The idea that only the naive or the immoral would question issues connected to something as broad and protean as race and racism is hasty at best and anti-intellectual at worst. What qualifies as discrimination? As cultural appropriation? As aggression? What is an ethnicity? What does racial courtesy consist of, and for what reasons? These are rich, difficult questions with no hard-and-fast answers.
Any insistence otherwise is religious. The term is unavoidable here. When intelligent people openly declare that logic applies only to the extent that it corresponds to doctrine and shoot down serious questions with buzzwords and disdain, we are dealing with a faith. As modern as these protests seem, in their way, they return the American university to its original state as a divinity school—where exegesis of sacred texts was sincerely thought of as intellection, with skepticism treated as heresy.
November 28, 2015
Race is a "broad and protean" matter, presenting "rich, difficult questions," and "Any insistence otherwise is religious."
John McWhorter writes, in a WSJ piece, "Closed Minds on Campus":
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46 comments:
Brilliant
"These are rich, difficult questions with no hard-and-fast answers"
Take the guy to a struggle session, and I'll bet he comes up the right answers pretty fast.
"Any insistence otherwise is religious"
Borderline racist. Is he saying blacks can't reason? And then, what's wrong with acting on conviction anyway?
"As modern as these protests seem, in their way, they return the American university to its original state as a divinity school—where exegesis of sacred texts was sincerely thought of as intellection, with skepticism treated as heresy"
He goes overboard here. Who needs sacred texts? What is that "intellection" you speak of? "Divinity school" -- you mean, those old bastions of white privilege? Give us a break, McW, and get with the program. Your piece shows how pointless "skepticism" is. Who cares about "heresy," it's just a waste of time.
It's all about power. Period.
Since most all don't have my breadth of knowledge the notion this comment is off topic might become a reality, yet that being said this religion talk reminds me of Obama's failure to scare the bejezus out of everyone by repeatedly citing the specter of Global Climate Change Weirdness or whatever label is preferred today.
1% of Republicans and 6% of Democratics think climate change is the most important problem in the world today, after years and years and years of ad nauseum declarations we must all act NOW in order to prevent the killing of Gaia Earth and DOOM!
Race relations probably scores lower than climate robbery as people's number one concern, meaning the minority of minorities disgracing themselves, their names, and their races, will implode in louder, more obnoxious displays of God lost.
These people don't stand on the giants of shoulders, American's founding fathers, instead they are satisfied to merely snipe at the heels of the faithful.
“Racism is wrong,” they know—and we all agree.
I'll believe that when affirmative action is gone.
This sidebar link title was funny: "Tolerance, Free Speech Collide on Campus".
I find his description of Rutgers in the early 80's to be quite dissimilar to mine. I was there too. His reference to the Zimmerman case is less than honest too.
Among rational folks, calling something "religious" is showing contempt for it. Properly so. It never ceases to amaze me that religion lives on in Amerika in this scientific era, where so much of the universe has been explained, and the future predicted, by Darwin and Einstein. The vast majority of Amerikans are religious, and none of the GOP or Democrat candidates have declared themselves non-believers, humanists, rationalists or scientists. Our last president who had a clue about STEM was Carter, an evangelical, for god's sake.
The world is overtaking the backward USSA. How long do we have to wait for a Science Breakfast to replace the Prayer Breakfast?
" These are rich, difficult questions with no hard-and-fast answers.
Any insistence otherwise is religious."
Actually these questions are very basic to those pushing this crap, and any insistence that things might be more complicated, is merely me engaging in white privilege.
I wish Whorter would hold those enaaging in gross stereotypes and caricatures, accountable, if he wants us to take things like appropriation (as but one example) seriously.
The 50 shades of flesh are carefully ranked. And the Blue Eyed devils are worse than the Green Eyed devils.
Mongols uber alles was the wake up Empire of all time. They proved power comes out of the bows of a mounted calvary.
Between global warming and the shrillness on race, the left is becoming more and more faith based.
John McWhorter is one of the good guys and in a tiny minority in his world. Of course he's black. Whites are scared to do more than nod and ritually abase themselves and this the majority are glad to do. The spectacle goes beyond anything I've seen from the university crowd and has surprised me even though I would have said I've seen the worst. I enjoyed McWhorter's lectures and books on linguistics and recommend them. I hope he has the standing to endure the coming assault. I'd never seen his photo before he started speaking out. He's doing it though he knows very well that jacobins reserve their most vicious blows for those whom they consider ought to be with them but aren't, or are insufficiently enthusiastic, even. So he's courageous in addition to his other virtues.
"I'm just a soul whose intentions are good.
Dear Lord don't let me be misunderstood."
- Prayer for the new millennium
What qualifies as discrimination?
According to Merriam-Webster, the quality or power of finely distinguishing; the ability to recognize the difference between things that are of good quality and those that are not.
The altered meanings:
..distinguishing individual characteristics based on assumed or perceived group membership; and more specifically
..attributing a disfavorable characteristics to an individual based on assumed group membership,
id est prejudicial (pre-judged) treatment,
is a novel development of meaning within the lifetime of perhaps many of the readers here.
Don't forget the Cavaliers for Roger, 'cause Roger's a discriminating guy!
"How long do we have to wait for a Science Breakfast to replace the Prayer Breakfast?"
How about when leftists learn real science ?
A lot of the McWhorter piece is bad.
Argument by meaningless anecdote:
Of course, it was part of a racist America, and so I encountered discrimination here and there. The girl at the open-mic night who opened with “What do you call 150 black people at the bottom of the ocean? A good start!” The German teacher who told me I was in the wrong class the second I walked in and openly despised me for the rest of the semester. The frat boys yelling “Zebra!” as I passed with a white girl I dated.
These things could have happened in any country in the world. They don't say anything about America they don't say about Britain or Spain.
This is followed by an alleged anecdote, without context:
We should not expect a black Yale student to shrug it off if a fraternity member says a party is for “white girls only,” as has been alleged.
Blacks are sacred objects to the left. Derbyshire's podcast this week
Jonathan Haidt discovered from his questionnaires that people who are politically liberal register big positive scores on the Care/Harm axis and the Fairness/Cheating axis — that is, they are very keen on Care and Fairness — but not so much on the others; conservatives had much better balance, with positive scores on all the axes, on things like Authority/Subversion and, yes, Sanctity/Degradation.
It happens that I read Haidt's book shortly after my own public shaming in 2012. Reading about those questionnaire scores, I was shaking my head at the book. It seemed to me that liberals are not so much light on regard for Sanctity, they just attach it to different objects.
To blacks, for example. The late Larry Auster said that blacks are sacred objects in the modern West. He was right. To say negative things about blacks, or to be thought to have negative thoughts about them, is a blasphemy. It's like someone in 13th-century Europe speaking ill of the Virgin Mary. The reaction is just the same. You have violated a sacred object. That's what James Watson and I did.
This sacralization of blacks is lurking behind a lot of the campus shenanegins we've been reading about the past few weeks. A mulatto girl at Yale shrieks foul abuse at the master of her residential hall, a white guy. Another harpy, this one blacker, dishes the same treatment to the President of Princeton University.
"These protesters appear to miss how Orwellian their terms often sound;"
Really? Likely some of them fit that description but many fully understand the nature of their rhetoric. These people are called leaders.
It's Orwellian when the leaders manipulate the uncomprehending followers. That is what we have here.
"“What do you call 150 black people at the bottom of the ocean? A good start!”
Clearly offensive.
But how do you suppose this would play? "What do you call 150 black conservatives at the bottom of the ocean?" Cognitive dissonance ensues.
He comes so close!
Dr. McWhorter says: "These students aren’t so much trying to shut down free inquiry as they are assuming that, on this topic, it has already happened. 'Racism is wrong,' they know—and we all agree. * * *"
Yes, most of us agree that "racism" is wrong. But what constitutes "racism"? That's where the debate comes in. If a scholar does a study that shows that affirmative action college admissions harm Black students, is that "racism"? If someone shows that more Blacks are murdered each year by other Blacks than by White cops, is that "racism"?
In case you were wondering, the answer to both (and similar) questions is: No.
I suppose in an academic environment it may seem appropriate to categorize the failure to address such questions as "religious", but it would be more honest to say that this is really ignorant, prejudiced, and close-minded.
I was once 18-24 (college and law school). I now know how foolish and naive I was then. Someone needs to show the current crop of demonstrators and protestors that they are foolish and naive. Resigning your position in the university, or sucking up to the protestors, is NOT the way to do that. Dr. McWhorter is a lot closer to the mark than many of the academics we read about these days. If only he'd follow through!
In his most recent talk with Glenn Loury on bloggingheads, McWhorter made an interesting comment, I thought, about his role as a black professor at an Ivy League school. He said something to the effect that he was conscious of being a role model for the black students, or at least someone who would be looked at as a leader of some sort, so he couldn't just come out full force and call the black activists on campus a bunch of idiot thugs, even if that's what he really thought. He said it was his responsibility to moderate his criticism in an effort to make it more productive. An interesting idea, at least, and possibly tactically correct.
But honestly, I doubt any of the activist types will look at him and say, "I should be more like McWhorter," even though they definitely should.
Hmm. McWhorter was talking about race. he could have been talking about global warming and its enthusiastic advocates.
Actually, religion refers to beliefs regarding God or gods. It doesn't mean any belief held without rational basis. It means a particular sort of belief, without regard to why it is held. But I wouldn't expect a person with a PhD in linguistics to know that. At least, not if he's black. These days, it can safely be assumed that black people with college degrees were admitted to institutions for which they were grossly under-qualified, and received degrees they did not earn in subjects about which they know little.
"There are useful points in the students’ demands: Historical figures as especially bigoted as Wilson and John C. Calhoun should not have their names on college buildings; student organizations displaying openly racist behavior should not be a part of a college campus experience."
I have to laugh. McWhorter grants that the students are right about a couple of things;
1) All white Americans who lived prior to the passage of the Civil Rights Act were sickening monsters that no decent person could possibly admire on any basis whatsoever.
2) Organizations consisting of black people who march through libraries shouting "Fuck you, white bitch!" have a useful point, and should be encouraged.
Look, how long am I suppose dto go on pretending that
Yes, Christians believe that we are all children of God. Good luck finding your moral rules from breeding or genetics!
Martin Luther King was a religious man so I heard. His insistence on a colorblind society seems to be at odds with some.
Blogger Saint Croix said...
Yes, Christians believe that we are all children of God. Good luck finding your moral rules from breeding or genetics!
But nevertheless people look towards blind Nature as a source of morality. Nature 'engineers' a certain proportion of the human population to be homosexual, for example, so homosexuality is natural, not unnatural, human behavior.
They don't like it when Nature doesn't cooperate with their fantasies. The morality of 'survival of the fittest' is grim and not particularly progressive.
"Actually, religion refers to beliefs regarding God or gods."
You're excluding some well known religions.
That's definitely not how religion is understood in American law.
And it's not the definition in McWhorter's discussion.
Terry says, "Nature 'engineers' a certain proportion of the human population to be homosexual". I find it hard to square such a contention with evolution. If a random genetic variation caused a child to be homosexual, that child would be less likely to have offspring than a child that did not reflect that random variation, and hence natural selection would not preserve that variation.
On the other hand, if you leave room in your theory of the universe for God, then it isn't difficult to conclude that IF homosexuality is inherent, rather than an individual choice, then God must have intended it, for reasons that God deems sufficient, and we ought to accept God's decision.
I grant you that many Christians (and, so far as I can tell ALL devout Muslims) believe that homosexuality is a chosen behavior, but this gives you a target for changing opinions.
@Althouse: You say that the assertion (@Jupiter, 6:05 pm) that religion has to do with God or gods excludes "some well known religions." Other than Buddhism, I don't know of any belief system that is generally called a "religion" that doesn't involve belief in a God or gods. Of course there are belief systems like atheism or agnosticism (or global warmism) that don't include a belief in God or gods, but these are not commonly referred to as "religions", much less "well known" ones.
Can you identify the "well known religions" that you are referring to?
BTW I am not disagreeing with your assertion that US law sometimes grants the same privileges to non-religious individuals or groups as it grants to religions (special tax treatment, deferral from conscription, etc.). This is a reflection of our society's openess and pluralism, but that's a different issue from whether they are "religions" as we normally use that term. If that's all you mean, then I don't disagree with your statement, except that it's framed in a misleading way.
Maybe I should not have used homosexuality for my example of nature driven morality. It's just such crappy pop-science. In the end you get down to no morality at all from nature. Nature produces psychopaths regularly. Is it immoral to be a psychopath? Can a psychopath commit immoral acts that are caused by his (or her) psychopathy? With nature as a guide you end up formulating another arbitrary moral scale.
Actually you can deduce one bit of morality from breeding and reproduction--race is an arbitrary construct. It's not scientific at all. For instance, how many races are there? Nobody can answer that question. It's an infinite number. As soon as you try to define your terms (black, brown, white, yellow and red), a brown man and a red woman have a baby. And what do you have? A new race! It's why racists have to make that sort of thing illegal. You create races through "purity" laws (and fear). Races are created by governments, to divide people and empower the dividers. This is why we divide people into races with the census. We're not just counting, we're dividing.
Ann Althouse said...
"Actually, religion refers to beliefs regarding God or gods."
"You're excluding some well known religions."
Ann is totally correct. Atheism is by definition a religion. Global warming is a religion. It is an offshoot of Statism which is the religion responsible for the most killing in the last two centuries. None of them had deities as such. Just personalities.
You say that the assertion (@Jupiter, 6:05 pm) that religion has to do with God or gods excludes "some well known religions." Other than Buddhism,
Logic 101: It takes one counterexample to disprove an assertion. "The exception that proves the rule" is not logic, it's a folk saying.
Reducing humanity to breeds is like reducing humanity to dogs. The atheist project ("we're all animals and that's all we are!") is quite dangerous. What if we believe it?
In nature, the strong devour the weak. To respect the vulnerable and the helpless, one must recognize God, and tremble with great humility at our own weakness and vulnerability.
Achilles said...
Atheism is by definition a religion.
That's so lame. Atheism is no more a religion than not believing in Santa Claus, haunted houses or rainbow unicorns.
isn't "The Wiz" cultural appropriation?
@Eustace Chilke
What you said.
Other than Buddhism, I don't know of any belief system that is generally called a “religion” that doesn't involve belief in a God or gods.
The orthodox Hindu philosophical school known as Sankhya (whose philosophical metaphysics the parallel school of Yoga also makes use of) denies the existence of a divinity.
That's so lame.
Atheism deserves to be regarded as a religion (religious philosophy) in the same sense that zero is properly considered a number.
Godfather wrote:
Yes, most of us agree that "racism" is wrong. But what constitutes "racism"? That's where the debate comes in. If a scholar does a study that shows that affirmative action college admissions harm Black students, is that "racism"? If someone shows that more Blacks are murdered each year by other Blacks than by White cops, is that "racism"?
For many blacks pushing the racist memes, blacks can't even be racist. They can be prejudiced, but not racist. And if you dare question there statistics that supposedly show you and the rest of the country are racist through and through, then you are speaking from white privilege.
You can't offer an alternative opinion that need be mulled over, because you have the wrong skin tone. The only white people they care to hear from are those that are kissing their ass and getting to the back of the racial rhetoric bus.
"For many blacks pushing the racist memes, blacks can't even be racist. They can be prejudiced, but not racist."
This reflects the normal human propensity to define oneself and one's group as different (i.e., "better") than all others. To say of themselves they can be "prejudiced but not racist" is to assert a self-contradiction.
"Actually you can deduce one bit of morality from breeding and reproduction--race is an arbitrary construct. It's not scientific at all. For instance, how many races are there? Nobody can answer that question."
There's one race. Race is an arbitrary construct. (Perhaps there could be a scientifically valid distinction of "race" if we had people alive today who were 100% Cro-Magnon and others who were 100% Neanderthal. Then we would have two races.)
The ethnic subdivisions we refer to as "races" are merely categories of the physical differences among different groups of the one human race, often tied to geographical origin. This is sometimes carried to ludicrous extremes, where the "race" is defined by how much of one's "blood" is composed of this and that ancestral heritage. One could as easily divide the human race into "races" based on hair or eye color.
It's all just tribalism writ large.
There's one race. Race is an arbitrary construct.
You're behind the times Comrade Cookie. (again)
Scientists have determined that there are at least three (and I believe they have recently identified a fourth) distinct genetic populations of humans. These would be called sub species in any other animal, in humans we use the term race.
Scientists have also demonstrated that there are significant differences in these populations, primarily in the field of medicine.
Races exist, and there are differences among the races.
This morning in church, the opening prayer called for an end to 'Systemic Racism' . Later I told my wife that that term was a left-wing code-word. She said she had never heard of it and that me and my internet cronies were the only ones who paid any attention to things like that.
Racism has always been the one drop of Negroid Blood social stratication standard misapplied as if it is skin coloration degrees.
Today it is used to mean Americans descended from one of the Northern European cultures. Many of these "whites" inherited wealth that the jealous world after watching 70 years of Hollywood films demands be reditributied to them or else they will attack.
We now suffer under the tricks of a Commander-in-Chief Obama who 100% agrees with them.
I always get suspicious when people contrast "religious" with "logical". I became a Christian in my mid-20s by trying to refute Christianity, and the whole process sparked a deep interest in logic, philosophy, science and religion, and related subjects. The idea that one can just dismiss religion without thinking about it because "SCIENCE!" or "LOGIC!" is as intellectually lazy as anything could be.
Who you calling a protean?
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