America’s New Religion - "Antiracism has become, as John McWhorter pointed out in 2015, America’s new religion. It has its holidays, its saints and martyrs, its liturgical processions and gestures, its symbols and sacraments, its Scriptures and sermonizers, its modes of confession and almost-absolution, its eschatological hope that America will, somehow and someday, fix racism once and for all... Antiracism makes racial justice more difficult to achieve. It short circuits the painful honesty we all need. Certain questions cannot be asked, questions like: “Why are black people so upset about one white cop killing a black man when black men are at much more danger of being killed by one another?” Some do publicly raise such questions, most of them on the Right. But then the questions are taken as evidence that the questioner doesn’t “get it.” The many African-Americans who raise these questions are little better than traitors who deserve to be shouted down. Antiracism’s eschatology – its hope for a Judgment day when America “owns up to” racism – is not a political program so much as a “tacit promise of catharsis.” That same hope obscures the actual progress we’ve made on race relations. As McWhorter says, “if hatred and dismissal of black people were really still as much the bedrock of this society . . . then Antiracism—complete with the logical elisions and willful contempt of self required—would not be the new religion of enlightened white America.” That eschatology functions as justification for the persistent demands of Antiracism. Judgment Day is postponed, perhaps indefinitely. No matter what America does, it’s not enough. We haven’t reached the promised land. Like many perfectionist religions, Antiracism is satisfied with nothing less than total surrender. For the Antiracist, racism is the equivalent of original sin, the master explanation for all African-American problems. Antiracism siphons energy and imagination from practical solutions. Confession of white privilege relieves white guilt, but, McWhorter asks, does “self-flagellation by the ruling class” actually help anyone?... Antiracism manifests the intolerance of many established faiths. It prohibits blasphemy, and enforces its strictures through public shaming or lawsuits. Antiracism is trying to capture public squares throughout the nation, toppling old monuments. It’s agitating to capture public time, as it erases offensive holidays from the American calendar... Like many contemporary movements, Antiracism illustrates G.K. Chesterton’s observation that the modern world is overrun with “old Christian virtues gone mad because they have been isolated from one another and are wandering alone.” It’s sometimes difficult to tell the difference between the lonely mad virtues and the community of sane ones. Though disguised in Christian colors, Antiracism is a rival faith. And not only a rival in a general sense, a competitor for hearts and minds. It's a rival in the sense that orthodox Christianity is one of Antiracism’s targets. If there’s one thing a newly established religion cannot tolerate, it’s the persistence of the old establishment. Over the decades, “racism” has expanded to include every form of discrimination against any minority, including especially sexual minorities. Negative judgments are excluded. Antiracism morphs into a tyranny of non-judgmentalism. For many adherents of our new religion, Christians are the bigots and the Bible is our manual of authoritarianism . We're sexists if we deny a woman’s right to abortion, fascists when we refuse to celebrate transgenderism. We’re the heretics and the blasphemers, dissenters from the new established religion. There may come a time when Christians are a little wistful for the good old days when a President was willing to do a self-serving photo-op holding a Bible in front of a church."
DO BLACK PEOPLE ENJOY BEING TOLD THEY ARE WEAK AND DUMB? THE ELECT HOPE SO. - "the problems people like Taylor have with what they call neoliberalism justify deriding the idea of anyone having control over their fate (who isn’t white), and the things we consider it a positive trait to excel in – i.e. “meritocracy.”... parents’ objections are not to be heeded because today’s “antiracism” is a higher morality these “Nice White People” are too benighted to understand (although quite a few of them are South Asian and African, but never mind)... Why do so many of us accept this condescension as a compliment, almost enjoying being told we are too dumb to be truly educated, to be specific, or to be subject to genuine competition? Psychology has an answer to this question: a personal trait called the tendency for interpersonal victimhood, or an embrace of victimhood status... The syndrome manifests itself according to these four facets:
1) Constantly seeking recognition of one’s victimhood
2) Frequently ruminating about past discrimination
3) A sense of moral elitism, as a way to maintain a positive self-image
4) Lack of empathy for the pain and suffering of others...
Importantly, psychologists specify that the victimhood mindset need not come from actual victimhood: trauma may, but may not create the mindset, and the mindset may, but may not come from trauma. Rather, one can be socialized into embracing the victimhood mindset because, on a day to day level, it can function as a source of comfort and even belonging."
Thread by @DrIbram on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - Ibram X. Kendi: "The White supremacists who attacked the Capitol on 1/6 claimed they were defending America from the coming destruction of an antiracist politics. This fearmongering piece argues antiracist demands at schools “would destroy the institutions themselves.”
White supremacist violence is tacitly being fomented by pieces like this one. McWhorter urged people to “resist destructive demands” and press “for the very survival of the institution,” and praised a professor who said the demands would lead to a “’civil war on campus.’”
This is how the left persecute their rivals - by pretending that they are "harmful"
Thomas Chatterton Williams on Twitter - "The logic here seems to be: White supremacists oppose Antiracism™️ and John McWhorter also criticizes Antiracism™️, therefore McWhorter = a white supremacist. By attempting to own the term and meaning of “antiracism,” Kendi attempts to frame any disagreement as racist in itself."
More on what modern "antiracism" does to schools, or could not -- and some insight on the Kendi thing. - "antiracism manifestos that threaten to destroy institutions’ basic missions as educational... the Dalton School... from concerned parents who, because if they went public with their names they would be pilloried as bigots nationwide, are staying anonymous. “Every class this year has had an obsessive focus on race and identity, ‘racist cop’ reenactments in science, ‘de-centering whiteness’ in art class, learning about white supremacy and sexuality in health class.” “In place of a joyful progressive education, students are exposed to an excessive focus on skin color and sexuality, before they even understand what sex is. Children are bewildered or bored after hours of discussing these topics in the new long-format classes.” “Why would anyone voluntarily send their children to be taught that they are guilty regardless of their decency and kindness? A school where they are constantly reminded of the color of their skin, not the content of their character. What Black parent wants the other children to feel sorry for their kid and look at them differently? We have spoken with dozens of families, of all colors and backgrounds, who are in shock and looking for an alternative school for their children.” Now – The Elect (my term for the hyperwoke who are hijacking constructive leftist ideals in this nation) will claim that this sort of thing is exactly what education needs to be, and that white (or “white”) parents who object are displaying “fragility.” However, we get that “fragility” notion from one of the worst books ever written... What Dalton is doing is a tragic and grisly subtraction of what education should be... another Elect response here will be that Dalton is an outlier case. However, I hear from many more places... at Swarthmore, the President simply folded arms and said “no” to the protesters, upon which they basically folded in their tails and went away. Why? Because the President is a black woman, Valerie Smith. This is key here: she knew she could respond to melodramatic performance art with the refusal it deserved because no one could call her racist... being black allows you to respond to this agitprop with basic sense, including affording these performance artists the fundamental respect of calling them on their bullshit... a certain Mr. (sorry, “Dr.,” as he so pointedly specifies in his Twitter handle) Kendi announced last weekend that I am of a piece with the Trumpian insurrectionists. This joins him calling me a racist who “’sort of’ should look at himself in the mirror” a few months ago when speaking at Harvard. (I liked the “sort of” hedge – he knew he was “going there,” and “there” he indeed went and should not have.) That is, my 20+ years of commentary on race is the work of a self-hating black bigot whose ideas are compatible with the right-wing zealots who stormed the Capitol... his “scholarship” is not based on sustained, original research utilizing close reasoning and being tempered through rigorous evaluation by peers over years’ time. Too, I am unaware of a single instance of Kendi actually taking a deep breath and defending one of his ideas, as opposed to batting away criticism as somehow inappropriate... There is a certain mystique in his name, upon which we might consider that he was born Henry Rogers. Henry had no idea this fame was coming, and he’s doing his best... Ibram Kendi is someone who, in the role of social scientist, proposes a “Department of Antiracism,” in neglect of a little something called the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. Kendi’s insight on education, untethered to any engagement with pedagogical or psychometric theory, is that we should evaluate students on the basis of their “desire to know” rather than anything they actually do. This is a person whose most ready counsel to the public about interracial adoption is that white adopters might still be racists even if they don’t think they are. Kendi is a professor who, in the guise of being trained in intellectual inquiry, bristles at real questions. He dismisses them as either racism or as frustrated responses to envy, as if he bears not proposal but truth. His ideas are couched in simple oppositions mired somewhere between catechism and fable, of a sort alien to what intellectual engagement in the modern world consists of, utterly foreign to exchange among conference academics or even Zooming literati. And on that, let us remember that he is also someone who, into the twenty-first century, was walking around thinking of whites as “devils” à la Minister Farrakhan. Here’s the rub: The people who sit drinking all of this in and calling it deep wouldn’t let it pass for a minute if he were white. There is, in short, a degree of bigotry in how this man is received by people of power and influence. How to be an antiracist? Stop pretending about Ibram Kendi."
Columbia Professor John McWhorter On White Privilege, Safe Spaces, and Campus Politics - The Atlantic - "something has gone wrong on college campuses––that a strain of illiberalism advanced by a vocal minority of students is ascendant; that it is substantively wrong; and that most administrators and faculty are averse to speaking up...
'I think the spark for the current situation is perhaps more mundane than we'd like to think. I don't think that for some reason everybody went crazy. I don't think it's because of the president we happen to have in office. I think it's social media. Social media, especially when you have it in your pocket in the form of the iPhone, allows bubbles of consensus to come together such that you can whip people up in a way that was not possible a generation before, or even ten years before. It's not only about words but about pictures... it's inevitable that with the rise of social media you would have this assault on free speech on campus... I think anybody in their more sober moments understands that even though racism exists and microaggressions are real, college campuses are perhaps the least racist spots on earth. And the idea that any student is undergoing a constant litany of constant racist abuse is theater, it's theatrical––you hate to say that to somebody 19 years old, but it's not true... this new movement takes the idea that you're supposed to show you're not a racist or be sniffing out incidents of racism to give yourself a sense of legitimacy in society, into a place where language is being abused. And then when a speaker gets to campus, the idea is not that you protest the speaker, which was the idea when I was in college in the 80s, but that the speaker is not allowed to pollute the space with their words. Again, that is interesting, but it is theater. It's almost like Brecht when people are doing things like this. This is not the way usual socio-politics happens... The idea that words are not always mere words comes to the fore in the mid-80s with radical feminist arguments from people like Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin... you can take it too far if words are violence simply because you don't agree with them or find them slightly noxious. That's where free speech winds up being choked... [it] is not necessarily that people who have graduated from college have learned more facts, but that they have learned that life is complex, and that any issue worth talking about is one where easy conclusions are elusive––that the answer is not one where you're going to be able to just snap your fingers and say, okay, that works out... When I was in college in the eighties Republicans were thought of as ridiculous. I remember living in a hall at one point and there were Republicans down at the end. And you were supposed to think of them as some sort of vermin. Nobody questioned this. It was during the Reagan era. And I couldn't help noticing that they were also some of the nicest people on the hallway. Over the years I learned that I was not a Republican, but I could see how you could be one and have a coherent worldview. And it happened from listening to them and eating lunch with them. And now they're in my swimming pools! That is an experience that I don't think students are having as much these days. That means education is failing them. They're thinking life is much simpler than it is. They're not learning how to think ... The idea is you are to learn that you're a privileged white person; you are to learn it over and over; really what you're supposed to learn is to feel guilty about it; and to express that on a regular basis, understanding that at no point in your lifetime will you ever be a morally legitimate person, because you have this privilege. It becomes a kind of Christian teaching, and it seems to serve a certain purpose... To be a black student who learns that their purpose, that something special about them, is that they can make a loud noise and make white people guilty, I don't think that's an education... what I'm called is a white supremacist... Of course, that is an utterly athletic, recreational use of the term. You could go through everything that I've written for twenty years, and you would find nothing that advocated anything somebody twenty years ago would have regarded as white supremacist. So it's being used as a battering ram. And battering rams are big, and crude... we're being taught that is higher wisdom... on college campuses students are becoming this unquestioning people who think issues are easier than they are, something needs to be said more loudly than just people like Frank Bruni and I writing editorials. But college administrators and many college professors are quite craven about this sort of thing. Even if you have tenure, to have students in your class hating you is tough. I've had a tiny little dose of it and you really have to pull your stomach in... Trump week, after he was elected, was alarming on university campuses. It was the worst week at Columbia I ever had. Every second student was in tears for days... I am thinking of this ordinary college student who is throughly intelligent but doesn't want to have her head ripped off, who just keeps quiet. I can't tell her speak up and get your head ripped off and get called a racist and buck up. I think it's these other students whose behavior needs to change."
The Neoracists - "One can divide antiracism into three waves. First Wave Antiracism battled slavery and segregation. Second Wave Antiracism, in the 1970s and 1980s, battled racist attitudes and taught America that being racist was a flaw. Third Wave Antiracism, becoming mainstream in the 2010s, teaches that racism is baked into the structure of society, so 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 condition exquisite sensitivity toward them, including a suspension of standards of achievement and conduct. Third Wave Antiracist tenets, 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. But 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. Black people are a conglomeration of disparate individuals. “Black culture” is code for “pathological, primitive ghetto people.” But 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. But elevate the voices of the oppressed over your own.
4. You must strive eternally to understand the experiences of black people. But you can never understand what it is to be black, and if you think you do you’re a racist.
5. Show interest in multiculturalism. But do not culturally appropriate. What is not your culture is not for you, and you may not try it or do it. But—if you aren’t nevertheless interested in it, you are a racist.
6. Support black people in creating their own spaces and stay out of them. But seek to have black friends. If you don’t have any, you’re a racist. And if you claim any, they’d better be good friends—in their private spaces, you aren’t allowed in.
7. When whites move away from black neighborhoods, it’s white flight. But 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 only date white people, you’re a racist. But 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. But all whites must acknowledge their personal complicity in the perfidy throughout history of “whiteness.”
10. Black students must be admitted to schools via adjusted grade and test score standards to ensure a representative number of them and foster a diversity of views in classrooms. But 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.
I suspect that deep down, most know that none of this catechism makes any sense. Less obvious is that it was not even composed with logic in mind. The self-contradiction of these tenets is crucial, in revealing that Third Wave Antiracism is not a philosophy but a religion. The revelation of racism is, itself and alone, the point, the intention, of this curriculum... Battling power relations and their discriminatory effects must be the central focus of all human endeavor, be it intellectual, moral, civic or artistic. Those who resist this focus, or even evidence insufficient adherence to it, must be sharply condemned, deprived of influence, and ostracized.
Third Wave Antiracism is losing innocent people jobs. It is coloring, detouring and sometimes strangling academic inquiry. It forces us to render a great deal of our public discussion of urgent issues in doubletalk any 10-year-old can see through... Third Wave Antiracism guru Ibram X. Kendi has written a book on how to raise antiracist children called Antiracist Baby. You couldn’t imagine it better: Are we in a Christopher Guest movie? 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. I write this viscerally driven by the fact that all of this supposed wisdom is founded in an ideology 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 to revel in that status and cherish it as making us special. Talking of Antiracist Baby, 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 eyes shining at the prospect of showing their antiracism by teaching my daughters 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 21st rather than early-to-mid-20th 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. Many will see me as traitorous in writing this as a black person. They will not understand that I see myself as serving my race by writing it. One of the grimmest tragedies of how this perversion of sociopolitics makes us think (or, not think) is that it will bar more than a few black readers from understanding that I am calling for them to be treated with true dignity. However, they and everyone else should also realize: I know quite well that white readers will be more likely to hear out views like this when written by a black person, and consider it nothing less than my duty as a black person to write it... This is directly antithetical to the very foundations of the American experiment. Religion has no place in the classroom, in the halls of ivy, in our codes of ethics, or in deciding how we express ourselves, and almost all of us spontaneously understand that and see any misunderstanding of the premise as backward... terming these people The Elect implies a certain air of the past, à la Da Vinci Code. This is apt, in that the view they think of as sacrosanct is directly equivalent to views people centuries before us were as fervently devoted to as today’s Elect are"
Opinion | How the N-Word Became Unsayable - The New York Times - "In 1934, Allen Walker Read, an etymologist and lexicographer, laid out the history of the word that, then, had “the deepest stigma of any in the language.” In the entire article, in line with the strength of the taboo he was referring to, he never actually wrote the word itself. The obscenity to which he referred, “fuck,” though not used in polite company (or, typically, in this newspaper), is no longer verboten. These days, there are two other words that an American writer would treat as Mr. Read did. One is “cunt,” and the other is “nigger.” The latter, though, has become more than a slur. It has become taboo... “Nigger” began as a neutral descriptor, although it was quickly freighted with the casual contempt that Europeans had for African and, later, African-descended people. Its evolution from slur to unspeakable obscenity was part of a gradual prohibition on avowed racism and the slurring of groups. It is also part of a larger cultural shift: Time was that it was body parts and what they do that Americans were taught not to mention by name — do you actually do much resting in a restroom? That kind of concern has been transferred from the sexual and scatological to the sociological, and changes in the use of the word “nigger” tell part of that story. What a society considers profane reveals what it believes to be sacrosanct: The emerging taboo on slurs reveals the value our culture places — if not consistently — on respect for subgroups of people... For all of its potency, in terms of etymology, “nigger” is actually on the dull side, like “damn” and “hell.” It just goes back to Latin’s word for “black,” “niger,” which not surprisingly could refer to Africans, although Latin actually preferred other words like “aethiops” — a singular, not plural, word — which was borrowed from Greek, in which it meant (surprise again) “burn face.”... “Tigger,” then, was a polite substitute for the original “nigger.” After all, do we really imagine a tiger hollering in protest? So, for one, we gain insight into why the Winnie-the-Pooh character is called “Tigger” and the books are so vague on why it’s pronounced that way. That was an available alternate pronunciation to A.A. Milne. But more to the point, the original version of the “Eeny, meeny” doggerel is a window into how brutally casual the usage of “nigger” once was, happily trilled even by children at play. For eons, it was ordinary white people’s equivalent of today’s “African-American.”... Just as “cunt” was a casual anatomical term in medieval textbooks, “nigger,” however spelled, was simply the way one said “Black person,” with the pitiless dismissiveness of the kind we moderns use in discussing hamsters, unquestioned by anyone... While America was becoming recognizable as its modern self, its denizens said “nigger” as casually as today we do “boomer” or “soccer mom.” Frank Norris’s anthropological realism is an example... In the 20th century, with Black figures of authority insisting that Black Americans be treated with dignity, especially after serving in World War I, “nigger” began a move from neutral to impolite. Most Black thinkers favored “colored” or “Negro.” But “nigger” was not yet profane... Even into the 1970s, the word’s usage in the media was different from today’s. “The Jeffersons,” a television sitcom portraying a Black family that moves from working-class Queens to affluence in a Manhattan apartment tower, was considered a brash, modern and even thoughtful statement at the time... it was almost a defining element of a show like “The Jeffersons” that loudmouthed, streety George Jefferson would use “nigger” to refer to Black people with (and without) affection... On the show the character began in, “All in the Family,” while bigoted Archie Bunker does not use the word, as his real-life counterpart would, George uses it, such as when he rages about the possibility of having (white) Edith Bunker help out at his dry-cleaning location. (“The niggers will think she owns the store, and the honkies will think we bleached the help!”)... The outright taboo status of “nigger” began only at the end of the 20th century; 2002 was about the last year that a mainstream publisher would allow a book to be titled “Nigger,” as Randall Kennedy’s was. As I write this, nearly 20 years later, the notion of a book like it with that title sounds like science fiction. In fact, only a year after that, when a medical school employee of the University of Virginia reportedly said, “I can’t believe in this day and age that there’s a sports team in our nation’s capital named the Redskins. That is as derogatory to Indians as having a team called Niggers would be to Blacks,” the head of the N.A.A.C.P., Julian Bond, suggested this person get mandatory sensitivity training, saying that his gut instinct was that the person deserved to simply be fired. The idea, by then, was that the word was unutterable, regardless of context. Today’s equivalent of that employee would not use the word that way. Rather, the modern American uses “the N-word.” This tradition settled in after the O.J. Simpson trial, in which it was famously revealed that Detective Mark Fuhrman had frequently used “nigger” in the past. Christopher Darden, a Black prosecutor, refused to utter the actual word, and with the high profile of the case and in his seeming to deliberately salute Mr. Read’s take, by designating “nigger” “the filthiest, dirtiest, nastiest word in the English language,” Mr. Darden in his way heralded a new era. That was in 1995, and in the fall of that year I did a radio interview on the word, in which the guests and I were free to use it when referring to it, with nary a bleep. That had been normal until then but would not be for much longer, such that the interview is now a period piece... Our spontaneous sense is that profanity consists of the classic four-letter words, while slurs are something separate. However, anthropological reality is that today, slurs have become our profanity: repellent to our senses, rendering even words that sound like them suspicious and eliciting not only censure but also punishment."
