nationalities, but we all share culture and we share languages.
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I just don’t buy “white culture”. That to me sounds white supremacist. White is a broad term. There are all kinds of whites whose culture is foreign to me as a Canadian and there are way more non whites whose culture is very familiar to me as a Canadian. I think it’s unfair to paint one colour of person as being a certain way. I know that as a kid in the 70s a book about only children was very popular and very wrong. Because I was an only child (unusual for the times) teachers, without knowing me, decided I was unable to socialize with other children, spoiled, etc. Nothing could be further from the truth. So I got a pretty shitty educational experience in some lower grades. I couldn’t get them to see me. I can only imagine how much worse doing this CRT pigeon holing will be for the kids in the education system now.
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It may be interesting and informative to read some of these.
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Interesting. I read some of the cases. I suppose what immediately comes to mind is that some instances like subsidies are generally where governments are trying to correct previous imbalances. Other instances like the Columbus Academy case seem dubious or flimsy. I mean, Trump supporting students felt excluded? How does that compare to every LGBT student in most places?
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You listed some fringe radical ideas. CRT becomes mainstream. That’s the big difference. Quote from an email from my children’s school district They don’t openly teach it, but it’s nevertheless officially promoted.
I’m not against teaching about racism, teaching about Marxism, teaching about Nazism, or teaching about religion. When an ideology officially becomes “a lens” to view everything else, it is certainly concerning. They also lie that the “lens” is only applied to issues around race and racism. There are thoughts that teaching “white” (i.e. classical) music is racist. There are calls to rename bird species because they commemorate white racist scientists, etc.
The activists don’t simply call to abolish racist practices and laws which is a reasonable thing to do and can be done within the system. They call to abolish the whole system – justice, police, capitalism, etc. beginning with the Constitution written by a bunch of white slave owners. Hence the burning of U.S. flags, falling of the statues of Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln and replacing 1776 with 1619 as the starting point of the U.S. “What’s the big deal?”
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From OISE, the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, which sets national standards for education in Canada:
“(T)he principles of equity and inclusion are now at the forefront of Canadian education, the contributing authors in this publication remind us that inclusive education cannot remain at the level of theoretical discourse. Rather, the goal is to have inclusive education become evident in teachers’ practices and students’ learning.”
I have mentioned several times that CRT is not a theory to be considered, to be compared and contrasted, but a movement. It is a call to action. Here is the principle from the above quote: cannot remain at the level of theoretical discourse. This is why CRT IS indoctrination: it is the call to use ‘the system’ to force students into demonstrating action by teachers in their classrooms. (Equity means demonstrating the same results).
How is this to be accomplished? According to OISE,
“Teachers and teacher educators will need to strengthen ways in which they can infuse themes such as intercultural understanding, anti-racist education, and culturally relevant and responsive pedagogies into all components of their programs.
All components. In all subjects. Across the ENTIRE curriculum. Anti-racism ‘education’. Sounds like it wants to fight racism. But it achieves exactly the opposite: it promotes a racial framing of everything.
What is anti-racist education? CRT.
Those who want to pretend the objectification of children as representatives of their skin colour and taught by public education to believe this is true and act as if it were true I think is denying reality and so denying why this is racist. Because it is. To its core. And by not speaking up and and speaking against this objectification of children by the professionals we trust to educate them, we are complicit in the public teaching and promotion of racism. Anti-racists in CRT ARE practicing racists.
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P.S. I’ve got a ton of work to day, if I don’t answer immediately, that’s why. I’ll be back in the evening.
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That’s fine. I like to space these conversations. It allows for more thoughtful responses. Don’t have much time here myself.
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Can’t believe Tildeb is still getting space to spout his noxious nonsense and is not instantly shut up by the bigger minds round here. Are you all blind? Or are you dancing with him Pink? I’m not surprised he’s upset by anti-racism. He accuses anyone who doesn’t agree with his myopic life theories of holding beliefs like a religion so he can continue to curry favour with atheist blogland, when in fact it’s his blinkered view of life, of gender and of race that is like the yawn religion of the formally liberal white man whose sense of privilege is damaged by advances in understanding in human society. Think I’ll leave it another couple of years before I come lurking again 😁
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I’m glad to hear you’re alive and well! Evidently you’ve escaped Covid, which is good news.
I’m genuinely interested in the reactions to Critical Race Theory because I still haven’t quite understood the furore. It seems a bit like the right wing anger in Spain at the Catalan wanting to be independent. They’re not just critical of it, they want the idea wiped out and the Catalan punished.
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“What is more puzzling, at least at first glance, is the ire that critical race theory has also drawn from some leftwing and liberal camps. Some liberal media outlets seem almost as obsessed as conservatives are with critical race theory, “cancel culture”, “identity politics” and the like – phenomena which they treat as interchangeable symptoms of the same political malaise.”
Tildeb just follows the flow and copies other angry white men. It’s like a religion. 😁
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/25/critical-race-theory-rightwing-bogeyman-left-wing
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Yes, it must be whiteness… and not the dismantling of liberal democracy by those who should know better that motivates me. Who needs voices of criticism when the righteous path is so obvious? Maybe it’s my time in apartheid SA or travelling the Soviet Union, or going to Auschwitz and SEEING where this kind of virtuous thinking leads. Oh, it’s so easy after the fact to tsk tsk those other evil people so easily fooled into doing atrocity without pondering how this happens, how all the red flags of warning could be ignored, how so many good people could stand back and stand down and let this kind of totalitarianism take root and blossom. Yup, couldn’t POSSIBLY happen here and now under our watch.
Well, the first step is to believe in a group-based ideology that turns Us into Us/Them (check). The second is to change the law to support discriminating against Them (check). The third is to believe one is being virtuous doing so (check). The fourth is convince critics to self censor and go along to get along (check). The fifth is to vilify anyone who disagrees. (check)
When the greater crime is to offend – to point out the red flags to those too virtuous to see what they’re really doing – than criticize offensive ideas, then we’re well on our way to letting liberal democracy slip between our fingers. For such ‘evil’ to triumph, what it takes for good people to do?
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I think it’s kind of sad you have list off places you’ve visited as if it gives you any special understanding. Many an idiot has been there and more, and learned nothing about the systematic racism endemic in the world, about the harmful legacy of colonialism or reached any understanding on sex and gender.
The first step is to check your privilege. I can’t do this for you, but here’s some pointers for you to self-check:
Are you white?
Are you male?
Are you heterosexual?
Are you cis gender?
Are you affluent/comfortable?
Do you spend all day arrogantly mansplaining and assuming intellectual superiority?
If you ticked a few of these boxes, you’re probably terrified anyone would ever treat you like a poor black trans woman, and not allow you to have your white male platform dominating all discussions because you KNOW BETTER about everything. Imagine if men like you always leading the conversation were told they weren’t welcome to mansplain and whitesplain their perspective on, for example, a university offered platform? Just imagine if that platform was offered to a trans woman to talk about her intellectual perspective on life? Shudder to think. It must feel like liberal democracy is slipping from the control of white men. Terrifying. And you’d be left in an obscure corner of the internet ranting about the end of the world while everyone else learns and grows with the rest of humanity.
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You haven’t changed a bit, I see. If only I knew me as well as you think you do.
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You haven’t changed a bit either. I’m genuinely disappointed. One always hopes for progress, and I believe you have good intentions. But it’s like Star Wars when someone goes down the dark side of hate and fear….don’t be afraid of progress and open your eyes. All these things that seem frightening to you are opening doors to groups in society that have been repressed for centuries and more. It doesn’t all need to be perfect but the change in the areas where people are challenging things is a massive relief. And look at yourself putting all your energies into attacking traditionally oppressed groups for attempting to change and bring recognition to inequalities in the status quo, when blatant white supremacy and hate crimes are on the rise. That in itself should tell you something.
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CRT is not progress, VW. It is a highly regressive, destructive, and divisive Marxist model that fails to either address or rectify the problems it supposedly fixes. And it creates new victims. You’ve bought the lie that it is progress and are using all the regular tools to promote it not by arguing for its merit using facts and evidence but by trying to paint the character of those who criticize it as not just lacking basic humanity but represent intolerance of ‘victims’. This lack of evidence in its favour is a clue.
What I think you are trying to promote whether you realize it or not is a faith-based belief that reality just doesn’t agree is an accurate model (of both the problems and the solutions) and so the substitute problem in your eyes seems to be that it must be fault of those who do not agree, who point this uncomfortable and discombobulating mismatch out… and so it makes sense that you would double down in your belief that we can correct this mismatch only if the Elect, the Virtuous, the people who believe as you do, have the power to enforce this ‘progressive’ model on all. By believing hard enough, we can make it true. So it’s an unpleasant thought that there really is lack of demonstrated progress, that the solutions being proposed are not fixing anything. But this, too, is still a clue.
I think these clues are worth expressing to raise questions, raise doubt, raise concerns especially when I see the logical outcome being not just regressive but the same path that has led to so much colossal tragedies. I take the murder of over 100 million people seriously and so when I see the same ideological framing that allowed good people to go along and create the right conditions for them to unfold as they did, I am not going to stay silent nor go along to get along. You may think that’s a character flaw but I think it’s the only thing standing between where we are right now and where we are headed. I think we have to change course.
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Wow, last year it was people who wanted to express their gender as they wished who were a threat to the world, this year it’s people seeking to eradicate racial inequality. What’s the name of your cult and who sets the rules? Is it all older white men from rich societies who are smugly atheist? I remember seeing you round one of those sites as a hanger-on but don’t remember the same. Anyway, back to your tune, keep piping. I wonder who will be next.
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It’s the same reality-denying ideology in play (don’t read Irreversible Damage or your head will explode), the same victimhood card being played by the Elect, the same group-based arguments about changing laws and codes and policies and ‘doing the work’, the same attack against liberalism, equality rights, and individual autonomy in law that interferes with this remix of Marxist ideology, the same demand to tear down, the same virtue signalers obnoxious and censorious as ever while not realizing that doing so makes the practice a vice (may I recommend Nichmachean Ethics for a quick read?). I don’t expect you to understand my points or position, VW, because you think you already know me and so you are certain you are being a good person to disparage my character and dismiss everything I might say that doesn’t suit your fundamentalist faith in this virtuous ideology. Yes, I’m a blasphemer.
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Is it possible your definition of “Marxist ideology” is narrow too? When that could in fact encompass a whole range of things? Das Kapital is still considered an exceptional analysis by people on all political sides.
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The framework is the same. So by all means read Marx’s writings and learn what this framing is (in a nutshell, labour produces the worker, whiteness produces the racist, males produces the misogynist… philosophically, it’s a one to one match when one assumes the group identity is what’s real and the individuals who constitute them are just victimized cogs in this imagined world of group power hierarchy).
We just so happen to have lots of historical evidence how this kind of ideology works out in action. It’s not good. So if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck…
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That’s a very odd way to associate the two things. I’ve read a whole lot of Marx and then Engels, and it’s much more complex than labour produces the worker. He examines interactions and the value placed on variables, often in verifiable ways. If you think of Marxist theory as a simple formula that you oppose then I see where the problem is. The truth is there’s much of Marxist thought that we accept today as established reality.
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Another way to think about it is you have to first establish belief that ‘blacks’ are fundamentally different than ‘whites’ to erect an apartheid state. You have to first establish belief that ‘Jews’ are different than ‘Aryans’ to erect a Holocaust. You have to first establish a belief that ‘workers’ are fundamentally different than ‘owners’ to erect a dictatorship of the proletariat. It is the framing of placing people into groups as if real and meaningful things that is required to begin this process of separation. That I think is a fundamental problem of group-based ideology. Critical Social Justice in every facet – whether it’s CRT or transactivism or whatever – is based on exactly this framing. As Dianne has said, this treats people as objects and it is a central feature of what I consider toxic ideology.
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You can’t be serious? Who do you think established those distinctions and went on to enforce them?
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Those who believed…
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I don’t know you. I know your arguments. I know your “reasonable” arguments for the audience and the absolutely nasty ones that pop out when you can’t hold back. Your stance is based on fear of change from a position of privilege. My stance is based on concern for equality of treatment and a desire to see growth in human understanding. Nothing is perfect, but seeing the world from other perspectives helps humanity grow in a positive way. Your old-style liberalism is Conservative, and that’s the only reason these rants of yours overlap with the right. Mindblowing you’re blind to it.
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Here’s an idea: Go listen to people who have de-transitioned, VW. You have nothing to lose but your ignorance.
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And an idea for you would be to hang around a different echo chamber. Download tiktok and listen to what the kids are saying.
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Here’s one to start: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMd5XJBDa/
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Natalie Wynn is also brilliant: https://www.youtube.com/c/ContraPoints/videos
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This is excellent. I’m 20 mins into the JK Rowling one, hope Tildeb watches it all.
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I hope everyone watches it. She’s talented and funny, and entitled to autonomy and respect – which is something we shouldn’t have to say out loud at this point in history.
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And I must say, the definition of indirect bigotry on the video covers a lot of the comments on here. Everyone who has posted their “concerns” about CRT “going too far” even though some of their best friends are black and they love equality and are totally colour blind…. is a bigot. Where do you get your audience??
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Learn.
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Isn’t that like saying we should only listen to witness testimony if a situation goes wrong? For many years that standard was used to denigrate gay people. They’d take extreme negative examples and use that as if it were the only option. It’s intellectually dishonest.
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And here I thought I was appealing to those who so highly value the ‘lived experience’! It doesn’t get much more lived than this.
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I’m for standards of evidence. I’m some cases that means a preponderance of proof, in others we might need the standard to be beyond a reasonable doubt. With all due respect, it seems to me your knowledge of CRT and even Marxist theory (as you’ve mentioned here) is second hand and from sources that have an interest in generalizing and demonizing both those things.
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Oh ye of little faith! I always try to use source material. But presenting a nutshell take on something has quite correctly earned the reprobation that such simplistic renderings usually belong in one. Guilty as charged regarding Marxism. My side notes in my Economics and Philosophic Manuscripts text say this:
Labour produces the Worker
itself
product.
Product alienated from worker
Worker alienated from oneself
Worker alienated from labour
” ” other human beings
” ” species
” ” world
This is the underpinning for understanding the Manifesto, which itself demonstrates the framing used to describe its central thesis: historical materialism. That is the necessary belief needed to ‘correct’ who should own the means of production. And it is the SAME belief structure to accept CRT as ‘anti-racism’ when it’s unequivocally repackaged racism within the same Marxist belief structure.
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Sorry I didn’t answer sooner. I’m sure you’ll agree that that’s the tip of the iceberg 🙂
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Of course; this is the most simplified version from my notes. The readings are dense but all I’m trying to show is that the Manifesto itself is built upon the framing developed for the economic and philosophical manuscripts Marx wrote (incorporating much of Hegel’s ideas). It is a group-based hierarchy of power dividing all people into these carboard cutouts of either/or, owner/worker, victim/victimizer, white/black, racist-supremacist/anti-racist-social justice warrior, transphobic bigot/gender-identity virtuous supporter. This framing is identical to the fundamental philosophy of all of Critical Social Justice of which CRT is but one branch. It is Marxist to the core and just as totalitarian. That’s why there’s much ado about all of today’s Orwellian social justice movements. It is a fundamental threat to liberal democracy.
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Group based hierarchies are a defining factor in the history of humanity, both classical and modern. There are nuances and culturally specific factors, but the hierarchies still exist.
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The hierarchies are biological! Hierarchies emerge from being social animals. Yes, but so what? Well, if you want to curtail the discriminatory aspects, then recognizing hierarchies do exist in no way, shape, or form offers us any sane reasons to dismantle and discard individual equality rights in law and empower a totalitarian ideology that will impose equity as the arbitrator of what is discriminatory. This has been tried several times and murdered over 100 million people. That little fact one should think would raise a red flag when we start to head down this road yet again. There’s something fundamentally wrong with the approach, not least of which we are replacing the ONE system of values that has successfully stopped this malignant ideology in the past and offered measurable legal progress against systemic bigotries and discrimination. Even the most brutal totalitarian ideology imposing equity laws has had to bend to the reality of human biology that produces it. Some farm animals are more equal than others because, you know, reasons. Have we learned nothing?
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And it’s absolutely not the “only” avenue of inquiry. I’ve been following this shit show for decades.
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You mean people in the lgbt community haven’t? You think I haven’t known trans people since I came out?
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No, you’re comparing my suggestion to VW that she actually listen to people who have de-transitioned to people who used ONLY the worst case examples about gays. And then calling this dishonest as if, by association, I am being dishonest to make such a suggestion. Then you take the reins and continue on your jaunt as if I am ALSO suggesting you haven’t known any transgendered people.
None of this is true.
What de-transitioners offer is insight into how the Sudden Onset Gender Dysphoria affected them when every single avenue of finding out more from the various social, educational, and medical institutions followed the identical and professionally mandated script of affirmation. This is not the ‘worst’ result by any means but it does offer a way to see why such ideology enacted into professional standards institutionalizes HARM for many real people in real life. Even 13 years old girls are starting down the transition path without any real understanding or knowledge about what they’ve embarked on. And the professions designed to help real people in real life with real questions and real concerns are shackled by ideology (and some have lost medical licenses – a loss of livelihood – for not ONLY affirming). This is an unfolding tragedy.
Of course, introducing ANY criticism whatsoever no matter how well founded, no matter how legitimate, no matter how reflective of reality it may be, of the transactive ideology in practice will earn ONLY a full bore condemnation of being the worst kind of person imaginable from the True Believers. I suspect that’s why without knowing me VW goes immediately into trying to portray me as a deplorable person. And that’s why I admit to being a blasphemer.
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(Did anyone I’d know here not escape Covid?)
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Not sure, but the Evangelicals you frequented were all anti-vaccine so there’s a good chance
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I’ve missed you too VW. Still banging on about banning me for the good of others, I see. If only you had all the power….
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Not banning you. Putting you in your place.
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No, VW (dishonest as usual I see); you’re asking others to not grant me any “space to spout his noxious nonsense and is not instantly shut up by the bigger minds.” Of course, in your mind this isn’t censorious at all; twisting the meaning of words you claim it’s “putting me in my place.”
Because YOU know what my place is. Aren’t you special? And virtuous, to boot. And yet, magically, I’m the intolerant one!
Wow. Just… wow.
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No, it’s quite clear from my comment that I’m disappointed that Pink and JZ and others allow you to go on these rants without challenging you on your many ridiculous points. Keith was always the smartest and he didn’t put up with any of it, and perhaps Pink is playing with you, but I find giving your toxic point of view space without challenge generally really disappointing.
You’re right I don’t know you at all, but your attitude is that if a small white man angry he didn’t reach his privilege potential, like the incels. Angry and indignant and sure you’re the smartest in the room. You’re not. You know some facts, you’ve travelled a little bit, you have some work experience that makes you proud of your social and community efforts making a difference in the world. That’s all cool. But you don’t seem to understand the struggle of women, of trans people, of POC, and yet you act like you have all the knowledge, all the answers. Your experience as far as I can tell is painfully limited.
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I thought I was making some good points by asking questions. I think that can clarify how solid or shaky some ideas are. I also think the overall takeaway for someone reading through the comments is that the arguments against CRT aren’t against CRT, but against a narrow interpretation of its application.
Very amusing that it seems you and I have switched roles 😀
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Well, I guess I was skim reading 🙃 I just got all that rage back from old Tildeb arguments and couldn’t believe he was off on one about advances in understanding around racism and how it affects every aspect of society. Banging his old deplatforming drum, indignant anyone could suggest he’s not the perfect human being (moi? in any way racist?? how very dare you!) and still accusing any group of people who don’t agree him as behaving like a religion. Yawn.
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I came across Steve Pinker’s piece in the New Republic today talking about the dying of the Humanities at universities. I thought it worth mentioning in regards to CRT, which has been a focal point by Humanity departments trying to bolster enrollment by offering an assortment of programs (like Gender Studies, Ethnic Studies, Black Studies, and many others, for example). This has led many academics (accurately in my opinion) to label them all under the common theme that emerges by graduates as ‘Grievance Studies’. That’s what unites these programs – not to develop a deeper understanding of the Humanities themselves but encourage a patina of understanding aimed at criticizing all of them in order to lay blame for all of humanity’s failings and thereby dismiss their future roles in order to ‘progress’ past them. This is the heart and soul of post-modernism. He writes that the decline in the Humanities is due to, “the disaster of postmodernism, with its defiant obscurantism, dogmatic relativism, and suffocating political correctness. And they have failed to define a progressive agenda.”
This is what CRT is. Recalling that CRT is not a theory in any conventional sense but a movement – an activist driven agenda to dismantle what has come before and replace it with a inverted group-based retributive Utopia only Grievance Study graduates can truly grasp – designed to bring about ‘progress’ in regards to eliminating such systemic problems as racism in this case, we can see how this ideology has been delivered into every nook and cranny of our society, coming as it does from over a generation of students from the universities, and why everyone from government to business to sports to religion are hell-bent on appearing to be virtuous by signaling this anti-whatever intention. And the way to signal the intention is to go along to get along, to be seen as ‘anti-racism’ by agreeing to go along with a clearly racist agenda (I mean, seriously going along with affinity housing, affinity graduation groups? The old name suffices: we used to call it ‘segregation on the basis of skin colour’, Harvard and Yale and Princeton and public education.) That’s what anti-racism looks like today!.
So it’s not ‘narrow interpretation’ when it’s actions in reality is ubiquitous.
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So what’s the alternative to Gender Studies or Black Studies? That we leave the historical treatment of certain groups unexamined?
The problem with the Pinker argument and the group you mentioned that he’s a part of, is what I called “The Threshold of Injury to Demand for Action Ratio” in a previous post. Consider this, his group talks about a case where Trump supporting students felt “alienated” at school for their political beliefs; meanwhile there are eight US states which have variations of the Don’t Say Gay laws for schools. In the bible belt LGBT students live under a whole range of hostile action. Do you see the difference in burden? I haven’t gone into race, but evidently we’re also taking about extremely different burden index.
Adding to that, I think in the past I’ve already given you the statistical demonstration of the relative insignificance of these occurrences. Only 35% of Americans go on to complete a Bachelor’s Degree. And I think we can safely presume not all who do will have access to the disciplines you find offensive, right? The sky is not falling.
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“I cam across Steve Pinker’s piece” in my immersion reading echo chamber research among old, white men who are angry about progressive movements and how they affect their perceived sense of importance. Because when rich white men are an expert in one topic, everything they say is relevant about everything. Especially when they have the kind of supreme judgement of character and situations that leads them to support people who commit sex crimes.
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Dog whistle much?
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I’ve been reading about that and it seems that psychologically it’s much more overwhelming than just one’s sense of importance. We’re talking about a person’s entire set of parameters with which to see the world. The human’s sense of safety is built from early on in a fairly binary way; us/them, safe/danger etc. When a whole range of pieces are moved around in the society, the fear can become existential.
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This is your brain on CRT.
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I think you could be making an either/or argument here Pinky. A person with liberal, humanistic values doesn’t want people excluded and that goes for men, women, POC, LGBTQ+ etc. Race and gender should be examined and CRT can be part of that. But, I think there is no separating teaching a theory with CRT and doing it. It isn’t a theory in the confines of academia anymore than feminism is. The difference with CRT is it is now being used as policy and seen as the one truth. And yes, I think that organizations should work towards making sure that sexism, racism and all the other isms are removed and not tolerated but CRT is not the answer. And I think I have a rather unique position in that I’ve lived through organizations that are overtly sexist and racist. And they got away with it.
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My point may have come out wrong, I didn’t mean either/or, I meant where is the bar for something to be considered an injury based on the identity of the injured?
For example, at what point does the law interfere with male reproductive rights as opposed to with women? And at which point is “injury” set? In that vein, viagra is covered by insurance but female birth control isn’t. So my argument against the Pinker group is the threshold for injury is fantastically low as compared to traditionally oppressed groups.
Feminism is an interesting parallel because it has all sorts of offshoots and theories, right? Some quite radical.
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I actually think the injury on the individual is the same. If men were suddenly to find they had their reproductive rights controlled like women, they’d be just as enraged as women are. I think what you might be talking about is if you have more power as a group that is collectively addressed rather quickly and you are less likely to suffer this over and over. But I like to see it at the individual level. If you do something nasty to someone they are all going to bleed. So if you insist I am a white supremacist at work it’s going to hurt me whether that makes all whites suffer or not collectively and making people suffer shouldn’t be the goal or outcome of any action. If feminists didn’t have made allies we would all still be in the kitchen. If we had said we hated all men and called them rapists it would get us no where besides being hurtful and false. Yes there are radical feminist ideas particularly third wave but they haven’t been enacted into the workplace. So there are no trainings where men are asked to confess themselves as rapists.
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When I say injury I mean: to which group does something have to happen for it to result in action. I recall once you told me that all heart attack procedure/data was based on male patients. At least, I think that was you 🙂 That means the issue is only addressed as a problem when affecting group A.
So what I’m looking for is universality in application. If the standard for Pinker’s group is that a student not feel alienated for holding particular beliefs then the fight is much bigger than some Trump supporters. Or consider how Kim Davis felt her rights were being gravely infringed upon by having to stamp a gay marriage document, whereas it didn’t cross her mind that a gay person’s rights were being infringed upon by not having that document stamped and their rights (next of kin/inheritance/parenthood) recognised in law. Those two things don’t exist in separate vacuums but as an intersection of rights where one of the two sets will take priority.
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Aren’t you really talking about (and advocating for) equality rights for individuals rather than ‘group-based’ rights?
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Ideally yes, but it seems highly dependant on the application of particular justice systems. In some countries it seems applying the letter of the law across the board hasn’t been always possible, and so they’re left in a position where compensatory laws are put in place to correct imbalances. From a technical perspective it’s very unfortunate, but consider that in the past almost 40 years only 1 British officer has been convicted of a killing. How likely is it that through the Irish troubles there were no unlawful killings?
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I think you’re really thinking about privileged thinking more than injury. I consider things like yes we all feel hurt by certain things but that doesn’t mean we can’t talk about them or that we demonize a group. I think most liberals agree that racism needs to be corrected but they don’t agree with the application of CRT that puts race ahead of all else. For example, here if you were a POS you were given priority access to vaccines no matter your postal code or economic status or your likelihood to be exposed to the virus. My POS friends are far more wealthy than I and attain special positions based on knowing people that hold high positions so I found this just laughable.
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POS=Piece of ??
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No I meant POC (people of colour) and I wrote POS (Point of Sale) which I used to do support on for the devices.
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I figured that’s what you meant🤓
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Are POS the native Indians? Presuming they are, aren’t there a whole range of reasons that they should get the vaccination first as a group? Even if some of them are wealthy?
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And I meant POC. I’m hungry and tired and C and S sometimes becomes the same for me.
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A touch of the Covid brain fog, perhaps? I have no such excuse! Now, why did enter this room?
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I don’t want to admit it but I think a migraine could be coming. I’ve had the hardest times with words the last couple of days. Today I couldn’t remember “LRT”, the Light Rail Train and kept saying “you know, those street cars but they go both ways and they are new”.
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Migraines run in my family so I know to take the warning signs seriously. Fortunately, I was spared. Take care of yourself. But just in case it’s a passing phase like the weather…
Did you see OISE (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education) came out with a policy recommendation today to implement CRT across all public curriculum? I haven’t checked into it myself yet but this was the gist reported by the CBC.
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No didn’t see that about oise but I’ll keep my eyes open for it.
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I thought it was all about getting reparations and anequal income for everyone.
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And do away with police that arrest people and. courts that send people fo prison, and prisons. Following i instruxtions from police and obeying laws is just so white and European.
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Who cares that crime is up over 500% in Portland, the murder rate of blacks killing blacks in Chicago up 300% this year? It’s all about the police, donchaknow…
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In Atlanta crime has gone through the roof . Police are not allowed to arrest people. White people are randomly being shot, driving or walking through paring lots. Police are being shot. Dangerous to move around town now.
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The fruits of BLM.
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I hope you’re not implying that’s racial because statistics don’t support that position.
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You’re not suggesting the American policing method is successful, right? It’s the developed country with the worst figures across the board. More violence, more incarceration, more re-incidence. The US murder rate is higher than Kenya, substantially higher than Cameroon, Canada or France. I don’t think their system is in any way an example to be held up.
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One day your entire life will flash in front of your eyes. Make sure it is worth watching
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I don’t see it getting any better. The crt people want fo do away with European structure and replace it with their own ideas of equal results for everyone regardless of their abilities or contributions. The result if they are successful will be the collapse id the US economy. That gets some people upset. But as I said before climate change and toxins from fossil fuel use in the environment will do us in before long ar any rate.
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You think the American system and the European system are the same?
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Reflecting on the images. Chained people and the nurse have little to do with racism. One can find plenty of the same images with whites or any other race in both roles.
The girl looking at the dolls is the most interesting. Go to Japan and see the dolls there. Would you call Japanese society racist for making dolls look predominantly Japanese? Does the state prohibit making black dolls in the United States?
As for the video, one’s “got to be carefully taught” to see racism in that episode. It’s more about social status than race. Would the picture be different if the attendant were white? I was more impressed by your dad wearing white pants in this rainy weather.
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You don’t think there’s an intersection with race? I think the intersection is self-evident.
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There is an intersection. But slavery is not exclusively racist. There were white nurses and white serfs in Russia and many other countries. There are plenty of white attendants. These images are not racist per se.
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Absolutely! The concept of racism itself is culturally specific. It exists within the common experience of specific societies. I’ve argued for many years that sculptures of Egyptian and Nubian slaves (I have a blackamoor myself), for example, are completely separate from modern notions of racism. They were historical depictions.
Where are America is concerned, there is a bit of a mess because the cultural context of race was fairly appalling. Every arriving wave of immigrants was targeted with non-anglo-saxon-protestantism being used as the marker of difference.
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May I suggest you read ‘Titania McGrath’s’ ongoing curated list of Things That Are Racist. Awareness is key. Such important knowledge will help expose where racism resides (and the role we play promoting it) so that we can all be on ‘the right side of history’ and correct accordingly.
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Titania’s great, a true progressive visionary.
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What’s the harm of this ideology? As I said, CRT is but one branch. Specifically, CRT advances the framework that all human interactions is racist. The harm is that it stands in direct opposition to judge people by the quality of their character and demands that the only morally acceptable viewpoint is that any disparity between racial groups is evidence for racism. This is what is being taught as ‘education’. I know there is lots of harm because the graduates have now gone into positions of authority and continued the travesty on those over which they have power. not least of which is social media, government, and law.
But all of this falls under critical social justice ideology, which is ALL about identities and group hierarchy of power imbalance (which is why it’s post modernism BASED on Marxist ideology). As far as I can tell, the only two bulwarks against this incursion today is ethnic tribalism and religion, neither of which I think is damning in its own right yet demonstrates the paucity of principle by most liberals. And, as far as I can tell, the ideology when acted upon causes additional harm and produces nothing that reveals itself to be a social good.
I raised the transgendered activism (in response to Violet Whisp who questioned why you tolerated a hater like I am… the hate referring to me daring to criticize the transactivists who have promoted policies and procedures that harm real people in real life). because it’s now infecting medicine and causing harm. That should concern anyone who is either a male or a female because it has direct consequences. You say,
“The same (edit: overreaching the importance of CRT causing harm by promoting and increasing racism) applies to the trans issues you’ve dragged into this other topic (again). So what I’ll say is, if you want me to believe in your god, show me the evidence. I want to see the demonstrable harm in numbers.
I’ve explained why this is difficult considering that anyone who tries to collect data regarding the impact of this ideology in action is therefore considered some kind of ‘hater’ (now where have encountered that before?), someone who is then vilified, whose career is often under threat, whose livelihood is often eliminated, whose reputation is destroyed by accusation and innuendo alone, and whose findings are often rejected out of hand by those who already believe they are virtuous by supporting the ideology. But it’s not impossible, just improbable that such numbers have any bearing on the belief in critical social justice .
So, with this mind, let’s visit the state of medicine (original article with lots of links here).
A better question would be: show me the statistical evidence of benefit considering two key questions: what is the goal of this or that social justice policy, and how are YOU as a promoter going to measure it’s effectiveness?
That is where the entire rotten structure of this Marxist/post modern/group identity/ social justice ideology collapses on its own incoherence. It doesn’t do what you believe it does and it doesn’t achieve what you believe it will. But it does cause a lot of harm to a lot of real people in real life.
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Err . . . you do realise Titania is a satirical account, do you, Tildeb? And you do recognise irony, when you see it, yes?
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https://www.nimaxtheatres.com/shows/titania-mcgrath-mxnifesto/
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Wow, Hariod. That’s out of left field.
I have enjoyed ‘Titania’ forever and am well aware that Doyle understands that only irony works against the Woke. That’s why there are no humorists or comedians from these ranks. He highlights the incoherence that is this ideology and his thread on being prescient drives the point home. Why you think I am unaware, or have been taken in, is truly astounding to me. How you ‘arrived’ at this conclusion is beyond my comprehension.
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This is how; you just wrote: I raised the transgendered activism (in response to Violet Whisp who questioned why you tolerated a hater like I am. But spare me the concocted defence. The End.
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Show me the connection. Transactivism, like CRT, is an incoherent, reality-denying abomination that produces the opposite of what is supposedly intended.
To whit: protesting outside a women’s rights conference yesterday. Sure, you can see their point: women who won’t have sex with them, be naked in front of them, be intimately examined by them or touch their genitals are, as these protesters say, unconscionable bigots who deserve corrective rape.
I’m not making this shit up.
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I think Tildeb is in all likelihood a perfectly decent person and this is one of those information processing issues. My French grandmother who lived through the war hated anything Germanic to such a degree it was almost violent. To the point where for the brief moment I was interested in learning German as a teenager she forbad it. Intellectually it made no sense but her brain only focused on the negative associations. Now imagine if she’d found a group of anti-Germans, or newspapers that were regularly and consistently anti-German? It would/could have fed the dislike to the point of activism.
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Information processing issues?
Have you noticed that CRT has basically disappeared from public discourse? Have you noticed the substituted words now taking up most of the air, namely, exactly the same ideology now couched in terms of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’?
It’s a word game.
But if that’s all it was, I wouldn’t care. What I do care about, however, is that this is the fuel that gives life to and sustains the shift of the political centre towards support for the alternative, which almost always a far right wing alternative. That scares the shit out of me because ALL of our civil rights and political freedoms will be attacked in the quest of these alternatives to gain and hold power. Trump will be back and Trump will win and the whole notion of liberalism that alters democracy from mob rule to responsible government will be sacrificed. This ideology of wokism in all its forms can be recognized not just with the word game but its core anti-liberal and illiberal principles. That’s what links all these issues together.
I am not processing poorly when yet another in an endless stream of slit-your-own-throat examples of populist sepeku shows up like Abbott being disinvited from MIT to talk about climate change. The motivation for the disinvitation has nothing to do with dodgy science and everything to do with the threat that free speech brings to those dedicated to promoting anti-liberal tenets of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ that Abbott soundly criticizes, terms which when acted upon in the real world are not diverse nor respectful of diversity, which does not respect equality of rights and freedoms, and which excludes on principle those who do not support these anti-liberal principles!
There is a consequence to going along with wokism and feeling virtuous doing so. That danger coming from the liberal centre in this deluded sense of righteousness is what I am trying to expose.
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I didn’t say poorly, it’s just a different way of processing information. These things are influenced by generation, culture, exposure to particular circumstances, all sorts of things.
When I was a boy the social perception of a gay man was as a predator. When those men got together it was seen as a danger.
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I’m late to this post and life is too short to read all of it. My sympathies, Pink. But the little I can stand suggests to me that you guys are talking at cross purposes.
My two cents? The subjects under discussion are too complex and too interrelated to be reduced to a single theory, no matter what name you want to give it. Fighting any kind of bias is sort of a whack-a-mole game. I think you just have to admit that, agree on general principles — to my mind, based on something like “let’s all just get along” — and start whacking those moles.
I’d start with two things: demilitarisation of the police and significantly more funding for public schools. Then I’d add on better support for families, the kind that was provided during WW2 — basically the option of 24/7, government-subsidised baby and child care and the option of healthy, prepared meals available to take home.
Those things would be to the benefit of everyone, regardless of the amount of melatonin in their skin. So, my hope is, they would have broad support and unify people. Now we spend too much time pitting people against one another. Look at this thread, where I think everyone is more or less on the same side. What a mess.
So there.
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You couldn’t be more right (in every regard)!
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Interesting take:
https://www.edweek.org/leadership/opinion-students-deserve-to-know-our-history/2021/07
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Absolutely!
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The No. 1. problem in the world as we know it is: “Critical Race Theory”?
I admit, the three words together have an impressive, banging sound.
And such a euphonious concoction needs a song to make it truly universal, for all the kids out there.
My contribution starts with a Paul Shafferesque piano intro: “Critical Race Theory – Yeah!” but gets no further.
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Number one problem? No. That would be climate change. But CRT is but one branch of the new post modern religion that is metastasizing throughout Western society. Because GroupThink is now predominant across the Left, this presents in everything from law to government to education to business to media to online to medicine to science. It is an ideology that is pernicious, malignant, anti-liberal and highly divisive. It is the cancer that if unchecked will turn Western democracies into either populist or totalitarian states. It is a Very Big Deal.
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I hope, tildeb, that will not be offended if I name our next dog Critical Race Theory. Either that, or a post-punk band. One of the two, for sure, OK?
I do think, by the way, that racism is a terrible problem – I just don’t know what to do about it. I do kind of like situations where it’s all “Critical Race Theory is Comin’ To get ya, Whitey!” which seems to be what is keeping you up at night , but there are machines for that condition.
As for the “Left,” it is dead, and has been dead for a long, long time. No courts, no military, no politicians, no money, no police, no businesses, no nothing. You have no reason to fear the dead, other than the need to invent a living dimension to its corpse to get you all excited at the chance to kill it all over gain.
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Why have you neither gratitude nor appreciation nor care for how it has happened that you live at the very best time in human history by all metrics used to measure human flourishing when all that has come before is so… dead? Maybe, just maybe, you are not seeing things very well and your understanding is lacking.
Sure, it can get better, and in many ways, and there’s much to be done but how are you building on what has come before to make it so for the generations to follow? Or are you one those ingrates who think in your profound ‘wisdom’ that everything should be torn down because you know better? Yup, racism can be defeated, donchaknow, by framing everything as racist. Yeah, like that’s gunna work. Duh.
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Steven Pinker, is that you?
Thanks to you and all your special friends who made this world so very, very cherishable and near-perfect. Who cares about a little economic inequality, or billions of poor and starving people, or about insane military budgets, or astronomical rates of depression and familial strife – nobody before has been in a world where a financial criminal can can send his own sorry self outer space on his own dime, amiright?
I am “building on what has come before” to make the world better by making a Critical Race Theory dry rub that can be applied to all manner of poultry, fish, and exotic game. Everything works better with a little Critical Race Theory sprinkled in it. Start off your next meal with it, and you won’t be sorry!
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If you actually cared about any of these issues you wouldn’t be busy performing your virtuous signaling against those who actually do. Such empty criticism and blaming what has helped the most are is equally empty of merit… not that you even care about that fact, of course. All you want to do is sound like you care… pretending it’s all on behalf of all those victims when it’s transparently obvious it’s all about your own inflated ego. What a champion! Well, as long as you feel good about yourself. That’s all that really matters.
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“Virtuous signaling’? That’s such a lovely phrase – did you come up with that? Brilliant, as the English say!
There is a problem with that vacuous phrase, though – the only “signaling” that I am aware of doing is with my car – left or right, to be courteous to the drivers that can benefit from seeing my driving intentions. Is that what you are referring to as “virtuous”? If so, thank you, but I”m just doing my duty as a responsible driver. Perhaps you don’t signal at all, and yes, you should be incarcerated for that. Fortwith.
Along with all the other heedless, entitled morons.
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As a proud nihilist, why would you respect any rules of the road? Hypocrite.
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Sure, if you get to define nihilism as being a totally clueless idiot jerk, then the hypocrisy charged leveled against nihilism has some validity.
But maybe there’s more to this nihilism concept than that, so perhaps you don’t get to be the Definer-in-Chief?
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I just recognize hypocrisy when I see it. Why don’t you, swimming freely as you do in these dastardly liberal waters while you pretend to hold the values that keep you luxuriously afloat in such contempt?
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Sounds from all the water imagery like someone is mad that others have a swimming pool in which you can observe them “luxuriously afloat.” That’s just not going to get you invited to the pool party.
You might check with Sam Harris if could let you hop into his, but he’s going to bore you silly with all of his bullshit Buddhist theorizing. The Critical Race Theory folks are jetting off to Cozumel this weekend to celebrate their massive cultural victories over Whitey, but you’re not invited. Damn.
I know it’s really hot where you are, and that you equate a couple of people losing their parking privileges to the vast and endemic horrors of structural racism across the world (you do know there is an absolutely appalling white/black wealth divide in this country, getting worse, for which Sam Harris has done absolutely nothing, and has absolutely no propositions to offer). Just try to tough it out, OK?
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I thought the crown of sarcasm and salt was mine, but clearly, I must pass it on to you.
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Well I’d like to think I could contend, but no, you have the crown, and the papers and the followers (350 plus comments on Critical Race Car Theory alone!) to prove it.
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In this case I’m no sure that’s a win.
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LOL 😀
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One indication of how pernicious this ideology is regarding lesbians. Where did they all go? Why have so many lesbian organizations moved underground? Why is the term now used as the most caustic slur in young people’s vocabulary? How have we let this happen?
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This notion that CRT is some kind of distraction, a Republican dog whistle, a legitimate means to address racism, a much ado about nothing, is so wrong it’s not even wrong. The point is that its influence is infecting the culture to the point where self censorship is becoming necessary to avoid its fanatical judgement. For example, Maud Maron is/was a public defender and school board trustee in NYC who spoke out against both a large amount of money removed from the education budget and diverted into mandatory ‘diversity training’ as well as plans by mayoral candidates to eliminate admission testing criteria. For this expression, she was labeled as a ‘racist’ and so lost her job as a respected public defender.
This is CRT in action. It is much ado about something and it starts with understanding why it is so harmful to so many by accusation alone that is used to such effect against anyone who dares to raise legitimate concerns. It’s a punitive movement to either shut up and go along with its racist lies or pay some measure of a significant price, usually by having one’s career AND reputation (as well as those immediate family members who are associated with the ‘guilty party’) either damaged without consequence to those who so glibly libel or destroyed without either due process or evidential justification. It’s like being accused of blasphemy and then assumed guilty and deserving of any and all punishments. That’s why it’s so malignant.
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Speaking of blasphemy, I love Harris’ description of what’s going on:
“Racism exists in some places, but doesn’t exist everywhere, and it is being claimed to exist everywhere and is being found everywhere in what is clearly a mass hallucination. And this hallucination is being defended by people who are highly incentivized to defend it; and the level of dishonesty and callousness that surrounds this whole enterprise is just appalling. Genuinely good people, who everybody knows are not racist or sexist or transphobic, are being sacrificed to this new religion.”
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Is the problem not that you’re looking for absolutes, when in fact the discussion is about nuances? I’d argue that hierarchization, including by race, colours all aspects of social interaction.
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Not sure I follow your question, Pink.
What I am saying is that we need to keep – and defend – fundamental liberal values firmly in place and then do what we can to correct actions and policies that go against their spirit. Group ideology of any kind is a problem and racism definitely falls into this category. It can be addressed to great effect but it takes time to eliminate these kind of biases throughout society. This is why I raised the inter-racial marriage issue that has undergone a complete reversal in mere decades. Liberalism works to reduce these problems. Group ideology does not; it makes them worse. That’s why movements like CRT is so regressive: it has increased racism.
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I’m not sure I agree with that use of the word racist. To borrow Philip Agre’s words: “Racism is the notion that one race is intrinsically better than another. Affirmative action is arguably discriminatory, as a means of partially offsetting discrimination in other places and times, but it is not racist.”
I think the same applies to CRT. It’s not racist, although it use race as the primordial marker through which to see events. I don’t find that disturbing. Until my grandmother’s generation the vast majority of French literature was seen through the lens of the aristocracy.
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What you or I or Agre think defines racism doesn’t really matter here. What matters is how the law interprets it. When race is used as a descriptor of immutable characteristics (that belongs to all the individuals who constitute it) that is then used to discriminate, our liberal legal system defines this as a ‘prohibited’ discrimination. The same definition is used for a bunch of specific subset of identifiable groups that have faced discrimination on immutable characteristics in the past.. like women, religious believers, gays and lesbians, and so on. The illegality resides in acting discriminatorily based on the immutable part.
So it’s not ‘discrimination’ that is at issue here. We discriminate all the time about all kinds of things (like choosing a property or lover or food, for example… highly discriminating, as I’m sure you’ll agree!). What is at issue is implementing and enacting race-based policies that describes certain ‘negative’ characteristics as belonging ONLY to certain races… in CRT, for example, these negative characteristics are for things like working hard, being on time, valuing metrics in education, and so on. According to CRT, these belong only to ‘whites’ and so ‘discriminates’ against blacks when used as ways of measuring performance and comparing outcomes. These kinds of racist and idiotic and untrue assertions about ‘immutable’ characteristics of whites (that aren’t immutable whatsoever) are part and parcel not just of CRT taught to and enacted by school children but are at the core of the ‘privilege’ nonsense explored and explained by DiAngelo and Kendi to justify their vindictive racist framing of whites.
It’s not that this ideological racial garbage masquerades as ‘theory’ that has no basis in fact that should bother us any more than qAnon Jewish space laser crap, but that it is unquestionably and perniciously racist in the worst possible way.
CRT as a movement is itself a racist promoter and supporter. This framing is then presented as the ONLY anti-racist approach that is not inherently racist! Furthermore, CRT advocates its indoctrinated audience to get rid of ‘systemic’ racism by teaches and increasing reverse racism through action. It advocates and campaigns tirelessly for institutional racist policies and procedures. It is malignant racist ideology to its very core.
If every CRT advocate would follow one simple principle, it would be Do Not Lie. If that principle were dared to be followed, that would shut down the entire ‘anti-racism’ CRT bullshit program instantly.
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I have the impression you’re more interested in taking a side than in analysing the merits and demerits of CRT. I think that’s a problematic position when regarding something so broad.
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It’s because I have seen this indoctrination infect and take over my university and then get transmitted into public curriculum in education and law. I started talking about it online over 20 years ago warning where this would lead. It has unfolded as predicted and is continuing on the same trajectory. This leads to no place worth inhabiting and guarantees China’s supremacy.
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You won’t be surprised to learn I don’t see the world as having been “taken over” by anything, except perhaps technology. There’s nothing uniform in ideologies. We have different groups, different interpretations and they’re all competing (healthily).
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Well, just because you may not recognize its effects doesn’t mean it’s not there. You may not recognize the strangulated death of the Humanities, for example, unless you compare and contrast change over time. You may not recognize the ongoing polarization in moves to the extremes in politics. You may not recognize how many men are serving time in women’s prisons. You may not recognize lowering standards to facilitate rising graduations but producing what amounts to entry level ‘expertise’. You may not recognize rising tribalism in law nor have read the changes to Standards and Practices throughout professional oversight Colleges – from various sciences to medicine to law to engineering to nursing to education – to replace and impose group-based ideological expectations on what is and is not acceptable over and above professional and subject relevant concerns. You may not recognize the loss of the role for facts in media reporting. You may not recognize how widespread is self censorship on various kinds of Boards – from local to national, from non profits to multinationals.
Why would you understand and appreciate the long term cost when you already believe such ideological changes are by definition ‘progress’, that ANY criticism of this ideological intrusion is automatically determined and described to be bigoted, racist, fascist and – the worst possible accusation – conservative? You may have missed how this affects diversity of viewpoints in all these organizations and organs of state.
You may have missed the rise of Trump and be unaware of how this kind of ‘leadership’ through a ‘surprising’ electoral win in 2016 takes all of us to the brink of despotism on Jan 6 2021. There is a causal connection here. You may not understand how so many people in sound mind and body could conceivably vote this way. Granted, the rise in populism may not affect you today, may not cause you any concern whatsoever in your business dealings and social life today. For now. You may not recognize nor care about what steps into the void when nationalism at home rises. But it’s not good.
None of this is good. It – this rising tide of ideology driven by group-based belief that groups are real but individuals not so much – is like a rising tide of religious belief and blasphemy. This is why I am so surprised so many atheists don’t recognize what’s going on here and are complicit in promoting apologetics for it. I recognize this even if you don’t. But you should.
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Actually, we can examine all your claims through statics, and the numbers generally don’t support your conclusions. By that I mean not even close. I’ve already shown you the higher education math, and also that of cases of trans-women – and still you’re claiming statistical exceptions are the general rule.
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What, the statistics don’t show the recent arrival of something called ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’ offices with growing staff and sweeping executive power? They don’t show the drop in Humanities enrolment reflected in the massive growth of various kinds of Gender Studies whose graduates just so happen to then populate these roles? You don’t think it odd – or haven’t noticed, maybe – that an entirely new bureaucracy has Poof!ed into being throughout government, education, corporate business, and professional oversight colleges? Is it that you haven’t noticed or simply don’t care?
And please show me where ‘affirmation’ regarding ANY gender questioning therapeutic consultations have not been mandated from entire fields of medicine (including psychiatry and psychology) and in social services from these professional oversight bodies. Mandated. Anything else is now considered ‘conversion’ therapy (and subject in some places like Canada to accusations of ‘hate crime’ if ‘watchful waiting’ is suggested as an alternative) and subjects professional license holders to risking their professional status.
Something important is going on, Pink. And just because you seem oblivious that these ‘recent’ changes are widespread and growing in power and influence that creates victims of its intolerance generally and are causing self censorship to take the place of free speech doesn’t mean you can wave it away and claim things are moving in the right direction. It is very much a response to this movement that gives rise to a counter populism and we see the results in elections of people like Trump.
Specifically, as a gay man you should be concerned that the next generation of gay and lesbian men and women are being urged by both policy and practice as well as social media pressure to switch sexes that is in alignment with, say, Iran’s policy and then expect everyone to ‘celebrate’ this kind of gender assignment. But the mouths of people who see this travesty unfolding are being shut by those apologists who presume any criticism IS intolerance. Look at the numbers, Pink, of how many young lesbians there are joining various lesbian organizations and marvel at how these plummeting numbers are of no concern except to the so-called bigots and so-called transphobes! Good grief. Notice the cross-dressers have evaporated or gone underground? Just ‘one of those things’ I guess.
To be an apologist of this unfolding discriminatory travesty in the name of diversity, equity, and inclusion is absolutely and utterly shameful because its so obviously and painfully hypocritical.
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That’s a very long answer which doesn’t address the simple matter of mathematics. I’m prepared to be convinced if you can establish a substantial pattern, and then show how sustained growth is continual. For example, anti-fay rhetors have used the argument that homosexuality would “end” humanity as if the existence of gays impeded the existence and reproduction of heterosexuals. If you can establish the patterns, I’m prepared to verify your numbers and be convinced.
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Yes, more information would be just lovely… except when trying to gain better insight very often earns one professional suicide and reputational disgrace based on accusation alone. You simply don’t hear about the multi-year lawsuits of libel that are settled in favour of the plaintiff long after everyone ‘knows’ the libel must be true because everyone says so. These stories aren’t carried. For example, Lisa Littman’s article that was reviewed and published was then pulled for special review after such attacks. You probably unaware it was later found to have no methodological errors. But it was still pulled and she was fired because of the reputational harm such a ‘guilty’ person who was labeled a transphobe brought to her work environment. These smear tactics and character assassination are so commonly and successfully used against those who are trying to get better information that why should anyone bother? Who cares if the number of gay women shrink to some tiny fringe minority in the growing sea of self-identified and self-medicated transsexuals? Who cares that there were no known cases of gender dysphoria by preteen girls prior to 2013? Who cares? Raising any questions is transphobic, donchaknow.
So yes, by all means hope that new information and good data will fall into our pool of knowledge like mana from heaven so that we can begin to see more clearly what’s going on. But in the meantime, let’s pretend there’s no widespread problem causing increases in self-censorship. It just kind of happens, I guess.
Or… one might consider the lack of good information itself is rather indicative that there IS a growing problem when we KNOW those who investigate to gain such data are subject to well advertised and effective smear campaigns. Must be coincidence because, gosh, we just don’t have the really good information we need.
This is why I say today’s defenders of this activist movement ARE the religious apologists and agnostics of yesteryear. There MAY be a problem but golly gee whiz, I just don’t know if I believe or not.
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That’s not really true from a statistical perspective. I’m sure you can find numbers for where CRT is implemented and how, and also regarding these other issues you’re concerned about like women’s prisons.
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Remember, CRT is just one branch of the infection.
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Regarding my June 29 comment about CRT being recommended in Ontario across all curriculum by OISE (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education), the Premier today stepped forward and made an announcement regarding the math curriculum and removing all references to CRT. He also said the subject could be discussed in other relevant social studies classes.
The curriculum had said “mathematics has been used to normalize racism and marginalization of non-Eurocentric mathematical knowledges, and a decolonial, anti-racist approach to mathematics education makes visible its historical roots and social constructions.” (Edit: Good luck figuring out what this word salad means.)
That section was removed from the preamble to the curriculum, as were mentions of “anti-racist and anti-oppressive teaching and learning opportunities,” and “the colonial contexts of present-day mathematics education.”
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Ibram X. Kendi shuts down this kind of “Get Off my lawn!” tedious racist invective from tildeb’s likes in his brilliant piece available here (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/07/opponents-critical-race-theory-are-arguing-themselves/619391/). This sums it up:
“The Republican operatives, who dismiss the expositions of critical race theorists and anti-racists in order to define critical race theory and anti-racism, and then attack those definitions, are effectively debating themselves. They have conjured an imagined monster to scare the American people and project themselves as the nation’s defenders from that fictional monster.”
Tildeb monopolizes the floor with Gish gallop after Gish, but never is there any answer to the two questions: 1. What accounts for the horrific black/white wealth divide in the US? 2.What is being done about it? Nothing in the way of answer to these two fundamental questions from the Trump/tildeb side. Zero.
Instead we get an endless rehash of Faculty Club grievances about the riff-raff that has been let into the academy. The “death of the humanities” – that’s an easy one – you killed it. Boring, tone-deaf lecturing about the verities of antiquity = money-hungry imprisoned students. Diversity/inclusion/gender studies hirees? If you hadn’t been so dogmatic and authoritarian in your vaunted religion of “scholarship,” there wouldn’t have been a need for them.
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From the High Priest Ibram X Kendi himself:
“To fix the original sin of racism, Americans should pass an anti-racist amendment to the U.S. Constitution that enshrines two guiding anti-racist principals: Racial inequity is evidence of racist policy and the different racial groups are equals. The amendment would make unconstitutional racial inequity over a certain threshold, as well as racist ideas by public officials (with “racist ideas” and “public official” clearly defined). It would establish and permanently fund the Department of Anti-racism (DOA) comprised of formally trained experts on racism and no political appointees. The DOA would be responsible for preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas. The DOA would be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.”
We use to call this the ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat.’ Now we call it CRT.
And, in spite of all historical evidence to the contrary, some people think (I use that term very optimistically) this is STILL a good idea because… race!
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As opposed to the rule of entitled racists, this fanciful proposal is grand! Good stuff.
You still did not answer the two questions, because you cannot. You are going nowhere by avoiding answering. Time’s up.
You will be reported to the DOA if you do not.
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Answers are obvious:
Problem defined in question one: history
Solution asked for in question two: individual equality rights
Assuming the first is caused solely by racism and then inserting imposed racial equity for the answer has already been tried in various forms. It doesn’t work. It never has worked. It never shall work. All this does is create a totalitarian regime.
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You still have not, after all this useless verbiage, answered why you think the US racial wealth gap exists. “History” is an asinine answer. There has been nothing in the way of “imposed racial equity” that has made the slightest difference in the documented numbers.
You want the apartheid system to continue; Critical Race Theory proponents, labeled as “high priests” by you, to its credit, do not. Read the short Atlantic piece. It will have you instantly dropping this ridiculous obsession.
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If I say anything more, you’ll call it a gish gallop. If I say anything less, you’ll say I refuse to answer.
Of course there are reasons including blatant racism in law for some disparity. But this disparity is not an inherited characteristic of racism when subsets of black people of different ethnicity are on the other side of this disparity. But I can guarantee you would not attribute this reverse disparity to racism. So I know your thinking using a racial framing of this issue of economic disparity is a no-win, no-change, never-wrong entrenched position. You believe, and so no evidence from reality or any explanation of a multitude of factors beyond ‘systemic racism’ is going affect what you think one iota.
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That’s an absurd non-answer – of course the horrific 8-10 times US racial wealth disparity is an “inherited characteristic of racism,” despite your nonsense about “black people of different ethnicity.” You can’t give any causes for that disparity, which you disparage as just “some” disparity, so it’s down to garden-variety racism for you. What “multitude of factors’ could you possibly be talking about?
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What I find particularly disturbing is I’ve spent my life watching these same tactics being used by the anti-gay religious right. Which is why I’d really like people against CRT to provide statistical evidence.
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Yes, this is the mindset of heedless barrage that that the “anti-gay religious right” continues to employ. That kind of institutionalized bigotry leaves a mark. In a humane world, you wouldn’t have had to be denigrated by it.
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Of what? Increased racism? Increased intolerance? Shutting down of diversity of thought? Increased segregation? Increased censorship? Increased disruptions and demonstrations and violence in the streets? Increased crime?
Again, although there is an increasing number of testimonials and small sample size statistics for all these things that are readily available, these are not data. To gather data requires large double blind studies. When such studies themselves are attacked as bigoted, as systemic racism in action, and its agents maligned and vilified and fired as racists and -phobes, how do YOU suggest we collect the data YOU want to see to even BEGIN to question this racist movement? What kind of data do YOU need to see before you withdraw your tacit support for this malicious and malignant ideology in action? You tell me, Pink.
Or how about you show me that CRT reduces all of the above. Because that evidence is lacking entirely.
You tell me because it seems to me what you’re asking for is equivalent to a religious believer demanding evidence from a non believer that ‘proves’ that there is no god. The correlation is the same: the inherited racism of every single white person is the CENTRAL FEATURE of CRT! And ANY disparity in outcome between JUST this selected binary group feature is ALWAYS evidence of racism! You have set the stage where everything by definition IS racist and ALWAYS SHALL BE racist and shut out ANY avenue of inquiry that in ANY way critical of this assumption because to do so is RACIST!
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If I were going to make a case against something, on the basis that it’s dangerous, I should be able to provide a straightforward set of numbers demonstrating harm. For example there are 5300 colleges in the US, in how many of them is CRT taught, and what have been the effects? Total number of firings, lawsuits, complaints? Is this number growing?
The same for the unrelated trans issues you’ve mentioned.
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Yeah, that would be great. I wonder why that information isn’t readily available?
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What I can tell you is that CRT is ubiquitous in education. I can tell you CRT is mandatory in Teacher Colleges. I can tell you that CRT is part of the entire curriculum.
Now, here’s the thing: every time some ridiculous real world example arises, defenders rush in to claim this is not CRT or not the correct version or not the real one. In this way, all of CRT in action (because it’s a social movement and not an academic theory) that creates intolerance and uses disparity to demonstrate systemic racism is protected in law from criticism on thee basis that is prohibited ‘hate’ speech. This is why specific legislation (or Order in Council) has to be formulated and passed to ban it… because it IS ubiquitous and part and parcel of every subject, part and parcel of every legitimate student organization, every student council, every Board meeting, every trustee decision. Administrators have been completely cowed or removed from interfering in any way this ongoing indoctrination because education is now teeming with the ever-growing DEI departments whose employees who oversee, seek out, and have the administrative power to ‘correct’ for disparity. To facilitate this, most Board (and most large institutions in business) now have what are called CDO executives – Chief Diversity Officer. This is not an HR department but an OVERSEER of all employees including Board members and executive officers. It is UBIQUITOUS. So to stand against this wave is professional suicide. And there are uncounted examples of exactly this. Please note, this overseer position is right out of the Kendi handbook.
I sincerely wish I could give you specific numbers. All I can tell you is that in every single case you want to look, diversity departments are growing. In Michigan State University, for example, it’s almost a hundred. In all of the Arts and Humanities, fewer than 50. This not unique.
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Andrew Sullivan called it the ability to be racist while still claiming the high ground. His discussion with Amy Chua, herself demonized, is one of this best. Of course Sullivan was drummed out of his media position but I’m glad he’s getting his own subscribers and I am happy to be one (and as a cheap person, I’m very discerning about where I choose to spend money on intellectuals and media – well okay not always because I do pay for Disney+).
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Me too. Even when I disagree with him, I still very much enjoy his writing. I wish I could express myself half as well and in half the words. Someday…
But notice that I raised these very points already with our host to absolutely no effect. Water off a duck’s back.
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Maybe there’s hope after all… it just takes a lot of people bothering to make an effort.
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You think it is unrelated, but it isn’t. IT’S THE SAME THING, the same movement, the same ideological imposition. And the reason it’s the same is because it’s the same DEI departments and officers are getting involved. Here’s yet ANOTHER example of how DEI officers are implementing the same ideology behind CRT that justifies their existence but aimed at booksellers regarding criticism of gender ideology!
It’s the same bloody thing over and over and over again. The front office is DEI.
If self-censorship by students throughout education including and especially universities isn’t a fundamental harm you think worth serious investigation until a specific percentage number can be presented to you that you can then evaluate whether it’s high enough to garner your interest (I know of many, many declarations by students who have told me they cannot say what they think or they will get in trouble with their peers, teachers, and parents), then I think you are a lost cause..
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I’m asking for evidence that I have no doubt is readily available. There are interest groups including the Pinker group you mentioned keeping track of events to make sure they can publicise these issues. So please show us the numbers. I don’t mean an anecdote, but an actual proportion.
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Well I certainly doubt such information is readily available. So, when you come across it, please let me know.
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NBC seems to have had no trouble collecting data on trans people in prison: https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/transgender-women-are-nearly-always-incarcerated-men-s-putting-many-n1142436
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Seriously? This is what you consider data? Didn’t the phrase ‘gender assigned at birth’ raise a red flag to you?
(California’s) SB 132 (whihc is hugely problematic in policy statements see here), which took effect in January (2021) allows transgender-identified male state prison inmates to transfer into women’s prisons based on “individual preference”—no hormones, surgery or time spent living as the opposite sex required. 264 male prisoners have declared a nonmale identity and formally requested transfer to women’s facilities.
How’s that going?
As the Los Angeles Times reports, the “management or security concerns” provision of SB-132 provides no protection for women.
Now, that might not concern you one bit. But it should concern anyone who think it’s not fair or just that a biological male and convicted violent criminal – especially one convicted of violence against women! – who then self-identifies as transgender can gain full and unfettered access to a women’s prison fully intact based on not offending such a criminal’s transgendered feelings while dismissing every other biological female’s feelings on the matter. How is that right?
Who cares that of the 124 sexual assaults this year in California against females in custody – or 5.6 per cent – have been perpetrated by transwomen, who account for about one per cent of the prison population? As long as we can feel virtuous regarding ONLY the transgendered criminals, who really cares about this increased risk?
What about Canada?
Transwomen with a history of violent crime are not disqualified for transfer, even though we have no evidence that an individual’s psychopathology disappears with a change of gender identity. A serial pedophile; a serial sex offender; a contract killer; a child killer; a murderer: All have been approved for Canadian women’s prisons or halfway houses. Rape centers are expected to open their doors to fully intact males self-identifying as trans, too. Such a transgendered claimant would never lie, of course, and who cares how traumatized the women in these centers might be to share a room with one?
As for crimes against women in these prisons by transwomen in Canada, we have a veil of secrecy. All we get are anecdotal reports after the fact – there are many and growing – by other inmates because the officials are not obligated to make such reports public… especially when by policy a transwoman is considered ‘female’ for the purposes of these stats! How very helpful collecting data!
So when you talk about gathering more data as if you are open-minded before forming an opinion, you can’t just select whatever seems to support a dismissal of concern like the NBC article you’ve offered and then go along with vilification of those who try to get data (that’s why I submitted the Abigail Shrier story earlier in the thread). It’s just circular thinking. What I’m pointing out is the common thread that links all of this together: an antiliberal ideology played out in so many ways and one that is demonstrably causing real harm to real people in real life to the applause and support – from active to tacit – of many believers.
If nothing else, this movement should raise alarms.
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Did you know Abigail Shrier was part of Katy Faust’s project?
I’m surprised you seem to not be interested in actual data. Please demonstrate the number of cases where there have been issues with trans prisoners. That’s the number that proves or disproves harm. Writing 5 paragraphs without data doesn’t prove anything. It’s more of an exercise in psychological manipulation, and I’m sorry but that won’t work with me.
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You may find this discussion between Amy Chua and Andrew Sullivan of interest as they touch on some aspects of CRT. Note that, like me, Sullivan is not against teaching critical theories, including CRT but he is not pleased with it’s acceptance into indoctrination and he explains his reasoning very well, much better than I’ve explained mine and I agree with him on his points in this conversation. https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/61371/private/75e7a2ba-3206-4ecd-ad39-2a05c46408af.rss
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Your link takes me to an incomprehensible page, do I need some sort of app to be able to read it?
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Consider yourself lucky: the “comprehensible” part would be a much worse, much more painful waste of time. Chua is the Ghislaine Maxwell of academia to Brett Kavanaugh, and Andrew Sullivan is a conservative Catholic war supporter. Two homeless bums opining on critical race care theory would be a far better pursuit of enlightenment.
Chua and Sullivan – two literal “show-stoppers” for me. That’s it – been fun – peace out, conservatives !
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It’s to a podcast. I may have shared it incorrectly. This may work better. https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/amy-chua-on-immigrant-success?r=7y1w9&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=copy
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I’ll watch it this evening 🙂
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Just audio but let me know if I goofed it again. If I did, you can always go here https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/ and scroll down to that episode. They talk about a bunch of stuff but do talk about critical theory as well and in particular CRT, which Amy actually clarifies and what she says is interesting.
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The difference between theory (critical theory) and practice (critical race theory)!
Also note the change in student’s admission essays demonstrating not overcoming life’s challenges and triumphs attained but through a single and particular ideology based not on Marxist economic classes but it’s modern mirror version: hierarchy based on power. As a prof who has to read many of these essays, Chau’s point has merit… not least of which is that this is red flag that widespread indoctrination is being exercised on high school students because it’s such a common theme over the past 7 years. Something has changed.
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Are you suggesting Marx’s categorization of class isn’t based in fact?
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It is one way to frame the world… on group economic class. But the core concept is only as legitimate as, say, group religious alienation to ‘explain’ history. When you define the world a certain way, it’s not surprising you then find the world this certain way. Duh. Today, the core concept of this ‘post modern’ version of the Marxist model frames the world… on group power dynamics.
So when one frames a complex world with such simplistic groupings that appears to be somewhat descriptive, what gets lost IS fact. This is demonstrated historically whenever ANY group ideology is imposed on individuals as if true for all. The ideology then becomes a belief imposed on reality when given political authority… with predictably awful results for many individuals not if but when the two – surprising only the believers, apparently – fail to get along.
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Are you making an argument against analysis and categorization? That goes against epidemiology.
Understanding how societies work isn’t an ideology. That’s nothing to do with imposition unless you want to call all learning an imposition.
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Equating economic class as “how societies work” is the premise you assume is true. This leads you to then claim not doing so is “an argument against analysis and categorization.”
This thinking has led you straight into a false equivalency. And it happens when you mistake the premise for the conclusion. What is obvious is that you have no intention of addressing or discussing or exploring any of my actual comments; you are simply trying to present them as something they are not. I have criticized you many times over the years for doing this to the point where I say this method you use is just a tactic. And it’s neither helpful nor I think honest.
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I made no such mistake. Economic classes are an integral part of how societies work. You’re the one trying to oversimplify this into an either/or. You’re implying either that’s the only descriptor or we can’t use the analysis at all. That’s nonsensical.
The idea one could analyse the functioning of any society without measures of power structures is simply ridiculous.
I have simply not found your arguments convincing. When I asked for statistics you tried to wriggle out of it by saying statistics didn’t exist – when clearly a whole range of them do.
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You’re doing it again. To be generous, maybe you don’t even know you’re doing it. But when I point it out and then you do the same thing, good grief.
I said, “It is one way to frame the world… on group economic class.”
You say, “You’re implying either that’s the only descriptor or we can’t use the analysis at all.”
No. That’s not what I’m implying; that’s what you are inferring. And you’re factually wrong. But you would prefer to choose to assume and then believe your own fiction that my opinion is nonsensical rather than reexamine your own presumption that led you there. That’s rather telling, don’t you think? That’s the tactic that demonstrates you are not commenting in good faith.
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Sorry, but I think you’re incredibly wrapped up in the whole Quillette victim ideology thing.
Your proposition is that CRT is some sort of dangerous concept; so dangerous and harmful it must be ignored/dismissed/not taught. The mistake you make there is firstly acting as if CRT is some sort of uniform ideology. You did the same thing with Marxism. Anyone who speaks of Marxism in simple terms, as if it’s reduced to class structure or control over means of production, is creating a simplistic straw man.
The same applies to the trans issues you’ve dragged into this other topic (again).
So what I’ll say is, if you want me to believe in your god, show me the evidence. I want to see the demonstrable harm in numbers. Of nearly 5500 college campuses, what is the number of dismissals/scandals/controversies. Or in the transgender prison population, for example, what’s the number of incidents recorded?
And please don’t answer with 5 paragraphs of ideology, because I’m not interested in opinions, I’d like to see actual evidence.
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You’re doing it again:
You say, “Your proposition is that CRT is some sort of dangerous concept; so dangerous and harmful it must be ignored/dismissed/not taught.”
Again, you substitute what you believe you think I’ve said rather than deal with what my actual position is. This is a dishonest tactic. Yet you go it time after time after time.
In fact, I said, “Yes, that’s why I’m not advocating for banning anything including CRT.”
I also stated, “Yes, the teaching of critical race theory – or it’s parent, critical social justice – should be taught just like Marxism.”
Why do you continue to claim my position, my opinion, my meaning is in fact opposite to what I have actually stated? You pretend that I imply your contrary substitution rather than either quote me. But as far as I can tell, you fail spectacularly time after time to ever question your own contrary inferring. That’s not my problem, Pink. It’s yours. And you do it all the time… with never an apology or setting the record straight. That’s why I claim that you do not engage commentary in good faith.
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If it should be taught, just like Marxism. And trans people are perfectly safe members of society, as the available evidence suggests — then what’s your goal exactly?
I scrolled up, just to be sure, and your comments don’t match your denial. But if I’m wrong, I’m happy for you to lay out your position.
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And as for notabilia who thinks it’s nonsense having not listened to it because of perceptions of who the speakers of the ideas are. Attacking the person and not the ideas is not how ideas are discussed effectively.
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A propos of nothing except thst it always cracks me up:
https://www.google.com/search?q=jesus+shaves+david+sedaris&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari
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What’s all this CRT business about? What’s the harm? It’s everywhere.
Dr. Tara Gustilo is of Filipino descent, the mother of black children, and a Harvard-educated physician at Hennepin Healthcare System (HHS) in Minneapolis. She was Chair of the OB/GYN Department, until HHS decided her personal views on race did not correspond with her skin color and revealed her supposed “internalized whiteness.”
Over the last decade, Dr. Gustilo has served successfully in various leadership roles at HHS. She created a program to reflect cultural differences in birthing practices to better serve her diverse patients. But over time, her colleagues transformed this program into racially segregated care. When Dr. Gustilo voiced her objections, advocated for race-neutral care, and criticized racial essentialism on her personal Facebook page, her colleagues told her that she, as a person of color, should hold the same race-essentialist views they do and could not lead because she does not share those beliefs. HHS then removed her from her position as Chair of the OB/GYN department. Dr. Gustilo has now filed an EEOC discrimination charge against HHS.
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I believe that’s called anecdotal evidence 🙂
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Of course it is. And the plural of anecdote is not data. I know this, too. But when this is all one has to work with because collecting data is evidence of some kind of hate crime, one does what one can and sees an environment into which all these anecdotes fit seamlessly. So like testimonials, it is evidence of the larger problem nevertheless.
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Not really. I’m sure there are enough conservative groups out there who’d be perfectly willing to do a count of cases they’d heard of. It just seems none of this amounts to a substantive pattern.
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Yeah, that’s what all deniers say no matter how much evidence is brought forward. The fact you care not a bit about an increase of 4000% in England and over a 1000% in the US where we have SOME statistical evidence of a change in the number of teenage girls wishing to ‘transition’ – all of which suddenly happened only after 2011 (funny, that) – demonstrates that your denialism is not rooted in any care for others who really have been victimized (through anecdotal testimonials backed by reality about the various dismissals, firings, reputational attacks, de-platforming, mobbing, etc) nor that you lack ‘enough’ information. This pattern of thinking to rationalize denialism and the dismissal that follows under the banner of ‘skepticism’ is identical to climate change deniers and anti-vaxers. No evidence, no pattern, no number of created real world victims is ever enough, and so we should dismiss the matter entirely as benign.
This observation I’ve stated above that this is what I think you are doing – whether right or wrong – should raise yet another in a long line of red flags to you if for no other reason than many well-informed people are in agreement that this is toxic and malignant ideology that when acted upon IS a significant and growing problem needing much more scrutiny, not less, and certainly not dismissal.
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I think your analysis of the increase in 1000% or 4000% is faulty. And I’m being generous using the term faulty. Increases and decreases are impacted by a whole range of factors, so the real number to look for is what the total in reference to the population. When looked at that way the numbers look perfectly reasonable.
So do us a favour and tell us if as a proportion of the population the number of people seeking transgender treatment is in any way unreasonably high?
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A brand new ‘medical condition’ explodes and you presume this is normal? Ha! No number, once any number is accepted and cemented as ‘normal’ as you have just done with a wave of your dismissive hand, is going to be ‘too high’! Duh. Nice little piece of circular reasoning.
But when there is strong evidence it fits a social contagion, and then that researcher and all related research vilified as day follows night (most renowned sex research departments have already been defunded and shut down), then real experts (of those few remaining in the field, Eric Topol knows his shit) become criers in wilderness and easily dismissed because they are the outliers donchaknow, and the massive harm goes on… until certain multi-year lawsuits are eventually rendered (like Bell’s case against Tavistock) and we begin to ever so slowly climb out of the pit of harm acting on this ideology keeps churning out to the cheering of its apologists and adherents who make finding what’s probably true ever more difficult and dangerous for those who actually care about the welfare of others.
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Do you mean you don’t want to analyse the actual number? Or how it relates to the population?
Perhaps you don’t know the history of prejudice in sexual minorities but throughout the 20th century the number of people who identified openly as being part of those minorities jumped dramatically a number of times. After the publishing of Kinsey’s book. After Stonewall. Even after the beginning of the sitcom Will & Grace. Again after gay marriage battles in various countries.
So yes, I’d like to know the number and how it relates to the population. An increase in and of itself is not a sign of a problem unless its ratio to the population is substantially higher than we should expect. Let’s stick to the evidence.
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From the NIH dataset in the Library of Medicine:
“A number of factors specific to TGNB (trans gendered non binary) individuals limit estimates of prevalence and healthcare utilization. Transgender demographics are difficult to study, as identifying individuals as transgender can publicly ‘out’ them, potentially putting them in physical danger or subjecting them to outward discrimination. Therefore, many of the largest studies on transgender epidemiology are anonymous online surveys, which preclude any verification of patients’ identities, and preferentially sample those respondents with computers and internet access. Furthermore, many electronic medical records do not record gender identity or sexual orientation data. This makes is difficult to distinguish between GCS (gender conforming surgery) and non-gender-related indications. For example, such systems could not distinguish between a prophylactic breast cancer mastectomy in a cisgender woman and a gender-affirming top surgery in a transgender man. Lastly, relatively little data, epidemiologic or otherwise, is available on the health needs and practices of non-binary people, which may be quite distinct from those of transgender men and women.”
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That affects estimates of trans people in the general population, but not concrete/known numbers of trans people in prison and the ratio of that to violence; or the number of people seeking treatment in clinics. I did a quick check and the UCLA’s Williams Institute gives an estimate of 0.6% of people being transgender. For a city like L.A. the number of trans people would therefor be 74,682. A certain percentage of those seeking treatment. Have you seen any numbers that seem unreasonable with that in mind?
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Wow.
The point is we have no good numbers to work with. But what we do have is a concentrated effort to STOP inquiry to get accurate numbers. That alone is cause for concern you do not share even though you think good numbers is the central issue.
We know we have a concentrated (and successful) effort to stop any means to question transitioning by anyone anywhere all the time. This is also a cause of concern you do not share because accurate numbers of those harmed is not readily available in the form you would like.
We also know that an ideological insertion in place of best evidence-adduced practices is GUARANTEED to produce victims. This is a major cause of concern you also do not share. After all, when did an ideological insertion in place or respecting reality ever cause harm? Where are those accurate numbers of some claimed famine from China and Russia? Nothing to see here.
And we know that about 90% of those who had diagnosed gender dysphoria before 2011 resolved the issue in favor of their birth sex, usually by the early 20s. (We know that those who remained gender dysphoric after a wait-and-see approach combined with talk therapy and who gained successful medical intervention as adults – not as confused children – are almost never a transactivist.) We know this number cannot be true today because ONLY the policy of affirmation is to be used by ALL medical and social services REGARDLESS of the questioner’s age or psychological and psychiatric impairments and conditions. In other words, there are zero checks and balances on young kids at every stage of professional enabling deciding for themselves what drugs and medical procedures they want if it falls under the umbrella of ‘gender identity’. If said professionals fail to comply, their medical and professional licenses are under threat. Policy must be followed, donchaknow. You have no concern about this whatsoever, either, which truly astounds me.
These concerns are simply waved away and excused much like throwing gays off high buildings, mandating sex change operations or death, and killing lesbians in a theocracy can be waved away because no one can produce good enough numbers to satisfy a critic such as yourself. There cannot be any cause for concern if the right numbers aren’t supplied on demand and subject to your expert approval. So there cannot be a problem, you see, and certainly no cause for concern. Who am I to claim throwing gays off of buildings is a problem if I don’t have the correct numbers and situational awareness of each case that you insist will satisfy you?
I am gobsmacked.
So here’s the question: what specific numbers would satisfy you that there is problem here?
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I’ve told you exactly what numbers would be necessary to substantiate the sort of argument you’re trying to put forward. And in both cases I mentioned the numbers would be available.
Are you trying to resort to emotional arguments to cover up the lack of data? Are you honestly comparing throwing a gay person off a building (homicide) with a person voluntarily seeking hormone therapy for gender dysphoria?
If your argument is that there is an overdiagnosis of gender dysphoria, you need to demonstrate how or why the number is unreasonable. That is not done with an increase in diagnoses, but with the proportion to the general population.
To make the argument a group in society poses a danger, a similar rule applies. You’ve mentioned trans women in prison a few times, so you’d have to demonstrate the level of violence for those prisoners is higher than the average. Unsubstantiated accusations and appeals to emotion may incite mobs but don’t prove points.
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“Are you honestly comparing throwing a gay person off a building (homicide) with a person voluntarily seeking hormone therapy for gender dysphoria?”
See, this kind of shit comment is just theatre. It’s neither honest nor worthy.
I’m sure the firing so many organizers of the Olympics brought about by righteous offense archeologists has nothing to do with the ideology (like this branch of CRT) that I continue to say is ubiquitous and malignant while you demand more numbers to satisfy what you decide is enough harm is entirely beside the point. While I thought you as a gay man might be concerned about gender reassignment that magically reduces the percentage of gays and lesbians in the population favorable to the Iranian policy that there’s no such thing as a gay or lesbian but gender confused youth, I was obviously wrong.
Because you are incorrigible, I’ll leave it there.
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Did you or did you not bring up throwing a gay person off a building? In what context did you bring it up? If you want to talk about honesty, start there. No one forced you to insert that line. I certainly didn’t. So don’t do it and then pretend I’m the culprit.
Just so we’re very clear, gay men aren’t interested in increasing or decreasing the percentage of our population. I think most of us are in favour of trans people deciding with their doctors and possibly families, what the best path is for them. It isn’t for me as a third party to interfere with another free citizen’s medical decisions — period.
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Doubtful, but maybe you might actually learn something. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
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I think I’ve made it clear that anecdotal evidence doesn’t prove points. You say you understand that, but thus far you’ve offered nothing else.
You should seriously ask yourself that if all your sources are either from or referenced in Quillette — there might be a problem with them.
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All the credit goes to the host of the blog, who has been extremely tolerant in the back-and-forth that just kept popping up in my in-box. Nothing ever came from the brickbats thrown by the pro-racial wealth gap specialist who is unable to use the correct from of “its,” but a book by Andy Norman, entitled “Mental Immunity,” explains why that other side is so mule-headed:
” A philosopher shows how to rid ourselves of breaks in logic that cause destructive thinking and extremism, and provides the tools to inoculate our minds and keep them safe from becoming infected by bad ideas. Why do people reject science and believe conspiracy theories they see on social media? How do people become so radicalized online that they commit acts of violence? Why is our society so politically polarized? How has a growing percentage of Americans become unhinged? Andy Norman has spent years studying the destructive forces that can flip the minds of sensible people to understand how they take hold. He calls them mind-parasites, ideas that can poison our thinking and leave us more susceptible to wild conspiracies, lead us to reject scientific evidence, and convince us to double down on unfounded beliefs.”
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“A woman who defected (from) North Korea over a decade ago says she was excited about studying in the United States – only until she actually did that. Yeonmi Park, 27, attended Columbia University and was shocked by the anti-Western sentiment and the level of political correctness that she witnessed there. “Even North Korea is not this nuts.”
“(I)n American schools, students are forced to think a certain way. I expected that I was paying this fortune, all this time and energy, to learn how to think. But they are forcing you to think the way they want you to think,” she said. “I realized, wow, this is insane.”
The point here is that I’ve heard this sentiment expressed literally hundreds of times from those who have lived under such infected regimes and who are perhaps more sensitive to what self-censorship means, what it leads to. Like Yeonmi Park, they cannot believe, cannot wrap their heads around, those who presume the harmlessness of such an ideology, who go along with anti-liberal sentiment to get along, who do not stand against anyone or any system that threatens the liberty of neighbours. I’ve talked with many (and read many more) who lived under South African apartheid, who survived Nazi concentration camps, who escaped from Iran, who served out sentences in the Gulag, who walked out of China. I have neighbours who have managed to get their children out of Iraq (Yizidi), whose families have been killed in Turkey (Kurds), who escaped on horseback from Byelorus, who went over the Berlin Wall in the late 60s, who fled Prague in ’68, and a Hungarian family whose grandparents were shot for helping them escape to the West in ’56. It’s very serious business, maintaining liberal values when they are under attack. But far too many of us aren’t even willing to admit that there’s a problem when the growing evidence is all around us. And we know this is the case because we have censored ourselves in the face of this ideology.
We’re not listening. I think we should.
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That’s quite the victims’ list there – with nary a perpetrator in sight. Also missing – victims of all the varieties of settler-colonialism.
You seem to have landed in a rightist-victims’ paradise of an apartment building, but your allegation of your “caring,” which seems mighty hollow, should be applied in much greater scope to those who were killed by Pinochet or the Brazilian generals, to the victims of Suharto, or those dispossessed by the Likud, by American white slavery, by European genocide in Africa, by fascism in WWII, und so weiter.
You have a rightist mind parasite, as you could read about yourself in Andy Norman’s book.
You ascribe wildly disproportionate influence to what’s going on in the year-long summer camps that is American higher ed, slighting the evident and on-going horrors and sufferings caused by the litany of -isms that have accompanied the rise of the supersystem. Racism, sexism, homophobia, supernaturalist fascism, anti-human religion – and you want us to be focused on a couple of arch-rightist profs who got their parking privileges yanked for a month?
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Whataboutism. Thanks for the example.
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I was born in a military dictatorship. My mother, a Spanish citizen, was born during the regime of General Franco. My French grandmother lived through the German occupation and Vichy — so I am, perhaps, in a better position than people born in the United States or Canada to understand the difference between real oppression and the tantrums of partisan academics who are peddling their wares.
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My concern is how this oppression begins, what are its signs and symptoms, and how we can thwart it before it becomes institutionally oppressive. This is what I am hearing – this same concern – from those who have seen it arise, the concern that it is not being addressed, not being challenged, but allowed to grow not just unfettered but welcomed as ‘progress’.
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I have to disagree that based on inheritance you’re in a better position than people in Canada or American to understand oppression. Canada and America exist because of oppression. My ancestors came here because their land was forcibly taken from them, they were removed from their country and they settled in the US only to have revolution start up and be chased away again. Some of my ancestors were starved our of their homeland through attempted systemic genocide – they too came to Canada and America to escape and many didn’t make it. On my mother’s side, her family fled the French Revolution during the terror to England and others left Germany after WWI when the economy was devastated and went to NZ, also a place for many who fled oppression.
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How closely have you experienced authoritarianism? When I was a child Brazil was still behind a wall. Imports were against the law and censors controlled television, radio and the print media. Dissidents were tortured and killed. The dictatorship had ended in Spain, but the long term effects were still easily seen with one of the main parties still pushing fascist ideology. Divorce, for example, was illegal. My mother was the first person in her family to divorce.
I say all of that because when I read the complaints by Pinker’s group, I can’t help but find them laughable. I grew up hearing gay people should be excluded, marginalised, sometimes worse. To this day people will, off the cuff, slip into conversation something like “throw a gay person off a building”; with that fell swoop setting a tone. The tone that implies, if not says, that “people like you, they get thrown off buildings”. That is in itself an aggression, a form of violence – and that is what I understand parts of CRT are attempting to address.
I think people who have lived through violence, emotional, social, political or exclusion because of identity, are more sensitive to recognising it.
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I don’t want to get into a “who is more oppressed” contest. My point is to claim that because of who you are you are more fit to comment on oppression than all the citizens of two colonial countries is just not accurate given that the population that makes up those countries had a large portion of them flee oppression to form those countries.
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You don’t think a person born in a dictatorship (former colony) has a better understanding of how it works than someone born in a free country? How about someone who spent time in both systems?
I’d argue that person may have much more knowledge than another who read a bit about it. Proximity is key. Growing up with someone who keeps a cupboard with supplies prepared in case war breaks out or descending from Quakers who immigrated in the 17th century isn’t exactly the same thing.
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No, I think your claim that you are better positioned than all Canadians and all Americans is false especially when there are many of us born in very oppressive countries who emigrate here and call ourselves “Canadian” or “American”. There is a very large population of Chinese and South East Asians here who call themselves Canadian. There is also a significant Indigenous population. And even through generations, abuse, trauma persist (ask any indigenous person who went to a residential school). So to make the claim that you as an individual are much better positioned to speak about oppression and then site your family history of oppression (not just your birth country) is a bit insulting to millions of people.
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I didn’t say all Canadians and all Americans, did I? I specifically said people “born in” Canada or America — which is a very important distinction. And yes, I absolutely believe that the life experience of the people who raised us has a massive influence on our understanding of the world. The children of people who survived the holocaust, for example, probably have a level of knowledge those of us who didn’t experience that will never have.
My knowledge of Franquist Spain is deep and personal, as is my knowledge of the military regime in Brazil. As I used that explain a North Korean wasn’t alone in understanding authoritarian regimes, I feel it was more than justified and well explained. Or are you implying the US or Canadian governments are comparable?
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I’m claiming that it’s ludicrous to make a statement that you as an individual based on your heredity and place of birth are better positioned to comment on oppression more than any native born person in the US or Canada. Millions of people don’t know as much as you as one individual because they were born in the US or Canada. I think that is incredibly insulting and reduces the experience of all those who you claim will benefit from CRT to nothing.
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That’s not what I claimed. You’re taking what I said out of context to be able to attack it. Tildeb introduced a topic about a North Korean. I countered I know authoritarian regimes too, in a personal way, probably better than people who didn’t experience them. I never mentioned oppression in a general way. Obviously, Fritzl’s daughter who never left a basement in Austria understands that better than any of us.
Do you know why some professions insist on practical experience? Because it adds a whole new dimension to understanding.
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If I missed what your intent was or took it out of context, I apologize. I didn’t intend to misconstrue your meaning go argue against it. If it turned out that way, it wasn’t intentional.
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On the internet we don’t get tone, and in many people’s cases (including my own) there’s usually a huge discussion going on inside one’s head that people don’t get to see 🙂 Misunderstandings are par for the course!
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This ‘better understanding’ was why I quoted Park. who came out of Columbia just last year when she made this comment. If nothing I have been criticizing was going on at universities, why on earth would she talk about this self-censoring? I also mentioned many others who have lived under totalitarian regimes and who add their voice to this concern about the rise in self-censorship, that it’s new, that it is a harbinger, that it is widespread and growing and malicious. That was the point.
Typically now, you first wave all this concern away and then misrepresent it as if it’s either a figment of my imagination or without enough enough ‘hard’ evidence in numbers it matters not at all. The dismissal is packaged as if it’s another ‘Pinker’ concern, something driven by some fictitious ideology against which real. progress is trying valiantly to advance – like getting men into women’s prisons and eliminating the term pregnant ‘woman’ or the ever-shocking and discriminatory ‘breast’-feeding woman.
I raised the issue of self-censorship because it’s not just a personal opinion and cannot be dismissed this categorization as you are wont to do.
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Can I just add…no..my husband was born into Communist Romania but he and his family have less of a fear and political interest in oppression than me. I am genuinely upset about Afghanistan. My husband doesn’t really care. You can understand and have empathy even if you are not directly influenced. My family fled to Canada due to WW2. My father’s family left Scotland for better living standards. It was all haves and have nots, even if they were not being shot at.
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Oh FFS, Pink: I used the analogy to say it is UNREASONABLE to deny why throwing gays off buildings is a problem when the person you are trying to reason with INSISTS there is no problem unless and until accurate numbers can be neatly packaged and delivered to you for judgement about their quality (like the throwaway smear against Pinker, reminiscent of similar smears used against atheists with a Dawkins reference).
You cannot be this obtuse.
I cannot believe you didn’t comprehend my point when I raised the ANALOGY of you pretending there’s no problem with stuff like CRT or transactivism – in spite of OBVIOUS problems of examples delivered to you that demonstrate harm – unless you first receive and then grant your esteemed approval to these appropriate numbers and judge maybe, just maybe, the ideology is a problem. Even if the number of gays thrown off buildings is ONE, the take away point remains it represents an intolerable ideology in action. I don’t think you missed this point at all, but rather than admit the analogy I raised has merit, you doubled down and repackage this to intentionally misrepresent the example as some kind of demonstration of some kind of personal attack against you in order to intentionally misrepresent me and my motives. That’s why I call this kind of shit comment from you nothing but theater that demonstrates your incorrigibility.
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Thank you for the clarification. Surprisingly, I do know what an analogy is. The question is, do you, hand on heart, believe it’s an appropriate analogy? I ask because when one uses an analogy (or metaphor) one normally considers proportionality.
So do tell us, what action or event is as unacceptable as throwing a gay person off a building to their death?
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Now you are going to be the judge and jury of ‘appropriateness’ of analogies? Whatever you do, don’t think about any of the points I raise. Just defend and dismiss. I’m sure it will all go away as you wait for your numbers.
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Yes, I am. I think gay people are entitled to ask why you feel you can equate the murder of gay people to events that seem fairly banal.
This is important because it goes to your ability to measure the importance or impact of an event. When your point is that something is the equivalent to murder, you’d better be prepared to demonstrate how and why.
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“When your point is that something is the equivalent to murder…”
That’s not my point and you know it. I’ve explained why this isn’t my point. I’ve explained what my point is – dismissing a problem that IS a problem by pretending getting accurate numbers about the problem is the problem! And you keep doing this kind of substitution, over and over again. It’s a tactic. And it’s dishonest but effective at changing the topic and avoiding legitimate criticism of your own opinions that excuse real world problems that create real world victims and further real world suffering.
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If it’s not your point, then why did you use it? For theatrical effect or to create a sense of urgency and importance that doesn’t really exist?
And when you say “I’m sure it will all go away as you wait for your numbers.” Are you implying we should discriminate without evidence? The problem here is perhaps you’re speaking without considering the implications of what you say. You can’t throw murder into a discussion and then pretend it’s nothing. The “real-world problems” you’ve mentioned have amounted to very little.
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“The “real-world problems” you’ve mentioned have amounted to very little.”
Unless you are the one being harmed. Then it amounts to a very big deal.
That’s the assumption you are making that is wrong. You pretend that until hard numbers are available for your assessment the way you want them about areas you determine are ‘better’ – bringing with you some level of expertise to decide on behalf of all those harmed that maybe NOW we should begin to address the root causes of this harm in spite of massive and mounting anecdotal evidence that it is widespread and growing in malignancy – this concern should be dismissed. THAT is why I introduced the throwing of gays off buildings, that the level of harm is NOT determined by some demand for accurate numbers by some interested bystander first but by the OBVOUS wrong being perpetrated to those subject to the harm.
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Fascinating theory! So following your logic of making these forms of “harm” you mention an impossibility; how do we apply that standard to people who suffer the harm of discrimination? Or people who, say, have their necks kneeled on?
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Here’s a very short compilation video (via Peterson’s podcasts of ~40 minutes) that I think begins to reveal the scope of indoctrination – and an idea of what the harm actually is – currently well underway throughout education (each of the speakers talk about some aspect of the Academy) – as students and teachers – with representatives from secondary to post doctorate and why this matters so much. I am very much a fan of Rex Murphy (the old guy with the baseball cap) in particular not necessarily because of what he thinks but because of how it says it. The man is a national treasure and a pleasure to listen to. Apparently, all of these people also ‘belong’ to this vague and obviously disreputable ‘Pinker’s group.’ But that’s par for the course for anyone who criticizes po-mo ideology in whatever form it arises; criticism can only be justified if it’s first approved by those whose ideas are being criticized. Otherwise it’s source must always be a character flaw. Yeah, no red flag there.
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You don’t seriously think I’m going to listen to a grifter like Peterson, do you?
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Of course not. You will determine who is ‘qualified’ and of course no victims ever meet your bar so, no. It would surprise me if you bothered. But perhaps another reader or two might just dip their toes into these and listen to a Yeonmi Park tell us why her four year experience at Columbia university was an execrable and expensive exercise in going back into her totalitarian past and self-censoring. Yeah, again, no red flags to worry abut here.
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I suggest you look over your comments before proceeding because you’re going down an odd if not unhinged path.
This appeal for people to enforce exclusion based on anecdotal evidence or innuendo reeks of religious thinking.
And get a grip, someone self-censored? Oh my! Did they also have to wear a mask? Imagine how they’d feel if for much of their life, if their partner died they might face losing everything because there were no laws protecting their relationship. Imagine if they could be fired for their sexual orientation until 2020! Oh the self censoring!
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Too funny. And so the humorous irony is rich that these points you raise are themselves exposed in the video is lost on you. Oh well. I do what I can. So I remain quite well hinged, that you very much.
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Ah yes, exposed by Jordan Peterson. LOL. I think it’s quite clear to anyone who glances through your comments that apart from deep seated fears, you don’t seem to be able to develop ideas any further. CRT is a villain, Marxism is a villain (and a simple ideology that can be opposed as a whole), Trans rights and the people who support them are villains. Last year it was the Muslims who were your villains-du-jour. And the genius source of all the evidence for the villainy writes for or is referenced in a single partisan source known as Quillette. Not independent evidence, not studies, just Quillette talking points which are mysteriously in line with the Heritage Foundation’s talking points of old.
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CRT is Marxism. So is BLM. So is transactivism. And Marxism is very much similar to religious belief in that it creates groups, imbibes them as if nouns, and turns people from nouns into belonging to these group verbs. In other words, it’s a word game and not reflective of either reality or principled liberal values. In fact, all of these are antithetical to liberal values, which is why I do express my critical opinions of them. But you would know that if you stopped inserting and then substituting your beliefs about what I write and try to understand what I’m actually saying.
Sure, I read Quillette and I do read many of the authors introduced to me through this source. You mistakenly believe this is my only source (all good chums apparently with the somehow disreputable Pinker) and so form your opinion once again around what you believe. In your world 1 out of a 100 may be perfection but it is not a reflection of reality. It is a reflection of your belief.
I have at least 30 different subscriptions across the political and social spectrum and read very widely about all kinds of stuff every day, enough to recognize illiberalism hard at work when I see it no matter what form it may take. I also realize illiberalism in whatever form it takes is a social malignancy in desperate need of more criticism. And the reason? A faith-based belief is a faith-based belief is a faith-based belief. And just as dangerous. I’ve maintained this position consistently.
John McWhorter has just come out with a book called Woke Racism, How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. I’ve said as much for over 15 years because I saw it unfolding at the universities and schools I taught at. It’s now in the curriculum and it’s a faith-based social movement causing indoctrination no different than a religious one. Valerie Terico raised exactly this similarity to religion back in 2019 and I wrote about it then. And she’s never written for Quillette nor a chum of Pinker as far as I know. But I have no doubt your beliefs will alter reality enough to somehow make this all fit into a nice neat package.
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And yet all of your arguments are precisely faith-based. Including the idea that Marxism is some sort of religion — which confirms your knowledge of it is next to nothing.
A serious, evidence based argument on the dangers of a particular group of people or of an ideological strain wouldn’t need artifice or deceptive language.
If one wanted to make an argument on rapists being included or excluded from certain prison populations one would point to the relevant recidivism rate, and in what circumstances those numbers apply. How those numbers compare to other groups like perpetrators of other violent crimes. To demonstrate the boiling temperature of water I don’t need to tell a story about how the water’s mother was thrown off a building by a black man. I need heat, a pot, water and a thermometer.
Valerie Tarico does seem to be a lovely person; very much in line with the Harris/Quillette/Peterson mindset which she has recycled into her own posts. I don’t need to go far, I can point to articles she wrote that are contemporaneous to works by those authors. I also recall when she wrote that BLM should have taken the example of Nelson Mandela and his non-violent struggle. I explained to her that Thatcher used to call him a terrorist. So the package, a combination of ignorance and evidence-free ideology, is already there.
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No. This is another shit comment.
I am a classical liberal trying to defend liberal principles through critical thinking. Faith plays no part. All the rest of this smear is from your own mind that you then apply to me and my motives and topics and make demands that I produce for you only what you decide is of any value. What is of value to both of us is liberalism but only one of us is supporting it and it’s not you. I am pleased to have been an active supporter of Counterweight prior to and after its launch. I urge anyone in any position to help to look this mandate over for themselves. (very short video here.)This is liberalism in action. This is what I support.
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That Sam Harris crowd lost its credibility a long while ago. Before anyone embarks on that path I highly recommend reading this: https://www.wired.com/story/sam-harris-and-the-myth-of-perfectly-rational-thought/
Wright does a magnificent job of demonstrating quite flawlessly the errors made by Harris and his Dark Web brigade. Errors I have no doubt he’s aware of, so then we have to ask what his motives are for pursuing discredited “ideas”? I think we can rule out good faith.
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You realize you are excusing illiberalism at every turn, do you not? Here’ another article about the harm caused by going along with self-censorship (that you continue to believe is negligible or even imaginary because I am not providing you with collated hard numbers of harm that you might agree with, as unlikely as that might be considering the source you have already dismissed!) that has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with what YOU think makes every concerned person’s position dismissible by your Royal Hand Wave.
I am fast concluding that you are not a liberal in fact, that you actually have no respect for vital liberal principles upon which your life and livelihood are based, and seem to go out of your way to vilify anyone who tries to defend them from some illiberal imposition. This makes you the worst kind of collaborator. The long term cost paid for by others is real enough for those who have previously been very strong supporters of equal rights for gays that you now enjoy, a legal equality based on the very liberal principles you now dismiss so easily, by people who in your mind have morphed into terrible people that you vilify for some apparent transgression they have made against your Holy Beliefs. Good thing your own perfection grants you immunity from others in your Order who might – oh hell, who WILL – turn this tactic on you.
This illiberral support you offer is a pretty poor way to show your appreciation as an openly gay man for all this principled support these terrible people have freely undertaken. In fact, I think your current ideology is deeply shameful because it is a betrayal you are making at every turn. You sacrifice the reputation of others flippantly and without any remorse. You are quite comfortable cloaked in righteousness as judge and jury and find every liberal guilty of some transgression and so all are equally damned. So I have probably been mistaken presuming that you’re simply not thinking well. It goes much, much deeper than that and I’ll leave you to your self-hatred.
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Coming from the person who wants to impose a presumption of danger on trans people, what you say is almost funny.
I’m not tied to any tribal definition of myself — but entirely confident I’m for universal standards.
Again you speak without considering the implications of what you say.
…” a pretty poor way to show your appreciation as an openly gay man for all this principled support these terrible people have freely undertaken.” (italics are mine) LOL, seriously? Do tell me what the amount of debt is precisely, that we the openly gay, owe to the Sam Harris brigade? Here I was mistakenly thinking that all citizens were entitled to equal rights. How uppity of me. And I’d also love to know how it is that if we disagree with them it means we hate ourselves?
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“(I)t’s worth noting that the vast majority of teachers and DEI trainers are not sitting down with students or groups announcing a lesson on CRT. More often than not, the name “CRT” never comes up at all. However, a CRT-based perspective is quietly shaping the conversation anyway. Its impact can be seen in conversations about race, power, identity, intent, privilege, and in an insistence on seeing the world through its lens…. Here is the source)
I’ve claimed that lens is a Marxist ideology about groups in all but particular selected characteristics of those groups in the same way it’s all algebra using x,y, and z regardless of their numerical values.
So I know you want to make my concerns and criticisms all about me and my shortcomings/biases/bigotries/fears/yada/yada/yada, and so seem quite comfortable waving away and dismissing each and every point I raise on this basis. Oh, and each and every point anyone anywhere anytime with whom you disagree not because this is a tactic you rely on but because you deem every one of them unsuitable. The coincidence is to be expected, I guess.
So this hand waving away and outright denialism that a problem exists can work for a while.
But when enough people grow sick and tired of this denialism that supporters and apologists exercise to justify racist, bigoted, and discriminatory policies and laws to be imposed on everyone and claimed to be ‘progress’ and ‘social justice’ and ‘tolerance’ and ‘equity’ and ‘diversity’, to wave away legitimate criticisms and concerns that there’s even a problem coming from an identifiable political party or name that supports their imposition on everyone, then the effects can be devastating for everyone. Trump is a case in point. A return of Trump probably no less a concern. And rest assured, a revival is coming starting with mid-term elections.
So the point here is that the rise to high public office for people like Trump very much is caused by to those who vote for them, to be sure. But that culpability ALSO belongs to the very supporters and apologists who favor the imposition of this malicious and destructive progressive ideology on everyone. Responsibility for the pushback to this intolerant progressivism belongs to those people who refuse to admit there’s a problem when in fact there is. This is a typical and reoccurring malaise of the Left. I think you could be its poster boy.
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I didn’t at any point try to make your criticism about you. In fact I hadn’t made up my mind on the topic. I specifically asked for an evidence based outline supporting positions to which angle had more going for it. That doesn’t seem too much (or offensive) in my opinion.
After listening and reading about it now (more than I wanted to) I don’t see that there’s any serious reason for alarm. Nearly all of the cases mentioned fall into the category of inconvenience. And not *more* inconvenient than issues faced by people in society across the board.
A CRT based perspective won’t be the only one. It will be one amongst many. The Evangelicals have theirs and try to push it. We atheists have ours and fight for the separation of church and state. The feminists have the right if not obligation to see the world through the lens of how women are affected; in every circumstance. All of that is part of understanding the world.
The “pushback” narrative is statistically false. Hillary had over 3 million MORE supporters than Trump. Trump won because of the electoral college. See, numbers. Show me the numbers and I’ll see if they add up.
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In regards to schools, this short video I think captures the gist. And I see nothing offensive in it.
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The link doesn’t work
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Well, shit. It does for me so I don’t know what sorcery or communist plot is behind this.
This is the address I used:
Here’s hoping…
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Now it worked. How would inserting the word “about” look to you? That instead of teaching CRT, students are taught about this how this school of thought exists?
The video presumes equal footing, which might be true in some places, but not others. Was your contact with other ethnicities growing up on an equal footing? When I was at school we had no blacks and only a handful of Asians who were not treated with a whole lot of respect. And I don’t say that as something other people did, I was very happy then to take part in what I now recognise was extremely cruel bullying.
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“About” would defeat the point. In my first unsuccessful attempt at a college degree I learnt “about” feminist criticism, Marxist criticism, and Freudian criticism from a neutral standpoint and it inoculated me from taking any of them seriously.
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I don’t believe you saw no merit in any of those things.
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I have a certain respect for Marxism but I don’t take it seriously in the sense of being an accurate description of reality. It does expose some of the hypocrisies of the social hierarchy, but hierarchies also serve a legit purpose. The others, nah.
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There’s a lot of Marxism that looks borrowed if not plagiarised from Catholicism 😀
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Some people argue Marxism is Christian eschatology without God, but I suspect that is by way of Hegel rather than a direct cribbing.
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I wouldn’t say Christianity as a whole, but certainly Catholicism. In fact through the ages a number of convents and religious orders were fully operational Marxist communes.
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Of course! This school of thought IS important to consider for poli-sci courses. That’s not and never has been the issue.
The issue is using CRT has a fundamental approach to present through ALL education, which is ideological activism. This is the ‘movement’ so many people are up in arms over, teaching primary school children to view the world this way as the default.
My public education was fully integrated, not just with races but ethnicities and languages and religions. The big event ending every summer was a cultural 2 week celebration involving passports and free busing throughout the city and area to attend all manner of cultural presentations. A group – say at a Hindu temple or an Italian soccer club – would on various days host food and drink events, shows, traditional dress and dance, art, ceremonies, advertise programs they offered throughout the year, lots of information, speaking events, and so on. It was amazing how multicultural and integrated were all the minorities that made up the overall community, and as kids, we loved not only participating in our parents’ contribution but planning an itinerary on what to attend and for how long so that our ‘passports’ were full of international but local visits (with stamps to prove it!).
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That’s very interesting. We had international day, but it was mostly another chance to see things and people as other. I imagine this variety of egalitarianism is what makes you and Diane (both in Canada) presume that’s the norm. Brazil’s most famous children’s author, Monteiro Lobato, is also famous for the line “the place for Blacks is in the kitchen.” None of this was considered wrong until very recently, and still there’s huge opposition, hence the election of Bolsonaro.
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I don’t really presume it’s the norm. But remember we are being taught this way in Canada too. I want history taught with all it’s badness and for racism to be exposed and not tolerated but using a collective guilt approach, having children profess they are racist is very wrong. I felt the same way when there was a story about boys in Australia (young 10 year old boys) being forced to turn to a group of girls and apologize for rape. This is not the way.
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I agree that path is unreasonable, but what did you think of this angle of CRT: https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2021/08/10640659/the-white-lotus-review-the-limits-of-white-self-critique
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It’s hard for me to relate to a lot of these things as someone who was extremely poor and working class all my life but as someone who was able to become educated, thanks to government programs, scholarships, and finding summer employment and being lucky enough to live in a university town where I could take the bus in at a 30 min to 1 hour ride and be born at a tune when tuition only left me about 20k in debt. When I mingled with the richer middle class folk I found their complaints foolish and their ability to take things for granted infuriating. I still don’t mingle with the upper middle class and I have non white friends who do and who have complained to me about “white people”. I say to them that the white people they are complaining about are not the same white people I have access to. Those are rich white people and they don’t associate with me. It’s not that there is a hierarchy but I just don’t have the finances that would permit me to move in the same social circles though I have the education. It still strikes me as weird to hire house cleaners. I never think of it because my working class people were the house keepers. My peers all have them and I just never even consider it because I’m just not if that world. It’s an odd place to be.
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Well, it served a bunch of interests to promote tolerance and wider exposure and reveal that any ‘majority’ based on selected criteria was a construct when, in fact, the majority is always made up of nothing but minorities. There are two very important elements that I think Canada offers. The first is how to construct a political system that advances (not perfects) peace, order, and good government when the constituent population is so diverse and in so many ways. The second is to put into practice that inclusive multiculturalism is a strength that should be celebrated by all, that all of us have differences and that’s a good thing when a common purpose is shared by all.
Classrooms that divide students into groups based on imported group-based criteria doesn’t create social cohesion; rather, classrooms that treat all students as part of the student body subject to the same curriculum does. CRT as a social movement – not an academic subject about race and power – is diametrically opposed to social cohesion and celebrated differences and inserts a racialized and competing power hierarchy that creates victims and victimizers.
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I’d be interested to know your take on this angle of CRT: https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2021/08/10640659/the-white-lotus-review-the-limits-of-white-self-critique
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I’m not subscribed to HBO.
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For me I see nothing in these pictures that arouse anything more than…why not? But you can’t change history, you just need to normalise equality today and trying to counter the past by doing the total opposite won’t work. Forcing whites to feel inferior, or pushing black agendas into everything is not going to normalise attitudes. It wrongly assumes people have motives due to colour. At what point does my pale British skin convert to a colour value that means I have rights not to feel guilty over something unproven? My husband is Romanian and at least five shades darker than me if I use a makeup scale. Does he automatically become less guilty? Time to just take away this categorising and just let people be what they want to be. Until people stop labelling, we are not going to solve equality.
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Interesting. I’m not sure I see it as making white people feel inferior or pushing a “black agenda”. I have the impression the scales always tip to the most powerful, rather than to the person with the most merit.
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I agree. Influence as always seems to lead. BLM for me was totally ineffective in its way of dealing with slave issues. Bringing down statues is actually a negative. Sensationalist yes, but actually harms what they are trying to achieve. I honestly hate agenda in anything, it just pushes radicalism to the top. Better clear cut, sensible, doable changes based on fact, merit, empathy and not impassioned bias and bigotry. In these photos I didn’t see white as inferior, nor think oh why is that. Historically the cotton industry needed labour to sustain the insatiable need. Unfortunately blacks were a free or at least tradable commodity. Not right hiw it panned out but you can’t blame whites…its too simplistic. Big subject.
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Are you a Tory?
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Not really any political party. I mostly feel we need elements from all. I used to vote sometimes Tory, sometimes Green Oarty and a few times Labour for local elections. My husbands from Romania snd although its not always seen as a positive, some elements of communism work. I believe in capitalism, but I don’t think privatisation is the answer to everything. Here in France the protectionism and lack of business freedom is a real sticking point for me.
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