Category Archives: bigotry

WaPo editor emits bigoted and hateful Tweets, but will she be disciplined as others have been?

June 29, 2020 – 12:30 pm

Here we have Karen Attiah, a major editor with the Washington Post, spewing out stuff on Twitter that’s even more vile and bigoted than the stuff Trump emits regularly. It’s racist, full of hate, and exactly the kind of stuff that got New York Times tech writer Quinn Norton fired. (Sarah Jeong, her replacement, wrote […]

By whyevolutionistrue | Also posted in journalism, journalists behaving badly | Comments (36)

A philosophical analysis of the “n-word”

November 9, 2019 – 11:15 am

This article in Quillette by Matthew Small, a graduate student at Western University (formerly the University of Western Ontario), raises a question I hadn’t though much about: what if a word is considered offensive to some but not all members of a minority group? (Actually, that holds for “majority groups” as well: some southern whites […]

By whyevolutionistrue | Also posted in racism | Comments (100)

The end of the SPLC?

March 22, 2019 – 2:15 pm

I have the dubious honor of having criticized the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) many times before it recently start circling the drain. (Of course, real journalists starting going after the SPLC long before I did.) Once a reputable organization fighting for civil liberties and against bigotry, it’s devolved into a money-grubbing organization whose top […]

By whyevolutionistrue | Comments (18)

How do we deal with anti-Semitic philosophers of past centuries?

March 21, 2019 – 11:45 am

Here is a strange but timely article from the New York Times‘s philosophy column, “The Stone.” Laurie Shrage, a professor of philosophy at Florida International University, asks how we should deal with the palpable anti-Semitism of early philosophers. But in the course of her lucubrations, she conflates four distinct questions. Read the piece by clicking […]

By whyevolutionistrue | Also posted in Offense culture, philosophy | Comments (45)

Morris Dees fired from the Southern Poverty Law Center

March 15, 2019 – 1:30 pm

I’ve posted a fair amount about the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which at one time was a great organization fighting segregation and pushing for civil liberties (see my posts here).  But, as civil rights became national law, the organization started changing its mission, which largely became fighting “hate speech.” That is not necessarily bad, […]

By whyevolutionistrue | Also posted in civil rights | Comments (32)

Farrakhan says that the “wicked Jews” are using him to attack the Women’s March

February 27, 2019 – 12:00 pm

From the Jewish Telegraphic Agency we have a short report and a video showing a recent speech in Chicago by Louis Farrakahan—misogynist, racist, anti-Semite, and leader of the Nation of Islam (NoI). He blames the “wicked Jews” for trying to drive a wedge between him and the Women’s March (WM), presumably referring to the the […]

By whyevolutionistrue | Also posted in anti-semitism | Comments (17)

The affair of Jussie Smollett

February 21, 2019 – 10:30 am

UPDATE: Reuters reports that Smollett staged the attack because he was dissatisfied with his salary on Empire. (It must have been substantial, though!). This motive apparently comes not from Smollett, of course, but probably from the two “assailants” he hired. And it gets even weirder. Smollett wrote a CHECK to pay off his assailants, or so this […]

By whyevolutionistrue | Also posted in crime, crime and punishment | Comments (82)

Should the governor of Virginia resign over racist yearbook photos?

February 3, 2019 – 8:15 am

As many venues report (NYT article here), Ralph Northam, the governor of Virginia, is now the object of gazillions of calls for him to step down, all based on a photo of a person in blackface, accompanied by a person dressed in KKK robes, that appeared on Northam’s page in his medical school yearbook of […]

By whyevolutionistrue | Also posted in politics, racism, Uncategorized | Comments (250)

Professor suspended for using “n word”—as written by James Baldwin

February 1, 2019 – 10:45 am

From Inside Higher Ed (click on screenshot below), we have a white professor being suspended—and going on medical leave because of the resultant stress—because he used the “n-word” in a discussion of James Baldwin’s famous book The Fire Next Time. If you’ve read that 1963 book (I have), you’ll know it as a powerful and […]

By whyevolutionistrue | Also posted in censorship, racism | Comments (156)

Should we teach kids to be colorblind?

October 31, 2018 – 1:00 pm

You’ll probably remember this quote from Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech; one of his dreams was this: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” This seems outmoded […]

By whyevolutionistrue | Also posted in "privilege", racism | Comments (103)