Quotulatiousness

January 29, 2023

D.C. Public Schools – “if this were a corporation, it would be in liquidation. If it were a house, it would be condemned”

Filed under: Education, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Andrew Sullivan on the latest PR campaign by the disaster that is the DC Public School system:

In my web-reading this week, I stumbled across two statistics that made me sit up straight. The first came from a devastating story last September about my home city’s public schools. I had just watched a slick new video from DC Public Schools about their new “equity” push, which aims to go “beyond students’ academics” and “call out inequities”. The video is full of vague-sounding pabulum — they never define what they mean by “equity”, for example, apart from invoking Ibram X Kendi’s term “antiracism” — but the message is very clear: “equity” is now the central focus of the school district. And it’s a bright new day!

Now check out the data on how the DC Public School system is faring. A key metric is what they call “proficiency rates” — a test of whether the kids are passing the essentials of reading and math at every stage of their education. Overall, only 31 percent of DC students have proficiency in reading and just 19 percent have proficiency in math. Drill down further in the racial demographics and the picture is even worse: among African-American kids, the numbers are 20 percent and 9 percent, respectively. Among black boys, it’s 15 percent and 9 percent. Which means to say that DC Public Schools graduate kids who are overwhelmingly unable to do the most basic reading and math that any employer would need.

This is not a function of money. In the most recent federal analysis: DC spends far more per student — $30,000 a year — than any other state, double the amount in many states across the country.

Let’s put it this way: if this were a corporation, it would be in liquidation. If it were a house, it would be condemned. But since it’s a public school system, it can avoid this catastrophic failure by emphasizing “equity”!

Call this the woke dodge. As they fail to educate kids in the very basics, they brandish a shiny object over there — “Diversity! Equity! Inclusion!” — to distract us. Or they claim that these scores are caused by “white supremacy” or “systemic racism”. Or they argue that now, they are educating “the whole child”. From the DCPS video: “The racial equity lens is a critical component of ‘whole child’ for us because being a whole child means thinking about all of your identities, but certainly the racial identity is a gap in what we’re discussing as a country.” Anything but do the basic job of teaching math and reading as they are supposed to do.

The truth is: they obviously can’t teach those subjects successfully. I’m sure many are good teachers doing their best, and some manage to rescue some of these kids, who often face terrible trauma in their homes and neighborhoods. But the data overall are damning. Imagine spending $30K a year on a student, any kid, in any country, and after 12 years, he still can’t spell or do basic math. It must be really hard to pull that off. And as a reward, you get a shitload of money from the city and the feds to keep it up. Criticize them? You’re a “white supremacist”.

Then there’s the other stat that blew my mind — on the post-BLM surge in murders of African-Americans, including many children. The rise in homicide has cooled off somewhat, as Robert Verbruggen notes. But check this out:

    Between the 2018–2019 and 2020–2021 periods, the black homicide rate went up by about 40 percent and the white one by 15 percent — already a glaring disparity. But since the black homicide rate started out so much higher than the white one, this translated to an increase of just 0.4 per 100,000 for whites and 9.7 per 100,000 for blacks — nearly 25 times as large. The increase in the black homicide rate was greater than the total homicide rate for the nation as a whole.

Read that last sentence again.

January 19, 2023

“Sir, was everyone in history a racist?”

Filed under: Books, Britain, Education, History — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At The Critic, Fred Skulthorp explains how British history is being taught in schools these days:

Sir John Hawkins (1532-1595), Sir Francis Drake (1540?-1596), and Thomas Cavendish (1560-1592).
Probably a copy of Daniel Myten’s’ painting of the same subject, now part of the Royal Museums Greenwich collection via Wikimedia Commons.

“Sir, was everyone in history a racist?” said Daniel one slow Thursday afternoon at my old school in North London. Daniel hadn’t put up his hand, so of course, I had to tell him off. Even worse, being in my usual teacherly bad mood, I wasn’t exactly Mr Chips with my response. What a silly question, I snapped, before going back to trying to teach a set of pandemic weary teenagers about the Reformation.

Daniel deserved a better answer than that. Not least because some version of his question has now worked its way onto the lips of the certain adults who run schools. The latest “yes” in a primary school in Lewisham saw an “overwhelming” majority vote to remove the stain of Sir Francis Drake’s name from the school. Who knows what arguments went into the decision, but one can only hope they delved a little bit more into his career than the BBC who initially served him up as a “16th century slave trader”.

The decision didn’t surprise me. I had briefly taught in another secondary school just down the road, and another in North London, where making the curriculum inclusive, diverse, decolonised, equal etc was all the rage. For me, Drake was a fascinating target. I had actually taught the man to a class of Year 8s. Funnily enough then, Drake was one of the few old white men of British history deemed more accessible — largely given his relationship with an escaped slave called Diego. According to Miranda Kaufman, whose book Black Tudors was gleefully worked into our history curriculum, Diego became Drake’s “right-hand man” in his various endeavours across the high seas.

This wasn’t enough to exonerate him in Lewisham. When it comes to slavery and being a dead white man, even flirt with it and you’re out. Beyond the expected uproar, the bigger issue here is the increasingly strange way we feel compelled to serve up our history to make it accessible for “minorities” in the name of “diversity, equality and inclusivity”.

Both schools I taught in during my short-lived career were some of the most diverse in London. This isn’t something that particularly interested me, but it certainly played on the conscience of some of my colleagues. One of the most cringe-inducing conversations I have ever had was with a fellow teacher, who on discussing changes to the curriculum in the name of “diversity” recalled something along the lines of: that they had looked down the register, seen the names and wondered how we might better tell their story. Presumably, this meant anything other than the usual fare of boring old “white” British history

What exactly is their story? As British citizens, their story is our story; our history, their history and vice versa. The attempts to presume exactly what these teenagers found relatable end up pretty disingenuous. Roman Britain? Ever heard of Ivory Bangle Lady? The Tudors? All old dead white guys, huh? Nope, check out this cool black trumpeter who was in the court of Henry VII! These are interesting curios, but sprinkling them throughout the curriculum all too often seemed to advance the misconception that Britain has always been a multiracial, multicultural society — something not only historically inaccurate but incredibly patronising to the children of second, third, even fourth generation immigrants.

This all came to a head during a unit on World War One, which our head of department insisted be based on the book The World’s War: Forgotten Soldiers of Empire by David Olusoga. The book is an interesting piece of revisionism about the role of colonial soldiers in WW1. In obsessing over race and teaching the Western Front, it does at some point have to contend with the fact that the vast majority who died there were, err … white men. In one particularly painful lesson, I ended up having to teach the Battle of the Somme by asking the class: what does the story of Chinese labourers reveal about World War One? Funnily enough, as it turns out, not that much! I’m sure being subjected to racial slurs whilst doing manual labour behind the front wasn’t much fun. But I felt something fundamentally dishonest, even borderline offensive, in prioritising their story over those of the Pals Battalions who went over the top that morning.

January 12, 2023

How the New York Times describes the Congressional Republican dissidents

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

It’s not the news, it’s the substitution of opinion for reporting:

Here’s the political journalist Mara Gay — currently of the New York Times, formerly of the Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic — explaining what the twenty Republican holdouts were up to in their maneuvering over the selection of a Speaker of the House:

It’s leftie Twitter in human form, with all of the slogans. Angry, hateful voters, disturbed by “diversity”, sent some dumb atavists to represent them in D.C., because they hate government and want to “burn it to the ground”. (“And really, that’s what these people were sent to do.”)

Time magazine, which apparently still exists, comes to much the same conclusion, in a piece that I tragically can’t read in full without creating an account, which I wouldn’t do for a free steak dinner or a blanket future pardon from the governor of my choice:

So the twenty GOP holdouts hate government and want to sow chaos and burn democratic norms to the ground, mainstream political journalists calmly explain. Now, via RedState, here’s a letter from seven of the holdouts listing their actual demands as conditions for their vote. Sample demand:

So the monsters who hate government and want to burn it all down were demanding clearly written legislation that every legislator has time to read and fully debate before casting their vote on it.

    Subject of Journalism: We want bills that are focused and readable

    Journalist: They want to destroy all government because of racism

It’s not even sort of an interpretation or an argument about the thing being discussed — it’s just a wholesale invention, completely severed from the thing that’s allegedly being analyzed. It’s like you ordered a tuna melt, so the waitress broke into your house and mailed your couch to Finland. “There’s your tuna melt,” she says, handing you the receipt from the post office. It’s so aggressive a non-sequitur that it would usually suggest the need for a neurology consult. Have you recently suffered a serious fall, Ms. Gay? Have you experienced dizziness or unexplained nause— oh, wait, I see from your chart that you’re just a political journalist.

January 11, 2023

“[T]o the ordinary American, those values [diversity, equity, and inclusion] sound virtuous and unobjectionable”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

John Sailer writes in The Free Press on the rapid rise of the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” bureaucracy in American higher education:

Graphic for Rhode Island College’s Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

The principles commonly known as “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) are meant to sound like a promise to provide welcome and opportunity to all on campus. And to the ordinary American, those values sound virtuous and unobjectionable.

But many working in academia increasingly understand that they instead imply a set of controversial political and social views. And that in order to advance in their careers, they must demonstrate fealty to vague and ever-expanding DEI demands and to the people who enforce them. Failing to comply, or expressing doubt or concern, means risking career ruin. 

In a short time, DEI imperatives have spawned a growing bureaucracy that holds enormous power within universities. The ranks of DEI vice presidents, deans, and officers are ever-growing — Princeton has more than 70 administrators devoted to DEI; Ohio State has 132. They now take part in dictating things like hiring, promotion, tenure, and research funding.

More significantly, the concepts of DEI have become guiding principles in higher education, valued as equal to or even more important than the basic function of the university: the rigorous pursuit of truth. Summarizing its hiring practices, for example, UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering declared that “excellence in advancing equity and inclusion must be considered on par with excellence in research and teaching”. Likewise, in an article describing their “cultural change initiative”, several deans at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine declared: “There is no priority in medical education that is more important than addressing and eliminating racism and bias.” 

DEI has also become a priority for many of the organizations that accredit universities. Last year, the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, along with several other university accrediting bodies, adopted its own DEI statement, proclaiming that “the rich values of diversity, equity and inclusion are inextricably linked to quality assurance in higher education”. These accreditors, in turn, pressure universities and schools into adopting DEI measures.

Much of this happened by fiat, with little discussion. While interviewing more than two dozen professors for this article, I was told repeatedly that few within academia dare express their skepticism about DEI. Many professors who are privately critical of DEI declined to speak even anonymously for fear of professional consequences. 

The Invention of DEI

How has this fundamental shift taken place? Gradually, then all at once.

For decades, university administrators have emphasized their commitment to racial diversity. In 1978, Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell delivered the court’s opinion in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, taking up the question of racial preferences in higher education. Powell argued that racial preferences in admissions — in other words, affirmative action — could be justified on the basis of diversity, broadly defined. Colleges and universities were happy to adopt his reasoning, and by the 1980s, diversity was a popular rallying cry among university administrators.

By the 2010s, as the number of college administrators ballooned, this commitment to diversity was often backed by bureaucracies that bore such titles as “Inclusive Excellence” or “Diversity and Belonging”. Around 2013, the University of California system — which governs six of the nation’s top 50 ranked universities — began to experiment with mandatory diversity statements in hiring. Diversity statements became a standard requirement in the system by the end of the decade. The University of Texas at Austin in 2018 published a University Diversity and Inclusion Action Plan, which began to embed diversity committees throughout the university. 

Then came the Black Lives Matter demonstrations of 2020. The response on campus was a virtual Cambrian explosion of DEI policies. Any institution that hadn’t previously been on board was pressured to make large-scale commitments to DEI. Those already committed redoubled their efforts. UT Austin created a Strategic Plan for Faculty Diversity, Equity, and Inclusivity, calling for consideration of faculty members’ contributions to DEI when considering merit raises and promotion.

White Coats For Black Lives, a medical student organization that calls for the dismantling of prisons, police, capitalism, and patent law, successfully petitioned medical schools around the country to adopt similar plans, including at UNC–Chapel Hill, Oregon Health & Science University, and Columbia University. In some cases, administrators even asked White Coats For Black Lives members to help craft the new plans. 

All at once, policies that previously seemed extreme — like DEI requirements for tenure and mandatory education in Critical Race Theory — became widespread.

January 5, 2023

The injustices inherent in “asymmetrical multiculturalism”

Filed under: Books, Britain, Law, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ed West traces the start of “asymmetrical multiculturalism” to a 1916 article in The Atlantic by Greenwich Village intellectual Randolph Bourne and traces the damage that resulted from widespread adoption of the policy:

“Asymmetrical multiculturalism” was first coined by demographer Eric Kaufmann in his 2004 book The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America, and later developed in his more recent Whiteshift, in a chapter charting Bourne’s circle, the “first recognisably modern left-liberal open borders movement”. 

Kaufmann wrote how asymmetrical multiculturalism “may be precisely dated” to the article where Bourne, “a member of the left-wing modernist Young Intellectuals of Greenwich Village and an avatar of the new bohemian youth culture,” declared “that immigrants should retain their ethnicity while Anglo-Saxons should forsake their uptight heritage for cosmopolitanism.”

Kaufmann suggested that: “Bourne’s desire to see the majority slough off its poisoned heritage while minorities retained theirs blossomed into an ideology that slowly grew in popularity. From the Lost Generation in the 1920s to the Beats in the ’50s, ostensibly ‘exotic’ immigrants and black jazz were held up as expressive and liberating contrasts to a puritanical, square WASPdom. So began the dehumanizing de-culturation of the ethnic majority that has culminated in the sentiment behind, among other things, the viral hashtag #cancelwhitepeople.”

The hope, as John Dewey said of his New England congregationalist denomination around the same time as Bourne, was that America’s Anglo-Saxon core population would “universalise itself out of existence” while leading the world towards universal civilisation.

These ideas certainly didn’t remain in New England or even the United States, as Britain has certainly seen just how destructive they can be recently:

Late last year I wrote about the tragedy of Telford, a town in the English midlands where huge numbers of young girls had been sexually abused. Telford, along with Rotherham in South Yorkshire, had become synonymous with this form of sexual abuse, mostly committed by men of Kashmiri origin against girls who were poor, white and English. 

This is the subject of an upcoming GB News documentary by journalist Charlie Peters, and it is quite clear, from all the various reports, that grooming had been allowed to carry on in part because of the different ways the system treats different groups.

Had the races of the perpetrators and victims been reversed, this tragedy would almost certainly be the subject of countless documentaries, plays, films and even official days of commemoration. But it wouldn’t have come to that, because the authorities would have intervened earlier, and more journalists would have been on the case.

Sex crime is perhaps the most explosive source of conflict between communities, and most recently the 2005 Lozells riots began over such a rumour. It is understandable why journalists and reporters were nervous about this subject; less forgivable is the way that, away from the public eye, those in charge signal how gravely they view what happened.

Until Peters revealed the story, Labour had planned to make the former head of Rotherham council its candidate for Rother Valley; this week Peters revealed that one of the councillors named in a report into the town’s failures to deal with the grooming gangs scandal has gone onto become a senior Diversity & Inclusion Manager working for the NHS. Presumably the people who hired Mahroof Hussain knew about his previous job, and still felt that it was appropriate to have him in a “diversity and inclusion” position. Again, were things different, would a Mr Smith whose council had been condemned for its handling of the gang rape of Asian girls have landed that job? The whole thing seems as morbidly comic as Rotherham becoming Children’s Capital of Culture.

Such a clear inconsistency can only exist because of socially-enforced taboos and norms which have developed over race. In Whiteshift, Kaufmann cited sociologist Kai Erikson’s description of norms as the “accumulation of decisions made by the community over a long time” and that “each time the community censures some act of deviance … it sharpens the authority of the violated norm and re-establishes the boundaries of the group”. Every time an individual is punished for violating the anti-racism norm, it strengthens society’s taboo around the subject, to the point where it begins to overwhelm other moral imperatives.

Then there is regalisation, the name for the process “in which adherents of an ideology use moralistic politics to entrench new social norms and punish deviance”, in Kaufmann’s words. This has proved incredibly effective; after paedophilia or sexual abuse, racism is perhaps the most damaging allegation that can be made.

Few people wish to be accused of deviance, which perhaps explains why Peters’s story has received so little coverage in the press this week. Again, were the roles reversed, it’s not wild speculation to suggest that it would feature on the Today programme, seen as clear evidence of racism at the heart of Britain. When the Telford story broke, it did not even feature on the BBC’s Shropshire home page.

December 18, 2022

Christopher Snowden reviews Andrew Doyle’s The New Puritans

Filed under: Books, Britain, Education, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Critic, Christopher Snowden praises Doyle’s recent book:

How wrong I was. As Andrew Doyle shows in The New Puritans, it took only a few years for Critical Social Justice to infect the corporate world, government agencies and the media. Most worryingly for a system of thought that favours “lived experience” over objective truth, it became pervasive in higher and lower education.

Doyle had been warning about this for years and kept the receipts. He has a long list of examples of institutional idiocy and persecution to show that there is more to concerns about the “woke brigade” than a right-wing panic over a handful of crazies.

So divorced from reality is Critical Social Justice, that unintentional humour often arises: the CEO of Stonewall accusing lesbians who refuse to date trans women of “sexual racism”; activists becoming uncomfortable with the phrase “trigger warning” because it invokes guns; an American professor of education asserting that “on many levels, mathematics itself operates as whiteness” (how many levels?).

[…]

Those of us who will never be intimately acquainted with the Frankfurt School owe a debt to Doyle for calmly dissecting the anti-liberal worldview. Doyle himself is a left-wing homosexual who is often portrayed as a Nazi on social media for defending free speech and mocking the “entitled demands and infantile tantrums” of the woke mob.

Borrowing a phrase from Isaiah Berlin, he argues that we are living through a “Counter-Enlightenment” led by “conformists with pretensions of radicalism”. The woke ideology is not a natural extension of left-liberalism, he says, nor of political correctness. It is something far more sinister, regressive and authoritarian. In its Year Zero approach to knowledge and history, it is almost nihilistic.

Academically rigorous but never pretentious, The New Puritans is virtually unimprovable as an analysis of this chilling social phenomenon. It begins and ends with the Salem witch trials of 1692–93, when two vindictive children sent 20 people to their deaths on the basis of nothing more than “spectral evidence” (AKA “lived experience”). The mania ended as quickly as it began when the adults in the room simply stopped believing them.

Doyle believes the current madness will end the same way if we can return to critical thinking and put a stop to ad hominem attacks. Good luck with that. Most of the people he is writing about would sooner burn this book than read it.

December 6, 2022

Elizabeth Nickson on Prime TV’s new mystery series, Three Pines

Filed under: Cancon, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I don’t watch much TV myself, aside from Minnesota Vikings football games, so what little I know about current TV offerings is pretty much all second-hand … and as Elizabeth Nickson‘s review shows, I don’t think I’m missing much at all:

I had the distinct unpleasure this week of watching Prime TV’s new mystery series, Three Pines, set in the village I grew up in, Knowlton, Quebec, where the author now lives and the geography within which she sets her series. I have a rule of not watching anything violent (except Yellowstone) but to catch a glimpse of the village I ranged through as a kid, I sucked it up.

Of course, I was immediately insulted, as the first scene had a white-blond beefy Anglo (Nazi Alert!) cop in Quebec City (an Anglo cop in Quebec City is vanishingly rare) beating up an Indian woman. The thing marched on, hitting every nasty leftie trope, through an increasing ugly physical landscape. The writer, Louise Penny, is very successful, top of the NYTimes bestseller list with every book and much loved by women of a certain age. Penny’s work is a look inside their heads. Hillary Clinton and she are friends, ’nuff said.

The show is like a beautiful painting over which an angry adolescent has thrown red and black paint in order to “show reality”. A friend who who lives across the street from Penny’s palatial residence states that, contra her reality, there has been one murder in the village in the last 80 years and that was an argument over a pig.

Penny has populated my village with killers, bigots, madmen and women, noble Indians, and noble artistes who wrestle with evil normals, all of whom are unhappy because they are so unethical, bigoted, homophobic and racist. There is also a former residential school in situ, which there was not. There are literally no children in the show. No children, no families. (Penny is childless like most of her generation of Canadian artists) Just noble artistes, hard-done-by-noble Indians and noble French policemen.

Oh wait, there is one 12 year old. She murders her mother.

An unrelated thematic undercurrent about Canada’s maltreatment of its native peoples clubs the viewer, so of course that gives Penny permission to trash the culture she exploits. There is, apparently, no wound that she will not scrape at, making it bigger, more dramatic, more focused on her hatred for white Anglo men.

And women. The villain, like all her villains, is a sick, entitled, white woman. Basically Penny loathes rich white people of any sex, while living a lush life in the place they created. Because Knowlton was the summer and weekend place of Canada’s then corporate elite. A village of 500 bulked out to 1500, as the interlocking network of the people who built the infrastructure of modern Canada came to summer. Penny profits off the product of bitterly hard generational labor, while trashing it. Which is a metaphor for our arts.

I went to the local school for seven years so was friends with both parts of the community. My father was on every committee in the village, and he and his fellows made sure there was not one fallen sparrow in the region. The only way anyone fell out of the network of care that used to exist in every small town in Canada and the US, was through alcoholism. Aside from crime caused by that sickness, there was virtually none. And for the fallen, there were halfway houses and treatment. Unlike Penny’s implication of hate and neglect, Indians in the area were, to the extent they allowed, helped, funded, cared for. Like almost every early settler family, my father’s family had married into two Indian tribes, and in the case of my father, given his cousinage, were understood.

Because that’s what Christians do, and at the time, everyone was Christian.

That job now falls to bureaucrats who, like Penny, see everyone as unreconstructed bigots, walking beasts capable of sudden mayhem, and treats them accordingly. The village, if my eyes are telling me true, is no longer beautiful. At least the filmmakers don’t see any beauty in it. Setting it there, like Penny, they hope to capitalize on the mythical small town’s history as a place where happiness and safety were possible. And then they can destroy its memory as a place where goodness reigned.

October 30, 2022

Andrew Sullivan on the rise of Rishi Sunak (or was it “Rashid Sanook”?)

Filed under: Britain, History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the free-to-cheapskates excerpt from his Weekly Dish newsletter, Andrew Sullivan contemplates the differences between how Barack Obama was seen as a historical figure to the US media and yet that same media can’t manage to see how Prime Minister Sunak is “the British Obama”:

Rishi Sunak shortly after becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer in 2020.

In his inimitable way, Joe Biden this week celebrated the rather remarkable fact the the new Conservative prime minister in Britain is the grandson of Indian immigrants:

    As recently as today, we’ve gotten news that Rashid Sanook is now the prime minister. As my brother would say, “Go figure.” And the Conservative party! … Pretty astounding. A groundbreaking milestone. And it matters! It matters!

He got the name wrong, but he’s Joe Biden. He gets names wrong. But unlike many on the left, especially the woke left, and perhaps because he is old enough to remember the after-effects of colonialism, Biden could bring himself to see what a staggering moment it is. It really is. It has gotten a bit obscured in the incredible mess of recent Tory politics. But staring us in the face is a historic shift.

It’s an Obama moment, after a fashion.

[…]

No, Sunak didn’t run an inspirational campaign like Obama. He’s not an orator even close in skill, he hasn’t won an election in his own right, and he didn’t come out of the blue. But he’s even younger than Obama when he took office — just 42, five years younger than Obama when he became president, and, unlike Obama, a slip of a thing and only 5’7″. And, for understandable reasons, Sunak seems much less worried about the cultural and political aspects of breaking the race barrier than Obama was.

Sunak is, for example, an openly practicing and proud Hindu. He lit Diwali lights around 11 Downing Street and took his oath on the Bhagavad Gita. That’s not someone running from his heritage. And he is also a Brexiteer from conviction, and, unlike Truss, a fiscal conservative who’s a realist about what can and can’t be done in a period of extraordinary economic stress for Brits and massive post-Covid debt.

All of this suggests something too many liberals have forgotten. These countries of alleged “white supremacy” have less racism than almost anywhere else in the world. It is hard to imagine a non-white president of France or Germany or Italy — let alone China or Russia or anywhere in Central Europe. It is hard to think of another empire that was deliberately unwound by its architects, and who then, within two generations, installed the grandson of former colonial subjects to its most powerful office. And Obama, of course, was twice elected with more heartland white support than Hillary Clinton.

Sunak has, moreover, been selected by the Tory party — that bastion of alleged bigotry that has already had three female prime ministers in its history, and now also a non-white man, James Cleverly, as foreign secretary, and a woman of Indian ancestry, Suella Braverman, as home secretary. Three of the top four ministers of state in Sunak’s cabinet are non-white. The new chairman of the Conservative party is Nadhim Zahawi. I’m telling you this because the US MSM — who are usually obsessed with racial representation in every single mundane situation — suddenly aren’t that interested, when some of their woke priors are rattled.

This is true of the broader American left. A faction obsessed with racial “equity” cannot take a moment to observe a historical moment of extraordinary proportions. Some, like Trevor Noah, have even completely invented a racist “backlash” against Sunak that simply hasn’t happened, apart from one call on one radio call-in show. (I was on BBC Radio this morning talking to an interviewer who was simply baffled by the projection.)

Noah has the excuse of being a comedian. But the New York Times‘ coverage has been almost as ludicrously slanted as its usual coverage of post-Brexit Britain, and it quickly ran two op-eds by British leftists trashing Sunak. Every story that refers to his ethnicity always slams his class “privilege” — i.e. that his parents were middle-class children of immigrants. This morning, the paper ran another hit-piece on Sunak’s wealth. The only benefit of his Indian ancestry appears to be that he will help the Indian diaspora in Britain itself. The incredible arc of imperial history finally coming full circle? Barely a mention.

October 27, 2022

Rishi Sunak becoming PM apparently – wait for it – proves that systemic racism is still a thing in Britain

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

You’d think the first non-white British PM would help dispel the constant claims that British society is still deeply racist, but as Theodore Dalrymple shows, that underestimates the political need to use “racism” as a rhetorical stick to beat the electorate with:

Rishi Sunak shortly after becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer in 2020.

The new British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, is the son of Punjabi immigrants from East Africa. You might have thought that this would satisfy, or at least please, the anti-racism lobby, by demonstrating that British society is an open one, not completely sclerosed by racist prejudice: but you would be wrong.

An opposition member of parliament called Nadia Whittome, herself of Indian origin, tweeted that Sunak’s appointment to the highest political position was not a victory for Asian representation.

This follows the assertion not long ago by Rupa Huq, another Member of Parliament of Indian subcontinental origin, that Kwasi Kwarteng, former Prime Minister Liz Truss’s short-lived Chancellor of the Exchequer, was only “superficially black” because he spoke what in England is called the King’s English. She said that, listening to him on the radio, one would not even know that he was black. Instead, he spoke like the highly educated person he was, which in Huq’s opinion was incompatible with being black. Whites are not the only racists.

The remarks by these two female politicians, all the more significant because they were spontaneous rather than deeply considered, reveal something about the nature of modern identity politics: that the function of minorities (whether racial, sexual, or other) is to act as vote-fodder for political entrepreneurs of a certain stripe. It’s therefore the duty of minorities to remain the victims of prejudice against them and not to rise in the social scale by their own efforts: To do so is to betray the cause and above all their supposed leaders.

The reason that Whittome considers that Sunak’s appointment isn’t a victory for Asian representation is that, although of Asian origin, his parents (his father was a doctor) had him expensively educated and Sunak is now a multimillionaire, unlike most people of Asian origin — to say nothing of most whites.

There are, of course, other ways in which he isn’t representative of the Asian, or any other, population, the most important of which is that he’s of far above-average intelligence. (I must here point out also that while a certain level of intelligence is a necessary condition for a successful political career, it’s far from being a sufficient one.)

Representative government doesn’t mean that the representatives in the legislature or government must reflect the population demographically, such that — for example — 5 percent of them must have IQ’s of less than 70, though increasingly it may appear that they do. Nor are a person’s political or social views straightforwardly a reflection of his or her own economic position: If they were, Engels (who was a factory owner and rode to hounds) would never have been Marx’s collaborator, and Marx himself would not have written Capital, for he was no more proletarian than is King Charles.

October 4, 2022

“… apparently the future of science is BAJEDI (Belonging Accessibility Justice Equity Diversity and Inclusion), which is quite a bit cooler than mere DEI”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Politics, Science, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

And you thought the stuffy old National Science Foundation was only supporting pale, stale, cisgendered white male research? Think again!

I’ve written many times about the National Science Foundation and its increasingly politicized conception of “science”. As an independent federal agency with a nearly $9 billion budget, the NSF is a behemoth in the world of academic science, shaping research agendas and the future of the professoriate. And apparently the future of science is BAJEDI (Belonging Accessibility Justice Equity Diversity and Inclusion), which is quite a bit cooler than mere DEI. Here’s a current funding opportunity for scientists:

The federal agency that funds research projects like “Probing Nucleation and Growth Dynamics of Lithium Dendrites in Solid Electrolytes” is moving hard into the business of social justice, with career-making grants that will focus STEM researchers on the problem of racial grievances. Here’s how much money is available for that racial equity program:

The premise underlying this turn toward equity-focused science projects is that “science scholars who are underrepresented in STEM produce higher rates of scientific novelty”. Innovation is grounded in race and ethnicity; the more gloriously intersectional you are, the more creative you become. Imagine the boldness of a transgendered Asian Pacific Islander astrophysics, and how much newer and fresher our conception of the universe is when it doesn’t come from straight white males.

And so the NSF wants to fund “diversity champions” who will freshen up our science with BIPOC innovation — which means adding more sociologists to the team of geophysicists: “When developing proposals, the PI team should acknowledge the need for increased engagement from social and behavioral science experts to address issues related to BAJEDI in the geosciences and include these best practices and experts in proposed projects.” […]

It’s a real cultural revolution in the world of academic science.

September 27, 2022

Sarah Hoyt on how Americans are mis-understanding the TV show Bridgerton

Filed under: Britain, History, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I don’t watch TV, so I haven’t seen the show myself, but apparently a lot of Blacks in the US are taking away the multi-racial casting of a parallel-universe TV show set in the Regency period as being a true representation of British history:

Anyway, all this came to a head with my watching the Bridgerton series. As other people know, it bothers the living daylights out of me to cast well-known historical figures as another race. Not because there can’t be decent actors of another race, but because I know there is a percentage of the population who takes fictional movies and shows as revealing “the truth”.

My mom, who is better educated (alas) than most American high school graduates is one of those. She will adapt her vision of the past according to some crazy movie she just watched. (The number of arguments I’ve had.)

For those who haven’t watched Bridgerton (bog standard regency romances, with gorgeous, if not period-accurate clothing) they cast a certain number of noblemen as black or indian or other “races” and the English Queen in Bridgerton is black.

The buried history in the mini-series (suggested and Heinleined in) is that black and white people coexisted in England side by side, until the king married a black Queen, and then suddenly mixed marriages were allowed.

This is obviously a fantastic parallel world history. Yes, there were black people in England in the regency. I’m sorry to tell you there were very few and 99% of them were slaves or servants brought by people who had lived in Africa.

There was no “black nobility” and no system of apartheid.

HOWEVER as we found out, American people absolutely believe this nonsense. They believe Queen Charlotte (mostly German, honestly) was “black” based on a very bad portrait and rumors of a Moorish ancestress. (Note this rumor was almost certainly political slander. Also that Moor at that time in the peninsula depending on whether in the South or the North might mean slim, small and tan, but did not mean AFRICAN.) Weirdly the best debunking I found was from Quora.

HOWEVER I also found endless pages of well-educated black-Americans celebrating Queen Charlotte for “Black history month”.

Let me also point out that both the Queen and her husband (Yes, mad King George) were ardent abolitionists and that did she have any legitimate hint of African blood ALL the opposition would have fixated on this, and the caricatures would have been next level. However this never happened. Queen Charlotte was and looked German, even if a portrait can imply “stereotypical” African features … As long as you remember that those features exist in a lot of other races, and that a lot of them are also Neanderthal.

Sure, if you go with the one drop theory, Queen Charlotte was black. So is everyone else. EVERYONE else, even those whose 23andme swears they’re pure Scandinavian. Because sometime in the last two thousand years all of us got an African ancestor, somewhere, on one of the many, many lines that fed into our family. (Note genealogy is also a lie to some extent, since it’s impossible to follow every single female (if you’re tracking the male. Vice versa otherwise) line that dropped into your family, and everyone who fed into every other of those lines.)

The problem is that it was the rats in the head of the American black producers of the series that led them to create this entire parallel universe which they THINK IS TRUE on the basis of “well the queen was black”. WITHOUT LOOKING.

And now those rats are reproducing everywhere, but most notably in black American heads, who now believe that “Well, the king married a black queen, so it must be true that the Americans rebelled to keep enslaving the black people”.

This is all not just arrant nonsense, but poisonous bullshit, and has no contact whatsoever with reality.

What can we do about it?

Correct it, ruthlessly, whenever we come across it. And keep pointing out that a queen who was blond and blue eyed was not in fact “black” unless everyone is. And that reading racial tea leaves is a pseudo-science, like phrenology.

I would very much appreciate if we could put this behind us so may family doesn’t keep getting asked “what is your racial background” by complete strangers. (And not just census takers, whom I like to answer with “human”.)

Look, in the end, the darkest African and the lightest Scandinavian have more in common with each other than not. To pretend otherwise is arrant nonsense.

Yes, our far-distant ancestors developed racism as a necessary survival tool (along with the uncanny valley discomfort) because you could fall into the hands of another hominin band and become “food”. (The chimps are less discriminating and will also eat babies of their own band.)

We are now past that, and I would like it not to return. Yes, there are physical characteristics that go with certain character traits, but it’s harder to track than you think, and they’re often things that have nothing to do with race, let alone racial stereotypes.

We all have one drop of slaves and enslaved, or saints, sinners, murderers, murder victims, kings and peasants, ascetics and whores. And we all have all the inclinations of all of mankind in varying degrees.
It’s what you make of it and with it that determines whether you can wear “human” as a crown, or in fact get cast out of the human race for shoving in line.

It’s time to stop with the nonsense.

September 21, 2022

Jonathan Kay on cultural appropriation

Filed under: Cancon, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Quillette, Jonathan Kay put together “a somewhat lengthy manifesto” on the topic of cultural appropriation in response to a request from Robert Jago who wanted to do an interview with Kay on this issue:

Justin Trudeau (Canada’s most prolific cultural appropriator) with dark makeup on his face, neck and hands at a 2001 “Arabian Nights”-themed party at the West Point Grey Academy, the private school where he taught.
Photo from the West Point Grey Academy yearbook, via Time

“Cultural appropriation” typically gets defined in a way that depends on whether one is defending it or denouncing it. If you’re defending it, you prefer to look at the big picture: Every new kind of art form, literary genre, style of dress, or cuisine typically represents a mix of inherited and borrowed elements. Shakespeare’s sonnets were written in an Iambic pentameter that Chaucer had “appropriated” from the French and Italians. So if Indigenous or African poets want to appropriate it from the English, no one has any basis for complaint. If you define cultural appropriation in this big-picture way, the concept isn’t just permissible. It’s artistically necessary, and indeed inevitable.

But if you’re denouncing cultural appropriation, on the other hand, the argument is more persuasive when your frame of reference is small, local, and community-rooted. I’m thinking of the (white) novelist or film director who passes through a region, and hears some garbled version of folklore that relates to a nearby Indigenous community. The guy thinks, “Oh wow, that’ll make a great novel” (or TV show, movie, etc.), and then makes a mint without consulting (let alone cashing in) the Indigenous community.

So the debate over cultural appropriation is like a lot of debates: It’s really easy to win if you get to define the terms. And since both sides pick definitions that suit them, it can become a dialogue of the deaf.

Indeed, there’s often no dialogue at all. Rather, both sides are apt to retreat into apocalyptic language about, respectively, (a) totalitarian censorship, and (b) white supremacist (cultural) genocide. This is absolutist language that leaves no room for nuance or discussion.

The cultural-universalism side of this dialogue is represented by people like me. I write about every topic under the sun, and so I get my back up when someone tells me that I’ve got to “stay in my lane”. My whole career is built around hopscotching from one idea to the next without worrying (much) about who gets offended. For me, the imposition of rules on what people are allowed to write about isn’t just an annoyance. It’s an existential threat to the creative faculties.

But if you’re on the other end of this — say, you’re a member of a small Indigenous community whose history and folklore have yet to be recorded or celebrated in any definitive form — you don’t care about some white guy in Toronto whining about how he can’t do the equivalent of wearing a sombrero on Cinco de Mayo. A small First Nations community might get only one real shot at telling its story to the world. If that shot gets used up by an outsider who strip-mines the locals’ oral history for a bestseller, that can no doubt feel like existential threat to one’s cultural autonomy. It’s like: “So you took our land, punished us for using our own language, sent our kids to residential schools, and now all we really have left is our culture, and you want to steal that, too?”

There’s this trite expression that often gets trotted out these days: Intent doesn’t matter, only the harm you cause. But of course, intent does matter. And if an author, director, or artist intends to respectfully and accurately include a community’s story in his or her work, then, for me, that’s very much a mark in their favour. That said, I absolutely do not think that this means there is an obligation to “honour” or “uplift” the community in question — let alone express “solidarity” or “allyship” with them. Doing so means you’re writing activist propaganda. What I mean, rather, is that you shouldn’t be intending to mock or belittle whole swathes of humanity.

The problem is that, in Canadian cultural circles at least, this isn’t really the standard that’s applied. I’ve spoken to a number of Canadian writers who, out of the best of intentions, invest their own funds in “sensitivity readers” — a process that can be not only expensive and time-consuming, but also creatively ruinous, since these consultants often are bursting with ideas about how to turn your novel or movie into a specimen of the above-referenced activist propaganda. I know one woman, in particular — a novelist — who appeared before a First Nations tribal council, and got its official permission to include a character in her book whose identity related to their community. But then a community member, someone not even involved with the band leadership, went after the woman and tried to smear her as racist. This is after she’d dotted every I and crossed every T of the sensitivity-reader process.

September 16, 2022

How “misgendering” shattered the Green Party of Canada

Filed under: Cancon, Environment, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Canada’s Green Party has never been noted for their tight party cohesion, so my use of the word “shattered” in the headline is a bit over-the-top, I must confess. Jonathan Kay provides a quick outline of the party’s history through the leadership of Elizabeth May, Annamie Paul, and most recently, interim leader Amita Kuttner:

Many grumbled that May was too slow to give up her leadership perch. Yet when she finally did step aside in 2019, the party learned that she’d been the only thing holding the outfit together. By the time the 2021 federal election rolled around, the Greens’ leader was a black Jewish woman named Annamie Paul, who got absolutely trounced in her own riding, winning fewer than 4,000 votes. Paul was then quickly run out of the party leadership during a complicated (and often farcical) internecine battle that involved public accusations of bigotry hurled in all directions, and which (predictably) repelled many of the party’s financial supporters.

    On Sept. 27 I began the process of stepping down as Green Party of Canada Leader. Today I sent formal notice of my resignation to the GPC. I will also be ending my membership in the GPC.
    It was an honour to work for the people of Canada and I look forward to serving in new ways.

    — Annamie Paul (@AnnamiePaul) November 10, 2021

One might think things couldn’t get any worse for the Greens. But, thanks to the installation of a 30-year-old interim leader named Amita Kuttner, they very much did.

Kuttner self-describes as non-binary, transgender, and pansexual. When asked, “What are your preferred pronouns?” in a 2019 interview, the one-time astrophysicist replied, “they/them”, but then elaborated as follows:

    When I write my pronouns, I sometimes write all of them: they/them, she/her, he/him, because I don’t care. There will be days where I’m not always even aware of what my gender is, and I will notice it based on how someone addresses me and whether I respond. I was in choir for many years, and they’d say, “women sing now”, “men sing now”. And I would find myself starting with one or the other group, even though I was obviously supposed to sing soprano. I’d be like, “Oh, I guess I’m feeling that today.”

And yet, despite the fact Kuttner apparently can’t always figure out “what my gender is”, and claims not to “care” in any case, the interim leader felt the need to issue a lengthy statement on September 6th detailing the allegedly devastating emotional effects that ensued when the pronoun descriptor “she/elle” appeared in the electronic caption that sat alongside Kuttner’s name during a Green Party of Canada Zoom call, instead of the Kuttner-approved “they/he/ille”. Indeed, Kuttner described the ordeal as evidence that the Greens were infected by a “system of oppression”:

    What happened here impacted me much more than a slip of the tongue. It made me feel hurt and isolated at a moment that should have been filled with inspiration and anticipation … This incident is reflective of a larger pattern of behaviours that a few in the party are perpetuating. Over the years, the party has documented reports which indicate a systemic issue disproportionately affecting Black, Indigenous, and racialized people and 2SLGBTQIA+ people, and I hope many more stories will be able to be shared so that this incident can be a catalyst for change … When things like this happen, people need to see those in leadership positions take some accountability, acknowledge how they have added to this system of oppression and what they must do to break the cycle.

Kuttner’s attempt to weaponize this (apparently very oppressive) instance of miscaptioning forms part of an ongoing civil war that’s been playing out for weeks within the Green leadership. That battle goes to the question of whether the party should proceed with its ongoing party leadership race, or pause it so that Green functionaries can investigate all of the (vaguely expressed) accusations of antisemitism, racism, and transphobia that were flung in every direction during the tumultuous last days of the Annamie Paul era back in 2021.

September 1, 2022

Rotherham Borough Council proudly announces they will be the first “Children’s Capital of Culture”

Filed under: Britain, Government, Law — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Honest to God, you can’t parody the real world harder than it parodies itself:

The news that the South Yorkshire market town of Rotherham would be the world’s first “Children’s Capital of Culture” in 2025 has been greeted by many as some kind of sick joke.

Rotherham is at the heart of England’s group-based child sexual exploitation crisis. In 2012, The Times revealed that a confidential 2010 police report had warned that vast numbers of underaged girls were being sexually exploited in South Yorkshire each year by organised networks of men “largely of Pakistani heritage”. South Yorkshire Police and local child-protection agencies were shown to have knowledge of widespread, organised child sexual abuse — but failed to act on this on-the-ground intelligence.

Rotherham borough council, South Yorkshire Police and other public agencies responded by setting up a team of specialists to investigate the reports. In 2013, an independent inquiry spearheaded by Professor Alexis Jay was launched. Her subsequent report into child sexual exploitation in Rotherham, published in 2014, made for awfully grim reading. It found that at least 1,400 children had been subjected to appalling forms of group-based sexual exploitation between 1997 and 2013. The report detailed how girls as young as eleven years of age — either in Year 6 or Year 7 of school — had been intimidated, trafficked, abducted, beaten and raped by men predominantly of Pakistani heritage.

Jay was also deeply critical of the institutional failures that had allowed organised child sexual abuse to flourish in Rotherham. The report concluded that there had been “blatant” collective failures on the part, firstly, of the local council, which consistently downplayed the scale of the problem; and secondly, on the part of South Yorkshire Police, which failed to prioritise investigating the abuse allegations. Indeed, the Jay Report found that the police had “regarded many child victims with contempt”. The inquiry discovered cases involving “children who had been doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone”. One young person told the inquiry that gang rape was a normal part of growing up in Rotherham. Just let that sink in — groups of adult-male rapists preying on vulnerable girls was normalised in an English minster town.

The Jay Report also took the local authorities to task for elevating concerns about racial sensitivities over the protection of the children in their care — an all-too-familiar element of the nationwide grooming-gangs scandal in England. As the Jay Report put it: “Several [council] staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought as racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so”.

The safety and protection of the most vulnerable girls in society was sacrificed on the altar of state-backed multiculturalism and diversity politics. A recent report published after a series of investigations carried out by the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) under “Operation Linden”, found there were “systemic problems” within South Yorkshire Police that meant “like other agencies in Rotherham … it was simply not equipped to deal with the abuse and organised grooming of young girls on the scale we encountered”. South Yorkshire Police recently landed itself in further hot water after it was revealed by The Times that the police force was failing to routinely record the ethnic background of suspected child sexual abusers. For Rotherham, suspect ethnicity was missing for two in three cases.

July 31, 2022

American publishing has a race problem, but it has an even bigger gender problem

Filed under: Books, Business, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest edition of the SHuSH newsletter, Kenneth Whyte considers a recent online brouhaha featuring novelist Joyce Carol Oates and notes that while she was being dragged by the usual online mob for her perceived defence of “white” authors, an even bigger problem for the ever-diminishing number of “big” publishing houses is their gender balance:

Publishing also has a gender problem. Only 34 per cent of the Penguin Random House workforce is male.

When you eliminate the warehouse staff, that figure drops to 26 per cent.

A Lee & Low survey from 2019 put the male component of the US publishing workforce at 24 per cent and a Canadian survey (referenced in SHuSH 90) found our publishing sector is 74 per cent women and 18 per cent men. Oates’ critics, many of them women, skated over this part of the equation.

That’s not unusual. Most people in publishing skate over this part of the equation. A few years back, when it was revealed that men are just 20 per cent of the fiction reading public, the question arose, might that have something to do with the lack of men acquiring and marketing books. Hardly anyone in publishing thought so. As I noted at the time, a Random House spokesperson said the gender composition of the firm was “not an issue of concern or even much contemplation for us”. And the head of Columbia U’s publishing program asserted that “great literature transcends gender in terms of editors”. A UK literary agent attributed the gender disparity in fiction to merit: some men, she said, “just aren’t very good”.

I spoke to several agents this week to see if the agent mentioned by Oates was an anomaly. What I heard suggests not. My agents were not surprised by the assessment of the anonymous agent. One just shrugged, as in, “what’s new?”

    Whether the comments following the Oates’ tweet are valid — “it’s about time”, or “welcome to the oppressed, now you know what it feels like” — I’m probably not qualified to say. The real issue, which seems to be missed in this conversation, is that work is very often not judged by its quality but by who the author is and what the author represents. (Not a wholly new phenomenon in the world.) It is heartbreaking to see work of real talent, maybe even genius, being rejected by publishers (and I do see this in action) in favour of an author who has the right name and biometrics.

Not all of my agents agreed with Oates’ anonymous agent. One said, “It’s equally hard to sell everybody in this market. I’ve got white authors, black authors, brown authors. It’s hard to get a good deal anywhere. The consolidation in the industry is real: there are fewer editors to pitch books to than there used to be.”

This agent admits that the trend is now toward loading up on BIPOC authors but believes that will blow itself out, as all trends do, and the publishing houses will all chase after the next shiney thing. As for the situation inside publishing houses, “it’s been tough for guys as long as I’ve been in the business. Talk to the white male editors who sit on editorial boards at publishing house and they’ll tell you, it’s tough, there’s a lot of pushback from the other voices around the table.”

This agent also noted that the agency world is starting to break down along gender lines. Not surprisingly, literary agents are overwhelmingly white women. Increasingly, they are representing only women.

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