Writes John McWhorter, in "Black Students Are Being Trained to Think They Can’t Handle Discomfort" (NYT).
The rock in question is that boulder the University of Wisconsin removed from Observatory Hill 2 years ago, which I blogged here. I said:
What is the cost of moving a 70-ton boulder? What is the value of the beauty of the rock itself, which has nothing to do with racism? The only reason for attacking the rock is that there is no way to do anything to the use of a word 95 years ago. That's an incident in the past. Gone. But the rock is there. You're getting mad at a rock? No, you're asking for something to be done that can be done. A 70-ton rock can be moved, and so the demand is to move the rock. It's theater, and the university should have the sense to say no.”
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७८ टिप्पण्या:
If universities had the sense to say no to absurd demands by left-wing students and faculty, they would be in far better shape today than they are.
But since one of the biggest problems with universities is the profligate, irresponsible way they burn through money such that student debt has exploded to pay for their profligacy, perhaps it's for the best that they are so miserably, cowardly, irresponsibly embracing of all woke such that we now have no choice but to deal with them.
As an alumnus, this was a signal to me that my alma mater is flush with money and does not need my donations.
When you succumb to the demands of idiots, you become an idiot.
If the Left can ban one of the greatest American books ever written - Huckleberry Finn - to soothe the feelings of black students what's moving of a rock other than a physical exertion with Caterpillar tractors and orange safety vests?
Racial fragility, much like faith, can start as a mustard seed but if nurtured and cared for over time can grow into something substantial.
They should break the rock up and sell authenticated pieces. $$profit!
What does Chris Rock think?
Black students aren’t that dumb. They know it’s performance art for white liberals. They just go along with it to get free stuff.
"Black Students Are Being Trained to Think They Can’t Handle Discomfort"
Not really. Black students are being trained to think they are more important than anyone else. All students are being trained to think there is a hierarchy of progressive virtue. Society as a whole is being instructed that it is systematically racist and must be transformed.
Appeals to discomfort and safety are just tools in the larger ideological movement.
Sadly, many blacks like being treated this way. Not sure why they assume letting the White Left control them will give them their freedom or their reparations... or whatever they think might lift them up into a life no one restricting them from living.
It won't. The White left are cruel and corrupt. Their methods merely remove agency and keep blacks mired in grievance. If you go thru life as a victim, the White Left smile.
De-fund the police is a White Left construct that mostly hurts blacks and black communities.
(well - the white left open the door to crime and shoplifting and other various criminal activity - (nothing says "fulfill my grievance" and comfort my soul... like a hot Gucci purse. grab your friends!) (The White Left have an insane and economic backward answer for that, too. "Insurance will cover it!")
I’ve read John McWhorter’s book, Woke Racism. He is not too happy about the way blacks are treated by the progressive left as victims of racism who have no agency of their own. He states that anti-racism has become a new religion in which blacks are being infantilized. They are set up for failure because, according to the woke left, they can never succeed on their own.
Maybe it was meant to allude to Sisyphus and the task of white people to keep moving rocks.
The left has recently pandered to mentally ill, emotionally unstable, and immature/juvenile people far more than the right (but the right does heavily pander to delusional religion and patriotism). On the left this has involved pumping the anxiety of women (e.g., environment, abortion, crime), telling Black voters that every problem is caused by others or Whitey (as they ignore the horrid historical treatment and wild success of Asians in the US), and scraping the bottom of the barrel for energetic voting blocs (e.g., a new rainbow flag novelty-of-the-week). Psychologically marginal-to-unstable folks are now the core activist base of the D party, so the D party will immediately lose every election if they stop lionizing weakness, mental illness, denial, and failure.
Responsibility for this outcome largely lies with those in power who refused to put their feet down and say no. Boomers who never grew up and passed it on. TDS sufferers. They know how to persuade others. They win elections. They have billions of dollars. They don't want to lose either one.
for a generation (or 2) we have given out "participation trophies" to our little boys and girls.
We've helicoptered them to school & soccer practice (OBVIOUSLY no letting them just play outside)
We've cuddled them and babied them and "protected" them from the cold cruel world.
(while letting them use drugs and have unprotected sex and view porn and sext IF they want to)
And Guess What? We've raised a nation sick skirtboys and bearded ladies.
We have DESTROYED the greatest nation on Earth.. And WHY?? So little Jill or John won't "feel bad"
None of this is actually about anyone being hurt or offended, that's just an excuse to wield power over others and make them do things at your behest, the sillier the better.
"As an alumnus, this was a signal to me that my alma mater is flush with money and does not need my donations."
Ditto, although my take isn't so much that they have enough money (though they apparently have enough that the Regents can turn their nose up at $800M), but that they will do ill with it. The "rock" episode displays actual harm done to those they seek to help, as per McWhorter's piece.
I'll give to my department for purposes I agree with. But to the university at large? The people running it lack judgement.
Blacks have been targeted by Democrats for real or imaginary martyrdom.
Real martyrdom is living in black communities and being recruited or victimized by black criminals. Imaginary martyrdom, among other things, is thinking giant rocks are racist or believing you are a Palestinian.
Joe Smith said...
What does Chris Rock think?
12/14/23, 11:07 AM
What does The Rock think?
That sounds an awful lot like "Ohhh - Crack Emcee must be stopped: HE COMMENTED WRONG!!!"
White people decide what to be fragile about, I guess.
"They should break the rock up and sell authenticated pieces. $$profit!"
I'd buy a piece! Is was a nice gabbro erratic. I loved that rock. Did a lot of studying beneath it, gazing out over the lake.
The White Left have an insane and economic backward answer for that, too. "Insurance will cover it!"
Lefties have never been hit with rate increases?
"The thing about race is that it exists in this weird liminal space where it’s both real and not real. It’s not real because the vast majority of scientists will tell you there’s no basis for racial differences on a biological level; that this is not a real thing. Yet we’ve structured our society and institutions on the basis that it is real. It’s both real and not real, and there’s an inherent absurdity there."
- From a review of American Fiction’: The Movie Everyone’s Going to Be Fighting About
The absurdity is squared by most people still blaming blacks for it. Or Palestinians. Go see "The Zone Of Interest" if you stongly sympathize with people holding a rave outside a Concentration Camp. It's about Germans living well outside a Death Camp.
May be THAT might straighten you out.
The cool thing about the inherit
racism of liberal wokeness is the psychological cover it provides to overt racist Republicans to give themselves a pass for their efforts to establish new Jim Crow laws throughout the South.
"I'll give to my department for purposes I agree with. But to the university at large?"
How does that help? Can't the university at large just figure that your department/purposes get less funding now since they have the money you gave to it?
Not being critical here, just trying to understand how this works.
Maybe "Black Students Are Being Trained to Think They Can’t Handle Discomfort,"
But I'm more concerned with the discomfort they cause to society.
Make it part of an initiation ceremony. Each student, as part of their orientation, will be expected to go to the boulder and chip off a small fragment from it. (The student will, of course, be issued safety goggles with the ceremonial chisel.) The students line up to do this. In the background, a choir, preferably all Black, sings the Battle Hymn of the Republic. The ceremony takes place at night and each student carries a candle while they wait their turn. At the end of the ceremony, they weigh the fragments of The Rock of Racism as it is called. If the fragments weigh more than the previous year's fragments, a Day of Progress is proclaimed, and the students can party to dawn and beyond. Safe sex is recommended but not mandated. Only by taking such decisive action can the curse of racism be lifted from the UW campus.
Every tragedy is an opportunity to say things you thought you could not say before. Or something.
"What we have here is failure to communicate!"
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/09/08/professor-suspended-saying-chinese-word-sounds-english-slur
There are no societal monoliths.
Black conservatives I frequent:
Charles N Charge
Black Conservative Perspective
Doc Rich
The Poor Mans Podcast
J-Hall
There are more.
Raised by women, their feelings are subject to mincing manipulation.
Black holes... whores h/t NAACP
[Black] "burdens" h/t Obama
Some, Select [black] lives matter
Diversity, Inequity, exclusion
[Catastrophic] [anthropogenic] immigration reform
Critical Racists' Theory
Blackrock... black rocks, too.
These are all modes and methods of the leverage racket in pursuit of capital and control.
None of this is actually about anyone being hurt or offended, that's just an excuse to wield power over others and make them do things at your behest, the sillier the better.
I was put in mind of the episode of the excellent BBC show Sherlock in which Holmes and Watson go to the mansion of the archvillian Magnussen (I think that's his name). Toward the end, the baddie stands a few inches from Watson and says something like, "I think I'd like to flick your face. Keep your eyes open," and proceeds to flick a finger against Watson's cheek, closer and closer to his eye, and Watson has to just stand there and take it because it's that or - actually I can't remember what the consequences are, but they made sense in the context of the episode.
That's exactly how things like this seem to me. The consequences for Western straight white people, especially men although I'm here to tell you I certainly think it's true of me too, of failing to comply with whatever the crazy demand of the moment may be, to a chorus of histrionic claims that your failure to comply is "actual violence," are losing your job, losing your kids, losing your bank account - even potentially losing your life, as Derek Chauvin has demonstrated. Prostrate yourself at the altar of insanity, or else.
If race isnt real why do you never shut your yap about it
I remember that GWB was vilified for owning a property on which one so named rock was located. Sweet Jesus.
Howard. Name a couple of these new Jim Crow laws we southerners are proposing. Thanks.
There's a very old saying we kids used to use when I was a young child growing up in the 50's;
Sticks and stones may break my bones but names (or words) will never hurt me.
Paint it black... rolling stones. Swarm!
McWhorter in his latest podcast episode with Glenn Loury remarked that of course he knew that "Hands up don't shoot" and all the similar narratives were hoaxes, EXCEPT for the "murder" of George Floyd which really happened. And then he was SHOCKED SHOCKED to learn that was also a hoax. "We've been lied to!" He reminded me of Charlie Brown with the football.
The DEI stranglehold on American academia keeps taking hits from the explosion of anti-Semitic activity on campus in light of the Israel/Hamas war. The craziness about the racist rock at Univ of Wis looks even crazier today than it did then. All for the good that it does, too.
"If you can’t bear walking past a rock someone called a dirty name 100 years ago, how are you going to deal with life?"
We're not "dealing with life," you moron, we're dealing with death. Mountains of it. The death of people someone called "animals" and "savages," and many, like John McWhorter, want to forget. Well fuck him. That's not how humanity works no more.
He's already got the eyes of an undertaker.
"Can't the university at large just figure that your department/purposes get less funding now since they have the money you gave to it?"
Those kind of contributions are for things (a scholarship, endowed chair, an instrument) that the university doesn't provide money for in the first place, so no, that's not how it works.
Oligonicella said...
"There are more."
There may be more, but - just like a liberal college campus - they're still only serving-up one repugnant point of view. There's no complexity, nuance - other blacks are limited to cartoons - which explains your comments. You think you're being open-minded, when you've really put parameters around your own ability to understand blacks, any further than the point of view of those who aren't invited to the picnics.
Except for someone with real expertise, like Tik History, I rarely subscribe to anyone who puts on headphones and speaks directly into a camera. First, the arrogance: I don't want to see them, and don't know what made them think I did. Next, I don't trust anybody, so WTF? Present your fucking evidence, or shut-the-fuck-up, because I don't believe you, either. You seem to think these guys know something. I looked and thought "Got it" in seconds. And it ain't much. (They mostly don't like women.)
ANYWAY, that's you. My feed gives everyone a voice - not just one political persuasion - and I'm grateful for it, otherwise I'D be cheering bombing babies, and not you.
A rock has an offensive name??
This is nothing more than trying to sell newspapers.
It's not fragility Crack, that's your sad metier. We just think you are an asshole.
That's a shitty name for a landmark.
Keep it, just change the name to "Badrock"
Gaza is not a concentration camp.
Gaza a welfare state ruled by Hamas terrorists, and inhabited in part, by people who want to live free of hamas terrorists. The Hamas terrorists will not let their people have freedom.
"Violence Violence, everything is Violence"
overt racist Republicans to give themselves a pass for their efforts to establish new Jim Crow laws throughout the South.
Howard, you were sounding sensible there for a few weeks. What happened ? Did the DNC send you a warning ?
TCE: "My Pafology" Took me back to Gage and Normandie - laughed out loud.
Yes terrorist propaganda is what we need more of,
Last election in Gaza. 2006. Not sure about big bad rocks in Gaza but probably worth looking
https://x.com/Ostrov_A/status/1734936694229516444?s=20
Jewish students are NOT being "assailed personally". Maybe they're being assailed by Pro-Palestinians for being Zionists and PRO ISRAEL. But they aren't being assailed personally for just being Jewish.
Or maybe these "Jewish students" are actually "Israeli students".
And they've reacted by crying to news media, getting the FBI involved, doxxing pro-palestianian protesters, suing the Universities, and getting one of the few non-Jewish Ivy League presidents fired. So, they're the "Tough guys" that McWhorter wants blacks to emulate?
They sound like snowflakes on steriods.
Today, it should be:
"He who works at a desk job, should go on a diet".
Michael, that was Texas Gov Perry with the rock on his property, I believe...
"The quiet bigotry of low expectations."
Doesn't it all boil down to that?
Blacks have more burdens but women have more obstacles.
Rh’s comment reminded me of Rock Hudson. Maybe they can ask for more $$ if the rock identified as trans or gay.
The price of black rock is already too dam high.
Crack and Howard sitting in a tree........
The soft bigotry of making wimps.
'White people decide what to be fragile about, I guess.'
As it should be.
You should try it sometime.
'We're not "dealing with life," you moron, we're dealing with death. Mountains of it.'
Tell your 'brothers' to stop killing other 'brothers.'
This is not difficult...
"We're not "dealing with life," you moron, we're dealing with death. Mountains of it. The death of people someone called "animals" and "savages," and many, like John McWhorter, want to forget. Well fuck him. That's not how humanity works no more. "
You just want a license to hunt people. How, exactly, do you think we should end the cycle?
Real martyrdom is blacks in urbane environments.
... Tutsi under Hutu occupation
... Zulu led by Mandela's Xhosa
... Kenyan deplorables ruled by Kenyan elites
... Palestinians and Israelis after decades of Fatah cum Hamas rule
... babies planned with rites performed for social, clinical, political, criminal, and fair weather progress.
Let us bray (sic).
“It's not fragility Crack, that's your sad metier. We just think you are an asshole.”
He claimed that, under the right circumstances, he could be “all ears”. He was soon disabused of that notion and advised that, no, he was definitely ALL asshole.
Crack, the man who complains when someone doesn't provide links and complains when someone does provide links.
Appears you forgot... you're ignoring me, remember? I'm an attack dog, nothing I provide is worth reading, etc, etc. All that rolled up in a pretty promise. Oh, and I'm white and racist.
Crack: "...otherwise I'D be cheering bombing babies, and not you."
You might be revealing more than you think with that formulation, you death dealer.
I think McWhorter fails to give black students credit for having their heads screwed on straight. The dizzy black bitch who initiated this particular clusterfuck in order to further her personal ambitions is very clearly a race-hustling little cunt, with big plans for her race-hustling future. She is the racio-political equivalent of an Only-Fans "star". I don't hold any very high opinion of young black people, but I doubt very much that the ones who got into the university were staying up nights worrying about that rock. More likely, like the mau-mauing kigs at Yale, they were desperate to find any excuse to not take their finals. Because they have been sucked into a rather demanding system, that they lack the ability to excel in, or even survive in, unless they can somehow avoid being held to the same standard as all the other students. This makes it very tempting to grab the racism excuse. Yeah, I would have mastered group theory, and written a profound and illuminating senior thesis on the subject. Becept, there wuz RACISM!
Roger this. Indeed. You are correct. Same idea
I used to listen to someone righteously telling me not to think I knew about a community different from my own on the basis of a few newspaper stories and podcasts. These days I hear that same person making judgements about a community not his own based on a few newspaper stories and podcasts. And just as righteous about it. Hmmm.
@Crack
”[Race is] not real because the vast majority of scientists will tell you there’s no basis for racial differences on a biological level; that this is not a real thing.”
tl;dr: not even a scientific statement but to the degree it is, it’s wrong.
The quote is simply not true, and if even it were true—i.e. that the “vast majority of scientists” say race has no biological basis, that doesn’t make their contention a fact, since real science is not a popularity contest. There is a biological basis for racial groups. Any bioinformaticist worth his salt should tell you that—whoops, there is an appeal to authority. Race is not just skin deep—it reflects the accumulated genetic differences of populations that evolved over many generations in isolation, with distinct haplogroups progressively formed from sets of common haplotypes in turn derived from many individual single nucleotide polymorphisms (i.e. single base pair mutations) passed down from parents to child.
But even if it were (skin deep), even the skin color phenotypes are based on real biological differences that group according to racial categories, which are themselves based on certain genetic differences. To wit: I can make accurate predictions about a whole range of variables, behaviors, and outcomes simply by looking at a person and assessing his race. And I can go in the reverse direction and determine a person’s race by looking at his genome.
Just because there are wide variations within racial groups and overlap across them in genotypic and phenotypic measures doesn’t mean race is “not real”. But if we really want to get to grips with these ideas on a scientific basis, then fuzzy, rhetorically slick but unscientific statements like “race doesn’t exist” need to be thrown out the window. It’s not the way scientists talk when they are bringing their expertise to bear on a subject, but rather are the norm when scientists are borrowing the imprimatur of science to advocate for a political position. For scientist to make an assertion of this nature, they would speak in a precise, qualified, modest, low-amplitude style.
If you stop and think for a moment, it’s hard to pin down what it even means. And it’s quite possible for personal interpretations to differ widely. So how could any scientist agree with such an open-ended statement that lends itself to wildly different interpretations, and gives no way for anyone to say for sure which one is right.
Thus the vague contention that race has no biological basis can produce people who agree or disagree based on their pre-inclination toward or away from what *they think* it means. A robust scientific statement is one that yields itself to testable hypotheses. It’s one that makes testable claims about reality and is thus falsifiable. Therefore, of course you could get scientists with a Leftist bent, and not speaking ex cathedra, as it were, to agree with the statement, because it can mean whatever they want it to mean (to themselves).
For example, it doesn’t say “skin color is only weakly (p < 0.1) correlated with perceived racial group,” because that’s an empirical claim susceptible to confirmation or rejection through experiment. This is why I tried to introduce specific claims to this discussion, such as that I can predict a racial group by looking at a genome, rather than arguing about the vague, untestable nothing in the quoted passage.
Of course, the idea that racial categories have a biological basis is a neutral statement that says nothing about society or racism or any other subjective interpretation of that fact. It’s not inherently good or bad, it just is. That race is real doesn’t mean people get a pass on being racist anymore than they would if it weren’t real.
rcocean said...
Jewish students are NOT being "assailed personally". Maybe they're being assailed by Pro-Palestinians for being Zionists and PRO ISRAEL. But they aren't being assailed personally for just being Jewish.
In fact, yes they are being harrassed as Jews. IMO someone who is an avowed Jew hater (such as rcocean appears to me) really shouldn't presume to speak for Jews and how they should respond to hateful demonstrations calling for the destruction of the state of Israel. Being Jewish is being part of a people, the people of Israel. This is not a legal designation, it's a spiritual and soul level experience and connection. This is a very personal matter and in my experience is very different from how Christians approach their identity as "a Christian." IMO there is little to no sense of community or belonging amongst Christians unless they are in the same church or denomination. Christianity is so large a group and the experiences of Christians throughout history and culturally are too diverse for their to be a common bond. Christmas seems to be the only time when Christians have something in common, although it seems little connected with the religion itself. In contrast, Jews either have a sense of identification with the group or they do not. And this is largely a product of having a Jewish education which extends into adulthood and a positive experience of the religion. Where there is no Jewish education or only a childhood level of understanding often you find Jews who are deeply self hating or hostile to Israel. They seem to have a need to prove how separate they are from this group that is so unpopular with the progressive Left. Ironically this is especially obvious when those individuals have a Jewish name, like Cohen. But there are many others: Norman Finkelstein, Jill Stein, etc. But for those Jews who do identify as part of the Jewish people, Israelis are our extended family. We sing the same exact prayers, we observe the same customs and holidays, etc. So that's why it's personal for Jewish students on campuses being bombarded by people calling for the death Jews in Israel and the destruction of that nation. UCLA demonstrators, for example, shouted, "Israel Israel you can’t hide, we want Jewish genocide." You don't get much more direct and personal. Likewise the demand that Jews must reject Zionism, i.e., their connection to the Land of Israel, in order to be OK is also deeply personal and offensive for the reasons I have already discussed.
@The Crack Emcee "the vast majority of scientists will tell you there’s no basis for racial differences on a biological level; that this is not a real thing."
The vast majority of leftist, universalist, console-everyone-with-blind-happy-talk academics try very hard to obfuscate and redefine race as a fictitious and a paper tiger. They throw out silly stuff such as "race is only skin deep -- skin color is determined by simple melanin production." No sh*t Sherlock, but that trivializes the totality of genetic changes and fully misses the point entirely.
The obvious and fatal problem with the "no biological basis for race" thesis is that the happy-talk people can't keep their own story straight. Every single government health and medical agency must refer to common, biologically-based racial categories because specific diseases and issues are clustered in specific ethnic/racial groups. This ranges from Tay-Sachs disease to sickle-cell disease to osteoporosis, etc. This is essential for directing funding and resources to those who need them. The government has no rationale for spending on WHITE sickle-cell treatment, and instead needs focus on White bone weakness, skin cancer, and other White-focused problems for that population. But, the government also wants to deal with sickle-cell disease...as clustered in Black populations.
One example of many, from the infamous federal CDC:
https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/sicklecell/features/keyfinding-trait.html
"The U.S. incidence estimate for sickle cell trait (based on information provided by 13 states) was 73.1 cases per 1,000 black newborns, 3.0 cases per 1,000 white newborns, and 2.2 cases per 1,000 Asian or Pacific Islander newborns. The incidence estimate for Hispanic ethnicity (within 13 states) was 6.9 cases per 1,000 Hispanic newborns."
Human racial groups merely reflect isolation from other populations (e.g., stuck on an island or continent) and genetic drift over time, AND/OR conscious social/political selective breeding by those who perceive their group as somehow different than other groups. Over time perception becomes biological reality through sustained mutations and drift. Over time birds of a feather first flock together by compatibility or preference, and then by necessity because they eventually become different species. These are universal facts of biology and nature. Current human races are half way down the new species path, while extinct species Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA is found in European and Asian populations.
We selectively breed dogs, cats, chickens, turkeys, cows, horses, pigs, etc. We keep those most suitable for our needs (e.g., huge amounts of meat on fast growing animals; horses and dogs that are less aggressive and that can read human intentions and emotions, etc.) Why and how could humans be different than the animals we so clearly and effectively manage? You can't have your cake and eat it too. Nature and biology are uncaring and inequitable, but facts. Gravity doesn't care about reckless fools falling off cliffs either.
Deal with it.
That was my original response to Jewish students chased into hiding from the marauding mob of
Hamas sympathizers.
The murderous crowd is made up of like minded students that could not take semester tests because Trump was elected President.
The leftist double standard.
They demand their feelings are honored, but care nothing for the feeling of others.
One sort of interesting thing about McWhorter and the big black rock incident is that the student who was the main proponent was named...Nalah McWhorter.
I don't know if there is any relation.
https://news.wisc.edu/no-longer-a-memorial-rock-removed-from-campus/
You can't take away people's context. It will always re-emerge.
I don't need big blocks of text. Give me the exact wording used to "assail jews".
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