Tuesday, August 11, 2020



Whiteness Lessons

I reproduce below some excerpts from a big NYT article about "White Fragility" -- a summary of Robin DiAngelo's message and her book of that name

The underlying fact behind her work is that in all sorts of ways whites do better than blacks.  Her reaction to that is rage and her explanation for it is that whites are racist in relation to blacks. She appears to think that she can talk people out of that racism but admits that she herself is racist. Her definition of racism is very wide however.  What would normally be regarded as human virtues are for her part of white racism.

Basically, her message is an incoherent rave against white society with the only message being that we all have to change our thinking into some sort of alternative consciousness.  How, when, where and why we do that is unclear, however.  It makes sense as a cry of rage only.  There is nothing rational or constructive about it. Anger is attention-getting, however, so a lot of people listen to her in the hope of learning something. What they learn from it however is probably nothing more than a weak sharing of her diffuse rage and a determination to be nicer to blacks.

Some of the paragraphs I reproduce below make the obvious criticism that her focus on race can be counter-productive:  With blacks  learning that all their failures are due to others and whites learning that they have to make extra efforts with blacks, which is undoubtedly contrary to ideals of equality.

At no point does the lady address obvious problems with her account.  Why, for instance, do Africans do much better in White America than in Black Africa? 

And the fact that various minorities such as Chinese and Japanese Americans do well would seem, on her account, to mean that whites become non-racist in dealings with those groups.  More realistically, there is racism against such groups but it is minor and they overcome it without assistance from white do-gooders.  Why cannot blacks do the same?  So it would seem that at least part of the disadvantage that blacks experience must lie with blacks themselves.  Querying that is surely the only likely way forward.



Robin DiAngelo and her book “White Fragility” have become a national phenomenon. But do the approaches taken by her and other antiracism trainers really serve the cause of racial equality?

Last July, in San Francisco, I attended three of DiAngelo’s sessions. ‘‘I wasn’t raised to see my race as saying anything relevant about me,’’ she declared to a largely white crowd in the Mission district’s 360-seat Brava Theater. Her audience had paid between $65 and $160 per ticket to hear her speak for three and a half hours. The place was sold out.

‘‘I will not coddle your comfort,’’ she went on. She gestured crisply with her hands. ‘‘I’m going to name and admit to things white people rarely name and admit.’’ Scattered Black listeners called out encouragement.

Then she specified the predominant demographic in the packed house: white progressives. ‘‘I know you. Oh, white progressives are my specialty.

Because I am a white progressive.’’ She paced tightly on the stage. ‘‘And I have a racist worldview.’’ Soon she projected facts and photographs onto the screen behind her.

No lone image offered anything surprising, yet the series caused a cumulative jolt: the percentage of state governors who are white, of the 10 richest people in the country who are white, of the ‘‘people who directed the 100 top-grossing films of all time, worldwide’’ - all the percentages over 90 - and so on. The onslaught of statistics was followed by a seemingly innocent picture of an all-white wedding celebration (about which DiAngelo asked her white listeners whether their own weddings were or would be just as pale), a photo of an all-white funeral (‘‘from cradle to grave,’’ she said, white people, no matter how liberal, tend to exist in overwhelmingly white spaces ‘‘without anyone conveying that we’ve lost anything - with a deeply internalized absence of any sense of loss’’), a screenshot of a Jeopardy board - during the semifinals of the 2014 collegiate championship - where the only category left entirely unselected by the contestants was African- American history (‘‘we don’t know our history,’’ we ‘‘separate it out and see it as their history’’), all of this culminating in a photograph showing a female silhouette standing without an umbrella in a torrential downpour. Messages of pre-eminent white value and Black insignificance, DiAngelo pronounced, ‘‘are raining down on us 24/7, and there are no umbrellas.’’ She declaimed: ‘‘My psychosocial development was inculcated in this water,’’ and ‘‘internalized white superiority is seeping out of my pores.’’ And: ‘‘White supremacy - yes, it includes extremists or neo-Nazis, but it is also a highly descriptive sociological term for the society we live in, a society in which white people are elevated as the ideal for humanity, and everyone else is a deficient version.’’ And Black people, she said, are cast as the most deficient. ‘‘There is something profoundly anti-Black in this culture.’’

At some point after our answers, DiAngelo poked fun at the myriad ways that white people ‘‘credential’’ themselves as not-racist. I winced. I hadn’t meant to imply that I was anywhere close to free of racism, yet was I ‘‘credentialing’’? And today, after a quick disclaimer acknowledging the problem with what I was about to do, I heard myself off ering up, again, these same nonracist bona fides and neglecting to speak about the eff ects of having been soaked, all my life, by racist rain. I was, DiAngelo would have said, slipping into the pattern she first termed ‘‘white fragility’’ in an academic article in 2011: the propensity of white people to fend off suggestions of racism, whether by absurd denials (‘‘I don’t see color’’) or by overly emotional displays of defensiveness or solidarity (DiAngelo’s book has a chapter titled ‘‘White Women’s Tears’’ and subtitled ‘‘But you are my sister, and I share your pain!’’) or by varieties of the personal history I’d provided.

White fragility, in DiAngelo’s formulation, is far from weakness.

It is ‘‘weaponized.’’ Its evasions are actually a liberal white arsenal, a means of protecting a frail moral ego, defending a righteous self-image and, ultimately, perpetuating racial hierarchies, because what goes unexamined will never be upended. White fragility is a way for well-meaning white people to guard what race has granted them, all they haven’t earned.

‘‘I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was ‘meant’ to remain oblivious,’’ one of the discipline’s influential thinkers, Peggy McIntosh, a researcher at the Wellesley Centers for Women, has written. ‘‘White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, assurances, tools, maps, guides, codebooks, passports, visas, clothes, compass, emergency gear and blank checks.’’ Borrowing from feminist scholarship and critical race theory, whiteness studies challenges the very nature of knowledge, asking whether what we define as scientific research and scholarly rigor, and what we venerate as objectivity, can be ways of excluding alternate perspectives and preserving white dominance. DiAngelo likes to ask, paraphrasing the philosopher Lorraine Code: ‘‘From whose subjectivity does the ideal of objectivity come?’’ DiAngelo’s ‘‘White Fragility’’ article was, in a sense, an epistemological exercise. It examined white not-knowing. When it was published in 2011 in The International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, it reached the publication’s niche audience. But three years later it was quoted in Seattle’s alternative newspaper The Stranger, during a fierce debate - with white defensiveness on full view - about the Seattle Gilbert & Sullivan Society’s casting of white actors as Asians in a production of ‘‘The Mikado.’’ ‘‘That changed my life,’’ she said. The phrase ‘‘white fragility’’ went viral, and requests to speak started to soar; she expanded the article into a book and during the year preceding Covid-19 gave eight to 10 presentations a month, sometimes pro bono but mostly at up to $15,000 per event.

White culture, for her, is all about habits of oppressive thought that are taken for granted and rarely perceived, let alone questioned. One ‘‘unnamed logic of Whiteness,’’ she wrote with her frequent co-author, the education professor Ozlem Sensoy, in a 2017 paper published in The Harvard Educational Review, ‘‘is the presumed neutrality of White European Enlightenment epistemology.’’ The paper is an attempt to persuade universities that if they want to diversify their faculties, they should put less weight on conventional hiring criteria. The modern university, it says, ‘‘with its ‘experts’ and its privileging of particular forms of knowledge over others (e.g., written over oral, history over memory, rationalism over wisdom)’’ has ‘‘validated and elevated positivistic, White Eurocentric knowledge over non-White, Indigenous and non-European knowledges.’’ Such academic prose isn’t the language of DiAngelo’s workshops or book, but the idea of a society rigged at its intellectual core underpins her lessons.

One critique leveled at antiracism training is that it just may not work. Frank Dobbin, a Harvard sociology professor, has published research on attempts, over three decades, to combat bias in over 800 U.S. companies, including a 2016 study with Alexandra Kalev in The Harvard Business Review. (As far back as the early ‘60s, he recounts in his book ‘‘Inventing Equal Opportunity,’’ Western Electric, responding to a Kennedy-administration initiative to enhance equity, presented lectures by Kenneth Clark and James Baldwin to company managers.) Dobbin’s research shows that the numbers of women or people of color in management do not increase with most anti-bias education. ‘‘There just isn’t much evidence that you can do anything to change either explicit or implicit bias in a half-day session,’’ Dobbin warns. ‘‘Stereotypes are too ingrained.’’ When we first talked, and I described DiAngelo’s approach, he said, ‘‘I certainly agree with what she’s saying’’ about our white-supremacist society.

But he noted that new research that he’s revising for publication suggests that anti-bias training can backfire, with adverse eff ects especially on Black people, perhaps, he speculated, because training, whether consciously or subconsciously, ‘‘activates stereotypes.’’ When we spoke again in June, he emphasized an additional finding from his data: the likelihood of backlash ‘‘if people feel that they’re being forced to go to diversity training to conform with social norms or laws.’’ Donald Green, a professor of political science at Columbia, and Betsy Levy Paluck, a professor of psychology and public aff airs at Princeton, have analyzed almost 1,000 studies of programs to lessen prejudice, from racism to homophobia, in situations from workplaces to laboratory settings. ‘‘We currently do not know whether a wide range of programs and policies tend to work on average,’’ they concluded in a 2009 paper published in The Annual Review of Psychology, which incorporated measures of attitudes and behaviors. They’ve just refined their analysis, with the help of two Princeton researchers, Chelsey Clark and Roni Porat. ‘‘As the study quality goes up,’’ Paluck told me, ‘‘the eff ect size dwindles.’’ Still, none of the research, with its dim evaluation of efficacy, has yet focused on the particular bold, antisupremacist consciousness raising that has taken hold over the past few years - and that may well become even more bold now. ‘‘I’m not afraid of the word ‘confrontational,’ ‘‘ Singleton said, and he predicted, in one of his more optimistic moments during our post-Floyd talks, that the society will be all the more ready for this because ‘‘the racism we’re seeing is so graphically violent,’’ leaving white people less willing or able to ‘‘operate in delusion.’’ Another critique has been aimed at DiAngelo, as her book sales have skyrocketed. From both sides of the political divide, she has been accused of peddling racial reductionism by branding all white people as supremacist. The Fox News host Tucker Carlson has called her ideas more racist than Louis Farrakhan’s, and the journalist Matt Taibbi has railed that her arguments amount to a kind of ‘‘Hitlerian race theory.’’ This isn’t Singleton’s concern. He thinks back to a long line of Black writers on race, and what he sees in the DiAngelo phenomenon is that ‘‘it takes a white person to say these things for white people to listen. In some ways, that is the very indication of the problem in this country.’’ He wrestled painfully with this at the outset of his career. At a training he conducted for educators in San Diego in the mid-’90s, there was ‘‘a collision,’’ he recalled, between him and the white people in the room.

‘‘I lost it, and they lost it,’’ he said; the session came to an early end, because of their ‘‘resistance to Black intelligence’’ and because ‘‘they were struggling with me as a Black person. As people of color who are facilitating learning about race for white people, we need to be very talented in terms of our facilitation skills.’’ One way he has grounded himself and gained poise is by positioning himself, in his mind, as the descendant of ancestral Africans who were ‘‘the first teachers.’’ Yet there may be something worth heeding in those who have resisted today’s antiracism training.

 I talked with DiAngelo, Singleton, Amante-Jackson and Kendi about the possible problem. If the aim is to dismantle white supremacy, to redistribute power and influence, I asked them in various forms, do the messages of today’s antiracism training risk undermining the goal by depicting an overwhelmingly rigged society in which white people control nearly all the outcomes, by inculcating the idea that the traditional skills needed to succeed in school and in the upper levels of the workplace are somehow inherently white, by spreading the notion that teachers shouldn’t expect traditional skills as much from their Black students, by unwittingly teaching white people that Black people require allowances, warrant extraordinary empathy and can’t really shape their own destinies? With DiAngelo, my worries led us to discuss her Harvard Educational Review paper, which cited ‘‘rationalism’’ as a white criterion for hiring, a white qualification that should be reconsidered.

Shouldn’t we be hiring faculty, I asked her, who fully possess, prize and can impart strong reasoning skills to students, because students will need these abilities as a requirement for high-paying, high-status jobs? In answering, she returned to the theme of unconscious white privilege, comparing it to the way right-handed people are unaware of how frequently the world favors right-handedness.

I pulled us away from the metaphorical, giving the example of corporate law as a lucrative profession in which being hired depends on acute reasoning. She replied that if a criterion ‘‘consistently and measurably leads to certain people’’ being excluded, then we have to ‘‘challenge’’ the criterion. ‘‘It’s the outcome,’’ she emphasized; the result indicated the racism.

Then she said abruptly, ‘‘Capitalism is so bound up with racism. I avoid critiquing capitalism - I don’t need to give people reasons to dismiss me.

But capitalism is dependent on inequality, on an underclass. If the model is profit over everything else, you’re not going to look at your policies to see what is most racially equitable.’’ While I was asking about whether her thinking is conducive to helping Black people displace white people on high rungs and achieve something much closer to equality in our badly flawed world, it seemed that she, even as she gave workshops on the brutal hierarchies of here and now, was entertaining an alternate and even revolutionary reality. She talked about top law firms hiring for ‘‘resiliency and compassion.’’ Singleton spoke along similar lines. I asked whether guiding administrators and teachers to put less value, in the classroom, on capacities like written communication and linear thinking might result in leaving Black kids less ready for college and competition in the labor market. ‘‘If you hold that white people are always going to be in charge of everything,’’ he said, ‘‘then that makes sense.’’ He invoked, instead, a journey toward ‘‘a new world, a world, first and foremost, where we have elevated the consciousness, where we pay attention to the human being.’’ The new world, he continued, would be a place where we aren’t ‘‘armed to distrust, to be isolated, to hate,’’ a place where we ‘‘actually love.’’ Amante-Jackson, too, sounded all but utopian as she envisioned a movement away ‘‘from capitalist, Western’’ ideals and described a future education system that would be transformed: built around students’ ‘‘telling their stories and listening to the stories of others’’ and creating ‘‘in us the feeling that we belong to each other as people.’’ Before I phoned Kendi, I reread ‘‘How to Be an Antiracist.’’ ‘‘Capitalism is essentially racist; racism is essentially capitalist,’’ he writes. ‘‘They were birthed together from the same unnatural causes, and they shall one day die together from unnatural causes.’’ I asked him whether, given the world as it is, many of the lessons of today’s antiracism training might inadvertently hamper the struggle for racial equality. ‘‘I think Americans need to decide whether this is a multicultural nation or not,’’ he said. ‘‘If Americans decide that it is, what that means is we’re going to have multiple cultural standards and multiple perspectives. It creates a scenario in which we would have to have multiple understandings of what achievement is and what qualifications are. That is part of the problem. We haven’t decided, as a country, even among progressives and liberals, whether we desire a multicultural nation or a unicultural nation.’’ Ron Ferguson, a Black economist, faculty member at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and director of Harvard’s Achievement Gap Initiative, is a political liberal who gets impatient with such thinking about conventional standards and qualifications. ‘‘The cost,’’ he told me in January, ‘‘is underemphasizing excellence and performance and the need to develop competitive prowess.’’ With a soft, rueful laugh, he said I wouldn’t find many economists sincerely taking part in the kind of workshops I was writing about.

‘‘When the same group of people keeps winning over and over again,’’ he added, summarizing the logic of the trainers, ‘‘it’s like the game must be rigged.’’ He didn’t reject a degree of rigging, but said, ‘‘I tend to go more quickly to the question of how can we get prepared better to just play the game.’’ When we talked again in June, the interracial protests had infused Ferguson with some optimism.

‘‘I have this mental image of plants that have been growing in the shade,’’ he said of the impediments Black people too often have to take for granted in our society, ‘‘and all of a sudden the shade starts to be removed, and these plants start to thrive in ways they never imagined they could.

I think there’s a possibility of a blossoming if the society starts to see us as fully human, removing the cloud of white-supremacist assumptions.’’ But, he suggested, ‘‘in this moment we’re at risk of giving short shrift to dealing with qualifications.

You can try to be competitive by equipping yourself to run the race that’s already scheduled, or you can try to change the race. There may be some things about the race I’d like to change, but my priority is to get people prepared to run the race that’s already scheduled.’’

More HERE  






‘White privilege’: an elite ideology

In the latest expression of its apparent death wish, the BBC put out a clip on social media this week of psychologist and former NBA player John Amaechi waxing lyrical on the subject of white privilege. In it, he gently explained why white privilege is real, and is even enjoyed by the underprivileged whites who generally resent the idea.

This is not the only time recently that the BBC – barracked by accusations of bias and campaigns to defund it – appeared to troll its critics. A podcast clip of two middle-class white women accusing other middle-class white women of being racist ‘Karens’ lit up the BBC complaints page a few weeks back.

But that Amaechi’s little video was put out on BBC Bitesize, the corporation’s homework and revision site, seemed particularly cheeky. That teenagers can now get woke on the same site as they revise for their French GCSE shows how orthodox ideas around identity politics and privilege have become at the BBC – and at elite institutions in general.

There was no debate set up here; the other side of this contentious issue was not given an airing. The theory of white privilege, it seems, is considered by the Beeb to be as uncontroversial as saying that we went to war in 1939 or that Henry VIII had six wives – just another plain fact to be relayed to the young folk.

Across the Atlantic, it fell to billionaire Oprah Winfrey to throw a hand grenade into this particularly tense arena of the culture war this week. On her Apple TV+ show, The Oprah Conversation, she said that even poor white people enjoy white privilege.

‘There are white people who are not as powerful’, the media mogul, net worth $2.6 billion, graciously conceded. ‘But they still, no matter where they are on the rung or ladder of success, they still have their whiteness.’ Right-wing Twitter obviously had a field day, mocking the obvious absurdity of a billionaire lecturing poor people about the privilege they enjoy.

Indeed, one of the consequences of the left’s increasing obsession with divisive identity politics is that it has ceded the language of class to the right. This week the black Tory mayoral candidate for London, Shaun Bailey, said in a speech that he had more in common with a white kid from Dagenham than a black kid from Hampstead, an old classically left-wing formulation about class solidarity.

What some right-wingers are cottoning on to, and exploiting to varying degrees of electoral success (Bailey, bless him, doesn’t stand a chance), is that the left’s recent embrace of wokeness is fundamentally a betrayal of class politics, and that where class politics can unite, wittering on about privilege only divides.

On a practical level, identity politics is just bad politics. Telling working-class white people, a huge chunk of the electorate, that even if they’re struggling to pay the bills and are thousands of pounds in debt they should always remember it could be worse is at best a non-starter. Making statements like ‘you can be homeless and still have white privilege’ would be churlish, to put it lightly, even if they were true.

But the problem with the theory of white privilege is not just that it winds people up. It also fundamentally fails to explain inequalities in society. In the UK, as Christopher Snowdon explained recently, white working-class boys are the poorest performing group in terms of educational attainment. Unless we are expected to believe this is solely down to them squandering their relative privilege, clearly race isn’t everything.

This is not to say racism doesn’t exist, or that racial inequalities aren’t real and serious. But the picture is far more complicated than the narrative of ‘white supremacy’ would have us believe: British workers of Chinese and Indian heritage are the two highest-earning ethnic groups by hourly pay, for instance, and there are big gaps in educational attainment between British African and British Caribbean kids.

For all the disparities in outcomes between different groups, influenced by various cultural, historical and economic factors, what class you were born into remains far more consequential than your skin colour. Even in eras far more racist and discriminatory than our own, radicals recognised that overcoming class domination went hand in hand with overcoming racism – not least given many ethnic minorities were and are disproportionately working class.

Simplistic notions like white privilege, then, obfuscate issues of economic privilege and dim the prospects of forging the coalitions necessary to make life better for all working people. What’s more, among the liberal middle classes, identity politics appears to have rehabilitated a form of class hatred, with the white working-class forever the implied villain of the piece.

After Black Lives Matter protesters toppled the statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol back in June, someone erected a temporary statue near the plinth, depicting a fat, string-vest-wearing pleb sitting in a wheelie bin and staring at his phone screen, on which were the words ‘England for the English’. Today, a white working-class caricature is what many associate with racism.

Regrettably, modern anti-racism has become the means through which class hatred is peddled and inflamed. Indeed, research suggests that ‘white privilege lessons’ have no impact on social liberals’ sympathy towards black people, but they do decrease their sympathy for poor whites, leaving them more likely to think they have ‘failed to take advantage of their racial privilege’.

Left-wing identity politics claims to sit in the anti-racist tradition. But today it plays much the same role that the racist right did in the past. It works to fracture class solidarity by insisting that different sections of the working class are fundamentally antagonistic to one another’s interests.

No wonder the elites love this ‘white privilege’ guff so much. A divided working class is no threat to them.

SOURCE 






We need to abolish race

Identity politics has revived racial thinking. It's time to move beyond it.

Thanks to the rise of identity politics and growing political polarisation, the politics of race has come to play an increasingly important role in mainstream public life over the past decade. The issues of race and racism now dominate the national conversation.

However, at the same time there is a growing opposition to the politics of race. Some writers and thinkers, like Kmele Foster or Thomas Chatterton Williams, are seeking to redirect the conversation about race. They don’t want simply to oppose racism, or to critique identity politics. They want to do away with the notion of race altogether. Their rallying cry is, ‘Abolish race!’.

Race abolitionism poses a challenge to both racism and modern forms of ‘anti-racism’. It is predicated on several core claims. First, race abolitionists argue that the social construct of race is based on a taxonomy invented to create and reinforce racial hierarchies. Therefore, to continue to affirm the meaning and existence of race will inevitably perpetuate racial hierarchies.

Secondly, race abolitionists contend that the concept of ‘race’ is scientifically and socially unsupportable. Unlike ‘sex’, which describes the material reality of the divided reproduction function of a given species, the concept of race has no such material, biological basis. That’s why its meaning is constantly shifting. For example, ‘mixed race’ people often consider themselves to be black, and at one time in the not too distant past, all non-white people were considered black. At the same time, several people who we now consider as unquestionably ‘white’ (for example, Irish or Italians) were once regarded as less than totally ‘white’.

And thirdly, race abolitionists argue that the perpetuation of the notion of race is in direct opposition to humanism and universalism. By dividing human beings into broad racialised categories, and institutionalising those categories in the form of quotas, ‘positive discrimination’ schemes, ‘black-only’ spaces and so on, identitarians reify race and racialise social life.

Leftist identitarians are fond of talking of human attributes as ‘social constructs’. However, their use of social-constructionist ideas is less radical than it sounds. In terms of race, they suggest that merely inverting racial hierarchies is sufficient to achieve social justice. So, instead of ‘whiteness’ being constructed to connote purity, power and intelligence, modern activists seek to invert its meaning so that it connotes guilt, debasement and privilege. Likewise, with blackness, activists seek to imbue it with new meanings, from innocence to moral superiority.

These tactics do not challenge racism, however. They preserve it, because they fail to challenge the idea of race itself. This raises several related questions. What does it mean to challenge the idea of race? What does it entail for a person to refuse to accept his or her racial designation? And, ultimately, what does abolishing race mean in practical terms?

Well, first, it means recognising that racial essentialism is a destructive idea, regardless of where it is coming from on the political spectrum. This concept assumes that individuals can be reduced to some racial essence, which in turn determines how they ought to behave and act. Thus, we need to deconstruct the idea of race, to de-essentialise or de-naturalise it, and to render ‘common sense’ understandings of race ‘strange’. In doing so, individuals will become a little more free to be themselves, rather than to live as their racial identity dictates.

Historically, social progress has been won through precisely such challenges to determinism, be it biological or, in this case, cultural. Think, for example, of feminists’ challenge to the idea of what it is to be a woman. Such challenges rest, in part, on what existentialists used to refer to as the ‘transcendental’ elements to our existence – that is to say, our existence precedes our essence. We therefore do not have to be defined by the designations (or indeed identities) imposed upon us. This includes not just the designations of racists, but those of anti-racists, too.

This is not easy. Race presents itself as such an eternal and omnipresent category of identity that many people today cannot imagine themselves existing outside of the racialised categories ascribed to them from birth, which proceed to determine their social relations. Because of this, the abolition of race is a radical challenge to the status quo. It poses the question of what possibilities for human relationships exist beyond the boundary of race. How can we destabilise the ideology and belief system of race?

It is time for us to think imaginatively about what the abolition of race might mean for us as individuals, and for society as a whole. Abolishing race doesn’t mean that we should ignore racism, however. It simply means that we should consistently argue against instilling race with meaning – positive or negative.

Ultimately, the abolition of race confronts us with big questions about who we are. Is the idea of racial difference more important than that of universal humanity? Is ‘race’ and racial essentialism more important than individual freedom? These are the fundamental questions that my new organisation, The Equiano Project, will be exploring. It will provide a vital forum for debate and discussion, in order to bring fresh thinking to bear on race, culture and politics. In doing so, it aims to facilitate conversations about, and to promote, the values of freedom, humanism and universalism.

Those on the identitarian left who currently want to re-essentialise the concept of ‘race’ have no positive vision beyond demanding recognition for past and imagined grievances. This is a dismal vision of our future possibilities as a unified humanity. It can only be challenged when we forge a new collective vision, for which The Equiano Project aims to be a catalyst.

SOURCE 






‘Systemic Racism’ or Systemic Rubbish?

The "systemic racism" refrain is a meaningless abstraction.

To concretize a variable, it must be cast in empirical, measurable terms, the opaque “racism” abstraction being one variable (to use statistical nomenclature).

Until you have meticulously applied research methodology to statistically operationalize this inchoate thing called "racism"—systemic or other—it remains nothing but a thought “crime”: Impolite and impolitic thoughts, spoken, written or preached. 

Thought crimes are nobody's business in a free society.

The law already mandates that people of all races be treated equally under its protection. The law, then, is not the problem, logic is. In particular, the logical error of reasoning backward.

“Backward reasoning, expounded by mystery author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle through his famous fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes,” writes Dr. Thomas Young, “applies with reasonable certainty when only one plausible explanation for the … evidence exists.”

Systemic racism is most certainly not “the only plausible explanation” for the lag in the fortunes of African-Americans, although, as it stands, systemic racism is inferred solely from one single fact: In aggregate, African-Americans trail behind whites in assorted academic and socio-economic indices and achievements.

This logical error is the central tenet of preferential treatment—affirmative action, and assorted quotas and set-aside edicts and policies.

According to diversity doxology, justice is achieved only when racial and ethnic groups are reflected in academia and in the professions in proportion to their presence in the larger population. On indices of economic well-being, the same egalitarian outcomes are sought.

Equalizing individual and inter-group outcomes is an impossibility considering that it is axiomatically and self-evidently true to say that differences have existed since the dawn of time.

Nevertheless, absent such wealth egalitarianism and proportional representation in the professions, the walking wounded who control America’s cultural discourse have concluded that racism, systemic or other, reigns.

The systemic racism non sequitur is even harder to sustain when considering the Asian minority, a minority that has had its own historical hardships. In professions and academic pursuits where mathematical precocity is a factor, Asians are overrepresented, consistently outperforming whites. If proportional underrepresentation signals oppression, then overrepresentation, likewise, must reflect an unfair advantage.

And if social justice requires that the State and corporate America act as social and economic levelers—then surely fairness demands that all minority groups that are overrepresented in assorted endeavors be similarly kneecapped in the name of equality? Should not such leveling policies be deployed to make the NBA or the 100-meter dash more “representative” of America?

High among Corporate America’s priorities is acting as a race leveler—voluntarily sniffing out deviationists and generally proceeding against and “re-educating” pay-dependent prey. Corporate America’s human resource departments are in the habit of deluging employees with the racial agitprop of illiterate (if degreed) pamphleteers. The woman who wrote White Fragility comes to mind.

In a workplace so shot through with hatred of whites, quite foreseeable is a form of intellectual reparations, where the designated white “oppressors” labor behind the scenes, while the officially “oppressed” manage them and take credit for their intellectual output.

SOURCE 

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here
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