Sunday, November 08, 2020


Are all white people racist? Why Critical Race Theory has us rattled

The article below is a reasonable summary of the claims and counter-claims of the currently influential "Critical race theory".

It is however a theory in search of something to explain. It arose as an attempt to explain the immovably "disadvantaged" state of American blacks. It sought to find an explanation of that state in the way white society operates. Society was at fault as the cause of black poverty etc.

But if society is inherently racist and oppressive to minorities, how come most minorities in America do very well? The highest-paid ethnic group in America is in fact Indians, with Japanese, Jews, Koreans and Chinese not far behind. If the mechanisms of American society are so oppressive, how do we expain the stellar record of those minorities? White society may not have given them a bed of roses but its "oppressive" mechanisms would appear to be in fact very weak, far too weak to explain the badly depressed state of black achievement.

So why are blacks such a standout? Is there anything in white society which affects only them? The reality tends in fact to be the opposite of that. There is a great deal of prejudice in their favour, usually under the rubric of "affirmative action". Yet still they fail as a group both economically and in other important way such as the crime-rate and disruptive male-female relationships.

So it is clear that the cause of the uniquely bad state of American blacks has to be found in something unique to blacks. And from a scientific point of view what that is could hardly be clearer. But "clear" does not mean socially acceptible. Around 100 years of scientific research showing that blacks on average have markedly low IQs just cannot be accepted. And East Asians of course have markedly high levels of average IQ. Average IQ is the critical variable. The very low level of black IQ explains perfectly the very low level of black achievement

So "critical race theory" is a tortured attempt to explain black disadvantage in a way that defies clearly established scientific facts. As such it deserves no respect. The "racist" nature of American society is a desperate delusion -- as the great success of most racial minorities in America shows


There's a good chance you've never heard of Critical Race Theory. But if its opponents are to be believed, this niche academic discipline poses the biggest threat to Western civilisation since the Dark Ages.

Donald Trump has called it "toxic propaganda" that threatens to destroy America. British Conservative MP Kemi Badenoch, a black woman of Nigerian parentage, last month told Parliament it leads to a "segregated society" and makes everything "about the colour of your skin"; teaching it in British schools without offering an alternative view, she added, was "illegal". In Australia, the Murdoch media has railed against it for "reducing people to a racial essence", and judging them on the basis of "group identity" rather than "individual character, behaviour and merit".

Its advocates say it lays bare the hidden machinery of "systemic" racism, but its critics say it is itself racist, pitting white against black, peddling damaging notions of "white privilege" and "white supremacy" and making a virtue of victimhood.

But what exactly is Critical Race Theory — CRT for short — and is it really as dangerous as all that?

CRT has its origins in US law schools in the mid-1970s, as researchers began to ask why the legal advances won by the Civil Rights movement had produced so little improvement in the lives of minorities. The answer, they came to believe, lay in the way these new laws that supposedly guaranteed equal opportunity were being applied — and effectively resisted or undermined — by the courts. This was, they argued, "systemic racism" in action.

"Think how our system applauds affording everyone equality of opportunity," wrote Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic in their 2001 book Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, "but resists programs that assure equality of results."

The term Critical Race Theory was coined in 1989, and the discipline has ebbed and flowed in the years since. In Britain and the United States it has found its way into the education system and workplaces in explicit terms, prompting Badenoch's speech in parliament and Trump's September edict that no government funding would go to federal diversity training programs that drew upon it "because it's racist".

But in Australia it remains a minor field, cropping up in the odd humanities, law or politics department, though only occasionally labelled explicitly as CRT. For the most part, it's only in the occasional flare-ups on social media that we see its influence in this country.

The language deployed around the Mukbang controversy at the Sydney Film Festival in June was typical. In drawing upon a Korean internet phenomenon and featuring a briefly seen anime-style drawing of a white girl strangling a black boy, the short film (directed by a young white woman) was guilty of cultural appropriation and racism, critics insisted. In awarding it a prize, and allowing the offending anime image to be removed after the fact, the festival was even more guilty, of both whitewashing and of upholding a "white supremacist" system (never mind that the festival’s director, Nashen Moodley, is a South African-born person of colour).

Condemnation flared again in August when the candidates for the Rob Guest Endowment, a $50,000 scholarship offered to an up-and-coming star of musical theatre, were announced — all of them white. There was outrage, a botched apology, and finally the mass withdrawal of “the 30 former semi-finalists" in solidarity with "artists identifying as First Nations and People of Colour".

This masthead found itself in the crosshairs in May when it appointed five emerging book critics — again, all of them white. Amid outrage at yet more evidence of "white supremacy" in action, two resigned, labelling the selection process "a missed opportunity to support non-white voices in arts criticisms in Australia". In August two new reviewers from diverse backgrounds were appointed.

The accusations are typically fierce, and the apologies that follow often reek of the re-education camp.

It's easy to be dismissive, to chime in with the tired observation that each one of these outbursts is just another case of "political correctness gone mad". But focusing on the doctrinaire nature of the language only obscures and distracts from the critique that informs it — and it's a critique that perhaps ought to be taken seriously if we are to avoid the ructions currently splitting American society.

Broadly speaking, Critical Race Theory argues that the laws and institutions of Western societies only appear to be neutral; in truth, they discriminate against black, indigenous and other people of colour in myriad ways, often invisible to the naked eye. The job of the antiracist is to expose the workings of this systemic racism, no matter how incremental, and call them out.

The key insight of CRT may be that it locates racism not just in the acts of individuals — the white supremacists of bedsheets and cross burnings, say — but in a system that upholds, deliberately or not, inequality of outcome on the basis of race. It might manifest as racial profiling in policing, say, or failing to get into university because of the way eligibility is assessed (favouring tutored wealthy white kids over under-resourced kids in Indigenous communities, for example), or in the lack of diversity in particular kinds of workplaces.

Tim Soutphommasane, professor of sociology and political theory at the University of Sydney and Australia's former Race Discrimination Commissioner, says CRT is not the only model for dissecting racism, and nor is it "beyond reproach". But for many people concerned with combating racism, "there has long been the view that a liberal approach that focuses on individual attitudes and behaviours only gets you so far ... you can't understand racism without understanding how it involves power."

Plenty of white people who think of themselves as non-racists might find it hard to accept the idea that our institutions — education, employment, policing, the law, even health and welfare services — might be shot through with racism, and that they benefit from it. And for working-class whites struggling to pay the bills, the idea of "white privilege” is even harder to swallow (one reason why the issue has been so divisive in the US, and prompted many traditionally Democrat voters to swing to Trump).

"Many people still think you shouldn't be tagged as racist unless you subscribe to racial supremacist doctrine," Soutphommasane says. "Many don't understand that racism is as much about systemic impact as it is about individual intention."

One of the key criticisms of CRT, particularly from those on the Right, is the way it identifies "whiteness" as an object of study — and a problem. But advocates insist there's an important distinction to be made between "whiteness" as a system of power, and "white people", who may or may not be "allies" in dismantling that structure in order to end racism.

"Any decent critical race work doesn't focus on the individual, it focuses on the system, the structure," says race critical scholar Alana Lentin, an associate professor at the University of Western Sydney. "As soon as we can see that, we also see that no one benefits from a divided society."

One of the most widely cited "proofs" of CRT's inherent racism is history professor Ibram Kendi’s assertion that to declare oneself "not racist" while doing nothing to actively combat racism is the same as actively being racist.

"Being antiracist is not harmful," Claire Lehmann, founder of the liberal politics and philosophy website Quillette, has said. "What is harmful is this notion … that everything is either racist or antiracist. That's a really damaging idea because it doesn't allow for neutrality."

Kendi's version of CRT — as articulated in his book How to be an Antiracist — would argue that neutrality is anything but. It would, for instance, cast the recent assertion by Wallabies coach Dave Rennie that players taking the knee before a match would be a "political move" in a very different light. Given the rise of the gesture around the world as a display of solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and the campaign against racially motivated police violence against people of colour, not taking the knee would be seen as the real political statement.

It's not only conservatives who have issues with CRT, though. Writing on the broader subject of cancel culture in the most recent issue of The Monthly, Waleed Aly observed that the insistence on calling out "microaggressions" (the tiny daily instances of discrimination, none prosecutable in their own right but collectively degrading) was counterproductive.

"In this world view, no act or comment is too small to be considered part of a system of oppression," Aly writes. "[But] when nearly everything can be found problematic, when labels like 'white supremacist' can be hurled at most social behaviour and people, they flatten out the very idea of oppression."

For James Lindsay, host of the New Discourses podcast and a staunch critic of CRT, its real intent is nothing less than to overthrow liberal society. It aims, he says, to "awaken ... that awareness of oppression ... agitating people to see how bad their lives are even when they liked them, so that they would want to effect a revolution".

Or, as Australian writer, actor and Twitter activist Michelle Law put it in June, it seeks not to reform the system so much as to "burn it all down".

White supremacist groups such as Proud Boys are clearly racist. But is failing to speak out against such groups and their beliefs similarly racist?
White supremacist groups such as Proud Boys are clearly racist. But is failing to speak out against such groups and their beliefs similarly racist? CREDIT:AP

Not everyone who identifies with CRT holds that view, though. Just as liberalism is a broad church encompassing everything from anti-government libertarians to pro-welfare interventionists, so CRT hosts a range of views.

"I haven't read anything in CRT literature that argues that white people are the only people who can perpetuate racism," says Amy Maguire, associate professor in law at the University of Newcastle. "Whiteness theory situates whiteness in Western societies as the neutral or non-raced position, and situates non-white people as racialised/other. My read is that it would be possible for a non-white person to engage in racism against racialised communities in this type of framing."

CRT isn't a prescriptive set of rules, says Dr Tess Ryan, president of the Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association and an Indigenous woman of Birapai descent from Taree in NSW. "There are a lot of learnings from the US and Europe and the UK that need to be nuanced and adapted to the Australian situation. I think it's about taking what you need at a particular time and in a particular context. It's a toolkit situation — or a dilly bag, if you will."

It would at any rate take a very great effort of will to pretend inequity and racism do not exist in Western societies (or in non-Western societies for that matter). And if we agree on that point we have a choice: to accept it as the natural order of things, or to try to change it.

CRT demands change. In some versions it seeks to force people into extreme positions - of black victim and white supremacist, or of self-flagellating white ally - that do little to encourage faith that we might find a middle path to a better, post-racist society.

But, says Dr Ryan, it doesn’t need to be that way. "You don't have to walk down the street slapping yourself with a whip," she says. "It's about recognising and acknowledging, and that's not hard to do."

Trump, the 'Racist,' Won More Minority Votes Than Any GOP Candidate Since 1960

Everyone knows that Donald Trump is a racist. How do we know? ‘Cause media says so, that’s how. Every single statement or off-the-cuff remark by Trump that could be deliberately misinterpreted or taken out of context, or twisted into meaning something entirely different, has been used to paint an ugly racist picture of the president.

With black Americans, it’s worked. A poll earlier this year found 83 percent of blacks believing Trump is a racist. How could they not with every media outlet telling them it’s so and many prominent blacks in politics, entertainment, and sports reinforcing the narrative every chance they get?

The so-called “leaders” of the minority communities were virulently opposed to Donald Trump’s re-election. It was nearly unanimous. There were notable exceptions, but brave it was for any black or Hispanic notable to back Trump in public.

But as it turns out, many minority voters tuned out the anti-Trump noise and made an independent decision to back the president.

New York Post:

Team Trump and Republicans nationwide made unprecedented inroads with black and Hispanic voters. Nationally, preliminary numbers indicated that 26 percent of Trump’s voting share came from nonwhite voters — the highest percentage for a GOP presidential candidate since 1960.

In Florida’s Miami-Dade County, the heartland of Cuban America, Trump turned a 30-plus point Hillary Clinton romp in 2016 into a narrow single-digit Joe Biden win. Texas’ Starr County, overwhelmingly Mexican American and positioned in the heart of the Rio Grande Valley, barely delivered for the Democrats. Biden’s Hispanic support in other key swing states, like Ohio and Georgia, tailed off from Clinton’s 2016 benchmarks.

Cuban-Americans have been loyal Republican voters since the 1980s and Ronald Reagan’s strong opposition to Fidel Castro. But they were particularly energized in 2020 to vote for Trump. Conversely, Mexican-Americans in Texas had probably never voted Republican before but were drawn to Trump’s “opportunity agenda.”

And surprisingly, young black men voted for Trump in unprecedented numbers. We won’t know the particulars of how that vote broke down for a few days, but ambitious young men who see a future in a capitalist America were no doubt repelled by the Democrats’ anti-capitalist agenda. They’re also tired of being used by Democrats as props in their little morality plays and are weary of unkept promises.

But what does this say about the Democrat-Media information complex? Looks like someone blew a circuit or two.

It turns out that minorities aren’t so infatuated with the brand of unrepentant progressive “woke-ism” now peddled by the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wing of the Democratic Party. The political, legal, media, corporate and academic establishments have gone all-in on the woke agenda, peddling a toxic brew of intersectionality, socialism lite and Black Lives Matter anarchism. Latinos and many blacks aren’t buying it. As one Twitter wit quipped, Democrats may have won the “Latinx vote,” but they didn’t fare well with actual Latinos.

The cognitive dissonance on the part of our bicoastal ruling class is, and will be over the ensuing months, astonishing. The ruling elite is incapable of processing the notion that the MAGA hat-clad Bad Orange Man is not, in fact, an avatar for racist whites and a harbinger of impending fascism.

The bottom line is that it isn’t only white voters who don’t listen to the media about Trump’s faults. Many in the minority community can judge Trump and what he can do for them all by themselves and don’t need to be instructed on how to vote by those who really don’t have their best interests at heart.

It takes guts to be a black or Hispanic Trump supporter in a lot of places in America. You would wish that wouldn’t be the case, but it is. Are they the harbinger of a movement by the minority community toward the Republican Party? Time will tell, but the electoral earthquake that would ensue if that were the case would be felt even among the coastal elites.

UK: The demonisation of lockdown sceptics

Supporters of the Zero Covid orthodoxy will not tolerate any dissent.

It is apposite that it is Nigel Farage who has stepped forward as the party-political voice of lockdown scepticism, with prospective Brexit Party rebrand, Reform UK. After all, it was as the leader of UKIP that he started to give expression to a similar anti-technocratic sentiment a decade ago.

And now here he is again, challenging the ‘barrage of lockdowns, rules, regulations and threats’ implemented in response to Covid just as he once challenged the rules and regulations imposed by Brussels.

There is more to Reform UK than just criticism of the government’s lockdown-happy response to the Covid crisis – it is also calling for the reform of Britain’s governing institutions more broadly. But the response to Covid is its current focus. And so, referencing the lockdown-sceptical Great Barrington Declaration, he and his Reform UK comrade Richard Tice issued a joint call in the Telegraph for an alternative Covid strategy based around the ‘focused protection’ of those most at risk, which would allow the rest of the population, ‘with good hygiene measures and a dose of common sense’, to ‘get on with life’. They cap off their appeal to the public with a promise to challenge ‘consensus thinking and vested interests on Covid’.

Whether Reform UK is the right vehicle, Farage or Tice the best people, or the Great Barrington Declaration the most suitable basis on which to take on the technocratic orthodoxy on Covid is up for debate. But what is not is the need for precisely that concerted challenge to the ‘consensus thinking on Covid’ that Reform UK claims to provide.

And make no mistake, it is a consensus – and a lazy, barely questioned one at that. Yes, there are arguments about the efficacy of test-and-trace systems or the wisdom of this or that particular social restriction. But on the underlying objective of suppressing viral transmission to near-enough zero and sitting tight until the ghost in the machine provides a vaccine (the so-called Zero Covid strategy), there is widespread agreement.

So where is the challenge to this view?

It is certainly not being provided by party politics at the moment. Labour, under the pointless, pedantic leadership of Keir Starmer, is doing a lot of shrill posturing. But its approach to Covid differs from the Tories only in the haste and harshness with which it promises to lock us all down. Like a couple of bald men fighting over a comb, Labour and the government bicker over who is ‘following the science’, but they never question where it is ‘the science’ is taking them, let alone what ‘the science’ actually is.

However, the challenge facing Reform UK, and all those other groups and individuals also seeking to take on the Covid orthodoxy, is, ironically enough, similar to that which faced first UKIP and then the far broader coalition of Brexit supporters taking on the EU — namely, the determination of their powerful opponents to delegitimise them. Hence no sooner had Farage made his re-entry than Labour’s shadow justice secretary David Lammy called him a ‘shameless opportunist’, ‘risking lives’ in the search for votes. These defenders of the dominant approach to Covid, occupying positions of political and cultural power, do not want to debate their opponents. They want to dismiss them. Ridicule them. Even demonise them.

Indeed, the echo of then prime minister David Cameron’s characterisation of UKIP as ‘fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists’ can be frequently heard in the blithe disdain meted out to those questioning the social restrictions under which we have been living since March. They are labelled ‘cranks’, ‘Covidiots’, and ‘Covid deniers’. And their views are dismissed as ‘far-right’, ‘libertarian’ and ‘conspiracy theory’.

Such insults are not only being hurled at predictable liberal bĂȘtes noires like Farage or Toby Young. They are also being hurled at anyone, no matter how left-wing or credentialled, willing to put his or her head above the parapet, and question the wisdom of devastating our social and economic life in the name of battling a virus. Think of the treatment of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, such as Sunetra Gupta, a professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford University, or Martin Kulldorff, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. They have not only been subject to a shocking level of hostility and abuse; they have also been accused of being ‘co-opted by shady ideological interests’ by the Guardian; of being ‘scamademics’ by Byline Times; and of representing no more than a ‘fringe viewpoint’ outside the ‘scientific mainstream’ by their colleagues.

Given the level of abuse that established and esteemed academics have received for challenging lockdowns, it is hardly a surprise that many younger, less institutionally secure scientists are, according to the New Statesman, ‘afraid to speak out for fear of being vilified’.

And that is a profound problem right now. Dissent is being stifled, and not just by the explicit censorship of Big Tech. It is also being stifled by a growing climate of fear created by the hostility and abuse dished out to those who dare to question the political orthodoxy. Suggest that Covid is seasonal, as epidemiologist Stefan Baral did in March, and you will be called ‘Trumpian’. Propose protecting the vulnerable, as trade unionist Paul Embery did this weekend, and you’ll be damned to hell by a Sky News correspondent. Interrogate the scientific basis of Zero Covid, as Professor Gupta has done throughout the pandemic, and you’ll be dismissed as a ‘fringe’, ‘non-mainstream’ scientist by your academic peers.

Which is absurd, given that questioning the prevailing scientific consensus has always been the engine of scientific progress. Likewise, political argument is the lifeblood of a democracy. Get rid of it, through the stifling and suppression of alternative points of view, and you no longer have much of a democracy.

Those now cleaving to the technocratic Zero Covid consensus with even more intolerant zeal than that with which they cleaved to the technocratic EU consensus should remember what happened in 2016. People don’t like being demonised for holding different views. And they really don’t like having their lives dictated and devastated by a distant, technocratic elite that treats them with disdain.

Christian magistrate sacked for saying children should be raised by a mother and father and NOT same-sex couples denies being biased as he fights 'religious discrimination' at Appeal Court

A Christian magistrate who was removed from the bench and sacked from his NHS job after saying children should have a father and a mother and not same-sex parents has today started a new legal challenge.

Richard Page claims he was removed from the magistracy and dismissed from his senior role at an NHS trust in 2016 after expressing his views on same-sex couples and adoption.

In 2014, when considering the case of the adoption of a child by a same sex couple, Mr Page said that as a Christian it was in a child's best interests to be raised by a mother and a father.

He was reprimanded by the UK's top legal officials, before giving an interview to the BBC in which he claimed had been discriminated against for his opinions on the issue.

Mr Page, 74, was later removed from the magistracy by then Justice Secretary Michael Gove and sacked from his non-executive director role on the NHS.

Now he is bringing a legal challenge against the Government and the NHS Trust Development Authority, which started today at the Court of Appeal. He attended today's hearing.

Mr Page's challenge, in which he claims he was discriminated against and faced victimisation because of his religion and beliefs, is opposed by the Government and the NHS Trust Development Authority. Both argue that the appeals should be dismissed.

Today Mr Page's lawyers said his 'world was turned upside down' in 2014, when he was one of three magistrates considering an adoption application by a same-sex couple.

He objected to the adoption order being made and claimed it was better for children to be bought up by a father and mother rather than a gay couple.

Complaints were made, alleging Mr Page was prejudiced against same-sex couples - which he denied.

Mr Page was reprimanded by the Lord Chancellor and the Lord Chief Justice in December 2014 and ordered to undergo training. He later took part in a number of media interviews about his case.

Mr Page was told he should follow advice given to magistrates about their conduct in private and public life - which included advice in 2012 that the general guidance for all levels of the judiciary was to not communicate with the media.

Mr Page was referred to a conduct panel after taking part in a 2015 BBC interview, without seeking advice on his involvement, about workplace religious discrimination.

The conduct panel recommended his removal from the magistracy and he was removed from office in March 2016, by then Justice Secretary Michael Gove and Lord Thomas, who said his comments suggested he was 'biased and prejudiced against single sex adopters'.

He was suspended from his role as non-executive director at the Kent and Medway NHS and Social Care Partnership Trust after the BBC interview, having previously been told that he should inform the trust before contacting the media.

He was told his contract would not be renewed after June 2016.

Mr Page is challenging two rulings of the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) which upheld previous Employment Tribunal decisions rejecting his discrimination claims.

The EAT concluded that Mr Page had lost his positions due to the manner in which he had expressed his beliefs, including giving interviews without speaking to his employers, rather than his views.

At a hearing on Tuesday, lawyers for Mr Page argued that he had been dismissed from his roles for suggesting on television that he had been subjected to discrimination for expressing his views on parenting, and said the EAT was wrong to conclude this was not a 'protected act' under equality laws.

Mr Page's barrister, Paul Diamond, said: 'The appellant decided to appear on the news report as he felt he had been subjected to both discrimination and detriment for the expression of the view that a child needs a father and a mother, views premised in his religious and philosophical beliefs.

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http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

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http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

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