July 17, 2020

"Is the Anti-Racism Training Industry Just Peddling White Supremacy?"

Jonathan Chait is asking what I think is the right question. Let's see if he answers "yes." I'm afraid the "just" provides weasel room, but I have been asking the same question and my answer is yes.

So let's read Chait:
[T]he anti-racism trainers go beyond denying the myth of meritocracy to denying the role of individual merit altogether. Indeed, their teaching presents individuals as a racist myth. In their model, the individual is subsumed completely into racial identity....

The ideology of the racism-training industry... collapses all identity into racial categories. “It is crucial for white people to acknowledge and recognize our collective racial experience,” writes DiAngelo, whose teachings often encourage the formation of racial affinity groups. The program does not allow any end point for the process of racial consciousness. Racism is not a problem white people need to overcome in order to see people who look different as fully human — it is totalizing and inescapable.

Of course, DiAngelo’s whites-only groups are not dreamed up in the same spirit as David Duke’s. The problem is that, at some point, the extremes begin to functionally resemble each other despite their mutual antipathy.

I want to make clear that when I compare the industry’s conscious racialism to the far right, I am not accusing it of “reverse racism” or bias against white people. In some cases its ideas literally replicate anti-Black racism....
Chait is talking about the way "the industry" characterizes written communication, rationality, science, hard work, and planning as white. Here's his last sentence:
[O]ne day DiAngelo’s legions of customers will look back with embarrassment at the time when a moment of awakening to the depth of American racism drove them to embrace something very much like racism itself.
Is that a "yes" to the question in the post title? It's pretty close.

98 comments:

doctrev said...

I don't need to ask a neocon coup supporter like Chait his opinion on anything, thank you. Let his caste reap what they sowed as the Democrats purge them for being too elite and "white," while the Republicans expel them for their globalism.

Birkel said...

Marxists are never quite as excited with actually getting Collectivism as they are advocating Marxist policies.
Will any of the Marxists repent?

And I include Althouse in the Marxist-inspired crowd.

Birkel said...

Let's attack the nuclear family.
And religion?
And social organizations.

Then we replace it with government.

STEP 2: ???

STEP 3: PROFIT!!

Beach Brutus said...

"In their model, the individual is subsumed completely into racial identity."

That is destined to run into the wall of "miscongenation" -- cross ethnic dating, marriage, and parenting are so common now that in a few generations most Americans will be multi-ethnic - and in a few more generations after that almost all will be. Your typical American will be 65% white European, 13% African American, 13% Hispanic, and 9% "other" -- all blended together.

Would be interesting to see a computer model of how that would appear.

robother said...

One obvious difference: David Duke doesn't make $150,000 a month from Fortune 500 companies and governmental and academic institutions, for spreading white race consciousness. This woman doesn't just preach white privilege, she's walking the walk!

gilbar said...

This is nothing new.
My Bleeding Heart Liberal Mom was a regional director for WIC
She was the Biggest Liberal i've ever met in my life.
She was also, the Biggest Racist i've Ever met in my life.

She Truly Felt; that Blacks NEEDED a Helping Hand...
'cause they were too stupid and lazy to do anything for themselves

Rocketeer said...

[O]ne day DiAngelo’s legions of customers will look back with embarrassment at the time when a moment of awakening to the depth of American racism drove them to embrace something very much like racism itself.

It has feathers, webbed feet, a bill, quacks, paddles on water, waddles on land - why, it's very much like a duck!

Sebastian said...

"look back with embarrassment"

Progs don't do embarrassment. Neither do anti-racist fellow travelers. Once progs are in power, no one will be permitted to be embarrassed.

"at the time when a moment of awakening to the depth of American racism"

After 60 years of massive improvements in civil rights and public opinion, major increases in black power and social programs, progs didn't suddenly "awaken," they are using claims about "deep" racism for political purposes--first to beat Trump, then to seize prog power.

"drove them to embrace something very much like racism itself"

It's not any awakening that drove them--for some it is simple ideology, for others fear.

As a movement, current prog hysteria does show some parallels with prior religious awakenings.

Ken B said...

The answer is yes. A question is, how does this connect to the way the consumers of this twaddle seem to wallow in white saviourism. I think it’s clear that they do that, and so I am asking if the racism makes that easier or more appealing.

I think maybe it does. David Duke would nod at that Smithsonian thing and say that it proves whites are superior. These people only have to make one small change, flip one bit, and conclude that these stereotypes are bad instead. But they can comfortably believe in them still.

Lucid-Ideas said...

In recent weeks Tyler Cowen has made daily links on Marginal Revolution (highly recommend) that have garnered debate expressing pretty much that precise conclusion. This is an industry. More importantly, it's also not-so-veiled careerism. It's no coincidence that these old guard liberals are being knocked off in industries/institutions that are aged strongholds for them: Academia, Journalism, Politics, Arts & Culture, etc.

This reverse-bigotry apparently sells and it sell well.

JohnAnnArbor said...

It's a enormous waste of time that can't possibly help anything.

It's at least partly a make-work program for people who like insulting other people and want to make it into a job.

They're peddling mutual suspicion and anything BUT just treating people equally and politely as individuals. It's also staggeringly patronizing.

Gk1 said...

Of course there is money to be made fleecing white owned corporations for white liberal guilt. Just like personal injury lawyers running to an amusement park ferris wheel thats just tipped over. MONEY!!!!!

PB said...

Training sessions? Struggle sessions soon to follow for those who resist.

Richard Dolan said...

"Chait is talking about the way 'the industry' characterizes written communication, rationality, science, hard work, and planning as white."

To criticize 'the industry' in those terms sounds like the op-ed that set off the hounds determined to cancel Amy Wax, after she suggested that a rejection of middle-class values was a source of so many social problems. Luckily for her, she had tenure (and an endowed chair). Same with Jonathan Katz at Princeton, a tenured classics professor who is now in the process of being cancelled for essentially the same wrongthinky refusal to sign on with the anti-racist screed. Unfortunately for William Jacobson at Cornell, he is accused of the same kind of wrongthink, but doesn't have tenure. Cornell seems to be especially carried away with religious fervor for Anti-Racism dogma (does it have anything to do with being located in the Burned-over District?). And so he may soon be cancelled for good.

Lovely.

n.n said...

The diversity and division, diversity and exclusion, rackets are for social, economic, political profit and leverage to suppress competing interests, to force redistributive change, and to normalize racism, sexism, and other class-based bigotry under a liberal banner.

The Cracker Emcee Refulgent said...

Duh. And, Doh! Yes, this moment will pass faster than anyone imagines. They’re not building a movement. They’re tearing one down. And ransacking it as they go.

n.n said...

[O]ne day DiAngelo’s legions of customers will look back with embarrassment at the time when a moment of awakening to the depth of American racism drove them to embrace something very much like racism itself.

Diversity (i.e denial of individual dignity, denial of individual conscience, affirmative discrimination, color quotas, color blocs) and division, and exclusion breeds adversity. Yes, it is another wicked solution with social justification... Lose your religion.

tim in vermont said...

I think that the fact that they keep calling it “white supremacy” rather than “white supremacism” is the tell. It’s kind of a Freudian slip.

Rick said...

[T]he anti-racism trainers go beyond denying the myth of meritocracy to denying the role of individual merit altogether.

Nothing could destroy our institutions and businesses faster than executing this belief.

Gahrie said...

I thought that the simple process of placing people into collectives based on their skin color was racism.

Why isn't it?

n.n said...

Diversity; sex chauvinism; political congruence; some, select Lives Matter; immigration reform; social justice; reproductive rites. It's not just the diversity racket peddling exclusionary dogma at the black hole... whore h/t NAACP horizon. The tell-tale hearts beat ever louder.

Ken B said...

How long until this training is mandatory to vote?

robother said...

Sebastian: "Progs don't do embarrassment."

Indeed. I can't think of single failed Progressive program from urban renewal housing projects in the 50s to Great Society welfare of the 60s, court-ordered busing in the 70s, to anti-police measures of the Ferguson Effect inner city killing spree under Obama that has ever generated embarrassment or even an acknowledgment of failure.

But, of course, this is also true of corporate CEOs and academic department heads who have paid for DiAngelo and her fellow DIE scammers to torment their lesser employees. An unaccountable ruling caste everywhere I look in our (soon to be defunct) civilization.

Anonymous said...

"DiAngelo’s legions of customers will look back with embarrassment......" No they won't. Commie Apologists don't seem to be looking back with embarrassment on the Soviet Union, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Embarrassment requires recognition of wrong. Do people buying into "White Fragility" have any notion that they're wrong? They don't seem to.

dbp said...

I have a really hard time understanding what Chait intends with, "[T]he anti-racism trainers go beyond denying the myth of meritocracy to denying the role of individual merit altogether."

"Myth of meritocracy" would already imply that meritocracy is problematic in some way. So if you are denying this "myth", does it mean they're supporting meritocracy? Somehow, I don't think so. It would have been more clear if he just left out the word, "denying".

YoungHegelian said...

Indeed, their teaching presents individuals as a racist myth. In their model, the individual is subsumed completely into racial identity.... The ideology of the racism-training industry... collapses all identity into racial categories...The program does not allow any end point for the process of racial consciousness. Racism is not a problem white people need to overcome in order to see people who look different as fully human — it is totalizing and inescapable.

The philosophical roots of this are obvious --- it's the Marxist appropriation of Hegel's dialectic Lordship & Bondage, except applied to racist categories.

Of course, "racism is totalizing & inescapable". Just like for Marxists, class consciousness is totalizing & inescapable. That's what consciousness means in this tradition. Consciousness is the end result of a set of experiences that creates the subjective state, including the epistemological boundaries of a "person". All consciousness is by definition totalizing & inescapable.

"White Fragility" is also based on Lordship & Bondage (L&B). In Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, the Slave in the dialectic emerges with a superior consciousness to the Master because the Slave must overcome the alienation of subject from object in order to work for his Master, i.e. he must make the objective world serve his & the Master's purpose, such as harnessing the forces of nature to grow crops. For Marx, the dialectic of L&B explains why the proletariat, who shapes objective reality by its labor, ends up actually seeing the world for as it is. The proletariat's labor not only creates a broad objective reality, it shapes the epistemic foundations of the proletariat's consciousness. The proletariat sees the world as it really is because the proletariat created that world.

This explains why People of Color have superior consciousness to white people. POC must be able to navigate the reality of not only their own world, but also the foreign culture of the white power structure, and this ability to "pass" in multiple worlds gives the POC a consciousness that surpasses the narrow epistemic range of a white person, who lives only in his dominant cultural paradigm. The POC must overcome a reality alienated from him as matter of daily existence, and is the stronger for it. This is a clear analog of the Marxist dialectic of L&B, except in place of the proletariat is the Person of Color.

Now, do I believe this shit? No, I do not, but I clearly recognize its philosophical antecedents. I also think its important for those of us who wish to resist this ideology to know exactly what we are dealing with, because only then we can see the ideology's true strengths & weaknesses.

tim in vermont said...

It’s a cult. The more crazy the thing they ask, no, require you to believe, the more the exalted pride you feel when you manage to believe it, or at least manage to convince others that you did it, all the while coping with “imposter syndrome” because you know in your heart you don’t really believe it.

Every system of values can be deconstructed. Every fucking one. Therefore you have to draw a line in the sand when yours is threatened by bullshit that you honestly believe will only make things worse, because this idea has, every other fucking time it’s been tried.

Yancey Ward said...

It is amusing watching useful idiots like Chait stumble around in the dark. Or, it is amusing at present.

Inga said...

IMO, these white fragility “trainers” have found an easy way to profit off of white people who are easily parted with their money. It’s nonsense. White people know what they need to do to not be racist, whether we choose to is up to us, some guru isn’t going to change anyone who wasn’t willing to change all on their own.

PM said...

Some believe any action is a waste of time: Afropessimism.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/07/20/the-argument-of-afropessimism

MayBee said...

Isn't a lot of liberal thought kind of based in white supremacy?
Only white people are capable of getting IDs to vote with. Mexicans need to come here illegally to get jobs that underpay and have no rights? Black people are used to living in places where people get shot all the time. Black people can't help but loot when they are mad at the system? Black people should all think alike politically?
That's all pretty racist, right?

Nonapod said...

THe term "the industry" implies that some product is being produced in a uniform manner. The only thing DiAngelo is producing is racial guilt sophistry and drivel, which I guess is a product that has a specific target audience of self hating weirdos.

tim in vermont said...

Ford Motor Co. is currently "auditing" an estimated 188,000 salaried and hourly employees worldwide to see where the 117-year-old company stands on workplace attitudes about diversity.

When they say “diversity” that never includes diversity of thought. The Red Guards are coming for you. Oh well, fuck it, I liked the GMC pickups better anyway. It’s all I can do when the car company starts implementing policies as directed by the DNC through it’s super pac #ActBlue of which #BLM is a subsidiary. All BLM money goes to Democrat candidates. I am not spending 40 or 50K on a truck to send the Democrats money. It’s a funny “revolution” when it has corporate sponsorship at the highest levels of power. It started when they demanded seats on corporate boards with the idea of destroying their corporations. I am sure that they will see this comment as “racist," any defense of freedom of thought and speech is “racist” so who cares?

This is a top/bottom against the middle cultural revolution, and guess who is going to walk away with all the chips? Hint: It won’t be the bottom.

5M - Eckstine said...

You were wondering if this type of training is mandatory? Yes it is. Even if it carries an "Optional" label. The HR system tracks your participation. People who don't participate stand out like a sore thumb. Then the velvet hammer is applied. Here and there. Up and down. All with a silent frown. Before you know it the edge is sharpened. Chop. chop. chop ...

tim in vermont said...

"Nothing could destroy our institutions and businesses faster than executing this belief.”

Yep, it’s institutionalized loserthink. "Why work so hard to master differential equations when your skin color alone defines your success?” Xi could hardly have come up with a better plan to cripple American innovation.

Big Mac said...

Is it pitiful, or just amusing, to watch corporate America embrace the consultant hustle of anti-racism “training”. The closed system of thought, with its own implicit and explicit biases, is presented as dogma, the one true faith. And, like all dogmas, it’s own unique definition of terms, assumptions and premises, all of which are deemed inarguable, with the logical fallacy of the Kafka Trap at the ready to snare non-believers (variations on the theme of denials of racism only prove racism, etc.). Corporations deplete assets belonging to their shareholders so their staffs can be properly indoctrinated. The worst offenders are the corporate chief executives loudly trumpeting corporate contributions (I.e., the shareholders’ money) to the black lives matters movement, a Marxist group dedicated, of course, the destruction of those same corporations. As Lenin said, “The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.”

Tommy Duncan said...

These folks need to be careful. At some point Americans will ask them the obvious question "Is there an alternative explanation for the racially disparate results you complain about?" Is "whiteness" the only possible explanation? Is systemic racism the only possible cause?

They won't like the dialog that results.

Yancey Ward said...

And then there are the useful idiots like Inga that write with the impression that other commenters have completely forgotten all the other things she has written over the years.

Yancey Ward said...

No enemies to the left.

Hat tip to Arnold Kling and his commenter Handle.

Martin said...

"The problem is that, at some point, the extremes begin to functionally resemble each other despite their mutual antipathy."

Like Communism and Naziism?

Like Fascism and Anti-fascism?

RigelDog said...

Beach Brutus said: ""In their model, the individual is subsumed completely into racial identity."

That is destined to run into the wall of "miscongenation" -- cross ethnic dating, marriage, and parenting are so common now that in a few generations most Americans will be multi-ethnic..."

Many people including me had hoped that would be the case. In my own family of straight-up hillbillies, I remember lots of bigoted attitudes expressed by some (not all) of my otherwise loving relatives going back to roughly the beginning of the eighties. At that point things began to change and we now have three of the latest generation married to and/or having children with black men. My formerly bigoted aunt could not be more loving and accepting of all this.
But of course, radical critical theory has foreclosed the idea that racial categories kcan ever become blended and obsolete. They do this by lumping everyone--absolutely everyone--who rejects their totalized-definitions of racial grouping into categories such as "white-adjacent" or "those who have internalized their own oppression." Thus, even multi-racial people will still be considered as belonging either to the power-wielding white category, or to the woke, oppressed non-white category. Ta-da! Woke magic bullshit.

Rory said...

"it's the Marxist appropriation of Hegel's dialectic Lordship & Bondage, except applied to racist categories."

Yep. Ask people where their philosophy comes from. Most have no idea, beyond the first-hand teaching they've received.

n.n said...

People of Color

or

we, the colored people, newly emancipated and rejoicing in our blood-bought freedom, near the close of the first century in the life of this Republic

RigelDog said...

YoungHegelian said: "For Marx, the dialectic of L&B explains why the proletariat, who shapes objective reality by its labor, ends up actually seeing the world for as it is. The proletariat's labor not only creates a broad objective reality, it shapes the epistemic foundations of the proletariat's consciousness. The proletariat sees the world as it really is because the proletariat created that world."

Wow, that's a fantastic and informative post! I've been doing deeper dives into the historical and philosophical underpinnings of the Critical Theories insanity; reading Paul Johnson's "Intellectuals" for instance, and the work of people like James Lindsay and the writers on the website New Discourses. Your explanation of group consciousness and its link to L&B is much appreciated.

Night Owl said...

"You were wondering if this type of training is mandatory? Yes it is. Even if it carries an "Optional" label. The HR system tracks your participation."

If enough people refuse to take the "training" this goes away. My company would have to fire me. Then I'd sue them for making the workplace hostile to me.

Why are so many people cowards?

n.n said...

The indoctrination sessions are not limited to diversity (e.g. racism, sexism), but are inclusive of political congruence. They really should lose their religion, normalized by mortal gods and goddesses, founded on selective, opportunistic dogmas that are internally, externally, and mutually inconsistent.

Automatic_Wing said...

No, it's not "just" peddling white supremacy. It's mostly peddling anti-white racism.

You take all the whites and put them in a room and tell them white people bad, white people bad, whitepeoplebad. How can this not be anti-white racism? Certainly if it were any other group of people, it would be described in those terms.

If you look at it from a certain angle you can see "white supremacy" because apparently we whites control everything with our evil, racist mind rays. Which sounds really powerful. But for most people going through the "training", the overwhelming message is simply white people are bad, mmmkay.

daskol said...

YoungHegelian, I think Stephen Hicks did a good job of flowcharting evolving socialist strategies in his little book Explaining Postmodernism, which has since been expanded and re-released. He's an Objectivist and hostile to the post-modernist project, and his book has come in for criticism over the years from proponents of various schools of thought that he savaged: he's simplistic, doesn't understand Kant or Hegel, misses the essence of their pet philosopher, etc. I don't know: I studied some of this stuff in college, and have read more since, but curious if you're familiar with the book, as you seem to know your shit. I read it when it first came out, and found it a valuable gleaning of most of the thinkers and their relationship to current trends in philosophy, and his critique and description of evolving progressive/socialist strategies to be spot on. In Hicks' terms, it wold appear we have completed the transformation of both the ethical standard and epistemology, and therefore wealth is bad, equality of outcomes is the true socialist objective, and finally, only recently, silence=violence.

Leigh said...

Mis-use of the word "myth" has been bothering me lately. Doesn't Chait mean to say the "anti-racism trainers go beyond accepting the myth of meritocracy to denying the role of individual merit altogether ..."? It seems to me that (by definition) to deny a myth is to accept its premise. No? It's sort of like "Oh, that myth has long been debunked." Is that not a total non sequitur?

As others here have noted, racism or racialism or whatever word you choose (or make up) must never have an endpoint because its perpetuity is fundamental to the business model. If racists were redemptive or racism had an endpoint, a company would only need to prostrate itself and pay homage (i.e., pay for a seminar) every few years. It's a fixed cost -- though obviously its cost is not only born by companies -- at the moment.

John McWhorter, a black linguistics professor at Columbia, had this to say about either the author, or the "solutions" put forth in "White Fragiity" (or perhaps both):

"White Fragility is, in the end, a book about how to make certain educated white readers feel better about themselves. DiAngelo’s outlook rests upon a depiction of Black people as endlessly delicate poster children within this self-gratifying fantasy about how white America needs to think—or, better, stop thinking. Her answer to white fragility, in other words, entails an elaborate and pitilessly dehumanizing condescension toward Black people. The sad truth is that anyone falling under the sway of this blinkered, self-satisfied, punitive stunt of a primer has been taught, by a well-intentioned but tragically misguided pastor, how to be racist in a whole new way."

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/dehumanizing-condescension-white-fragility/614146/

I would say McWhorter's takedown was masterful, were but the word allowed.

Maybe we should ask McWhorter what he thinks about denying myths, since he's the linguist.

mandrewa said...

I predict we will transition quickly to a new narrative where nothing good can be said about white people at all. In fact I think many people are already at that point.

But I predict -- it's not much of a prediction since it's so obvious -- that it will soon be the case that is mandatory for every one on the left to not say anything good about white people at all. And saying something good or that might be interpreted as good will soon become a firing offense. If it isn't already.

If white people were not the majority of the population this point would have been passed some time again. The left is once again searching for an excuse for genocide even if the individuals that make it up don't understand what the mass mind is doing.

Craig said...

Wouldn't it be something if, one day, anyone who bought DiAngelo's book or wrote favorably about it gets cancelled?

Although I abhor cancel culture, that would be pretty funny.

Krumhorn said...

Our hostess put it perfectly yesterday when she crystallized the significance of assigning to white people the value of hard work while, by implication, leaving blacks assigned with a traditionally racist stereotypical opposite trait. It's hard to imagine how anyone could promote this crap without giving a single thought to what is actually being said.

- Krumhorn

Lucien said...

Chait’s use of the term “reverse racism”, like “reverse discrimination” reveals how deeply the liberal worms have burrowed into his brain. He should imagine being half black, half Japanese and living n Seoul. Would the treatment he received involve racism, reverse racism, or no racism at all because no White people were involved?



daskol said...

Oh, and here's Hicks flowcharting the Individualist Enlightenment vision, apparently unaware that this is white supremacism's embodiment.

Francisco D said...

Inga said...IMO, these white fragility “trainers” have found an easy way to profit off of white people who are easily parted with their money. It’s nonsense. White people know what they need to do to not be racist, whether we choose to is up to us, some guru isn’t going to change anyone who wasn’t willing to change all on their own.

While I fully appreciate your thoughts on this matter, I think you are missing the boat as to the purpose of this "training". I say this as someone who conducted management training seminars in the 1980's and the 1990's.

There is no empirical evidence that seminars focusing on attitudes have any effect. It is a different story when they are focused on skills and specific knowledge. Psychologists have known for decades that attitude seminars or values training are totally bogus. However, there is profit in them, as you say.

The purpose of values and attitude training is to allow organizations to limit liability for work environment lawsuits. For the trainers it is about (making a living and) recreating the college classroom with captive audiences. A lot of these people are fanatics that believe their own bullshit. More importantly, it is about silencing thoughts and attitudes that are counter revolutionary. If the trend continues, it will morph into Chinese Cultural Revolution struggle sessions.

n.n said...

When they say “diversity” that never includes diversity of thought.

Specifically, diversity dogma denies individuals and provides a taxonomy that reduces people... persons to colorful clusters of cells (e.g. color blocs) devoid of individual conscience, and normalizes the doctrine of some, select lives matter. Diversity dogma forms the foundation of the Pro-Choice religion.

n.n said...

to deny a myth is to accept its premise

Akin to atheism, also agnosticism, and plausible science.

gerry said...

Some Portland protesters are definitely racist.

DanTheMan said...

>>It started when they demanded seats on corporate boards

They never demand positions on roofing crews, which here in Florida are roughly 100% Hispanic. They do have quite the sense of entitlement...

robother said...

Franscisco D: "The purpose of values and attitude training is to allow organizations to limit liability for work environment lawsuits..."

I rrecall one of our law firm's labor lawyers telling me in the early 90s that such seminars were the greatest single generator of discrimination lawsuits. That kind of thinking is what Dilbert has taught us to expect from the corner office managers.

Never-Biden Never-Putin said...

The left need to keep white supremacy alive.. create it, make more of it.. fake it... whatever works.

Skeptical Voter said...

Let's descend into tribalism (which is where all this bushwah is taking us). Ask how things worked out in Rwanda where the only two tribes that counted were Hutu and Tutsi.

Once everyone is locked into a tribe (and no other personal identity matters) then the tribes go to war. Your weapon, depending upon your tribe--say "White Homeowner" might be an AR 15 and a Glock (which you don't know how to use), or maybe "Latin Gangbanger" in which you know how to pull the trigger early and often in a driveby but can't hit your intended target, or maybe your tribe is "Karen--where a white lady puts on a mask and lectures a black cop about racism. But sooner or later in tribal war you get down to the machete--as the Hutu and Tutsi did.

n.n said...

White people know what they need to do to not be racist, whether we choose to is up to us, some guru isn’t going to change anyone who wasn’t willing to change all on their own.

Unfortunately, the propensity to reduce some, select human lives to a colorful cluster of cells that is denied her dignity is a modern condition. Hopefully, people will lose their Pro-Choice, selective, opportunistic religion, and stop exercising liberal license to indulge diversitist thoughts and practices, so that its progress can be mitigated.

Stephen said...

Fair enough. Good on you to be able to find a liberal who joins you in rejecting the unpersuasive and potentially dangerous part of the white fragility project.

Now...where are you on the parts of it that Chait (and Megan McCardle and others) acknowledge to be correct? To quote Chait:

"The anti-racism consulting industry does deserve both some sympathy and some credit. Its intention, to prod white Americans into more awareness of their own racism, is beneficent. And their premise that white people are often unaware of the degree to which racial privilege has enabled their success, which they can mistakenly attribute entirely to merit and effort, is correct. American society is shot through with multiple overlapping systems of racial bias — from exposure to harmful pollution to biased policing to unequal access to education to employment discrimination — that in combination sustain massive systemic inequality."

Agree, disagree? I find you to be remarkably silent on this issue, but isn't it really the core issue, and the one where the call for greater white awareness is warranted?

Never-Biden Never-Putin said...

12:41 Yancey

that should be a blog post.

Never-Biden Never-Putin said...

Yancey 12:41

from the link:

"But now liberals are being persecuted and deplatformed. Now liberals thinking over the mistakes they’ve made in the past. And they still don’t get how messed up it is to collect 153 signatures in support of free speech and viewpoint diversity but to exclude conservatives from that as well."

Inga said...

“And then there are the useful idiots like Inga that write with the impression that other commenters have completely forgotten all the other things she has written over the years.”

And then there is Yancy Ward who proclaimed that Covid deaths in the US would not exceed 7,500.

I'm Full of Soup said...

They are peddling bullshit not white supremacy. I am so tired of BLM narrative. The Philadalphia metro area has 20% non -white population yet the local news has basically been taken over by BLM narative. It's ridiculous to call it the news anymore- it's more like Pravda.

mandrewa said...

"They never demand positions on roofing crews, which here in Florida are roughly 100% Hispanic. They do have quite the sense of entitlement..."

This is a two-fold racism. Or maybe it's two-fold racism and a one-fold sexism.

The sexism is implicit in how feminists never demand that there be more women on roofing crews, which is an indicator, one of many, that women are not in fact being discriminated against and that in fact they, or at least the women call themselves feminist, are extraordinarily privileged, and in fact in the modern world it is the men who are more likely to be discriminated against in pretty much all the ways that matter.

The first fold of racism is the lack of awareness that just a short time ago all these jobs were occupied by predominately white men, with a sprinkling of blacks, and the idea that there is nothing racist about their displacement by people from another country who have immigrated here illegally and who have displaced others in no small part because they were willing to work for less. It's the people who think this is all okay, and who think there is nothing wrong with that scene who are at heart anti-white racists.

The second fold of racism, which I don't want to delve into too deeply, but is nonetheless quite real, is just why it is that these crews are all Hispanic. It's about more than just economics.

And the third fold of implicit racism is to note just how deeply and profoundly racist, not to mention how extraordinarily destructive, it is for the left to not see racism in people who are not white.

The Crack Emcee said...

"Is the Anti-Racism Training Industry Just Peddling White Supremacy?"

The President said there's white supremacy.

AG William Barr said there is widespread disparities, by race, in US law enforcement.

Now, blacks at Fox News are describing what goes on there, and what they see being broadcast to America.

It sounds like some white supremacy. I especially like this part:

“That’s something they routinely do—they turn out these people, like Candace Owens, to support these things, and use Black apologists to denigrate other Black men and women....”

I think you guys ought to take some time and entertain the distinct possibility that it's whites who have been running a racket on the people they've deliberately kept uneducated, but who are still feeling our way forward, no matter what you say, or what you do, or what you want. You've lost the intellectual argument, because you've been dishonest, but - more importantly - you've lost the moral argument, for the same reason. And off-the-hook paranoia. You're STILL trying to paint us as the criminals doing something to YOU. It's simply incredible. As someone at Fox said, how hard is to say you're sorry? We're getting a master class.

You lack what it takes to create a more perfect union.

The Crack Emcee said...

This attempted lynching happened in broad daylight - with no shame or sense there was anything wrong - but you keep pretending it's blacks running a racket of perceptions here.

TheOne Who Is Not Obeyed said...

From Stephen: "... but isn't it really the core issue, and the one where the call for greater white awareness is warranted?"

Well, no, it isn't the core issue, for me or for any of the fascists or liberals or lefties or corporate flunkies or corporate leaders or anyone else. The core issue is POWER and how to gain it back by any way necessary for the Marxist project of reducing the West to ashes.

If there were "greater white awareness" of racial disparities in the US, this "conversation" would be over because no sophistry is needed to understand that the "America is irredeemably racist" narrative is demonstrably untrue. The purpose is to make whites (i.e. the majority population) NOT ask awkward questions about the roots of racial disparities, or they would all realize that the root of the problem was the liberal destruction of the black family from 1967 onward. Imagine what would happen if millions of white liberals suddenly understood it is not "systemic racism" but "welfare state socialism" that has brought us to this current unpleasantness.

And THAT, dear Stephen, cannot be allowed in any way, shape, or form.

The Crack Emcee said...

The hero who has openly written about his belief in astrology - to no grief, mind you - now wants to go somewhere he can be free.

If you can write about astrology, and people still treat you like a thinker, I'd say you're freer than this black man, who's held to a much, much stricter standard.

But there's no white supremacy. Just a crazy white man who shouldn't have a job but he checks whatever boxes white people need and skeptical blacks against cultism and pseudoscience and bullshit beliefs like NewAge astrology do not.

There's no room for such people. Not when all of you know your "sign" before most things pertaining to black people, because priorities.

Oh, fuck all y'all.



The Crack Emcee said...

'You're going to get your a** whooped!' Virginia trooper is being investigated after resurfaced video shows him 'terrorizing' a black motorist during a traffic stop

I think you guys have to stop talking exclusively to each other, because you've created a bubble of racial ignorance, and you're not allowing reality to permeate it - on purpose. I mean, how hard is it to see what's out there? How hard is it to understand this guy getting terrorized is a message to others? How many others? What part of terrorizing your neighbors are you still comfortable with - and you're not racist?

This shit is happening right under your nose - and much more - and you "do" nothing. My hobbyhorses revolve around fraud - it's everywhere - you assholes are more-than-comfortable with it. You talk about it. But you're comfortable with it. It's not goin g to make you anti-social with rage because you DON'T CARE. And that's the difference.

Stop pretending you do.

YOu're not who you think or say. You're just not.

You're the type of people who will watch a poor black man go mad under the weight of what white society thinks is an acceptable level of madness.

You'll even tease him as it happens.

That's who you are.

You're useless to me, the United States, and the world, because you just won't do, what needs to be done, for the enlightenment.

YoungHegelian said...

#daskol,

I have Hick's book on Post-Modernism, and I've watched quite a few of his videos on YouTube. While I like Hick's stuff, the fact that he really doesn't like post-modernism shines through & it colors his approach. Steven Best & Douglas Kellner's book on the subject is a harder slog, but is a more sympathetic reading.

In my post above, I took an example where it's fairly easy to trace the ideological history. Most of the political uses of Post-Modernism are nowhere near that easy. It's made all the worse by the fact that, well, a great deal of the Po-Mo Left actively lies about its heritage. The ol' timey Marxists were more or less honest, assuming the regime they were under wasn't going to kill them for the wrong answer. But the new Po-Mo guys want to spread the fable that their ideology is the product of the immediate consciousness & lived experience of blacks, gays, women, trans, Latinos, etc, etc. They sure don't want some (newly) dead white male to get credit.

For this reason, among others, it's very difficult to trace the lines between the classical French Po-Mos such as Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Deleuze, Guttari, etc and what's out rioting on the streets. I honestly don't know the writings of the "intersectionality" generation of thinkers. They're too young, I'm too old, and they just strike me as horribly derivative.

YoungHegelian said...

@Crack,

Do we get to post videos of all the black people behave like assholes to white people? How about that fun one from a few years back from downtown Baltimore where two black chicks beat the shit out of a white transsexual for using the women's room at a McDonalds? Do you really think black people are going to come out ahead in that contest?

We all know that sometimes blacks get treated like shit for being black. But, you know what? Many of us, like me who's lived in the DC area for 40 years, know just how badly black people treat each other. We've seen it over & over. We also have seen over & over how black politicians launch some brand new initiative supposedly to help the lowest of the low, but yet somehow the funds end up in the pockets of the black politician's friends, and the black politician ends up on multiple corporate boards after he leaves office. The lowest of the low end up exactly where they were. Over & over again.

We all know just how fucked up we are, and what evils we are heir to. Your problem is -- can you convince us you can run things any better, with less fuck ups & less evil? My experience of 63 years, 40 in DC, is Not a Chance In Hell.

daskol said...

Thanks YH. That really was a masterful taxonomy and genealogy of shitty politics borne of questionable philosophy. I didn't realize you'd just cherry-picked an easy one.

Hicks is obviously hostile to post-modernism, and he has a quirky and negative attitude towards Kant that I don't recall seeing elsewhere, Kant being Hicks' all-destroyer. And yet on the topics I was familiar with, I thought he gave an honest accounting. That other book you posted looks interesting: with a blurb praising it from Frederic Jameson, whose dense prose I had to wade through in college, I imagine this is indeed a more sympathetic account. Of all of the contemporary ones, the only one I remember fondly is Rorty, although I couldn't tell you why besides remembering that he surprised me.

Sometimes I still find it remarkable: as a result of being a relatively perceptive person at a good liberal arts college in the early 90s, and indulging my interest in then trendy courses focused on Frankfurt School thinkers, early intersectionalist critiques of other academic disciplines and mass culture (it was just called race/class/gender critique or perspectives then--the class on the Jerry Springer show was fun), I got such a detailed preview of so much of what's happened in media and culture and even academia in the intervening 2 or 3 decades. Like, the kind of movie preview where you don't really need to watch the movie. This includes the cancel/deplatform culture, which was nascent even then, although focused more on students with unfortunate opinions or habits like playing sports or belonging to fraternities, rather than invited speakers. The inherent, unavoidable totalitarianism at the heart of it all creeped me out then, and still today. The value of this preview is such that I'm wondering if my hope that my kids don't go anywhere near schools like that is misbegotten: a lot can go wrong in such an environment, but if you're paying attention and not one to be subsumed by movements and ideologies, you can learn a lot about the coming world, assuming this pattern of the campus invading the world continues.

daskol said...

Also, if you add Marcuse to your list, it gets easier to trace those lines. That dude was literally in the streets with the kids acting like an idiot.

DanTheMan said...

>just why it is that these crews are all Hispanic

Because they are almost to the man illegally in the country from Mexico or Central America.

So, yes, you get a cheaper roof than if they hired Americans. And you pay out the nose for car and health insurance and all the social welfare programs.


Howard said...

YH: Right On! Just because you treat human beings like abused dogs doesn't mean they are allowed to bite back. Look at all them in those free TSA jobs and security in federal buildings taking away work from more qualified Caucasians. Free room and board at the Nick for blowing grass, a nickle upstate for dealing. Some of 'em even get conjugals. I mean, fuck, we give'em three hots and a cot plus a 55" TV as a welfare bonus. What more do those people want? We have reparationed them into the stratosphere and they just want more free stuff. I really don't understand why they complain so much. You must think they are an inferior class of human because if it's something else, we need to change how our gravy train runs and you ain't givin' up your cheese for them ingrates, amIright? 23 my peckerwood brother

JAORE said...

Now do Jessie Jackson. Or Sharpton. Or Mad Maxine. Or....

boatbuilder said...

DiAngelo's legions of customers are constitutionally incapable of, and entirely uninterested in, looking back with embarrassment upon any aspect of the endless stream of trendy idiocy they have signed on for; much less being able to consider rationally the effect that such destructive foolishness has had (and will have)on the welfare of their fellow man.

Leigh said...

So here I was feeling a bit sharp and sassy on this Friday afternoon, about to congratulate everyone for not quizzing RigelDog on the topic of mis-congregating, and then I read @Young Hegelian:

"In my post above, I took an example where it's fairly easy to trace the ideological history. Most of the political uses of Post-Modernism are nowhere near that easy. It's made all the worse by the fact that, well, a great deal of the Po-Mo Left actively lies about its heritage. The ol' timey Marxists were more or less honest, assuming the regime they were under wasn't going to kill them for the wrong answer. But the new Po-Mo guys want to spread the fable that their ideology is the product of the immediate consciousness & lived experience of blacks, gays, women, trans, Latinos, etc, etc. They sure don't want some (newly) dead white male to get credit.

For this reason, among others, it's very difficult to trace the lines between the classical French Po-Mos such as Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Deleuze, Guttari, etc and what's out rioting on the streets. I honestly don't know the writings of the "intersectionality" generation of thinkers. They're too young, I'm too old, and they just strike me as horribly derivative."

THEN @Young Hegelian struck again, flattening @Crack.

Brilliant. Dang.

(As I've said before, I came for the content. But I stayed for the comments.)

cf said...

white supremacy is a joke. The true Supremacists are our one-World Elites now, owning Media, Tech and the BiGBlue Democrat Machines, seems a treasonous Panopticon w @NyTimes @NPR condeNast & Obama/Hillary, creating legions of drones and heifers across the nation, leading our best to ruin.
Sad.
Trump is our only Hope.

ga6 said...

Good article showing this foolishness in the Navy:
http://cdrsalamander.blogspot.com/2020/07/diversity-thursday_16.html#disqus_thread

C R Krieger said...

I had racial sensitivity training back in 1973. It was pretty worthless, or so it seemed to me.

However, the fact that time was taken, in the middle of a combat tour in Thailand, signaled to me that it was important to my masters.

How do we convey that importance to people who are at the place where the rubber hits the road? Maybe person to person stories. I remember a West Point grad, Black, with a new Jag, telling how he was stopped eight times enroute to Craig Field (Selma, AL). 1964. It is the stories that stick with you. It is Crack MC conveying his experience. Do some not hear? Yes. Do some only hoist in 85%? Yes. Are some afraid to admit for fear of unknown consequences? Yes.

Regards  —  Cliff

Bunkypotatohead said...

"That is destined to run into the wall of "miscongenation" -- cross ethnic dating, marriage, and parenting are so common now that in a few generations most Americans will be multi-ethnic - and in a few more generations after that almost all will be. Your typical American will be 65% white European, 13% African American, 13% Hispanic, and 9% "other" -- all blended together."

Your typical American will be stronger, stupider, and more violent.
I don't see that as an improvement.

Yancey Ward said...

"And then there is Yancy Ward who proclaimed that Covid deaths in the US would not exceed 7,500."

The difference between us, Inga, is you won't see me pretending that never happened. I own all of it. You, on the other hand, pretend every single day that we can't remember the positions you took even yesterday. You apparently think we are easily fooled around here.

Krumhorn said...

Crack, I'm sure you are wedded to the vituperative political flow of the current effort to get whitey's head down, but there is nothing about the links you posted that is representative of anything useful. People often behave like shits to one another. The black guy in the car was behaving like a shit and the cops didn't respond well. If you think that you have the intellectual capacity to imagine a way in which society can function that produces a consistently better outcome, you are delusional.

People can certainly be expected to treat other people better, but it happens incrementally and when ALL parties participate in the improvement. In each of your examples, self-righteous activists are seen working hard to provoke a poor response...and they were successful.

I don't see how anyone is going to learn anything constructive from that.

- Krumhorn

Martin said...

Critical Race Theory and 'anti-racism' are the 21st Century's reboot of Nazi race theory.

DiAngelo, Streicher. Potato, potahto.

The Crack Emcee said...

JAORE said...


"Now do Jessie Jackson. Or Sharpton. Or Mad Maxine. Or...."

You guys look at a few people in 13% of the population and mistreat everybody - when you're 65% murderous assholes with guns on a tear.

You're insane.

The Crack Emcee said...

JAORE said...

"Now do Jessie Jackson. Or Sharpton. Or Mad Maxine. Or...."

This is who you are: you want to talk about people - not arguments - and when you do, you want to discuss dumb ones, not good ones.

How many posts has Ann done about Bryan Stevenson? I've called him the MLK of our time - a kind, thoughtful, intelligent man, with a lot to say about America and civil rights. Compare that with how many she's done on the three names above. Then explain the discrepancy. Don't talk to me about the dumbing down of America., Y'all's dumb as Hell.

DEEBEE said...

Cannot do a foreground without a background. If one is behaving because of their group identities (interjectionally speaking), that would have to include blacks and if a certain trait is classified as white, blacks do not have it. Sort of like the alleged culture in black schools against learning as being a white man thing.

The Crack Emcee said...

rumhorn said...

"I don't see how anyone is going to learn anything constructive from that."

We're centuries past that.

The Crack Emcee said...

Tom Brady's pseudoscientific wellness racket is the American dream

Now remember: the only way you can make it, ghetto man, is to abandon your education and appeal to people about this bullshit - because white people reward this handsomely - they have created whole INDUSTRIES dedicated to absolute nonsense and you have to COMPETE with them on this basis. Otherwise, you're participating in THE DUMBING DOWN OF AMERICA because you want other voices - like your own - to be heard through this din of bullshit all of them are spewing.

What's your sign? You could be regarded as a top level writer and thinker - by law professors, even.

I bet you, years of marginalizing a black artist's plea for help, to bring sanity to these subjects - just to find yourself catering to an astrology fan with a typing fetish - would crack Bob Dylan UP.

Nichevo said...

The Crack Emcee said...
This attempted lynching happened in broad daylight - with no shame or sense there was anything wrong - but you keep pretending it's blacks running a racket of perceptions here.

7/17/20, 4:36 PM

"Vauhxx Booker"

Pull the other one. The "civil rights activist" is lying. Meanwhile "you people" are kicking babies and pregnant women.

Nichevo said...

This is who you are: you want to talk about people - not arguments - and when you do, you want to discuss dumb ones, not good ones.


LIKE CULTS?!?

Crack, do you just have a low IQ?

Nichevo said...

Your typical American will be stronger, stupider, and more violent.
I don't see that as an improvement.


Also less distinctive, and IMHO, less attractive.