I try not to do book reports, although David's Blog (I think that is the title - I really should know that) has historically been more about books than anything until the last few years, but I think John McWhorter's Woke Racism deserves something. This actually isn't a book report, so to speak, as I'm quoting directly.
Who is John McWhorter? He teaches at Columbia University, linguistics, music history and American studies and has authored over 20 books (I'm taking this off the book jacket). I came to know him as a linguist, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue being one of my favorite books on the English language. But, I have also read his Losing the Race and now his Woke Racism, two phenomenal books on race issues (I own, but realize I never yet read Losing the Race - you can't read everything). In very short summary, Winning the Race explains unfortunate focus on self-victimization, anti-education and separatism in the black community and now, Woke Racism absolutely excoriates woke racism as a religion that we all must put behind us, not least because of the damage it does to blacks. I consider him the best writer on the issue of race in America, though I doubt anyone who calls himself an anti-racist in the common vernacular would agree (if they've heard of him).
I do not agree with everything he writes, but I do most of it. I often take notes when I read non-fiction, usually copying the words directly on my computer (I did it before there were computers too, but, not surprisingly, little has survived). Unfortunately, that took me 39 pages. Of course, I am not going to subject you to that - I AM SUGGESTING YOU BUY AND READ THIS SHORT, VERY READABLE BOOK! I wish every person, particularly CEO, teachers, school administrators and parents, would do so. I will just select what I thought were the best parts. It's not a long book (about 180 pages) but much more in depth than I can show.
But, I will give you a taste, some quotes, I hope not too many (I could easily have doubled it). I do have to edit, that is, usually by removing material from paragraphs and adding ellipses. Otherwise, you will stop reading. I've done my best, and I think successfully, to do it without changing his meaning. If anyone feels I did not succeed, please give me an actual example - don't just tell me I did.
"My
main aims will be:
1.
To
argue that this new ideology is actually a religion in all but name, and that
this why something so destructive and
incoherent is so attractive to so many good people.
2.
To explain why so many black people are
attracted to a religion that treats us as
simpletons.
3.
To show that this religion is actively
harmful to black people despite being intended as unprecedentedly “anti-racist.”
4.
To show that a pragmatic, effective,
liberal, and even Democratic-friendly agenda for rescuing black America need
not be found on the tenets of this new religion.
5.
To suggest ways to lessen the grip of this
new religion on our public culture."
"I
am not arguing against the left. I'm arguing against a particular strain of the
left that has come to exert a grievous amount of influence over American
institutions, to the point that we are beginning to accept as normal the kinds
of languages, policies, and actions that Orwell wrote of as fiction."
"I write
this viscerally driven by the fact that the ideology in question is one under
which white people calling themselves our saviors make black people look like
the dumbest, weakest, most self-indulgent human beings in the history of our
species, and teach black people who revel in that status and cherish it as
making us special. I am especially dismayed at the idea of this indoctrination
infecting my daughters’ sense of self. I can't always be with them, and this
anti-humanist ideology may seep into their school curriculum. I shudder
at the thought: teachers with eye shining at the prospect of showing their anti-racism
by filling my daughters’ heads with performance art instructing them that they
are poster children rather than individuals. Ta-Nehisi Coates, In Between
the World and Me, wanted to teach his son that America is set against him;
I want to teach my kids the reality of their lives in the twenty-first, rather
than the early to mid-twentieth, century. Lord forbid my daughters internalize
a pathetic--yes, absolutely pathetic in all of the resonances of that word--sense
that what makes them interesting is what other people think of them, or don't."
"A version of this book written by a white writer would
be blithely dismissed as racist. I will be dismissed instead as self-hating by
a certain crowd. But frankly, they won't really mean it, and anyone who gets
through this book will see that whatever traits I harbor, hating myself or
being ashamed of being black is not one of them."
"AS I WRITE THIS in the
summer of 2020, Alison Roman, a food writer for The New York Times, is
on suspension. . . In an interview, she passingly criticized two people for
commercialism . . . Chrissy Teigen and lifestyale coach Marie Kondo. Roman was
Twitter-mobbed for having the nerve, as a white woman, to criticize two women
of color.
Teigen is half white and
half Thai. Ondo is a Japanese citizen. . . In 2020, the mere fact of a white
person criticizing not just one but two (apparently the plurality tipped the
scales) non-white persons justified being shamed on social media and disallowed
from doing her work. Roman, as a white person, was supposedly punching
down—i.e., “down” at two people very wealthy, very successful, and [2] vastly
better known than her."
THAT SAME YEAR, Leslie
Neal-Boylan lasted only a few months as dean of nursing at the University of
Massachusetts Lowell. The problem was that in the wake of statements nationwide
after the murder by police officers. . . of George Floyd, Dean Neal-Boylan had
the audacity to pen this blinkered, bigoted screed to her colleagues and staff:
'EVERYONE’S LIFE
MATTER . No one should have to live in fear that they will be targeted for how
they look or what they believe.'"
"Third
Wave Antiracism, becoming mainstream in the 2010's, teaches that because racism
is baked into the structure of society, whites’ “complicity” in living within
it constitutes racism itself, while for black people, grappling with the racism
surrounding them is the totality of experience and must contingent exquisite
sensitivity towards them, including suspension of standards of achievement and
conduct.
Under
this paradigm, all deemed insufficiently aware of this sense of existing
while white As eternal culpability require bitter condemnation and
ostracization, to an obsessive, abstract degree that leaves most observers
working to make real sense of it, makes people left of center wanted to just
when and why they started being classified as backward, and leaves millions of
innocent people scared to pieces of winding up in the sights of a zealous brand
of inquisition that seems to hover over almost any statement, ambition, or
achievement in modern society."
"It is
losing innocent people that jobs. It is coloring academic inquiry, devouring
it, and sometimes strangling like Kudzu. It forces us to render a great deal of
our public discussion [6] of urgent issues in double-talk any 10-year-old can
see through. It forces us to start teaching our actual 10-year-olds, in order
to hold them off from spoiling the show in that way, to believe in sophistry in
the name of enlightenment. On that note, Third Wave Antiracism guru Ibram X. Kendi has written a book on how to raise
anti racist children called Antiracist Baby. . . This and so much else
is a sign that third wave antiracism forces us to pretend that performance art
is politics. It forces us to spend endless amounts of time listening to
nonsense presented as wisdom, and pretend to like it."
"People in positions of influence are regularly being chased away from their
posts because of claims and petitions that they're insufficiently anti racist.
School boards across the country of washing teachers and administrators to
waste time on “antiracist” infusions into their curricula and make no more
sense anything proposed on the Chinese cultural revolution. Did you know that
objectivity, being on time, and the written word are “white” things? Did you
know that if that seems off to you, then you are one with George Wallace, Bull
Connor, and David Duke?"
"Third Wave Antiracism also outright harms black people in the name of its
guiding impulses. Third Wave Antiracism insists that it is “racist” for black
boys to be overrepresented among those suspended or expelled from schools for
violence, which, when it's translated into policy, is documented as having led
to violence persisting in the school and lowered students’ grades. Third Wave
Antiracism insists that it is “racist” that black kids are underrepresented in
New York City schools requiring high performance on a standardized test for
admittance, and demands that we eliminate the test rather than direct black
students to resources (many of them free) for practicing the test and reinstate
gifted programs that shunted good numbers of black students into those very
schools just a generation [8] ago. That the result will be a lower quality of
education in the schools, and black students who are less prepared for
exercising the mind muscle required by the test taking they will encounter
later, is considered beside the point.
Third
Wave Antiracism, in its laser focus on an oversimplified sense of what racism
is and what one does about it, is content to harm black people in the name of
what we can only term dogma."
"For
example, the Third Wave Antiracist is deeply moved by a collection of tents
that, stated clearly and placed in simple oppositions, translate into nothing
whatsoever:
|
1.
When black people say you have insulted them,
apologize with profound sincerity and guilt
|
Don’t put black
people in a position where you expect them to forgive you. They have dealt
with too much to be expected to . . .
|
|
2.
Don't assume that all, or even most, black people
like hip-hop, or good dancers, and so on. Black people are a conglomeration
of disparate individuals. ”Black culture” is code for “pathological,
primitive ghetto people.”
|
Don’t expect
black people to assimilate to “white” social norms, because black people have
a culture of their own.
|
|
3.
Silence about racism is violence.
|
Elevate the
voices of the oppressed over your own.
|
|
4.
You must strive eternally to understand the
experiences of black people.
|
You can never
understand what it is to be black, and if you think you do you’re a racist.
|
|
5.
Show interest in multiculturism.
|
Do not
culturally appropriate. What is not your culture is not for you, and you many
not try it or do it.
|
|
6.
Support black people in creating their own spaces
and stay out of them.
|
Seek to have
black friends. I you don’t have any, you’re a racist. And if you claim any,
they’d better be good friends—albeit occupying their private spaces
that you aren’t allowed in.
|
|
7.
When whites move away from black neighborhoods, it’s
white flight.
|
When whites move
into black neighborhoods, it’s gentrification, even when they pay black
residents generously for their houses.
|
|
8.
If you’re white and date only white people, you’re a
racist.
|
If you’re white
and date a black person, you are, if only deep down, exotifying an “other.”
|
|
9 . Black people cannot be held accountable for everything
every black person does.
|
All whites must
acknowledge their personal complicitness in the perfidy of “whiteness”
throughout history.
|
|
1. Black students must be admitted to schools via
adjusted grade and test-score standard to ensure a representative number of
them and foster a diversity of views in classrooms.
|
It is racist to
assume a black student was admitted to a school via racial preferences, and
racist to expect them to represent the “diverse” view in classroom
discussions
|
There simply is no logical “medium” to be found between these alternates. One
could not preform any pair of them simultaneously."
"[T]he problem is that today,
this reductive, prosecutorial, and ultimately joyless kind of thinking actually
is taking over not just university culture but American culture at large."
"[A]ntiracism is everything--regardless of logic."
"Ironically,
the weapon is so lethal because of the genuine and invaluable change that has
occurred in our sociopolitical fabric over the past decades. That changes that
to the modern American, being called a racist is all pretty equivalent to being
called a pedophile. . . A key part of their toolkit is that they call those who
disagree with them racist, one more potent term of art of our moment, “white
supremacist.” That kind of charge has a way of sticking. To deny it is to
confirm it, we are taught; Once the charges hurled, it's like your court in a
giant squids tentacles. At least you can wash a cream pie off."
"The question is: will we knuckle under to this and
pay-to-play? Or will we assert that these people are gruesomely close to
Hitler's racial notions in their conception of an alien, blood- deep malevolent
“whiteness,” in their simplistic conception of what it means to be “black,” in
their crude us-versus-them conception of how society works, as if we were all
still rival bands of australopithecines?"
"Author
and essayist Joseph Bottum has found the proper term, and I will adopt it here:
We will term these people the Elect. They do think of themselves as bearers of
a wisdom, granted them for any number of reasons—empathic meaning, life
experience, maybe even intelligence. But they see themselves as having been
chosen, as it were, by one or some of these factors, as understanding something
most do not. “The Elect” Is also good in implying a certain smugness, which,
sadly, is an accurate depiction."
"The
problem is the degree to which the more hostile adherents have come to
influence, robustly, so very many less argumentative but equally devout others,
whose increasing numbers and intimidating buzzwords have the effect of
silencing those who see Elect philosophy as flawed but aren't up for being
mauled. The Elect are, in all of their diversity, sucking all of the air out of
the room. It must stop."
"Do not
heed those who say that this religion isn't important. Make no mistake: These people are coming after your kids."
"I do not mean that these people’s ideology is 'like' a religion. . . . I mean
that it actually is a religion."
"Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility seeks to convert whites to a profound
reconception of themselves as inherently complicit in a profoundly racist
system of operation and thought. Within this system, if whites venture any statement on the topic other than that harbor white privilege, it only proves
that they are racists, too “fragile” to admit it. The circularity
here—"Your’re a racist, and if you say you aren’t, it just proves that you
are”—is the logic of the sandbox."
"At one meeting at Northwestern University’s law school in 2020, professors
actually stood up and ritually denounced themselves as not only harboring
privilege but as being outright racists. All were required to do this
regardless of individual nature or political commitments, leading an observer
to say of one professor, 'He is a wonderful man universally loved by students.
It makes me sad that he is forced to say otherwise.'”
“'Why don’t they allow
people to have different opinions?'
You’re missing he point.
The Elect can seem truly baffling—until we see that they are a religion.
Specifically, an evangelical one."
"[I]n 1951, Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer noted that
movements such as Fascism, Communism, and nineteenth century segregationists
have attracted and retained their followers by appealing to an idealized past,
a fantastical future, and an indelibly polluted present. Under the Elect, black
people’s noble past is Africa; the glorious future is about those terms that
we come to; while the present, if the religion is to make any kind of
sense, must always be a cesspool."
"The
general idea that America is in some kind of denial about race--or racism,
which is what people really mean when they say this--is perfectly absurd.
America is nothing less than obsessed with discussing and acknowledging racism,
and those who insist year that America wants to hear nothing of it or dealing
in pure fantasy."
"The Associated Press has decided to capitalize the word Black.
Merriam-Webster is revising its definition of racism to include modern
definitions focusing on disparities rather than attitudes. The term master
bedroom, tech designations like master drive and slave drive,
and even golf’s Masters Tournament are being reconsidered. Suddenly the entire
nation is aware of, and helping black America to celebrate, the Holiday
June-teenth, with many cities giving black people the day off as a paid
holiday. In many of the protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, so many
of the faces are white that you’d think the movement was sponsored by
Greenpeace."
"The
1619 Project in The New York Times, despite the conclusive determination
that it is founded on a mistaken interpretation of the historical record, has
been awarded a Pulitzer Prize, out of the tacit Elect assumption that when it
comes to race, indignation outranks accuracy. Black Lives Matter protests in
solidarity with the ones here are taking place in countries where many of the
protesters don’t speak much English and have never known a black American.
Congress—the deadlocked travesty that is our Congress in the twenty-first
century—has passed a bill encouraging serious police reform. Minneapolis, where
Floyd was killed, vowed to dismantle its entire police force, while nationwide
a debate rages over whether the police should be defunded to a radical degree.
Nationwide,
prominent whites are examining, themselves for abusive 'whiteness,' such that
Tina Fey has pulled four episodes of her beloved sitcom 30 Rock from
streaming because it had quick blackface gags. Comic actress Jenny Slate has
withdrawn from providing the voice of a biracial character on the series Big
Mouth. Disneyland has retooled its Splash Mountain ride to highlight The
Princess and the Frog, with its black princess Tiana, instead of the
controversial Song of the South. New York City has painted BLACK LIVES
MATTER in big letters right down the street in front of Trump Tower.
White
attitudes on race and the prevalence of racism were dramatically different in
2020 than they had been just a few years before. . . .
And
yet notice that, to the Elect, none of this has mattered a whit."
"To
these people, actual progress on race is not something to celebrate but to talk
around. This is because, with progress, the Elect lose their sense of purpose."
"If by
chance the new mood leads to an actual reparations program, a worthy guess is
that the new memes will be things like 'Reparations is just a start' and 'They better not think they can treat us like animals for four hundred years
and just pay us off.” You don’t have to take my word for it. Coates is useful
again, giving it away long ago in his famed article on reparations, where he
ventured that 'we may find that the country can never fully repay African
Americans.'”
"The Elect consider it imperative to not only critique
those who disagree with their creed, but to seek their punishment and
elimination to whatever degree real-life conditions can accommodate. There
is an overriding sense that unbelievers must be not just spoken out against,
but called out, isolated, and banned."
"The Elect do not ban people our of temper; they do
it calmly, between sips of coffee as they surf Twitter, because they consider
it a higher wisdom to burn witches."
"As Andrew Sullivan noted about
his having to leave his post at New York magazine in 2020, I had gotten to the point
that the Elect staffers found his very presence unbearable:
They seem to believe, and
tis is increasingly the orthodoxy in mainstream media, that any writer not
actively committed to critical theory in questions of race, gender, sexual
orientation, and gender identity is actively, physically harming co-workers
merely by existing in the same virtual space."
"The truth is that this is not real fragility, but a pose. The Elect do not feel frightened, much less physically injured, by columns, tweets, syllabi, symbols, and verbal expressions. They are posing as injured in order to demonstrate the “violence” of the views with which they disagree and thus prove that those views are evil."
"Caricature!
Overstatement! Okay, but behold this faculty letter, from a body of PhDs--PhDs—at
Princeton, one passage from a suite of demands submitted to the university
president (who was in warm agreement with ideas of this kind):
Constitute a committee
composed entirely of faculty that would oversee the investigation and
discipline of racist behaviors, incidents, research, and publication on the
part of faculty, following a protocol for grievance and appeal to be spelled
out in Rules and Procedures of the Faculty. Guidelines on what counts as racist
behavior, incidents, research, and publication will be authored by a faculty
committee for incorporation into the same set of rules and procedures.
If
this isn’t a star chamber, I don’t know what is."
"New
York City mayor Bill de Blasio genuflected to the Elect in sanctioning ongoing
protest despite the quarantine order. Legions of protesters were taking to the
streets for weeks on end . . . De Blasio had broken up a Hasidic wedding . . .
but weeks later he was fine with people breaking the same rules in much larger
numbers and for much longer when the issue was battling racism. . . .
And
de Blasio wasn’t alone. In one of the most medieval moments in modern American
history, medical professionals refrained from condemning this behavior, often
even openly venturing that battling racism was more important than avoiding
the transmission of a grievously destructive virus. Few of
these medical professionals were likely Elect themselves, but they were cowered
enough under its power to act like they were. . . ."
"A
friend wrote on Facebook that they agree with Black Lives Matter, only to be
roasted by an anonymous person:
Wait
a minute! You 'agree' with them? That implies you get to disagree with them?
That’s like saying you 'agree' with the laws of gravity! You as a white person
don’t get to 'agree' OR 'disagree' when black people assert something! Saying
you “agree” with them is EVERY bit as arrogant as disputing them! This isn’t an
intellectual exercise! This is THEIR lives on the line."
"The
difference between good old-fashioned left and modern Elect began to emerge
when, for example, legal scholar Richard Delgado began teaching non-whites to
base their complaints about injustice not on something so 'rigid' as objective
truth, but upon the 'broad story of dashed hopes and centuries-long
mistreatment that afflicts an entire people and forms the historical and
cultural background of your complaint'.”
"Critical race theory tells you that
everything is about hierarchy, power, their abuses—and that if you are not
Caucasian in America, then you are akin to the captive oarsman slave straining
belowdecks in chains."
"We must not be taken in by the fact that this is called “critical,” that it’s
about race, and that it’s titled a 'theory.' It is a fragile, performative
ideology, one that goes beyond the passages above to explicitly reject linear
reasoning, traditional legal theorizing, and even Enlightenment rationalism. We
are to favor an idea that an oppressed race’s 'story' constitutes truth, in an
overarching sense, apart from mere matters of empirical or individual detail."
"Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility . . . reads in the present tense like a
bizarre exercise in mind control created by someone bent on manipulation and
getting paid."
"Amid nationwide anti-cop protests,
National Public Radio interviewed the author of In Defense of Looting (no,
not an Onion parody!)."
"[T]o forge a society in which whites are un-supreme . . . is it necessary
that the president and board chairman of the Poetry Foundation be forced to
resign because the group’s statement in allegiance with Black Lives Matter
after the Floyd murder was not long enough?
Is it necessary, that when, in 2018, a woman attended a party thrown
by a Washington Post employee and wore blackface in ridicule of a recent
comment by Megyn Kelly, she was not just called aside but cast into unemployment as
a revolting heretic unworthy of civilized engagement? . . . Only in the late
2010s could this clumsy goof-up qualify as grounds for unemployment, with her
callers-out claiming that she had made the party’s space “unsafe,” . . . A few
people at the party not only hounded her out but dedicated themselves to
getting her fired from the newspaper for her transgression of etiquette. They
succeeded, after even going as far as strong-arming the host of the party into
revealing her name to them so that they could pursue her persecution.
[I]s
it necessary that when the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art was
criticized for being insufficiently committed to non-white artists, and the
museum’s long-serving curator Gary Garrels concurred but added that the
museum would not stop collecting white artists entirely, because this would
constitute “reverse discrimination,” he was fired? His use of that term was
pivotal in his losing his job, for implying that non-whites, as people deprived
of power, can be racist."
"Racism, in all of its facets, is real, but since the late 1960s a
contingent of black thinkers had tended to insist that things were as bad as
they were in 1940, leaving even many black people who actually experienced Jim
Crow a tad perplexed and even put off."
"The Pathway is short, then, between critical race
theory’s celebration of communal “narrative” over empirical truth and this
modern black frame of mind in which exaggeration is allowed to pass as a kind
of alternate form of honesty."
"What distinguishes our era is the number of white people who have taken up the
politics of black radicalism since about 2013, and especially since 2020. To
wit: The essence of the Elect’s new moment is a critical mass of white people
coming to think like a charismatic hard-left contingent of black people have
been thinking for decades."
"Some
black people’s responses will be that America listens to the truth only when
white people take it up. But that’s just it: What’s being taken up is not 'truth.' . . . For all of the fascination it exerts, black America’s gains
since the 1960s have happened in spite of, not because of, black radicalism."
"[A]
Pew Research Center survey identified something readily apparent on the ground:
that college often teaches black students a view of whites as oppressors. Nine
percent of black high-school students report experiencing racism regularly; the
number doubles among black college graduates, to 17.5 percent."
"Even
the polling data suggest that the issue is more what one has been taught to say
than what one actually feels. Half of black people with college degrees say
that racism has made them fear for their safety; just a third of younger black
students do."
"While purportedly “dismantling racist structures,” the Elect religion is
actually harming the people living in those structures. It is a terrifyingly
damaging business. Here is how Elect ideology does not genuinely care about the
welfare of black people.
You
are to turn a blind eye to black kids getting jumped by other ones in school.
You are
to turn a blind eye to black undergraduates cast into schools wereh they are in
over their heads, and into law schools incapable of adjusting to their level of
preparation in a way that will allow them to pass the bar exam.
You are
to turn a blind eye to the willful dimness of condemning dead people for moral
lapses normal in their times, as if they were still alive.
You
are to turn a blind eye to the folly in the idea of black “identity” as all
about what whites think rather than about what black people themselves think.
You
are to turn a blind eye to innocent children taught to think in these ways
practically before they can hold a pencil."
"Black boys get suspended and expelled from schools
more than other kids. According to Elect ideology, this must be because they are
discriminated against.
. . .
[T]he simple fact is this: Black boys do commit more violent offenses in public
schools than other kids. Period. The Elect earnestly decry that most black kids
go to school with only other black kids, because it fits into their agenda to
point out “segregation.” But that “segregation” also entails that the black
boys they should be allowed to beat up other kids in school are handing out the
beatings to other black kids. This means if we follow these prophets’ advice
and go easier on black boys, we hinder the education of other black students.
For
example, The Philadelphia Inquirer fanned out across the city’s public
schools in 2012 and found that there had been thirty thousand violent incidents
in public schools between 2007 and then, which included robberies, rapes, and a
pregnant teacher punched in the stomach. (She was one four thousand teachers
assaulted by students between 2005 and 2010.)
[O]ne
might imagine that a lot of these assaults may have been committed by white
kids. But the numbers don’t square with it: In Philadephia’s public schools,
more than two in three students (70%) are black or Latino.
Or
one might imagine that, just maybe, those white kids who make up one-third of
the students are committing a disproportionate amount of the assaults? But
other studies reveal that black boys are responsible for a disproportionate
amount of school violence. . . .
A
Fordham Institute study showed the same thing in 2019. . . .
In fact,
the teachers in this study often reported that in the wake of calls like the
ones above to treat disciplining black boys as bigotry, underreporting of
serious incidents was “rampant,” and also that higher tolerance for misbehavior
was in part responsible for the recent decline in student suspensions.
Reports
from a New York City initiative have even more explicitly located and especial
problem with school violence among black boys. . . .
The
Elect will see only “racism” here, but only because their religious commitment
numbs them to the harm their view does to real children living their lives in
the real world. Obviously, poverty can make kids more likely to be violent—there
is no reason to see these boys as pathological beings. But to insist that
bigotry is the only possible reason for suspending more black boys than white
boys is to espouse harming black students."
"It’s often thought that affirmative action at
universities involves, simply, considering racial diversity only after
assembling a pool of students with the same caliber of grades and test scores.
The vision is that all candidates have the same scores, and then you fill out a
certain pie chart. Few reasonable people would have a problem with that kind of
system. . . .
But
the question is whether black and Latino students should be admitted with significantly
lower grades and test scores than those that would admit a white or Asian
student. . . .
Many
insist that despite the initial mismatch, the students excel nevertheless and
the mismatch has no actual effect. But this would mean that the admissions
standards applied to other students are meaningless, and actual studies have
shown, not surprisingly, that this is not the case. At Duke University,
economist Peter Arcidiacono, with Esteban Aucejo and Joseph Hotz, has shown
that the “mismatch” lowers the number of black scientists. . . .
In 2004,
UCLA law professor Richard Sander revealed an especially tragic tendency in
this vein, showing that “mismatched” law students are much more likely students
are much more likely to cluster in the bottom of their classes and, especially,
to fail the bar exam. . . .
. . . .
. . . But here’s what happens on the ground. At the
University of California, San Diego, the year before racial preferences were banned
in the late 1990s, exactly one black student out of 3,268 freshmen made honors.
A few years later, after students who once would have been “mismatched” to
Berkeley or UCLA were being admitted to schools like UC San Diego, one if five
black freshmen at the latter school were making honors, the same proportion as
white ones."
"In Between the World and Me, required reading
for millions of undergraduates nationwide for years now, Ta-Nehisi Coates
states that he had no sympathy for the white cops and firemen who died at the
World Trade center on 9/11. They were just “menaces of nature; they were the
fire, the comet, the storm, which could—with no justification—shatter my body.”
. . .
It was unexamined and irresponsible for someone billed as a public
intellectual.
Yet
the white punditocracy at most tsk-tsked him for it. In our society, where a
person can be roasted as a moral pervert and fired for wearing blackface makeup
as a joke. . . or for criticizing one and half Asian celebrities while white .
. . Coates was allowed to say that those white public servants deserved to die
but continued to be celebrated as America’s lead prophet on race.
The only
reason Coates was given this pass was condescension: brute denigration (word
chosen deliberately) of a black human being. To not hold Coates responsible for
the horror of a judgment like that . . . and to even assign the book containing
it to impressionable young people nationwide is to treat him as someone not
responsible for his actions. It is to treat Coates as a child. . . ."
"Black
journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones insists that the Revolutionary War was fought to
preserve slavery. She got a Pulitzer for it. The 1619 Project included more,
indeed, but the claim about the Revolutionary War and the resulting redating of
America’s birth to 1619, when slavery can be argued to have begun, was the main
thing that attracted so much attention to it. Hannah-Jones would have won no
prize for a series without that central claim.
. . .
On the issue of the Revolutionary War, Hannah-Jones’s claim is quite simply
false, but our current cultural etiquette requires pretending that isn’t
true—because she is black. Someone has received a Pulitzer Prize for a mistaken
interpretation of historical documents about which legions of actual scholars
are expert. Meanwhile, the claim is being broadcast, unquestioned, in
educational materials being distributed across the nation.
. . . White people patting her on the head for being “brave” or “getting her views
out there,” rather than regretting that she slipped up and wishing her better
luck next time, are bigots of a kind. They are condescending to a black woman
who deserves better, even if the zeitgeist she has been minted in prevents her
from knowing it herself."
"Racist,
too, are those who actually hear out black scientists claiming that the reason
there are so few black physicists is “racism.” Unless these people point out
black scientists doing the same work of the same caliber as their white
colleagues and being refused PhDs or postdoctoral fellowships or jobs, they are
out of court."
"And as for the proposal that, say, physics needs to change what is considered
real work so that a 'black' perspective is allowed, to even allow this at the
table is more condescension. Presumably the 'alternate' perspective would
eschew the tough, uncompromising higher mathematics that the serious physicist
is supposed to command. Surely the idea isn’t that black physicists will
command the math but do it 'blacky' or 'diversely.'"
"If
I sound rhetorical, consult an interesting paper by black physicist Chanda
Prescod-Weinstein, in which she condemns 'white empiricism' as keeping black
women out of physics. You will work to glean what she considers a viable
alternative, but it is clear that she thinks reasoning from A to B to C is just
one way of being a scientist."
"The KIPP
academies, a charter school network devoted to giving poor brown kids a solid
education and getting them into college, have decided that they’ve been too
hard on the children. Their sin: the slogan 'Work hard. Be nice.'
KIPP
has announced that to expose their charges to that mantra “diminishes the
significant effort to dismantle systemic racism, places value on being
compliant and submissive, supports the illusion of meritocracy, and does not
align with our vision of students being free to create the future they want.”
Translation:
Schools committed to helping kids make the best of a bad hand now feel
uncomfortable teaching their students that following rules and putting forth
effort will have beneficial results. Rather, there are apparently other, woker
pathways to creating a successful future, as in the 'future they want.' Apparently
this is a future you can have without following rules, while distrusting effort
as playing the white man’s game.
The
KIPP people are suspending common sense as well as true compassion, in a
fashion that their teachers would never consider for their own children at
home. This is the Elect at work, espousing a charismatic but senseless dogma as
a public posture of moral goodness. Their religion supplants earlier ones in
which, rather often, “Work hard. Be nice” would have qualified as wisdom. The
Elect’s mantra instead is Battle racism, be indignant—even at the
expense of the well-being of black American people, including black children."
"Electism
calls for everyone who isn't white to found their primary sense of self on not
being white and knowing whites don't quite “get” me. Electism forbids us
non-whites from being individual selves, out of an idea that white racism is so
onerous that ourself definition must before, Despite that this vastly
exaggerates the role of racism in most black lives. . . Your Elect friend may
claim that I am distorting what they believe. Ask them to specify just how it
does so—and the word-salad answer they craft while looking over your shoulder
will show you that I am not."
"Here
is where wokeness takes us back to the balkanized and artificial racial
categorizations we all thought we wanted to get past. Yet ask why we are no
longer supposed to get past them and the Elect—wait for it—suspect you of white
supremacy. All of the Enlightenment’s focus on individualism, all of
modernism’s permission for people to be themselves rather than live bound to
preset classifications, falls to pieces before this idea that to be anything
but white requires obsession with the fact that you are not white, and
diminished by their possibly not seeing you in your totality."
[T]he Elect
analysis must see racism, and thus comes Ibram Kendies 'idea' that our whole
metric for evaluating scholarly success must be overturned in favor of
pretending that black kids should be measured as smart on the basis of 'desire
to know.'”
"To be
Elect is to insist that unequal outcomes mean unequal opportunity, which is
false. The misimpression misdirects our efforts at change, but inculcating in
us a blindness to how a society actually operates. The insistence on this
mantra makes us dumb."
"The Elect think that if a historical figure had slaves
(Washington) or was ensconced in the slave trade (John Locke), or even was not
hotly interested in dismantling slavery when they could have played a part in
it—Alexander Hamilton has come under fire for that—then this must be the main
thing we remember them for. They should be recalled only with condemnation.
They are useful to us only as object lessons in how not to be. Their
achievements otherwise should be treated as footnotes, largely of interest only
to the historian. Their backwardness on race must cling to them in our minds
the way a gendered definite article must cleave in our minds to a French noun. La
plume; George Washington, le slave owner."
"Thus,
we are not to celebrate that America got past accepting slavery, but to reach
backward in time and slap at the people who had yet to, in order to show how
goodly we are now. The Elect require that we pretend that figures of the past
are walking around with us, as if time does not pass."
"To be
Elect is to insist that figures in the past might well be living now, and that
they must merit the judgments we level upon present-day people, who inhabit a
context unknown to those who lived before."
"The
Elect’s harm to black people is multifarious and rampant that anyone committed
to this religion and calling antiracist walks in certain shame."
"On racism,
Elect philosophy teaches black people that cries of weakness are a form of
strength. It teaches us that in the richness of this thing called life, the
most interesting thing about you is that the ruling class doesn’t like you
enough. It teaches us that to insist that black people can achieve under less
than perfect conditions is ignorant slander. It teaches us that we are the
first people in the history of the species for whom it is a form of heroism to
embrace the slogan “Yes, we can’t!” Elect philosophy is, in all innocence, a
form of racism in itself. Black America has met nothing so
disempowering—including the cops—since Jim Crow."
"The Elect, in terms of the combined effects of their warriors and their
supporters, are today a mob, pure and simple."
"The
Elect must be othered. We must stop treating them as normal. Already, the term
“woke” is used in derision, but using that term with a snicker is about as
oppositional as many dare to be against this mob. It isn’t enough."
"Anyone
with any familiarity with the the Collegetown scene knows that the Elect are by
no means only kids. Many of them are nearing retirement age and today enjoying
a new sense of dominance. . . This is not about kids."
"Elect
ideology is being presented as fundamental to child pedagogy in public and
private schools nationwide? New York City’s former schools chancellor Richard
Carranza presented his teachers and staff with the idea that the written word,
objectivity, being on time, and individuality are 'white things.'"
"All this is being done . . . sincerely under the impression that the
national reckoning about race requires enshrining this Orwellian poppycock. . .
If the Elect are reaching our children, then this is real."
"Meanwhile,
no one can deny that Elect ideology has a stranglehold on institutions that
barely knew it just a few years ago. The Elect are changing America or at least
what much of America is comfortable presenting itself as when threatened with
slander. The Capitol mob are changing nothing."
"But—get ready, this must be said,
and, frankly, it’s better said by someone black:
As often as not today,
what the person “feels” is based on what they have been taught to 'feel' by a
paradigm that teaches them to exaggerate and even fabricate the 'feeling.' In
other words, much too often, the person who tells you to accept and go from how
they 'feel' has been, coached."
"I
make no apologies for not being a character from The Wire. I am
committed to greeting getting help to black people who need it, and my
positions in this book stand or fall on the basis of their applicability to
that mission."
"What we must do about the Elect is stand up to them.
They rule by inflicting terror, either through invective or quietly trailing
off with the likes of 'Well, I guess if you think racism is okay, then. . .' They think that to require them to engage in actual reason is heretically 'white.' There is nowhere to go with them from there."
"Our
response to this cannot be simply fold, because this means giving up the
post-Enlightenment society we hold dear. We must stop being afraid of these
people, and once we do, there is something we need to steel ourselves against
and get used to.
People
often ask, 'How can I talk to people like this without being called a racist?'
The
answer is: You cannot."
"Yes, it
will be easier for some to stand up to the Elect than others. Temperamentally,
some are more comfortable with conflict than others. Some people’s jobs require
them to toe an Elect line more than others. Some people’s incomes allow them to
leave positions more easily than others. The decision must be individual."
"If you need perspective, talk to anyone you know from
a formerly Communist country. A great many of our immigrants from Russia and
China are mystified at how readily so many smart Americans are rolling over the
face of the rhetoric these immigrants recognize as what they escaped or what
their own parents and relatives had their lives ruined by."
*****************************
I again recommend his book as I obviously had to leave most of it out. It is short, persuasive and easy to read. I do disagree with some of his points - (Trump, Obama, drugs, etc.). But, the important part is to understand what this woke insanity is doing to our country, including blacks and our youth, and to end it.
