Category: wokeness

The persistence of wokeness

October 13, 2024 • 9:45 am

Sam Kahn, an editor at Persuasion, has written a piece taking issue with the claim that wokeness is on the way out—that we’ve passed “peak woke”.  I though we had, given the increasing frequency of stories in the MSM that questioned the “received wisdom” of progressive authoritarianism, like this 2022 piece from the NYT (it did, by the way, encounter strong pushback from the paper’s staff).

And we all know that DEI programs are being dismantled in both the academic and corporate world.  So I was hopeful that “wokeness”—by which I mean “progressive and performative authoritarianism that does little to improve society but inflates the reputation of the promoter”—was on its way out. This was buttressed by an article in The Economist which used graphs (see below) to show a decline in wokeness.

Click below to read Kahn’s piece (Michelle Goldberg of the NYT also made this claim about “peak wokeness” going away):

Kahn takes issue with the “wokeness-is-declining” conclusion on two grounds. First, he argues that wokeness is so deeply entrenched in mainstream institutions that we barely notice it any more. Second, he argues that the statistics presented in The Economist article are misleading: they may show a small decline in indices of wokeness in the past couple of years, but no long-term trend.  I find his argument pretty convincing, especially the main example he uses to demonstrate his thesis. Click below to read:

Kahn’s example of his thesis is the infamous interview of Ta-Nehisi Coates by CBS journalist Tony Dokoupil. Coates has just published a book containing three essays, one of which is a 100-page anti-Israel screed based on a mere ten days that Coates spent in “Palestine,” by which he means both Israel and the West Bank.  I will be reading that, but the book hasn’t arrived at the library yet. However, Dokoupil’s questions, the scathing review of the book by Coleman Hughes, along with other reports, are indicate a one-sided accusation of Israel. The fact that Coates doesn’t even mention Hamas or the terrorism inflicted on Israel is a telling sign that his essay is misleading, as is the praise for it.

The sign for Kahn that we haven’t reached peak woke is the fact that Dokoupil was called on the carpet by CBS officials simply for asking civil but hard questions of Coates (see the video here). The problem, as everyone knows but only a few will admit, is that Dokoupil challenged some dubious conclusions and observations of a black American icon. That is simply beyond today’s journalistic pale, and that’s why Kahn sees wokeness as deeply embedded in the media. Had Coates been white rather than black, the pushback on Dokoupil would have been far less intense. Race mattered.

Kahn:

My point here is that a clash like Coates v. Dokoupil v. CBS News is Exhibit A for how the “woke wars” never went away, how if “peak woke” seems quieter than it did circa 2020, woke censoriousness is, contra Goldberg and contra The Economist, part of American institutional life, now maybe more than ever.

. . . What’s going on is a bit subtle. The woke revolution already said its piece. The University of California endocrinology professor long ago apologized for saying “pregnant women” instead of “pregnant people” in class and “imply[ing]” that only biological women can give birth. The University of Michigan music professor long ago stepped back from teaching after showing Lawrence Olivier’s 1965 blackface film of Othello in class. The fear of being “canceled” remains pervasive. Wokeism, now, has been so internalized by the institutions that they barely need to articulate it—and employees have an acute danger sense of what not to talk about. Meanwhile, “peak woke” finds itself memory-holed. An article like The Economist’s depicts it as a temporary blip—a reaction to Trump’s election. Michelle Goldberg, in her New York Times op-ed, finds herself longing for the “progressive urgency” of the “peak woke” moment. A representative NPR piece, from 2023, frames the whole discourse as a Republican talking-point—something that has “been co-opted as a political slogan on the right … [and] could lead to violence.”

All of those dynamics emerged in the Dokoupil fracas. The admonishment by the CBS executives was a delectable bit of muddled corporate speak. “We are journalists and as hard as it is, this means we set our personal feelings and beliefs aside,” CBS executive Adrienne Roark said on the staff call. “Our job is to serve our audiences without bias or perceived bias, to provide objective news that we know and they know they can trust.”

The phrase “perceived bias” (what a wide-ranging idea!) gives the game away. It tips off that the issue with Dokupil had very little to do with journalistic standards and was instead that he strayed outside of the bounds of acceptable expression. By challenging a much-beloved author and his ferocious critique of Israel, he was violating unspoken tenets of the new woke corporate regime. The fact that it’s literally his job to argue with on-air guests seemed to matter not at all to the corporate brass.

Regardless of what Coates said in his book, and I will be checking it, you don’t treat a journalist like this for asking hard questions.  That is what we expect journalists to do when they interrogate someone having strong opinions on contentious issues. The fact that CBS would give Dokoupil a verbal spanking (and later refuse to admit that Jerusalem is in Israel), shows that they have “structural wokeism.”

As for the Economist‘s statistics, it is true that they shows rise in indices of wokeness until 2020, but then a tiny decline in the subsequent three years. It may mean something, but it may not. Here are three graphs given by Persuasion and taken from The Economist:

As The Economist notes:

. . ., . we measured how frequently the media have been using woke terms like “intersectionality”, “microaggression”, “oppression”, “white privilege” and “transphobia”. At our request, David Rozado, an academic based in New Zealand, counted the frequency of 154 of such words in six newspapers—the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, New York Post, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and Washington Times—between 1970 and 2023. In all but the Los Angeles Times, the frequency of these terms peaked between 2019 and 2021, and has fallen since.

Yes, but it’s not much of a fall: a small drop in one year and a tiny rise in 2023:

A plot of those who think that inequities are due to discrimination, again showing just a slight drop after 2021.  No statistics are given so we don’t know if the figures are significantly different, but at any rate the drop is tiny.

And woke terms in social-science papers. Again, a smallish dip between 2022 and 2023.

None of this is convinces me that wokeness is decreasing. You’d need a longer-term analysis to show that. The Economist article also gives data on the censuring of academics, mentioning DEI on earnings calls, and DEI jobs in big companies, all showing declines between 2021 or 2022 and 2023.  And the first two declines look significant, but again we’d like long-term data. It may be that DEI as an institution is on the way out, but is still embedded in academia in non-obvious ways (I think this is the case for my university). I have no idea what to make of the “earnings calls” mentions.

Perhaps Kahn is right: wokeness has so thoroughly imbued America that we no longer notice it. Teachers are inhibited from saying certain things in the classroom; the NYT and Washington Post are still biased in their news coverage towards progressive issues, and identiarianism—a sure sign of wokeness—is still with us.  Perhaps wokeness has just become hidden so much that we no longer see it as wokeness.  But I’ll give Kahn the last word (feel free to tendewr your opinion below):

A situation like what happened at CBS has become something very close to a new normal in institutional America. Some perspective, even a very radical one, gets favored. Any opposition to that favored perspective goes beyond the bounds of acceptable discourse and is suggestive of “perceived bias.” Corporate management, in its attempt to smooth things over, placates whatever the loudest voices are at the moment and punishes whomever espouses the less-favored perspective. At CBS News—which is a company full of journalists dedicated, at least in theory, to independence of thought—there’s some pushback, but in most companies, employees would simply know where the guardrails are and steer well clear of causing any offense.

It’s not placards or encampments or Twitter mobs but it’s no less insidious. “Peak woke” has profoundly changed the way that American institutions operate. If it’s impossible to have honest, challenging conversations at CBS News—a place whose whole reason for existence is to pursue journalistic truth—then it’s likely impossible to do so anywhere else in the American institutional structure. “Wokeism” may have peaked around 2020, but that doesn’t mean that it just disappeared afterwards. What happened was that there was a culture war and “wokeism” won.

I can’t help adding that the wokeness evinced by asserting that Israel is a demonic, apartheid-ridden, and settler-colonialist state—a “progressive” view evinced by Ta-Nehisi Coates—has certainly not declined over the last year. It began on October 7 and has ramped up ever since.

h/t: Ginger K.

 

Are we past peak woke in America?

September 22, 2024 • 11:40 am

Here we have two different British media venues: the Sunday Times of London and The Economist, coming to different conclusions about a questions that gnaws on many of us: “Is wokeness in America on the wane or on the rise?”

The Times (second article below) says “no, we aren’t even near peak wokeness”, taking issue with the Economist article (first headline below), which, based on thei analysis of trends in views and in the use of “woke” terms in the media, says wokeness has peaked.  First, the Economist piece (click to read)

The results of the Economist survey and a chart:

The simplest way to measure the spread of woke views is through polling. We examined responses over the past 25 years to polls conducted by Gallup, General Social Survey (GSS), Pew and YouGov. Woke opinions on racial discrimination began to grow around 2015 and peaked around 2021. In the most recent Gallup data, from earlier this year, 35% of people said they worried “a great deal” about race relations, down from a peak of 48% in 2021 but up from 17% in 2014. According to Pew, the share of Americans who agree that white people enjoy advantages in life that black people do not (“white privilege”, in the jargon) peaked in 2020. In GSS’s data the view that discrimination is the main reason for differences in outcomes between races peaked in 2021 and fell in the most recent version of the survey, in 2022. Some of the biggest leaps and subsequent declines in woke thinking have been among young people and those on the left.

Here’s their chart. I have to say that, with the exception of race being the most important issue in the U.S., which could be dampened by the election and concerns about the economy and immigration, I’m not impressed by the “peaks”.  Wokeness is still way higher than it was just ten years ago.

Polling about sexual discrimination reveals a similar pattern, albeit with an earlier peak than concerns about race. The share of Americans who consider sexism a very or moderately big problem peaked at 70% in 2018, in the aftermath of #MeToo. The share believing that women face obstacles that make it hard to get ahead peaked in 2019, at 57%. Woke views on gender are also in decline. Pew finds that the share of people who believe someone can be a different sex from the one of their birth has fallen steadily since 2017, when it first asked the question. Opposition to trans students playing in sports teams that match their chosen gender rather than their biological sex has grown from 53% in 2022 to 61% in 2024, according to YouGov.

Now that last statistic, about trans students—clearly males identifying as females playing on teams not matching their biological sex (I love that term)—I do find convincing, simply because in the media I see increasing opposition to it, and think that, on issues of fairness alone, the “transwomen are women” trope, and vice versa, is on the way out. This is about fairness (morality), not solely ideology. And, of course, you can’t contest the data on the frequency of terms used, but again, Biden and the election have pushed woke issues largely to the side. More from The Economist:

To corroborate the trend revealed by opinion polls, we measured how frequently the media have been using woke terms like “intersectionality”, “microaggression”, “oppression”, “white privilege” and “transphobia”. At our request, David Rozado, an academic based in New Zealand, counted the frequency of 154 of such words in six newspapers—the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, New York Post, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and Washington Times—between 1970 and 2023. In all but the Los Angeles Times, the frequency of these terms peaked between 2019 and 2021, and has fallen since. Take the term “white privilege”: in 2020 it featured roughly 2.5 times for every million words in the New York Times, but by 2023 had fallen to just 0.4 mentions for every million words.

Still, maybe, just maybe, the Economist is right. The use of “white privilege”, for example, is only 16% of what it was just three years before.

The Times rejects the “peak” conclusion, although they are going largely on intuition rather than statistics. Still, the article has a point: we need longer-term data, and the wokesters haven’t yet taken over society since they’re too young to have attained much power.

Click to read, or find the Times article archived here.

Matthew Syed, disagrees with the Economist thesis because of “invisible data”! I couldn’t resist some self-aggrandizement in what I excerpt below, but it does belong in their analysis:

Last week The Economist published an exhaustive analysis of the rise and apparent fall of wokeism. The magazine defined woke — I think rightly — as a term that has morphed over the decades from denoting an awareness of racism to a spectrum of views encompassing structural racism, radical trans rights, cancellation and the like. I won’t waste time pinning down definitions since, as with pornography, I suspect most of us know wokeism when we see it (although perhaps that is now a view that could get me cancelled).

The Economist looked at a variety of trends: how often terms like “intersectionality” and “white privilege” are used in print media (it examined millions of articles); how often they are used in TV programmes (it analysed thousands of transcripts); how often they are used in scientific papers; how often they feature in companies’ financial reports; how often calls are made for academics to be disciplined; and so on. As I say, the data was exhaustive and, I would add, superbly assembled.

But it was the way The Economist interpreted the data that troubled me. It noted that trends, by almost all these measures, particularly in America, were falling back after a high point roughly around the aftermath of the George Floyd riots. It concluded that the phenomenon was on the decline. We are, it said, almost audibly breathing a sigh of relief, “past peak woke”.

I disagree. I say this because, while the visible data reveals a clear pattern, I find myself asking: what about the invisible data? What about the cancellations that have become so normalised they are no longer reported? What about the initiatives (like mandatory unconscious bias training, which has never had evidence to support it) that are no longer mentioned in quarterly reports because they have become routine? What about the conservatives who self-censor out of fear of cancellation? When you take a step back, the data shows that woke is not past its peak but has moved from the wallpaper and into the brickwork.

Consider that Auckland University has now started requiring all students to take a course that is “effectively indoctrination in the coloniser/indigeneity hierarchy”, according to the decorated academic Jerry Coyne. This was scarcely reported. The list of cancellations in western universities grows daily, but is no longer newsworthy.

Or take a blog post from ten days ago revealing the scale of censorship in publishing, none of which shows up in datasets because the books are not, well, published (the subhead was: “Widespread censorship is killing writers’ careers before they begin”). I know authors who have had to edit out words like “stupid” and “mad” because they are considered “ableist”; who have deleted references to drinking through straws as they might prove offensive to people with disabilities who can’t use a straw; who have referred to the moon as “a small white rock orbiting the Earth” and had to remove “white” because it was racially sensitive. And I haven’t even mentioned how difficult it is to publish anything that hints at benign aspects of the British empire.

(I have to note that my article was about New Zealand, not the U.S., which was what the Economist piece was about.)

But, as you see, Syed doesn’t really give data; rather, he gives anecdotes (there are more). But it is true that deplatformings and censorship aren’t considered by the Economist, and I suspect that FIRE’s database of college deplatforming really would show an increase in the last few years (do the analysis yourself). And of course a lot of wokeness was instantiated by pro-Palestinian demonstrators, who are by and large on the Left and see Israel as white oppressors. Yet none of the friction caused by those demonstrations aren’t measured, either, and the issue isn’t going away any time soon.

Syed’s main thesis is that the woke are young and haven’t gotten societal power that will keep wokeness increasing.

Forgive a crude generalisation, but those on the right tend to go into finance and business because they are motivated by money. Those on the left tend to go into museums, charities and academia because they are willing to play a longer game. That is why cultural institutions trend left and Marxists console themselves with the thought that, while they live in smaller houses, they have the greater — if subtler — influence.

And this, I fear, is the other fallacy in The Economist’s analysis. It’s true that a fightback against wokeism has begun, largely driven by older liberals who — after cowering rather pathetically out of fear of cancellation — started to stand up for free speech, due process and the reality of biological sex. But you can glimpse its grip on our cultural institutions in the fact that much of Gen Z, which will soon replace the present generation in positions of political, cultural and corporate power — has markedly different views. And that is why it is in a decade or so that the rubber will hit the road: on women’s rights, single-sex spaces, free speech, the West’s relationship with Israel, our understanding of history, indeed our very sense of self.

Well, the liberal mainstream media is already colonized by the woke (check reports about the Slack channel of NYT reporters), but there are still nonwoke people writing for the paper. What happens when they leave?

In the end, Syed asserts that he is somewhat of a progressive, and is in favor of diversity, forms of affirmative action, and so on. But he ends like this:

But I have long feared radical wokeism, a strangely transmissible virus that could yet prove lethal to our future, and that has inspired a mirror version on the populist right, which seems just as keen to denigrate our history, the memory of Churchill and Nato.

That is why epitaphs for wokeism are not just premature but dangerous. Indeed, when you look at the invisible data, you’ll see that the fightback has only just begun.

My take: I am not sure if wokeness is on the wane. Certain aspects of it are, like the willingness to allow men identified as women to enter women’s spaces, but other aspects are on the rise, most visibly (to me) the incursion of wokeness into science journals and magazines. But the important conclusion is that wokeness is here and ubiquitous, and seems entrenched in many areas. But whether or not it’s increasing, it needs to be fought at every turn. And that means that those of us who object to the invidious side of Social Justice—of course “social justice” is not all bad; I’m referring to  the ca[ota;ozed performative and non-effective pretense of fixing society by changing words, bird names, and monitoring speech and behavior—must stand up and call out this nonsense when we see it,  It’s not pleasant, as you’ll be ostracized and demonized, if not fired, but since when was society ever improved without people taking flak from those who wrongly see themselves as the pinnacle of morality?

h/t: Pyers

 

Meanwhile at the Democratic National Convention. . .

August 22, 2024 • 9:00 am

I’m off to the Blyde River Canyon today and most of tomorrow, so posts will be nonexistent or thin for a few days—save for Matthew’s postings of the Hili Dialogues.  I’ve largely avoided reading the news, as I find it depressing and not conducive to a relaxing vacation, but two readers sent me stuff about the Democratic National Convention that is taking place in Chicago.  I’m glad I’m not there.

Here’s one item that epitomizes the wokeness I fear is metastasizing in the body of the Democratic Party: a land acknowledgement to open the convention. I was sent a link to the video below, which YouTube describes as follows:

Two citizens of the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation — Zach Pahmahmie, tribal council vice chair and Lorrie Melchior, tribal council secretary — gave the land acknowledgement Monday at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where Kamala Harris will step into the spotlight not as a running mate but at the top of the ticket.

And the video:

My response to these things is always the same: they are performative gestures signaling the virtue of the organization, but accomplish nothing. If the Democratic Party really does acknowledge that the lands on which the convention is taking place was stolen from Native Americans, why don’t they try to compensate the Potawatomi Nation for the theft? (Land in Chicago is expensive!)

Granted the speaker notes that the Interior Department placed some of their tribal lands into a trust, making the Potawatomie “the only federally recognized tribal nation in Illinois in 175 years.” But did any individual get land or cash?

And there are the expected pro-Palestinian protests. Here’s one where an American flag gets burned (legal speech), but a guy who tries to put it out gets jumped on and pushed away.

This shows the divisiveness that plagues America, and that I fear will appear again on campus this fall.

I can’t find an article someone sent me relating that the Convention has given pro-Palestinian protestors far more space than pro-Israeli demonstrators, who have apparently been pushed far away from the site, but I do remember reading that somewhere. In the meantime, the Washington Post reports this:

. . . pro-Palestinian activists have won small but notable concessions at the Democratic National Convention that, three days into the event, have largely headed off any major eruptions of anger or division. Organizers have provided space for a panel to discuss Israeli-Palestinian conflict and for a vigil for Palestinians killed in Gaza [was there a vigil for the dead Israelis, including now six more hostages?], and several high-profile speakers have demanded an end to the war from the stage.

Those concessions have helped defuse the issue, but most critical has been the emergence of Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee. Harris, in her public comments, has emphasized Palestinian suffering notably more than President Joe Biden has and held Israel more directly responsible for the high civilian death toll and the slow pace of humanitarian aid. In addition, her campaign has ramped up its efforts to engage with those calling for a change in U.S. policy.

This wokeness and anti-Israeli sentiment does of course worry me about Harris and the election, to the point where I’ve been contemplating not voting for President at all (there’s no question of me voting for Trump, who I think is unstable and dangerous). But make no mistake about it: if Harris wins, Israel is in for a hard time, with some Israelis even regarding Harris as an existential threat to their country. I’m hoping that they’re unjustly worried.

And I’m hoping the centrist Democrats will push back on the party’s new cooling toward Israel.  Above all, Democrats have to realize that a permanent cease-fire now is a victory for Hamas, and that the IDF has been more careful than any army in history in trying to reduce civilian casualities. Blame the deaths of Palestinian civilians not on Israel, as have Harris and Biden, but on Hamas, which actually wants the deaths of its own civilians as part of its strategy to win the world’s favor. And Hamas seems to be succeeding, even among Democrats.]

Finally, I wish that Harris would have some interviews or press conferences before the election; it’s surprising to me that’s she’s had exactly none. We all know why that is, of course, but Democrats resolved to support her will find some reasons why no such events are required.

If Democrats share “the contagious power of hope,” as Michelle Obama said in her speech, then my hope is that the Democratic party stops its movement towards its “progressive” wing.

Anyway, these are some early-morning thoughts before I take off to see the wonders of nature. Please discuss them but, as always, be civil to your fellow commenters and to your host. Debate is fine; insults are not.

More on the decline and fall of science education in New Zealand

August 21, 2024 • 11:15 am

Skip this if you don’t care about science education in New Zealand, but plenty of scientists there are worried about it. And it’s a harbinger of what may happen to science education in the U.S. as science courses add requirements to teach indigenous “ways of knowing” and the curriculum itself pushes out traditional material to make way for content that aligns with ideological and political objectives.

Each faculty at the University of Auckland, for instance, has to have one of these mandatory courses tailored to ideological ends.  The one below, for instance, is being created on a trial basis as a requirement for all science majors. I believe I’ve discussed it before, so click on the headline below to see what’s on tap in science education.

Here is the course overview and the course goals (“learning outcomes”):

Course overview:

Contemporary science is deeply entwined with place, knowledge systems and ethics. This course examines these concepts through the lens of sustainability to demonstrate how they shape research agendas, methodologies, and applications of contemporary science. To address the environmental, social, and economic dimensions of sustainability, science must recognise and navigate the complexities of these interrelated concepts.

Explore the role of place-based knowledge, the importance of embracing diverse knowledge systems for science and the ethical responsibilities inherent in contemporary science in Aotearoa New Zealand. This interdisciplinary course will challenge you to think critically, fostering an awareness of the intricate relationships between science and its broader context, including Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

Learning outcomes:

By the end of this course, students will be able to:

    1. Demonstrate how place, and an understanding of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, are significant to your field of study
    2. Critically and constructively engage with knowledge systems, practices and positionality
    3. Employ a reciprocal, values-based approach to collaborating
    4. Communicate ideas clearly, effectively and respectfully
    5. Reflexively engage with the question of ethics in academic practice
    6. Demonstrate a critical understanding of sustainability

Note the worshipful discussion of “Te Tiriti o Waitangi”, the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi that is nearly sacred and almost serves as a constitution for New Zealand, though some of its interpretations are questionable and it was not signed by many Māori leaders on the South Island.  It’s not even a document with hard legal status.

The Treaty did assure the Māori that they’d have the same rights as British citizens and would keep control of their lands and properties, and was written to bring New Zealand into being as a British colony. That means that today Europeans are seen as oppressive “colonizers”. The treaty is now used as a rationale to ensure that Māori or those of Māori ancestry are given equity (not just equal opportunity) in admissions, grants, and so on. The Treaty is also the rationale for the current change in curricula, meant to effect “decolonization,” which in my view means changing modern education to one infused with traditional Māori “ways of knowing.”

The course outline and objectives above are ideological in this way, involving not science per se but a postmodern philosophy of science in which reality is shaped by the scientist and the place where he/she came from.

The emphasis on “ethics” doesn’t belong in a mandatory science course, and I think will serve only to confuse students.

Finally there’s this:

“the importance of embracing diverse knowledge systems for science and the ethical responsibilities inherent in contemporary science in Aotearoa New Zealand”

and this:

“This interdisciplinary course will challenge you to think critically, fostering an awareness of the intricate relationships between science and its broader context, including Te Tiriti o Waitangi.”

I’d be delighted if someone would explain to me why the Treaty of Waitangi should be explicitly discussed in a required science course. Note the emphasis on “diverse knowledge systems”.  I can only guess what that means, but it’s pretty clear.

Now here’s a new course that isn’t required for science majors, but still counts as a science course. Click on the headline below for the course description, even more risible than the one above,

Here is the course prescription, the course overview, and the learning outcomes. Remember, this is a course for which students get science credit:

Course Prescription

Mātauranga is central to the future practice of science in Aotearoa New Zealand. Explores foundational understandings of mātauranga Māori and Kaupapa Māori for scientists. Students will meaningfully and respectfully engage with te ao Māori through place-based relational learning and case studies grounded in whanaungatanga. Students will experience Māori ways of being, knowing, and doing.
Course Overview
This course welcomes all students who wish to engage with mātauranga in relation to scientific place-based knowledge. Engagement with Indigenous knowledge, including mātauranga, is increasingly important to the practice of science in Aotearoa [New Zealand] and beyond. Pūtaiao, meaning science curriculum that includes mātauranga, is well established in primary and secondary education. This course will further develop the learning of pūtaiao [pūtaiao] into tertiary science education and scientific research. Enhancing understandings of mātauranga and Kaupapa Māori [Māori practice] for scientists will develop skills in critical thinking, reflective and relational practice, and the application of Kaupapa Māori in science.

Learning Outcomes:

By the end of this course, students will be able to:
    1. Compare articulations of Kaupapa Māori, mātauranga and science.
    2. Recognise strategies that support, protect, and empower mātauranga in science and the relevance to whānau, hapū and iwi.
    3. Critically explain and communicate understandings of the relationship between Kaupapa Māori, mātauranga and science.
    4. Describe the history of Pūtaiao in science education and relate the development of Pūtaiao to the practice of science in Aotearoa.
    5. Work effectively in a team to develop research skills, including the ability to meaningfully and respectfully engage with te ao Māori.

Note that Kaupapa Māori means the practices of the indigenous people and  Mātauranga Māori comprises Māori “ways of knowing”, including some empirical knowledge gained by trial and error (MM isn’t hypothesis-based), as well as a bunch of superstition, ethics, tradition, myths, lore, legend, and religion.

This course appears one designed to demonstrate that indigenous ways of knowing are not only vital to modern science, but nearly coequal to it, something “central to the future practice of science in Aotearoa New Zealand.”

My answer to that last quote is simply “no it isn’t.” In science classes what should be taught is modern science: the general body of knowledge and tools for knowing as practiced throughout the world today.  Indigenous knowledge may be a part of that, but only a very small one, and likely could be omitted without loss.  If traditional lore and knowledge about when to collect eels or berries is to be taught, it should be in anthropology or sociology class, not a class that gives you science credit.

This course shows that the new curriculum in NZ simply has lost sight of the distinction between science and non-science, and is blurring the boundaries between naturalistic modern science, social science, and ideology.

Note in particular this bit from the second course: “Students will meaningfully and respectfully engage with te ao Māori”. (Te ao Māori is the specifically Māori worldview.) What would people make of the phrase “meaningful and respectful engagement” if used in a science course, where students are encouraged to question everything? What this shows is data being replaced by motivated reasoning that aligns with social justice principles.

If you think this is irrelevant to America, think again. What we’re seeing is fast-forward time travel of DEI carried to its logical limits, with the sacralization of everything indigenous.  While I don’t think for a moment that we’ll have Native American science courses pervading American universities, American teaching of science is becoming increasingly infected with principles of social justice. I’ve gone into this issue many times before and won’t repeat my thoughts, but do spare a thought for the poor science teachers in New Zealand who have to spoon this stuff into the mouths of their students, impeding what should be a real education in science.

Richard Dawkins interviews John McWhorter on linguistics and “woke racism”

June 9, 2024 • 12:15 pm

Here Richard Dawkins interviews linguist and author John McWhorter, a person familiar to readers of this site. And most of the 54-minute discussion is about linguistics.

It’s refreshing to hear McWhorter’s enthusiasm for linguistics, and this bit of the discussion goes from the start of the interview until about 37 minutes in. It’s sad that McWhorter has, by his own admission, been more or less drummed out of the fraternity of academic linguists because of his heterodox views on racism. I’m sure, based on this interview alone, that he was a terrific teacher.

At any rate, McWhorter explains why he began studying linguistics (it involves Hebrew), how many times he thinks language originated (McWhorter thinks just once, though he’s not convinced that this is supported by the existence of a “universal grammar” or universal “recursion”: subordinate phrases embedded within phrases). Rather, McWhorter is convinced of a single origin of language by parsimony alone. As to when it originated, McWhorter makes rather unconvincing arguments (criticized by Richard) that Homo erectus could use syntactic language; he’s on more solid ground when he thinks that Africans, because of evidence of their mental sophistication, used language around 300,000 years ago.

They discuss evidence that the FOXP2 gene was implicated in origin of language, and McWhorter is accurate in saying that this theory hasn’t worked out, though he believes, along with Steve Pinker, that the ability to use syntactic language is encoded in our genome.

The discussion of “woke racism” (the title of McWhorter’s well known book, which was originally “The Elect”) begins at 36:40.  Dawkins moves the discussion into why McWhorter considers woke racism a “religion”, even though there are no supernatural beings involved. I’m not particularly concerned whether one conceives of progressive racial activism as an ideology or a religion, for it seems a semantic question. To me the more interesting questions are the characteristics of the movement (Does it promote irrationality? Is it disconnected from reality? Does it promote “safe spaces”, which McWhorter sees as a religious concept?)

The discussion moves to the question of why you are considered black (or claim you are black) if you have any black ancestors, which leads to McWhorter’s assertion that we have to go beyond race as a personal identity.

The discussion finishes with McWhorter pushing back on the “defenestration” of figures like Thomas Jefferson because they were either slaveholders or didn’t denigrate slavery. He sees this demonization as “pernicious for education”, although he agrees that some extreme versions of racism (e.g., Woodrow Wilson) warrants taking down statues or erasing names. And what, he muses, will demonize us to our descendants.

It’s a very good discussion, I think, and shows McWhorter’s passion, eloquence, and thoughtfulness.

Since McWhorter mentions Jamaican patois as a form of English that isn’t recognizable as English, I wanted to hear some of it, so I’ve put the video showing such patois below.

h/t: Williams Garcia

Teachers’ union in Portland pushes pro-Palestinian propaganda on pupils

June 6, 2024 • 11:10 am

 

Here’s another instance of a teachers’ union imposing its political values on students.  And course it comes from Portland, Oregon. You have to remember that teachers’ unions don’t exist for the benefit of the students, but for the teachers themselves. As the Daily Signal reported in 2011:

As former American Federation of Teachers president Al Shanker infamously quipped: “When school children start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of school children.”

And here we have a paradigmatic case of where interests of teachers and students don’t coincide, or rather, when teachers appear so “progressive” that their unions urge teachers to propagandize students in favor of Palestine.  The two articles below documenting this are both conservative—the National Review and The City Journal—but just check the sources and judge for yourself. Christopher Rufo, for example, is widely demonized, but mainly because he’s a Republican who advised Ron DeSantis. In fact, I think his exposing DEI stuff and showing its weaknesses have been salubrious. And so is this exposé. But again, read and judge.

I have to emphasize that these are lesson plans made by the Portland Association of Teachers, and it’s not clear whether any of this material has yet been foisted on students.

Click on the two headlines below to read, or check out this series of tweets by Rufo documenting the teaching material.

From the National Review, by Ryan Mills:

And the City Journal piece by Rufo:

From the National Review Piece:

Jewish leaders and concerned parents in Portland, Oregon are accusing the local teachers’ union of indoctrinating students with anti-Israel messages and engaging in one-sided, pro-Palestinian activism as the war in Gaza continues to rage.

The 32-page guide, “Know Your Rights! Teaching & Organizing for Palestine within Portland Public Schools,” was published last month by the Oregon Educators for Palestine in collaboration with the teachers’ union. It offers legal advice to educators “teaching about the genocide in Palestine,” and advice on how to teach about the ongoing conflict.

The fact that parents and Jewish leaders say that the teachers’ union is actually “indoctrinating students” implies that this material is being taught, but it’s not clear. However, the guide seems to have disappeared, as the link above goes nowhere. Never mind; you can find the link below.

There’s more:

The teaching guide does not mention that Gaza is governed by Hamas, which the U.S. designated as a foreign terrorist organization in 1997. And critics note that while it focuses on the plight of Palestinians, it makes no mention of Hamas’ terrorist attack on October 7, which killed about 1,200 innocent people, mostly Israeli civilians, and led to the war.

The guide accuses Israel of engaging in “settler colonialism” and says that the “Zionist settler colonization of Palestine has been widely compared to settler colonialism in the United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa, and elsewhere.”

. . .For younger students, the guide recommends lessons, books, and videos from various far-left education outfits, including Woke Kindergarten, the Palestinian Feminist Collective, and Social Justice Books. It includes a visual guide titled “So You Made it to a Protest!” and “Lil Comrade Convos,” which urges young kids to discuss “power.”

Older students are directed to lessons on “Renewable Energy in occupied Palestine,” “Unions,” “Genocide of Palestinians,” “Queer Voices From the Fight For Palestine Liberation,” and “No Freedom Without Reproductive Freedom for Palestinian Women.”

What can you say except “Oy vey!” (if you’re a Zionist). But Rufo has more evidence in a working link and some tweets, so I’ll quote the second article as well. And the link in the first sentence, to the “Teach Palestine” resources, is working, though I don’t see how to download it.

I have obtained a collection of publicly accessible documents produced by the Portland Association of Teachers, an affiliate of the state teachers’ union that encourages its more than 4,500 members to “Teach Palestine!” (The union did not respond to a request for comment.)

The lesson plans are steeped in radicalism, and they begin teaching the principles of “decolonization” to students as young as four and five years old. For prekindergarten kids, the union promotes a workbook from the Palestinian Feminist Collective, which tells the story of a fictional Palestinian boy named Handala. “When I was only ten years old, I had to flee my home in Palestine,” the boy tells readers. “A group of bullies called Zionists wanted our land so they stole it by force and hurt many people.” Students are encouraged to come up with a slogan that they can chant at a protest and complete a maze so that Handala can “get back home to Palestine”—represented as a map of Israel.

Other pre-K resources include a video that repeats left-wing mantras, including “I feel safe when there are no police,” and a slideshow that glorifies the Palestinian intifada, or violent resistance against Israel. The recommended resource list also includes a “sensory guide for kids” on attending protests. It teaches children what they might see, hear, taste, touch, and smell at protests, and promotes photographs of slogans such as “Abolish Prisons” and “From the River to the Sea.”

In kindergarten through second grade, the ideologies intensify. The teachers’ union recommends a lesson, “Art and Action for Palestine,” that teaches students that Israel, like America, is an oppressor. The objective is to “connect histories of settler colonialism from Palestine to the United States” and to “celebrate Palestinian culture and resistance throughout history and in the present, with a focus on Palestinian children’s resistance.”

The lesson suggests that teachers should gather the kindergarteners into a circle and teach them a history of Palestine: “75 years ago, a lot of decision makers around the world decided to take away Palestinian land to make a country called Israel. Israel would be a country where rules were mostly fair for Jewish people with White skin,” the lesson reads. “There’s a BIG word for when Indigenous land gets taken away to make a country, that’s called settler colonialism.”

Before snack time, the teacher is encouraged to share “keffiyehs, flags, and protest signs” with the children, and have them create their own agitprop material, with slogans such as “FREE PALESTINE, LET GAZA LIVE, [and] PALESTINE WILL BE FREE.” The intention, according to the lesson, is to move students toward “taking collective action in support of Palestinian liberation.”

I can’t stop quoting!

. . . .The recommended curriculum also includes a pamphlet titled “All Out for Palestine.” The pamphlet is explicitly political, with a sub-headline blaring in all capital letters: “STOP THE GENOCIDE! END U.S. AID TO IRSAEL! [sic] FREE PALESTINE!” The authors denounce “Zionism’s long genocidal war on Palestinian life” and encourage students to support “boycott, divestment, and sanctions” policies against Israel.

You can peruse the teaching guide, and I’ll put up a few tweets by Rufo demonstrating what’s in it. It starts with lessons from kindergarten through grade 2 (roughly ages 5-7).

Here’s one I found from high school plans; click to read the whole lesson plan:

What the hell is going on here? This is blatant political propagandizing of the type that UNRWA foists on kids in Gaza, but it’s in AMERICA. Of course whether you consider Portland “America” is a matter of taste these days, but I don’t think any parent save someone blatantly pro-Hamas would want their kids fed one-sided propaganda these days. Particularly Jewish parents!

All I can say is that the parents of Portland should nip this nonsense in the bud, pronto.

Teachers’ unions of course have often taken stands inimical to the well-being of their charges: they are notoriously loath to fire teachers who are incompetent or even drunk, they are often pro-DEI, and they pushed schools to close down during the pandemic, a move that now, I think, is seen as deeply unwise, having set children’s education back by a long spell without really conferring much benefit to health.  And this post is one more example of how a teachers’ union, apparently besotted by Palestine and rife with anti-Zionism, is not teaching but propagandizing.

 

h/t: Luana, Rosemary

The Lancet, apparently off its meds, takes the position that sex is non-binary and that it can change within an individual

June 4, 2024 • 11:45 am

Among all scientific or medical journals, The Lancet is the most woke, and I’ve written about it several times before, once calling it the “medical Scientific American“. For a fuller account of its wokeness, which seems to be entirely the doing of editor Richard Horton, see this piece from the site The Daily Skeptic, which summarizes a lot of craziness in the journal.  The latest mishigass is the long (11-page set of “author guidelines” that you can read by clicking on the link below:

And right near the beginning, on page 2, you read the guidelines for using the terms “sex and gender”.  The bolding of the headers is theirs (I’ve put these in caps), but I’ve taken the liberty of putting in bold several select sections of the text.

REPORTING SEX-BASED AND GENDER-BASED ANALYSES 

Reporting guidance

For research involving or pertaining to humans, animals, model organisms, or eukaryotic cells, investigators should integrate sex-based and gender-based analyses into their research design according to evolving funder/sponsor requirements and best practices within a field. Authors should address their research’s sex and/or gender dimensions in their manuscript. In cases where they cannot, they should discuss this as a limitation to their research’s generalisability. With research involving cells and model organisms, researchers should use the term “sex”. With research involving humans, researchers should consider which terms best describe their data (see Definitions section below). Authors can refer to the Sex and Gender Equity in Research (SAGER) Guidelines and the SAGER guidelines checklist. They offer systematic approaches to the use and editorial review of sex and gender information in study design, data analysis, outcome reporting, and research interpretation. However, there is no single, universally agreed-upon set of guidelines for defining sex and gender or reporting sex-based and gender-based analyses.

DEFINITIONS

In human research, the term “sex” carries multiple definitions. It often refers to an umbrella term for a set of biological attributes associated with physical and physiological features (eg, chromosomal genotype, hormonal levels, internal and external anatomy). It can also signify a sex categorisation, most often designated at birth (“sex assigned at birth”) based on a newborn’s visible external anatomy. The term “gender” generally refers to socially constructed roles, behaviours, and identities of women, men, and gender-diverse people that occur in a historical and cultural context, and might vary across societies and over time. Gender influences how people view themselves and each other, how they behave and interact, and how power is distributed in society. Sex and gender are often incorrectly portrayed as binary (female/male or woman/man), concordant, and static. However, these constructs exist along a spectrum that includes additional sex categorisations and gender identities, such as people who are intersex/have differences of sex development (DSD), or identify as non-binary. In any given person, sex and gender might not align, and both can change. Sex and gender are not entirely discrete concepts and their definitions continue to evolve. Biology and society influence both, and many languages do not distinguish between them. Since the terms “sex” and “gender” can be ambiguous, authors should describe the methods they use to gather and report sex-related and/or gender-related data (eg, self-report or physician-report, specific biological attributes, current sex/gender, sex assigned at birth, etc) and discuss the potential limitations of those methods. This will enhance the research’s precision, rigor, and reproducibility, and avoid ambiguity or conflation of terms and the constructs to which they refer. Authors should use the term “sex assigned at birth” rather than “biological sex”, “birth sex” or “natal sex” as it is more accurate and inclusive. When ascertaining gender and sex, researchers should use a two-step process: (1) ask for gender identity allowing for multiple options and (2) if relevant to the research question, ask for sex assigned at birth. In addition to this defining guidance and the SAGER guidelines, you can find further information about reporting sex and gender in research studies on Elsevier’s diversity, equity, and inclusion in the publishing author guide available here.

Note that everything referred to here deals with HUMANS, as this is a medical journal. Note that the editors specify that “sex” has multiple definitions, but in so doing mix up the way sex is determined in humans (chromosomes carrying sex-determining genes), the way it is observed at birth (usually via genitalia), and the way it is defined (whether an individual has the apparatus for producing big, immobile gametes (“females”) or small, mobile gametes (“males”).

Biologists agree about the gametic definition of sex, which produces the sex binary that I’ve discussed so often, and that definition is not ambiguous. (Note that there are no cases of hermaphrodites in humans that are functional as both males and females, so even if you considere hermaphrodites to be members of a “third sex”, and I don’t, they don’t exist in our species.)

The editors also state twice that sex is “not static” and can change, but biological sex cannot change. What can change is gender—unless you use a hormonally-based definition of sex, which is not tenable and was used only to determine which group someone could compete in athletically. (The Olympics has now abandoned that approach.)

Finally, note that The Lancet recommends the term “sex assigned at birth,” which is simply wrong. Sex is not ASSIGNED at birth, it is observed at birth, but observed using characters like genitalia that are almost always concordant with biological sex but may not be infallible indicators of biological sex.  But regardless, sex is never “assigned” but exists.  The exceptions to the sex binary—individuals who are truly intersex—comprise about 0.018% of people, or about 1 in 5600. As I always say, “that’s as close to binary as you can come.”

Finally, why do the editorial guidelines imply that sex is not “static”?  There is only one reason I can think of, and that’s trying to push on the journal’s readers a gender-activist ideology.  If you truly believe that a transwoman is a woman in terms of biological sex, or a transman is a man in terms of biological sex, then yes, you can say that sex is malleable. But this is not accurate, for using the biological definitions of sex, a transwoman remains a biological man and a transman remains a biological women. (This of course is not to demean them or say that they’re somehow morally unequal to the rest of us; it’s just biology.) In the end, biological sex is not malleable but static.

As the Daily Skeptic notes at the end of its piece:

The Lancet’s guidelines on sex conclude by explicitly telling authors to use the term “sex assigned at birth” because it is “more accurate and inclusive”. I’m imagining a future Lancet article on Elizabeth Garrett Anderson: “She was the first person who’d been assigned ‘female’ at birth to qualify as a doctor in Britain, and she went on to found the first medical school to train people who’d been assigned ‘female’ at birth. All in all, she was a truly remarkable person who’d been assigned ‘female’ at birth.”

If this were some obscure Gender Studies periodical, it wouldn’t really matter. But we’re talking about the world’s second most cited medical journal. It’s read by doctors, surgeons, researchers and all the people to whom we’ve entrusted our health. How can they maintain our trust when they can’t seem to tell the difference between a man and a woman?

Indeed!

h/t: Luana