Quotulatiousness

October 23, 2020

The British Library goes “woke”

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

David Warren views this development with alarm and disdain:

British Library reading room.
Photo from the British Library website.

Did you know? That, “Racism is the creation of white people”?

Of course you did, if you are young, woke, and poorly educated, like the white woman who is now the British Library’s Chief Librarian. (“Liz Jolly.”) Her statement, in a video to staff last summer, promoting her Decolonizing Working Group, though perfectly acceptable to Guardian subscribers, was mocked by several African and Asiatic scholars who have depended upon that library’s resources over the years. Noting that history is more complicated than Ms Jolly was ever told, they criticized her as “pig ignorant,” &c.

But her explicitly racist “anti-racist” programme proceeds, with aggressive “anti-racist” exhibitions, new “anti-racist” signage, and so forth. The demand to de-acquisition authors who do not reinforce the current ideological stereotypes has not yet gathered to full force, but has started.

The capture of essentially all major cultural institutions by unhinged political fanatics with daddy issues, is among the signs of our times. Those who resist are driven out of employment; those who accede have a lock on the splendidly-paid positions, for which beleaguered taxpayers are billed. The consequences to Western Civ are not trifling.

Perhaps I am unfair to single out just the one career arts bureaucrat, when there are thousands to choose from. I may even be prejudiced, not only against white people, but against those of the scheduled races who have cooperated in trashing the institutional heritage of the Big Wen.

For London was my Athens, back in the day, and I take these things personally. My British Museum Library ticket was among my most cherished possessions, and the old Reading Room among my favourite haunts. I am now so old that I can remember when such places were ruled, and staffed, by respectably boring establishment types with Oxbridge degrees.

In a different context, we’ve seen just how eager Oxbridge types of the 1930s were eager to join the Soviet spy networks, so the change in establishment staff at non-explicitly communist establishments was only a matter of time…

October 21, 2020

“[A]ll white people are racists … because they participate in a system that secures their own structural advantages”

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

In The Line, Meaghie Champion commits some sort of thought crime by quoting Martin Luther King’s famous words (which I have been assured more than once are now “forbidden” to non-POC speakers because reasons):

President Lyndon B. Johnson meets with Martin Luther King, Jr. in the White House Cabinet Room, 18 March 1966.
Photo by Yoichi Okamoto via Wikimedia Commons.

Most of us have been committed to the ideals of anti-racism since Martin Luther King famously delivered his “I Have a Dream Speech.” This was a masterclass of persuasion and rhetoric; one that convinced generations to re-frame their positions on racial inequity.

King said that he hoped that one day his children would grow up to be judged, not by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character. That’s the ethos [BC NDP leader John] Horgan channelled when he said: “I don’t pay attention to skin colour or ethnicity.”

But this is not good enough for those who promote Critical Race Theory, an emerging ideology that tips these values on their head. CRT presupposes that the world is dominated by white supremacists. Further, that all white people are racists — regardless of their individual actions — simply because they participate in a system that secures their own structural advantages. CRT redefines what “racism” has traditionally meant: bigotry or discrimination based on skin colour.

Under this new ethos, only white people are capable of racism, because racism is systemic and works towards keeping all power vested in the hands of the white supremacists. I’m simplifying this, of course, because CRT is a rabbit hole best tackled by people with a lot more patience than me. One of the laziest rebuttals that CRT’s adherents use to deflect criticism is that its critics simply don’t understand it well enough, and therefore need to spend endless hours of their lives “doing the work,” integrating key academic texts, and absorbing their meaning until they fully accept the unerring truth of the ideology. If this tactic sounds indistinguishable from a deeply manipulative religious movement, well …

I’m a “person of colour” and I have spent my whole life trying to be anti-racist. I agree with the idea that there are systemic problems involving racism in many institutions within society. Some of those systemic problems are destroying Indigenous nations, including my own. Where I disagree with the Critical Race Theory crowd is in their depiction of everyone who is not a person of colour as being inherently racist. I don’t agree with their solutions for solving the racism problems we have to confront as a society. I don’t believe that they are the only ones working against racism, or coming up with viable strategies for how to do so. We can have differing views about racism and how to combat it; failing to adhere to one single philosophy, or parrot a specific set of terminology, does not mean a person is racist.

Horgan has worked for decades to do what he thought best for all the people. He’s been on our side in the struggle against racism all his life. The fact that he wasn’t up-to-date on the latest acceptable phrases to speak on the matter doesn’t negate that.

October 17, 2020

Andrew Sullivan on the pervasiveness of Critical Race Theory in academia

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

In his latest Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan discusses how deeply embedded Critical Race Theory has become in the academic, journalistic and cultural realms controlled by the left:

… the CRT advocates have brilliantly managed to construct a crude moral binary to pressure liberals into submission. Where liberalism allows neutrality or doubt or indifference, CRT demands an absolute and immediate choice between racism and anti-racism (defined by CRT) — and no one wants to be a racist, do they? Legitimate anguish about racial inequality and the sheer terror of being publicly labeled a bigot have led liberals to surrender their core values to the far left.

The second reason for CRT’s triumph is that it’s super-easy. Social inequalities are extremely complicated things. A huge variety of factors may be in play: class, family structure, education, neighborhood, sex, biology, genetics and culture are some of them. Untangling this empirically in order to figure out what might actually work to improve things is hard work. But when you can simply dismiss all of these factors and cite “structural racism” as the only reason for any racial inequality, and also cover yourself in moral righteousness, you’re home-free. Those who raise objections or complications or cite nuances can be dismissed by the same easy method.

Then there’s the deep relationship between CRT and one of the most powerful human drives: tribalism. What antiracism brilliantly does is adopt all the instincts of racism and sexism — seeing someone and instantly judging them by the color of their skin, or sex — and drape them with a veil of virtue. You don’t have to correct yourself when your tribal psyche makes you more cognizant of someone’s visible racial differences, and pre-judges them. You don’t have to resist this any more. You can give in to your core nature, and feel pride, rather than shame. You get to have all the feels of judging people entirely by their involuntary characteristics, while actually dismantling racism and sexism! What’s not to like?

Social aspiration also plays a part. The etiquette of wokery is increasingly indispensable for high society. They mark you as someone high up in the American social hierarchy. The right words and phrases signal your ease in this elite; the wrong ones — “sexual preference”! — expose you as a rube, a bigot or, worse, a middle class provincial. Rob Henderson argues that this aspiration to be in the upper classes helps explain why Asian-Americans, who are targeted for direct race discrimination under CRT, nonetheless often support it: “While money and education are tickets to the middle class, prizing diversity is a requirement to join the upper class. It’s part of what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu referred to as cultural capital — tastes, vocabulary, awareness and mannerisms which give social advantages to those higher in the social hierarchy.” Reihan Salam has also written brilliantly about this.

There’s little doubt, either, it seems to me that there is a religious component to wokeness. A generation of nones can feel bereft of transcendence and meaning, and “becoming woke”, like being “born again,” fills that spiritual hole. In an atomized and lonely age, feeling as if you are on “the right side of history”, banishing doubt, joining with countless of your fellow converts in marches and seminars, can abate the isolation and emptiness of it all. Many moderns want the experience of religion without God. With CRT, as in the past with communism, they can have it.

But what also make CRT so successful is ruthlessness. Those who hold a view of the world in which only power, and the struggle for power, matters, have few qualms in exercising it. After all, under CRT, power is always on the side of the white cis-heteropatriarchy, so payback is always fair play. Discriminating against the unwoke or whites or males or the cis-gendered or Asian-American, is not just fair, but vital. Shutting down speech protects the oppressed; bullying on social media and in the workplace becomes a form of virtue; mercy and forgiveness are mere buttresses for white supremacy; HR departments diligently identify dissidents, and discipline them. Once you set up this system of censorship and fear, persecute a few prominent sinners pour décourager les autres, and encourage snitches, dissidents will increasingly self-censor, and dissent peter out, until the new orthodoxy is the only one.

In the past, a new set of ideas could be engaged in a clash of argument and debate. But you’ll notice that the advocates of what Wes Yang has called “the successor ideology” never debate any serious opponents of their position. This is because debate in a liberal society implies equal standing for both sides, and uses reason to determine who’s right or wrong. But there can be no “both sides” within CRT, no equation of “racists” and “antiracists”, and debates are inherently oppressive. Logic, evidence, and reason are, in this worldview, mere products of white supremacy, forms of violence against the oppressed. In CRT, remember, there is no truth or objectivity; there are merely narratives. So, yes, 2 + 2 = 5, and math is inherently a function of whiteness. And what racist is going to deny this?

September 30, 2020

“The culture war is the ‘New Normal'”

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

Andrew Doyle discusses the debate over the culture war in Spiked:

The phrase that probably best characterises the events of 2020 is the “New Normal”. Although it’s typically used to describe our changed circumstances under lockdown, it could just as easily be applied to the way in which we have all grown accustomed to the worst excesses of the social-justice revolution.

News stories that only five years ago would have been dismissed as asinine aberrations now recur with a quotidian certainty. Recent notable examples include: Princeton University confessing to “systemic racism”, leading to an investigation by the Department of Education on the grounds that racism is a violation of civil-rights law; the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts making a similar admission, thereby emboldening some of its students to produce a 100-page document full of demands so entitled that it would make Veruca Salt blush; and an academic and novelist stating that debate is “an imperialist capitalist white supremacist cis-heteropatriarchal technique that transforms a potential exchange of knowledge into a tool of exclusion and oppression”. Yes, the culture war is the “New Normal”.

Yet with all the evidence before our eyes, certain commentators persist with their view that the culture war is a right-wing myth advanced by those who are resistant to change. “There’s no actual ‘culture war’, is there?”, writes LBC’s James O’Brien: “It’s just a new way of describing disagreements between people who hate racism and discrimination and people who love it.” Then there is the Guardian‘s Owen Jones, who maintains that “a lot of what’s called ‘the culture war’ is just younger people trying to assert their different social and moral values over older generations who run most of the media”. Nesrine Malik has argued that the culture war has been manufactured by the right, although it will not have escaped most people’s attention that the majority of salvos come from the left side of the battlefield.

It’s this kind of gaslighting – to borrow the language of social-justice activists – that we have already seen from writers who insist that “cancel culture” doesn’t exist, in spite of abundant and incontrovertible evidence that it does.

This is because, as Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay have so clearly outlined in their seminal book Cynical Theories, the ideology of social justice has its origins in postmodernism, a school of thought which favours “lived experience” and multiple “ways of knowing” over objective truth. It doesn’t matter, for instance, that JK Rowling has never said or written anything transphobic — her new novel must be denounced for advancing an anti-trans agenda, even though it contains no actual references to trans people. These activists have apparently taken their cues from Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass (1871). “When I use a word”, he says to Alice, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less”.

September 29, 2020

QotD: Robin DiAngelo’s theory of “White Fragility”

Filed under: Books, Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Throughout White Fragility DiAngelo tries to convince readers of two things. First, DiAngelo argues that white people are inescapably racist, writing, “All white people are invested in and collude with racism,” and that “The white collective fundamentally hates blackness for what it reminds us of: that we are capable and guilty of perpetrating immeasurable harm and that our gains come through the subjugation of others.”

Second, DiAngelo argues that any white person who does not admit to their own racism is blinded by their “white fragility.” In DiAngelo’s words, because white people are, “Socialized into a deeply internalized sense of superiority that we either are unaware of or can never admit to ourselves, we become highly fragile in conversations about race.” This fragility purportedly explains why, “people who identify as white are so difficult in conversations regarding race.”

It’s not difficult to see why the theory of white fragility might catch on. Race is a sensitive subject that many people of all races are uncomfortable discussing. Furthermore, white people publicly accused of racism risk social ostracization and professional ruin. The idea that some white people may be defensive when accused of racism is not surprising. But though some white people may exhibit a degree of what DiAngelo calls fragility, her grandiose theory as applied to all or even most white people has two fatal flaws.

First, DiAngelo’s theory of white fragility is unfalsifiable. It is impossible for someone to prove that they are not fragile, just as it is impossible for someone to prove they are not possessed by a demon. One could play mad libs with racial groups and nouns — “Asian Insecurity,” “Black Hostility,” etc. — and there would be no way for members of those groups to prove they are not insecure or hostile.

More insidiously, DiAngelo frames her theory of white fragility such that any conceivable reaction a white person has when discussing race is purportedly evidence of fragility, and any denial of her theory is interpreted as proof of its validity. For example, DiAngelo writes that,

    The mere suggestion that being white has meaning often triggers a range of defensive responses. These include emotions such as anger, fear, guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and withdrawal from the stress-inducing situation. These responses work to reinstate white equilibrium as they repel the challenge, return our racial comfort, and maintain our dominance within the racial hierarchy. I conceptualize this process as white fragility. Though white fragility is triggered by discomfort and anxiety, it is born of superiority and entitlement.

In other words, if DiAngelo accuses you of racism or fragility and you disagree with her in any way — through argument, silence, or withdrawal — your reaction is considered proof of your fragility. DiAngelo leaves white readers with only two options. Either acknowledge your fragility, which proves DiAngelo’s theory, or deny your fragility, which according to DiAngelo, also proves her theory. This is a logical fallacy known as a Kafkatrap. If our legal system worked this way, no person accused of a crime would ever be acquitted because their denial would prove their guilt.

David Edward Burke, “The Intellectual Fraud of Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility“, The Logical Liberal, 2020-06-13.

September 27, 2020

CHECKMATE, LINCOLNITES! Confederate DESTROYS Yankee with FACTS and LOGIC

Filed under: History, Humour, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Atun-Shei Films
Published 23 May 2019

Checkmate, Lincolnites! Debunking the three or four arguments Neo-Confederates always make when they talk about the Civil War.

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#CheckmateLincolnites #CivilWar #AmericanHistory

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September 26, 2020

“… debate is an imperialist capitalist white supremacist cis heteropatriarchal technique that transforms a potential exchange of knowledge into a tool of exclusion & oppression”

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

Andrew Sullivan‘s latest look at the ultrawoke:

If you’ve ever wondered why critical theorists and their popularizers never seem to actually expose themselves to direct criticism, this quote might help:

    I get regular invites to debate on various platforms. I always say no. Because debate is an imperialist capitalist white supremacist cis heteropatriarchal technique that transforms a potential exchange of knowledge into a tool of exclusion & oppression.

And also perhaps because debate is one of the most effective tools in rooting out ideological bullshit. Speaking of which, here’s an interview with Judith Butler, the patron saint of wokeness, in which she can actually say, with a straight face: “I am not aware that terf is used as a slur.” “Terf” is short for “Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist.” It’s yelled routinely at any dissenter from critical queer and gender theory. Of course it’s used as a slur.

Meanwhile, the 1619 Project has begun finally to implode. Its core argument – that America’s true founding was in 1619 not 1776, because America is in its DNA a slavocracy built on “white supremacy” and not a democracy rooted in the unrealized principle of human equality — has been withdrawn by the editor. Here’s the best summary of the rank dishonesty of the entire thing, from the preternaturally reasonable Conor Friedersdorf. He attempted to engage Nikole Hannah-Jones in good faith, a concept she simply doesn’t comprehend.

I think it’s clear by now that a completely defensible — even important — airing of new scholarship about the evil of slavery, and its profound impact on America, became hijacked at the NYT by the ideology that insists that the United States is inherently white supremacist, that this explains everything about the country, that this has never changed, that no white people were involved in perfecting the union, and that liberal democracy is a front for racism and should be dismantled. Given the extremist politics and unethical behavior of Nikole Hannah-Jones, this is unsurprising. But that this confused, half-baked rant won a Pulitzer and is being used to indoctrinate school kids in critical race theory is a staggering indictment of how corrupted by left-racism American elite journalism now is. In my view, the Pulitzer Board needs to rescind its prize. Fat chance, of course.

But there is hope. There are still reporters at the NYT interested in the truth about woke culture and politics. Nellie Bowles’ dispatch from Portland is a must-read. It’s a glimpse into the totalitarian impulses behind so many on the far left. Chilling.

September 20, 2020

The Lost Cause Myth in the 21st Century

Filed under: History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Atun-Shei Films
Published 23 Feb 2019

A former Gettysburg tour guide talks about how the American Civil War is remembered today.

Support Atun-Shei Films on Patreon ► https://www.patreon.com/atunsheifilms

#CivilWar #Confederacy #AmericanHistory

Watch our film ALIEN, BABY! free with Prime ► http://a.co/d/3QjqOWv
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September 19, 2020

QotD: Dictatorship of the Cancel Culture proletariat

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics, Quotations, Sports, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

This sort of thing is, to put it mildly, not good. There are at least three major problems with cancel culture. First, almost anyone could be cancelled, on the basis of the (claimed) standards prevalent on the modern “social justice” left. Secondly, cancellation tends in practice to be a non-random process targeted at political and ideological opponents, rather than a genuine attempt at a new moral standard. Finally, and most importantly, the declaration by wokesters that many conversations are now simply off-limits prevents the communication of important information that would make it possible for citizens better to judge the arguments of movements like Black Lives Matter.

While not the most important, the first of these points is the most relevant on a day-to-day basis. Without endorsing these behaviours, the plain fact is that the huge majority of people have probably at some point told an ethnic or regional joke, sent a pornographic or un-PC snap, had sex while intoxicated, used a slur tied to sexual orientation / race / gender online or in the lockerroom, worn a St Paddy’s Day or Cinco de Mayo outfit they would really prefer a mulligan on, or committed other Cardinal Sins against Wokeness. As a result of this, many young people are intently aware that Twitter and Facebook wars involving the unearthing of old content generally end with egg on the face of everyone involved. Caucasian NBA point guard Donte DeVincenzo was humiliated in late 2018 by the revelation that – at age 14 – he had described his hoops handle as “ballin’ on these nig*as like I’m Derrick Rose”. He ended up deleting his entire social-media presence. The point of monitoring this sort of thing, for the many people and organisations that do so, is not punishing the tiny minority of real racists and abusers out there so much as keeping normal citizens too terrified by the potential unearthing of past indiscretions to comment lustily on the issues of the day.

The fact that virtually anyone could in fact “legitimately” be cancelled leads into extreme partisan hypocrisy. While anyone who attended church as a lad might correctly suspect that the hard right is capable of similar behaviour, cancellers today are overwhelmingly concentrated on the “social justice” left – and they are, at least occasionally, reluctant to eat their own. This often results in remarkable and hilarious double standards. In February 2018, for example, liberal Virginia governor Ralph Northam – nicknamed “Coonman” – escaped any serious censure after he was revealed to have apparently appeared in a mid-1980s high-school yearbook photo wearing shoe-polish blackface.

To be fully fair to Northam, the same photo included a student dressed in full white robes as a Ku Klux Klansman, and CNN has noted that Northam has never actually said “whether he was wearing the Ku Klux Klan outfit or [the] blackface”. Oh, fair enough. At any rate, he serves as governor of Virginia today. Not to be outdone by any of his neighbors to the south, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau was revealed that same year to have worn black- and brown-face several times, and as late as 2001, once apparently painting his entire body to appear in costume as Aladdin at an Arabian Nights revue! He, too, remains solidly entrenched in office today.

Wilfred Reilly, “They can’t cancel all of us”, Spiked, 2020-06-17.

September 16, 2020

The Canadian echo chamber on American political issues

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

Ben Woodfinden’s latest for The Dominion looks at the weird effects political passions in the United States have on political stances in Canada:

Restricted and prohibited weapons seized by Toronto police in a 2012 operation. None of the people from whom these weapons were taken was legally allowed to possess them.
Screen capture from a CTV News report.

Participatory media increasingly defines and shapes our discourse. It submerges us in a broader reality but only does so by filtering it into a digital reality that offers a distorted reflection rather than picture of the real world. This has been going on for at least a decade now, but the pandemic has accelerated this transformation of our discourse and politics. By locking us in our homes the pandemic forces us to view the world through a digital lens even more than we already did, and in a world where we’re all viewing everything through our screens that digital reality becomes closer and closer to our primary reality.

One of the specific, and most pernicious effects of this, as I lamented in The Critic is that it turns us all into online Americans participating in their politics through the digital medium, rendering us virtual participants and not just foreign observers. I won’t repeat myself too much, I’d recommend just reading the piece [link], but the online realm is American, and what digital politics does is make politics everywhere more American. We participate in it as a game and a form of entertainment. This bleeds back into our own politics.

Americanized Discourse

Gun politics is one particular political issue where Americanized discourse is most pronounced. It captures perfectly how Americanization plays out. Every time there is some sort of tragic shooting or discussion of gun violence in Canada the debates play out in depressingly predictable ways. Progressives and Liberals paint a picture in which Canada suffers from the kind of rampant gun violence and mass proliferation of firearms as in America. This is the framing used to justify often highly symbolic or ineffective new gun laws and restrictions that, while often not all that effective, make the Liberals and progressives seem like the party for gun control in the face of this rampant violence. But only if you pretend we live in America.

And it’s not just the Liberals and progressives who play this game. Listen to some of the more vocal advocates of “gun rights” in Canada and you’d think we have a second amendment in the Charter. One side wants to make it seem like Canadians are walking around with and easily able to acquire assault weapons, the other side wishes it were so! The reality of course lies somewhere in between. Gun possession is heavily regulated, but lawful citizens can still buy firearms if they want to, and there is no explicit right in the Charter that prevents the government from regulating and restricting firearms. Talking about gun “rights” in Canada is itself quite a foreign and imported concept. At the same time we don’t have an epidemic of gun violence, and while we have experienced some horrific mass shootings, like the recent Nova Scotia tragedy, gun violence in Canada pales in comparison to the United States.

But because both sides are essentially happy to help paint a phantasmic picture of gun violence and/or gun regulations in Canada, we end up with a surreal politics around guns. Sensible debates around guns are made harder by this because debates take place on top of a framing and narrative that draws explicitly on American political culture more than it does Canada’s. Both sides want to take on American roles and are happy to contribute to this framing.

Gun politics is just one example, and there are so many others. Our discourse is so often built around framings that make it seem as if the issues and political cleavages here are indistinguishable from American ones, but it only happens because we import American framing and narratives into our own discourse and then build are arguments around these phantasms. We, like many other countries around the world, are in the middle of a moment of racial reckoning, or whatever you want to call it, because of something that happened in Minneapolis, not in Canada.

Racism is a real thing in Canada, no honest person should deny this, because there is racism in absolutely every country and society. But in the wake of George Floyd’s killing we ended up having a conversation about racism that reflected the particular ways racism works in America.

September 15, 2020

Critical Race Theory

Filed under: Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Dan Sanchez, Tyler Brandt, and Brad Polumbo discuss President Trump’s recent Executive Memo banning the use of federal government funds for Critical Race Theory training:

Critical Race Theory is a branch of Critical Theory, which began as an academic movement in the 1930s. Critical Theory emphasizes the “critique of society and culture in order to reveal and challenge power structures,” as Wikipedia states. Critical Race Theory does the same, with a focus on racial power structures, especially white supremacy and the oppression of people of color.

The “power structure” prism stems largely from Critical Theory’s own roots in Marxism — Critical Theory was developed by members of the Marxist “Frankfurt School.” Traditional Marxism emphasized economic power structures, especially the supremacy of capital over labor under capitalism. Marxism interpreted most of human history as a zero-sum class war for economic power.

“According to the Marxian view,” wrote the economist Ludwig von Mises, “human society is organized into classes whose interests stand in irreconcilable opposition.”

Mises called this view a “conflict doctrine,” which opposed the “harmony doctrine” of classical liberalism. According to the classical liberals, in a free market economy, capitalists and workers were natural allies, not enemies. Indeed, in a free society all rights-respecting individuals were natural allies.

Classical Race Theory arose as a distinct movement in law schools in the late 1980s. CRT inherited many of its premises and perspectives from its Marxist ancestry.

The pre-CRT Civil Rights Movement had emphasized equal rights and treating people as individuals, as opposed to as members of a racial collective. “I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,” Martin Luther King famously said.

In contrast, CRT dwells on inequalities of outcome, which it generally attributes to racial power structures. And, as we’ve seen from the government training curricula, modern CRT forthrightly judges white people by the color of their skin, prejudging them as racist by virtue of their race. This race-based “pre-trial guilty verdict” of racism is itself, by definition, racist.

The classical liberal “harmony doctrine” was deeply influential in the movements to abolish all forms of inequality under the law: from feudal serfdom, to race-based slavery, to Jim Crow.

But, with the rise of Critical Race Theory, the cause of racial justice became more influenced by the fixations on conflict, discord, and domination that CRT inherited from Marxism.

Social life was predominantly cast as a zero-sum struggle between collectives: capital vs. labor for Marxism, whites vs. people of color for CRT.

QotD: Racism and the minimum wage

Filed under: Africa, Economics, History, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

During South Africa’s apartheid era, racist unions, which would never accept a black member, were the major supporters of minimum wages for blacks. In 1925, the South African Economic and Wage Commission said, “The method would be to fix a minimum rate for an occupation or craft so high that no Native would be likely to be employed.” Gert Beetge, secretary of the racist Building Workers’ Union, complained, “There is no job reservation left in the building industry, and in the circumstances, I support the rate for the job (minimum wage) as the second-best way of protecting our white artisans.” “Equal pay for equal work” became the rallying slogan of the South African white labor movement. These laborers knew that if employers were forced to pay black workers the same wages as white workers, there’d be reduced incentive to hire blacks.

South Africans were not alone in their minimum wage conspiracy against blacks. After a bitter 1909 strike by the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen in the U.S., an arbitration board decreed that blacks and whites were to be paid equal wages. Union members expressed their delight, saying, “If this course of action is followed by the company and the incentive for employing the Negro thus removed, the strike will not have been in vain.”

Our nation’s first minimum wage law, the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931, had racist motivation. During its legislative debate, its congressional supporters made such statements as, “That contractor has cheap colored labor that he transports, and he puts them in cabins, and it is labor of that sort that is in competition with white labor throughout the country.” During hearings, American Federation of Labor President William Green complained, “Colored labor is being sought to demoralize wage rates.”

Walter E. Williams, “Minimum Wage and Discrimination”, Creators Syndicate, 2017-02-08.

September 13, 2020

“Systemic racism” in Canada

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At The Line, a useful examination of what is meant in the Canadian context by the term “systemic racism”:

Can we go back one step? “Systemic racism.” Let’s start there: which system? The legal system? Our social welfare system? The policing system? The media? Our corporations? All of human society? Are we talking about Canadian society, or North American society as whole? Are there geographic limits to the systems we’re talking about? Is China systemically racist?

Let’s break this down further: what definition of “racism” are we using? Are we using the old definition whereby any bigotry based on skin colour is “racist”? Or are we engaging the new definition, where “racism” is an expression of structural power — and, therefore, only white people can be racist because only they hold structural power?

It’s impossible to fix a problem if we can’t come to a common understanding about plain meanings of the terms we are using. Vague in, vague out.

There are many statements of “systemic racism” that we, at The Line, would have no qualms agreeing with, i.e.; “The Indian Act is a clear example of systemic racism in Canadian law.” That isn’t a controversial position — but it also isn’t an unclear one. Asserting a belief in “systemic racism” sounds like a broadly agreeable thing to do, but the term is loaded with meaning and ideological baggage that is not immediately apparent.

Take, for example, a claim that Canadian society is systemically racist because it is structured at all levels to favour white dominance — and that any disparity of outcome between racial groups is proof of that fact. Well, that’s a much more all-encompassing ideological position, isn’t it? There’s a perfectly legitimate framework for critique in here, but there’s also a lot to unpack.

It’s easy to find legitimate examples of systemic racism while leaving the actual meaning and implications of the term both vague and tautological. But if we’re going to use statement of belief in “systemic racism” as some kind of litmus test for political acceptability, the clear meaning of the term matters.

In the absence of that clarity, using it as a gotcha question and backing people in public life into reciting this stuff as if it were some kind of statement of faith comes off as not a little creepy.

September 9, 2020

Today’s intelligentsia: helpless captives of their uber-woke disciples

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

Theodore Dalrymple on the temptations of power:

A building burning in Minneapolis following the death of George Floyd.
Photo by Hungryogrephotos via Wikipedia.

One must not exaggerate, of course. We do not yet live under a Soviet-type tyranny in which every university thesis, on no matter how arcane a subject, was obliged by hook or by crook to quote Lenin. It is still possible, though not at all easy, to live as a scholar in our societies outside the university system. But it does not require the tyranny of the complete police state to obtain a high degree of intellectual conformity, as we can now observe at our leisure. Young university academics of my acquaintance in several countries tell me that they are now afraid to speak their mind, not because they would fear for their lives, but fear for their promotion. This is not the same, or as terrible, as fearing for their lives, but it is nonetheless very far from the Millian ideal of freedom of thought and speech.

There is much worse. It is not merely that they must keep their mouth shut and not say what they think, bad enough as this must be for those who have chosen the life of the mind; it is that they must positively subscribe to things that they believe to be bad or false. And this is a mark of totalitarianism. They must subscribe to doctrines they believe absurd, for example by describing in job applications their future efforts to promote diversity, so-called. By making the expression of untruth the condition of employment, probity is destroyed in advance. Those who lack it are easier to control.

Increasingly, social movements do not allow any neutrality with regard to the causes that they promote. Non-adherence is no different from enmity and derogation is evil: if you are not part of the solution you are part of the problem. In vain might you argue that your interest is elsewhere, in the taxonomy of grasshoppers, for example, or in the biochemistry of acorns, or in the bibliography of Alexander Pope: there is one subject that trumps all others in importance, and on it only one opinion is permissible. You must pass a test of loyalty.

The latest of these movements is, of course, Black Lives Matter, and its success in cowing so large a part of the intelligentsia is in a way admirable, a model of political organization for the future, though one much to be feared. By claiming that silence is violence, it has made hand-wringing (to avoid its anathema) the mark, and almost the whole, of virtue. It has successfully reversed Martin Luther King’s goal, such that the colour of a man’s skin is once again more important than the content of his character, and it has made respectable that most Stalino-Maoist of notions, that people should be promoted and rewarded according to their social (in this case, racial) origins. And anyone who disagrees is an Enemy of the People, the word People being here used in a severely technical sense, to mean the arbiters of the allocation of rewards.

September 3, 2020

“[L]ooting is a powerful tool to bring about real, lasting change in society.”

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

Not everyone on the progressive team is all-in on the “Loot your way to utopia”, as Graeme Wood (risking cancellation by his co-religionists) criticizes Vicky Osterweil’s paean to looters and looting:

Last week, NPR’s Code Switch published an interview with Vicky Osterweil, the author of In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action. NPR summarizes the book as an argument that “looting is a powerful tool to bring about real, lasting change in society.” If the real, lasting change you wish to effect is burning society to cinders and crippling for a generation its ability to serve its poorest citizens, then I suppose I am forced to agree. Osterweil sees an upside. Looting is good, she says, because it exposes a deep truth about the great American confidence game, which is that “without police and without state oppression, we can have things for free.” She came to this conclusion six years ago, and in her book, which is written “in love and solidarity with looters the world over,” she defends this view as ably as anyone could.

Osterweil’s argument is simple. The “so-called” United States was founded in “cisheteropatriarchal racial capitalist” violence. That violence produced our current system, particularly its property relations, and looting is a remedy for that sickness. “Looting rejects the legitimacy of ownership rights and property, the moral injunction to work for a living, and the ‘justice’ of law and order,” she writes. Ownership of things — not just people — is “innately, structurally white supremacist.”

The rest of the remedy is more violence, which she celebrates as an underrated engine for social justice. The destruction of businesses is an “experience of pleasure, joy, and freedom,” Osterweil writes. It is also a form of “queer birth.” “Riots are violent, extreme, and femme as fuck,” according to Osterweil. “They rip, tear, burn, and destroy to give birth to a new world.” She reserves her most pungent criticism for advocates of nonviolence, a “bankrupt concept” primarily valuable for enlisting “northern liberals.” Liberal is pejorative in this book. Martin Luther King Jr. is grudgingly acknowledged as a positive figure, but not as positive a figure as he would have been if he had kicked some white-capitalist ass and put a few pigs in the ICU. The “I Have a Dream” speech was, Osterweil writes, “the product of a series of sellouts and silencings, of nonviolent leaders dampening the militancy of the grass roots” and “sapping the movement’s energy.” More to her taste is Robert F. Williams, who practiced armed resistance, and Assata Shakur, who murdered a New Jersey police officer and remains a fugitive in Cuba. The violence needn’t be in self-defense — Shakur’s certainly was not. Osterweil quotes the “wisdom” of Stokely Carmichael: “Responsibility for the use of violence by black men, whether in self-defense or initiated by them [emphasis mine], lies with the white community.”

By now you have guessed that I am not the audience for this book. I have a job, and am therefore invested in building a system where you get paid for your work and pay others for theirs, and then everyone pays taxes to make sure that if these arrangements don’t work out, you can still have a dignified life. (Easily my favorite line in the book was written not by the author but by her publisher, right under the copyright notice: “The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property,” it says. “Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.”) My job sometimes entails traveling to countries recently or currently destroyed by civil unrest, and that experience has made me appreciate the fragility of peace, and has not made me eager to conduct a similar experiment in my own city.

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