Category: “privilege”

Sarah Lawrence College on the road to Evergreen State: entitled students demand to review the tenure of a conservative tenured professor, issue many other ludicrous demands

March 14, 2019 • 9:15 am

Well, two previously highly-reputed and well respected colleges are going down the drain as they cave in to unconscionable student demands. The first is Williams College in Massachusetts, where an unhinged gender-studies professor is basically determining college policy with the help of an invertebrate President. I’ll have more on that sad situation later.

The second is Sarah Lawrence College, a high-class liberal arts college in Yonkers, New York. It’s an expensive school, too, as you can see from its list of yearly costs, totaling $69,697 (lots of students get scholarships or other forms of aid).

One would think that the students at such an elite school would be entitled, regardless of their ethnicity, but you would be wrong.  They are now up in arms big time over a New York Times op-ed written by a conservative professor.

The editorial, below, is by Samuel J. Abrams, a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence and a visiting fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Have a gander:

The editorial, based on a survey Abrams took, showed that school administrators were overwhelmingly on the Left, as were professors and students (the latter two groups weren’t quite as liberal)—a profound difference between academia and the American public. He was prompted to investigate after seeing the ideological indoctrination of students at his school, something we’re well familiar with as colleges change their mission from education to social engineering. Here are the words that damned Abrams:

I received a disconcerting email this year from a senior staff member in the Office of Diversity and Campus Engagement at Sarah Lawrence College, where I teach. The email was soliciting ideas from the Sarah Lawrence community for a conference, open to all of us, titled “Our Liberation Summit.” The conference would touch on such progressive topics as liberation spaces on campus, Black Lives Matter and justice for women as well as for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual and allied people.

As a conservative-leaning professor who has long promoted a diversity of viewpoints among my (very liberal) faculty colleagues and in my classes, I was taken aback by the college’s sponsorship of such a politically lopsided event. The email also piqued my interest in what sorts of other nonacademic events were being organized by the school’s administrative staff members.

I soon learned that the Office of Student Affairs, which oversees a wide array of issues including student diversity and residence life, was organizing many overtly progressive events — programs with names like “Stay Healthy, Stay Woke,” “Microaggressions” and “Understanding White Privilege” — without offering any programming that offered a meaningful ideological alternative. These events were conducted outside the classroom, in the students’ social and recreational spaces.

Abrams’s survey data:

Intrigued by this phenomenon, I recently surveyed a nationally representative sample of roughly 900 “student-facing” administrators — those whose work concerns the quality and character of a student’s experience on campus. I found that liberal staff members outnumber their conservative counterparts by the astonishing ratio of 12-to-one. Only 6 percent of campus administrators identified as conservative to some degree, while 71 percent classified themselves as liberal or very liberal. It’s no wonder so much of the nonacademic programming on college campuses is politically one-sided

The 12-to-one ratio of liberal to conservative college administrators makes them the most left-leaning group on campus. In previous research, I found that academic faculty report a six-to-one ratio of liberal to conservative professors. Incoming first-year students, by contrast, reported less than a two-to-one ratio of liberals to conservatives, according to a 2016 finding by the Higher Education Research Institute. It appears that a fairly liberal student body is being taught by a very liberal professoriate — and socialized by an incrediblyliberal group of administrators.

For all of this, his conclusions were fairly mild, even if the data weren’t all that surprising:

This warped ideological distribution among college administrators should give our students and their families pause. To students who are in their first semester at school, I urge you not to accept unthinkingly what your campus administrators are telling you. Their ideological imbalance, coupled with their agenda-setting power, threatens the free and open exchange of ideas, which is precisely what we need to protect in higher education in these politically polarized times.

In fact, I would have given students the same Hitchensian advice: think for yourselves. And colleges might rethink their mission, perhaps realizing that their job is to educate students and teach them to think, not fill them full of the professors’ and administrators’ own political ideology and act as super-indulgent helicopter parents.

But too late: the students at Sarah Lawrence went wild, demonstrating, sitting in, and issuing a multipage list of DEMANDS.

Here’s part of the demonstration (clicking on the tweet takes you to the video):

And the demands, published in the student newspaper The Phoenix (click on screenshot below), are generally risible. While some are reasonable, many are simply requests for Free Everything: food, housing, unlimited therapy sessions, and so on. Further, they are couched as demands, not requests, and all of us bridle when presented with demands that we are required to meet.

In addition, the students demand re-education of the administration, mandatory attendance at a session where they intend to hector administrators, and, worst of all, a review of Abrams’s tenure (he’s tenured)—a review conducted by members of the “Diaspora Coalition”—the student group that prepared the demands—as well as three professors of color. After all, Abrams’s editorial was VIOLENCE and hurt marginalized people, and he should be punished for that. If anything is a witch hunt, this is:

I can’t list all the demands, but, as I said, some seem reasonable (providing resources and advice to incoming and foreign students, as well as tax advice for foreign students); others debatable (send administrators to Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and so on to recruit students), and some downright ridiculous. The latter include these “demands”:

We demand a mandatory first-year orientation session about intellectual elitism and classism.

We demand all students have access to unlimited therapy sessions through Health and Wellness.

We demand indigenous land acknowledgement at all orientation and commencement ceremonies in addition to a permanent land acknowledgement page on both MySLC and the Sarah Lawrence website. These pages must also include a list of resources for local tribes.

They also demand race-segregated housing (their emphasis):

The College will designate housing with a minimum capacity for thirty students of color that is not contingent on the students expending any work or labor for the college. This housing option will be permanent and increase in space and size based on interest.

But wait! There’s more! (Emphasis is theirs.)

Diasporic Studies

  1. Students of color should not be forced to resort to racist white professors in order to have access to their own history. It is crucial that the College offer courses taught about people of color by people of color so that students may engage in and produce meaningful work that represents them authentically.

  2. We demand there be new tenured faculty of color – at least two in African diasporic studies, one in Asian-American studies, one in Latinx diasporic studies, and one in indigenous/native peoples studies.
  3. We demand there be at least three more courses offered in African diasporic studies taught by Black professors.

  4. We demand that the College offer classes that embody intersectionality, as defined by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, and address the racial diversity of the LGBTQ+ community instead of centering whiteness.

  5. The aforementioned classes must be taught by professors who are a part of the culture they are teaching about.

And, of course, they are going to conduct a sit-in in which they will miss class, and perhaps engage in illegal conduct or behavior that violates College rules. From this they DEMAND complete protection from prosecution:

The institution will not use the threat of expulsion, removal of positions held in student government, or any other forms of punishment in retaliation to civil disobedience.

Clearly these students don’t know what civil disobedience means. A powerful tactic of the civil rights movement, it constitutes peaceful disobeying of unjust laws, with the willingness to accept punishment for that disobedience. The Sarah Lawrence students want to have their cake and eat it too.

They demand in addition that a whole slate of administrators “attend the student-facilitated talk-back on March 13, 2019 in Miller Lecture Hall regarding this document”, and also that another list of administrators sign the demand document and agree to a meeting on April 5.

But the worst part is the DEMAND to punish Abrams for his editorial. I’ll reproduce that bit in full (their emphasis):

Sarah Lawrence must confront how the presence of Sam Abrams, an anti-queer, misogynist, and racist who actively targets queer people, women, and people of color and is an alumnus of an institute with direct ties to a neo-Confederate hate group, affects the safety and wellbeing of marginalized students. Additionally, Sarah Lawrence will forfeit donations and interactions from the Charles Koch Foundation and never hire alumni from the League of the South-aligned Institute for Human Studies in the future.

  1. Professor Samuel Abrams and Defending Progressive Education

    1. On October 16, 2018, politics professor Samuel Abrams published an op-ed entitled “Think Professors Are Liberal? Try School Administrators” in The New York Times. The article revealed the anti-Blackness, anti-LGBTQ+, and anti-woman bigotry of Abrams. The article specifically targeted programs such as the Our Liberation Summit, which Abrams did not attend, facilitated by the Office of Diversity and Campus Engagement. The Sarah Lawrence community deserves an administration that strives for an inclusive education that reflects the diversity of our community. Abrams’ derision of the Black Lives Matter, queer liberation, and women’s rights movements displays not only ignorance but outright hostility towards the essential efforts to dismantle white supremacy and other systems of oppression. This threatens the safety and wellbeing of marginalized people within the Sarah Lawrence community by demonstrating that our lives and identities are viewed as “opinions” that we can have a “difference in dialogue” about, as if we haven’t been forced to debate our very existences for our entire lives. We demand that Samuel Abrams’ position at the College be put up to tenure review to a panel of the Diaspora Coalition and at least three faculty members of color. In addition, the College must issue a statement condemning the harm that Abrams has caused to the college community, specifically queer, Black, and female students, whilst apologizing for its refusal to protect marginalized students wounded by his op-ed and the ignorant dialogue that followed. Abrams must issue a public apology to the broader SLC community and cease to target Black people, queer people, and women.

This is nothing other than a threat to a professor who dared differ from the ideology of the hyper-Leftist students. Note that Abrams did not evince misogyny, white supremacy, or any other form of bigotry in his editorial, yet he’s accused of nothing short of being both a Nazi and a Klansman. And his editorial is said to have “wounded” the students and targeted marginalized people. It did nothing of the sort: it took issue with the ideological indoctrination of students by Leftist administrators.

In this document we see a frightening future of American higher education: a future in which universities become not places of learning but Indoctrination Centers of the Left that cater to every student’s needs: all the way to free laundry detergent and unlimited therapy. We also see the policing of Wrongthink, in which dissenting professors are threatened with being fired. It is a place where those who dissent from “approved” opinion are afraid to speak, something now happening at Williams College in Massachusetts—a college that for 15 straight years has been rated the best of America’s liberal arts colleges. (It won’t be for long.) It is this suppression of dissenting opinion, which is pure censorship, that is frightening.

Sarah Lawrence is becoming the 1984 of college campuses, and it’s well down the road to becoming another Evergreen State College and to sharing that college’s fate: financial ruin and the refusal of parents to send their kids to a school Too Woke to Function.

I can only thank my lucky stars that The University of Chicago wasn’t like that when I was teaching there, nor is it like that now. That is thanks to the willingness of our faculty and administrators to stand up to ridiculous student demands while listening to and considering the reasonable ones. It is the failure of pusillanimous parents, administrators, teachers, and citizens to stand up to this nonsense that allows it to continue.

VICE is more concerned about “white savior” optics than helping impoverished Africans

March 4, 2019 • 2:00 pm

About 25 years ago, while waiting for an infrequent bus in a rural area of northern India, I became surrounded by a group of children who were intrigued by the camera-toting foreigner. I talked to them for a long time, as they wanted to practice their rudimentary English, and I even pretended that my name was Ganesha, the Hindu elephant-headed deity that I love. I can still remember one of the kids saying, “Ganesha? You are a GOD!!!”  (I eventually told them my real name.) They were really sweet kids and eventually I asked my companion to take a picture of me with the group.

I didn’t post that picture on Facebook or anything, but I might have had those venues existed then. But of course I would have been accused, as was Stacey Dooley, of evincing a “white savior” mentality. (Maybe you have to actually pick up a kid to be a white savior.)  For that is what VICE did in the annoying, hectoring, and Dooley-demonizing article below (click on screenshot):

Stacey Dooley is no random “savior tourist”, but an English television presenter who has done investigative reports on sex trafficking and on the disappearance of indigenous women in Canada. In other words, she’s woke, but in a good way. And apparently she was in Africa to film for Comic Relief, an organization that tries to relieve poverty throughout the world. In other words, Dooley was there to help Africans. Granted, part of African poverty is due to the continent’s history of colonialism, but Dooley wasn’t a colonizer. Her crime was being white and picking up a black child.  The dissemination of that photograph, moreover, can only help the charity, as we all know that pictures of specific individuals, especially children, bring in more money than just a general un-illustrated appeal for funds.

Here’s her Instagram post. 

And here’s VICE kvetching about it:

But “white saviors” does not refer to that. It refers to a very specific need for the West to portray Africa as a crumbling place of red soil, flies, and kids who don’t know it’s Christmas time at all. It reinforces the view that Africans can never be the solution, that they are helpless without any agency of their own, and that sunshine and hope only comes when cradled in the warm, bright embrace of whiteness. It centers the celebrity over and above those whose lives they’re supposedly trying to change. The young man in Dooley’s post is not a prop and should not be treated as such.

Imagery is extremely important. It’s something we all get wrong; VICE fucked up literally this morning. There are serious challenges facing Africa as a continent. Many of those challenges are universal because of the ramifications of colonialism and the way it divvied up the fruitful and fertile land, and forced grossly different cultures to form singular nations against their will. It’s something that a majority of nations are still trying to come to terms with. In that is space for anyone of good mind and spirit to do their bit where needed, hopefully directed by people on the ground.

(For more predictable kvetching, see the related Guardian article.)  Yes, of course Africa faces challenges, some of them stemming from a history of European exploitation. And yes, some tourists may pick up black kids as a sort of authenticating experience, or as proof of their non-racism. That is not a good thing to do. But I doubt that Dooley was doing that. She probably liked the kid, and when you like a small kid, your first impulse is to pick it up. (nb: I did not pick up any Indian children.)

But in the end, what VICE is after is for white people to stop helping Africans, for how can you even do that without the possibility of being accused as a “white savior”?  You are white and you’re trying to help people of other colors. “White saviorism” does not refer to a specific need to denigrate Africa, or to say that Africans can’t help themselves (many aid workers from Europe and the U.S. work hand in hand with Africans).

Dooley’s more or less poleaxed, as you can tell from her tweet below.

https://twitter.com/StaceyDooley/status/1100825979981889536

This whole policing of “optics” makes me ill. Now, when your impulse is to cuddle or pick up a child, you must consider the difference in pigmentation. Yes, of course you should ponder whether you’re being paternalistic or condescending, but how about extending some charity to people like Stacey Dooley? And now she has to suffer being demonized so that writers at VICE, who do not help people in Africa, can feel morally superior.

 

Godfrey Elfwick is outraged

February 17, 2019 • 12:15 pm

Godfrey Elfwick (aka Titania McGrath) apparently now has a regular column in The Spectator USA, and, frankly, I’m surprised that even a semi-conservative magazine would present Elfwick’s musings without saying that they’re satirical. After all,  Elfwick, McGrath and their/hir/zir schticks are so close to the fulminations of exteme Control-Leftism that they sometimes gets mistaken for being serious Woke Leftism. In other words, Elfwick and McGrath present an ongoing “hoax” along the lines of Boghossian, Pluckrose, and Lindsay’s more arduous efforts.

The latest Elfwick production takes off from a recent cover of Esquire, which made the mistake of profiling a white boy during Black History Month in the USA. Here’s the Esquire cover.  You can tell just from the words underneath “AN AMERICAN BOY” that it would rile up the Outrage Brigade.

And, after all, well-off white males are the most demonized of all groups of Americans, and it’s not out of the question to ask how this demonization has affected them. But not during Black History Month! The expected pushback arose quickly, as documented by, among other venues, the Guardian, the Independent, and, of course, PuffHo.  Here are just a few examples:

Now I haven’t read the story, which may well be dire and cloying, and were I an editor I probably wouldn’t have run it during Black History Month. Nevertheless, it still demonstrates how quick the Callout Culture is to react, and how strongly white males are being demonized—as if they represent some sort of monolithic, toxic and repressive cult.

But Elfwick comes to the rescue, in a funny article claiming that it should have been him—a “transblack genderqueer Muslim atheist”—who was profiled by Esquire. He makes a compelling case!

He rewrites the article in a way that even PuffHo would be proud of!  A few excerpts (the captions are Elfwick’s):

Rather than waste my valuable time talking about this Trump-adoring pale manchild, I have decided to rewrite the article, this time featuring a true warrior. Someone who deserves the limelight. A role-model for the marginalized. A social justice icon who more accurately represents the youth of today.

Godfrey Elfwick is 27 and happy to be a genderqueer Muslim atheist, born white in the wrong skin. From an early age, xe knew xe was special. At the tender age of 14 months, xe was already making protest banners in support of marginalized people while xir’s older brother Moneer, played with his toys, oblivious to his sibling’s struggles.

Godfrey Elfwick knew from an early age that xe would change the world

Being an activist is hard and requires a lot of emotional strength, Godfrey tells me (ximself). A lot of people think it’s just posting stuff online and getting offended about meaningless things…but it’s so much more than that. There are important protests to attend.

. . . Only last year, I stormed into a home for the elderly close to where I live and no-platformed an ignorant racist who was giving the residents a talk called ‘World War II Memories’. There’s no place for that colonialist rhetoric in the current year.

After walking through the front entrance, I came face-to-face with a bunch of old white people (probably Nazis), openly enjoying a lecture on what life was like during the war. It made me feel sick to my stomach when I heard one of them make a positive comment on Winston Churchill. That was when I understandably lost my shit and demanded they shut down this endorsement of fascism ASAP.

Well, maybe it’s a bit heavy-handed, and less likely to be mistaken for real Social Justice Outrage than are the lucubrations of Ms. McGrath, but still. . .

Here’s Elfwick’s self-portrayal as a woke person:

Godfrey is a strong, powerful black woman who takes no crap from anyone

Straight from Brooklyn!

And, for good measure, Titania’s latest:

Another Rachel Dolezal affair? Hawaii congressman claims he’s “an Asian trapped in a white’s body”.

January 17, 2019 • 12:00 pm

Rachel Dolezal was a white woman who felt she was black, and, using various cosmetics and hairstyles, successfully passed for black.  She in fact became head of the NAACP in Spokane, Washington before in 2015 she was outed as white by her white parents. She was summarily fired not only by the NAACP, but by the university in Washington where she was teaching and by the Spokane City Council, where she was a police ombudsman. And she was vilified and demonized.

I don’t understand why, if race is a social construct (Native Americans have claimed that Elizabeth Warren’s DNA test was irrelevant to her claim to be Cherokee, which supposedly has nothing to do with genes), and if gender is a social construct, one can justifiably claim to be a male in a woman’s body (or vice versa) but not to be a black person in a white person’s body.

In fact, when feminist philosopher Rebecca Tuvel published an article in the journal Hypatia that asked this very question about “transracialism”, she was demonized and exorcised, with some of the journal’s editors apologizing for the article, and many academics calling Tuvel a racist and a transphobe, demanding that the article be retracted (it wasn’t).

The question still remains, at least to me, a valid one. I really think that Dolezal felt she was black with the same honesty and intensity that some transgender people feel that their gender identity doesn’t match their bodies. And, as of a year ago, the Delaware school board was weighing a policy that let students self identify as to not just gender, but to “race”.

Now the controversy has bubbled up again. Congressman Ed Case, who represents the Honolulu area in Congress (a district with an Asian-American majority), declared at an event feting Asian-American and Pacific Islander voters and members of Congress that he is “an Asian trapped in a white body.” You can read about it at HuffPo, which clearly finds his statement horrific. (Their article, by Asian Voices editor Kimberley Yam, begins with the words “Oh… oh, no.”)  There are many other articles about Case’s supposed gaffee (e.g. here, here, and here).

Now Representative Case may not be trying to look Asian or pass for Asian, but his statement was meant to say that he feels as if he were Asian. From the article (there are a lot of articles about this):

Case spokesman Nestor Garcia said the congressman had been commenting “on what his Japanese-American wife sometimes says about him.” The Democrat, whose state boasts the largest percentage of Asian-Americans in the U.S., told HuffPost in a statement that he has “absorbed and lives the values of our many cultures.”

Is this a big deal, then? Words like Case’s would in past times have been accepted as saying something informative about the man—something not pejorative.

No longer. You cannot make the claim—even in a state where the majority is Asian and that majority wields much of the political power, and Asians aren’t an oppressed minority—that you’re a white person who feels Asian. Somehow that claim is ideologically unacceptable, and seems to many to verge on racism. But why?

(One could argue that it’s political and patronizing, but Case said the claim comes from his Asian-American wife.) And so the dogpiling began on social media and in the public eye:

And so on. . .

As the Washington Post reported:

It didn’t take long for Case’s comment to reach an audience online, as well, where the reception was a collective head shake.

“I just oof’d so hard I blacked out for a sec,” one Twitter user wrote.

“As a haole who lived in Japan for 7 years and now lives in Hawai’i, I couldn’t imagine saying something like this,” another said, using a Hawaiian term for someone who is a foreigner. “Check your privilege Ed Case.”

A CollegeHumor writer wondered whether Tilda Swinton or Scarlett Johansson would play the Asian trapped in Case’s body, a reference to the whitewashing scandals that ensued after the actresses were cast in the roles of Asian characters.

And Case apologized:

[Case] continued: “I regret if my specific remarks to the national API community on my full absorption of their concerns caused any offense.”

In the same email, Case spokesman Nestor Garcia clarified that the congressman was commenting “on what his Japanese-American wife sometimes says about him.” Garcia also noted that Case is a returning executive committee member of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus.

His full apology is here.

Truly, I don’t understand all the rancor about this. Is it racist to say something like this? Is he guilty of emotional cultural appropriation? Perhaps Asian readers can explain why this is offensive.

Now Case may not feel that he’s an ethnic Asian but rather a cultural one, but does that matter? (And indeed, there may be the white/Asian equivalent of Rachel Dolezal out there.)

Making a big stink about this, to my mind, accomplishes very little save allowing Asian-Americans to say that they have a 100% monopoly on “feeling Asian.” Does that eliminate bias against Asians, which is not that pervasive in America? What, exactly, does it accomplish?

And that is my problem with much of identity politics. It’s not that identifiable groups have no justifiable complaints about bigotry and oppression, or shouldn’t try to rectify this and obtain equal treatment and opportunity. No, what bothers me is that the way groups often go about this accomplishes nothing. (Remember the kimono fracas in Boston?) It’s a claim of ideological purity and not a way to achieve social progress. It is divisive rather than unifying.

Finally, Case made his statement in a spirit of goodwill and unity: what good does it to do hound and demonize the man? Does intent count for nothing?

Further, if you claim that ethnicity and gender are social constructs having nothing to do with biological reality but with personal feelngs, then you must be consistent, and you can have no valid reason to criticize what Case said—unless you think he was lying.

Feel free to correct me or explain this further in the comments, but, as always, please be civil.

___________

UPDATE:

Here’s an explanation from The Mary Sue. After reading it, I wasn’t sympathetic to their views: they’re hectoring a man for no good reason, flaunting their own ideological virtue, ignoring Case’s good intentions as well as the fact that Japanese people, especially in Hawaii, are not subject to “systematic racism and oppression”. This is language policing, pure and simple:

Here’s the thing: Case is not pulling a Rachel Dolezal here. He knows he is white, and he clearly has enthusiasm for Asian culture. But he’s going about it in a wildly insensitive and wrongheaded way. When a white person proclaims themselves to be a nonwhite race/ethnicity trapped inside a white body, they are discounting and dismissing the systemic racism and oppression that is inescapable for folks of that race or ethnicity.

It is peak white privilege, and it shares the same cultural voyeurism of straight women saying that they are “gay men on the inside.” These are marginalized communities that have suffered under discrimination and mistreatment since time immemorial, not a fashionable token to brag about how woke you are.

Race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, gender: these are not accessories to fit your mood: they are lived experiences and identities. If Ed Case really feels an affinity for Asian culture, he should know better than to insult it in this way. Fellow white people, it’s only January. Let’s be better than this, yes?

 

Burned out—before doing any work

December 18, 2018 • 12:45 pm

Trying to get attention all the time is hard and not cute! And the lady apparently doesn’t know how to chill, so she gets even more publicity by crowdsourcing her leisure:

And this is a real gem:

Well, as HuffPo might say (but wouldn’t), “AoC needs a face mask and Twitter isn’t having it.”

My suggestion for the incumbent Congresswoman:

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 now that skin color seems to be the proxy for everything, including viewpoints, degree of oppression or privilege, and so on. In fact, sometimes it seems—especially to regressive Leftists—that people should be judged on the color of their skin. And that’s what this latest piece by Doyin Richards in (Ceiling Cat help me) HuffPo seems to say. (Click on the screenshot).

My first thought was “Yes, of course: everyone should be treated the same.” But then I remembered that many people (and colleges) consider the statement, “I don’t see color” to be an actual microaggression. Such a view presumes that you not only should see color, but that it’s offensive if you don’t, and that you need to be constantly aware of ethnicity, for to be unaware means that you’re not woke and may even be lapsing into bigotry.

Well, sometimes it’s useful to recognize race, as when you’re describing somebody to someone who hasn’t met them, but look at this question and how Richards answered it. (I gave just the first bit.)

My 4-year-old son, who is white, recently started describing some of his friends by their skin color. For example, yesterday he said he played on the swings with “his black friend Andre” at preschool. Shouldn’t he just say that he’s playing with his friend Andre? How do I start this discussion with him?

[Richards’s answer]: This may surprise you, but I have no problem with your son’s labels whatsoever. As a matter of fact, I’ll go as far as to say that your son is on the road to enlightenment (or he’s becoming woke, as the kids say nowadays).

Some white parents get shook when race is brought up and try to change the subject as quickly as possible. But we should talk about race. Kids should be taught to recognize differences ― even if it means calling them out in the beginning.

Your son is in preschool, so you can’t expect him to understand the many nuances of race that, quite frankly, many fully grown-ass adults remain clueless about. As he grows older, your son will stop labeling his friends this way and will become more aware of the unique experiences black kids go through. He’ll learn to empathize with them. And because of that, I’m confident he’ll grow up to be a good human who gets it ― and we need more of those white men in America.

Personally, I’m more worried about the parents who think it’s a good idea to raise their kids to be colorblind and not see race. Those kids are the ones who grow up to post #AllLivesMatter nonsense on Twitter and who question why Megyn Kelly was fired from NBC for her blackface comments. If everyone is viewed as exactly the same, then any cries of racism are dismissed as overblown, we’re told that discrimination never happens, and we hear ridiculous false equivalency stories about how a white kid was a victim of racism that one time a black kid made fun of him.

Here’s the important part of all of this: Your son and Andre are different, but they’re still buddies — and that’s the way it should be.

I agree with Richards that kids of all races should have a talk about race with their parents. But constant labeling is a different issue. Richards, it appears, wants kids to be labeled with their race from the outset. Such a viewpoint can only come from identity politics, and not of the good type. When I hear somebody say “My black friend James,” or “I had lunch with this black woman,” and the racial designation serves no purpose and adds no information to the conversation, then I think that it’s been thrown in for reasons that are not useful: to show how virtuous one is, as a form of subtle bigotry, or so on.

Richards is making a mistake by asking kids to be aware of racial labels from the outset and to add them to descriptions of people. He’s further mistaken in thinking that doing this will in fact reduce racism and that using those labels will disappear as kids age. What is the evidence for these claims? What’s the evidence that “colorblind” kids grow up to be racists, as Richards implies? And isn’t it invidious to say that the experience of all black kids is homogeneous, that there are “unique experiences black kids go through”? What are those experiences, exactly? (I suspect he means racism, but to imply that skin color is a marker for homogeneity of experiences is simply wrong.)

The key to Richards’s identity politics is this sentence:

If everyone is viewed as exactly the same, then any cries of racism are dismissed as overblown, we’re told that discrimination never happens, and we hear ridiculous false equivalency stories about how a white kid was a victim of racism that one time a black kid made fun of him.

No, that’s not the way it works. You can be aware of racial discrimination, and try to ensure that all people are treated equally, without labeling people every time you see them, or being conscious of their race. It seems to me that skin color or other markers of race (note that race is still seen to be a social construct, which I reject) needs to be perceived in the aggregate—in the recognition that there is discrimination against individuals based on their shared physical (and perceived behavioral) characteristics with a group.

Beyond that, what is gained by telling your dad that you’re playing with your black friend, and constantly being aware of race? That kind of mindset will never get rid of racism, for it will never allow people to ignore race. And yet ignoring race, when races have achieved parity of opportunity, is what we want to happen.

But maybe you disagree. Here’s a poll on this article:

I bet I know how Martin Luther King would vote.

 

NYT apparently duped by hoax letter about white guilt (and a response from Grania)

August 16, 2018 • 11:00 am

In the New York Times article below (click on screenshot), a letter from someone called “Whitey” inspired a discussion by Cheryl Strayed, bestselling author of Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, and Steve Almond, an American essayist and short story writer. Strayed and Almond write an advice column for the paper called “The Sweet Spot”.

Here’s “Whitey’s” letter:

Dear Sugars,

I’m riddled with shame. White shame. This isn’t helpful to me or to anyone, especially people of color. I feel like there is no “me” outside of my white/upper middle class/cisgender identity. I feel like my literal existence hurts people, like I’m always taking up space that should belong to someone else.

I consider myself an ally. I research proper etiquette, read writers of color, vote in a way that will not harm P.O.C. (and other vulnerable people). I engage in conversations about privilege with other white people. I take courses that will further educate me. I donated to Black Lives Matter. Yet I fear that nothing is enough. Part of my fear comes from the fact that privilege is invisible to itself. What if I’m doing or saying insensitive things without realizing it?

Another part of it is that I’m currently immersed in the whitest environment I’ve ever been in. My family has lived in the same apartment in East Harlem for four generations. Every school I attended, elementary through high school, was minority white, but I’m now attending an elite private college that is 75 percent white. I know who I am, but I realize how people perceive me and this perception feels unfair.

I don’t talk about my feelings because it’s hard to justify doing so while people of color are dying due to systemic racism and making this conversation about me would be again centering whiteness. Yet bottling it up makes me feel an existential anger that I have a hard time channeling since I don’t know my place. Instead of harnessing my privilege for greater good, I’m curled up in a ball of shame. How can I be more than my heritage?

Whitey

Now Strayed and Almond respond earnestly, reflecting back the values of critical race theory and intersectionalism with statements like this:

Almond: . . . This feeling is especially acute right now, I suspect, because you’re suddenly immersed in a milieu that reflects your privilege back to you. We do live in a culture steeped in white supremacy and class bigotry, as well as patriarchal values. But the solution to this injustice isn’t to wallow in self-hatred. Instead, heed the words of the writer bell hooks. “Privilege is not in and of itself bad; what matters is what we do with privilege,” she writes. “We have to share our resources and take direction about how to use our privilege in ways that empower those who lack it.” You’re not going to empower others by disempowering yourself. . . As a straight white male raised by two professionals in an American suburb, I know I was born into a life of extraordinary privilege. But it wasn’t always that way. It took me many years to begin to recognize these advantages as unearned, the product of corrupt systems stacked in my favor. The rise of political actors and demagogues who promote white supremacy, misogyny and racism is, in part, an effort by the privileged to reject these truths.

Strayed: You ask us how you can be more than your heritage, Whitey, but what Steve and I are suggesting is that you need to own it first. As you seem well aware, your race granted you privileges that were and are denied to people who are not white. This is true for all white people in America, no matter how racially diverse their childhood neighborhoods were or were not, no matter how much money their families had or didn’t have, no matter how difficult or easy their lives have been. Every white person should be ashamed of that injustice. Which is different than being ashamed of being white. You don’t have to relinquish your heritage to be an ally to people of color, Whitey. You have to relinquish your privilege. And part of learning how to do that is accepting that feelings of shame, anger and the sense that people are perceiving you in ways that you believe aren’t accurate or fair are part of the process that you and I and all white people must endure in order to dismantle a toxic system that has perpetuated white supremacy for centuries.

Well, beyond the fact that we’re all supposed to all feel burdened by our original sin of being white, and that racism is “structural”, these responses aren’t out of line with what guilt-ridden liberals are saying these days, and do admit of the continuing fact of racism. But how does a poor coal miner or a homeless person relinquish their “white supremacy”? How can they be “allies” when they’re struggling themselves?

The person below person claims—and I have no way to verify it—that the letter from “Whitey” was in fact a hoax, reminiscent of the erstwhile hoaxer Godfrey Elfwick, who seems to have disappeared but was really good at pretending he was an Authoritarian Lefist (a status indistinguishable from parody) and taking those people in.

McGrath is much like Elfwick, as you can see by reading his/her Twitter feed.  And it’s curious to me that McGrath (who identifies herself as an “activist”, a “healer,” and a “radical intersectionalist poet”) wasn’t vetted by the Times to make sure this person was real and had a supporting (rather than a satirical) internet presence. The letter from Whitey does smack of satire, but I’m (PCC[E]) reading it from a cynical viewpoint.

https://twitter.com/TitaniaMcGrath/status/1030010992816742401

Since I have little time to post, and because Grania’s opinions are often sounder than mine, I asked for her take on the letter from McGrath (was McGrath a troll, or falsely claiming credit for someone else’s letter?) and on the responses by Strayed and Almond. Grania’s response:

Yes, it certainly seems she was a troll. It appears though that her letter is a perfect Poe that the NYT staff couldn’t see through. The letter content is certainly over the top, but it’s also perfectly consistent with the sort of stuff one sees on Twitter where self-professed woke individuals make sincere humble-braggings about their purity of thought.

It just reinforces my opinion that being woke / identitarian means one operates essentially as if in a religious Christian cult, albeit one without a god (although she may be “bell hooks”) or a leader. So long as your claims are rooted in the basic tenets of original sin and guilt, people will approve of your self-abasement and self-flagellation and entirely fail to examine them critically.
I really hope that this is not representative of what college undergraduates are paying several 100 grand to learn.
The replies [by Strayed and Almond] are almost funny, but I’m not laughing. Actually I feel nauseous.
JAC: I wonder if the NYT will do some checking, and admit that the letter was a hoax if it really was. But I suspect they won’t retract the column, because the responses reflect the NYT’s own editorial stance.