To me, THIS IS the difficult conversation worth having. Calling out each side on their respective bullshit, not wishing they’d all just shut the fuck up already. I mean, yes, they all need to get a grip and shut the fuck up. But they won’t if nobody pushes back or simply dismisses it as not something worth talking about.
That’s interesting, and I think I agreem as long as it’s clear where the fault lies.
The bullshit here is like 5% antiracist orthodox rigidity, and 95% people in a powerless committee being shitty to each other. An almost identical dynamic shows up in university academic departments at budget time and in Methodist churches when it’s time to plan the Easter picnic and in gaming groups when people don’t like the interpretation of the rules around the darkness spell and in 4H clubs when Jenna didn’t share her tips on grooming the sheep and on messageboards when someone disagrees with someone. The bullshit appears to me to be typical small-group bullshit, people being awful to each other.
What these people need to do is not simply agree that Robin DiAngelo and Ibrim X. Kendi aren’t required reading before speaking. They need to agree to something much deeper than that, something that everyone needs to agree to: they need to agree to engage in the conversation in a way that evinces mutual respect and a willingness to interpret the other person’s words in a charitable fashion. That’s not about wokeness, that’s about being human.
100%.
(…don’t you hate when people say that? 
)
Yes, I agree with that. I actually think everyone in this tale started with good intentions. But the ideas some of the members appear to have taken from the ‘woke’ movement don’t seem to be helping with this aim. In fact they appear counterproductive. The idea that it’s impossible to collaborate with someone who hasn’t ‘done the work’, or that if anyone sees racism in another person’s words or actions that means they were definitely racist and must apologise… those ideas are not increasing mutual respect or helping them achieve their goals (goals they all agree on!)
Are they just doing wokeness wrong, LHOD? (And what is the difference between non-racist and anti-racist?)
“Wokeness” is a terrible term, so I’m gonna hold off on that. They’re doing “being a decent person” wrong. As I said earlier: the ways these people are being shitty to each other aren’t endemic to the left, they’re endemic to small committees of people being petty-ass and shitty to one another.
As for the difference between non-racist and anti-racist, this article explains pretty well. Kendi sometimes talks about cancer. If your body is riddled with cancer, would you be satisfied with a treatment that was cancer-neutral? Would a doctor who treated you by doing nothing to exacerbate the cancer be a good doctor? Or would you insist on a treatment regimen that was actively anti-cancer, and be satisfied with nothing less?
Just listen to yourself! Why are you so anti-cancer? So much for Democrats being the “part of tolerance”!
…is the kind of stuff people on my FB are posting.
I don’t even see cancer. The people who spend all their time talking about cancer are the real tumors.
As long as we’re just having a conversation:
Agreed again. “Wokeness” has come to mean whatever people want it to mean and so it suffers from a similar marketing issue as “Defund the Police”. I’ll leave it there.
This is what the linked article says about “non-racist” (It’s only mentioned once):
There is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy. Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity between racial groups.
I think the cancer analogy is poor in this context. But if we’re going to roll with that analogy, a “non-racist” is akin to a “non carcinogenic” element. IOW, a public policy that is net neutral when it comes to issues of racism. For example: Should the price of USPS stamps go up? Now, it’s easy to claim that this impacts the poor community more than the more affluent. Since a large proportion of poor people in America are also minorities, does that mean it’s a racist policy? Kendi certainly makes that claim. Is he right?
I’ll let him make his argument here; I haven’t studied the issue enough to know for sure. And I’m also not 100% behind his ideas, and I also think that there are degrees of racist harm or anti-racist benefit in policies. If a policy like raising stamp prices is racist, it may be very mildly so.
That’s an important point: discussing whether something is racist isn’t discussing whether it is POSSESSED BY A DEMON SERVANT OF BA’AL, LORD OF THE UNDERWORLD. It’s just a matter of discussing its position in a society that’s deeply infused with racism. If we FREAK THE FUCK OUT whenever the word “racist” is used, it makes it harder to have discussions. Something like stamp prices may be racist in a mild way that is pretty low-priority. I don’t know.
You shouldn’t eat any food because it won’t cure your cancer. If it won’t cure your cancer, it’s a carcinogen.
I mean, reducto ad absurdem and all, but the food you eat sustains your body and helps you stay strong enough to do the things you need to do to fight off the cancer, so it’s sure as hell part of an anti-cancer regimen.
That’s actually a pretty good example of the sort of petulant and self-serving arguments people raise when confronted wtih the idea of being anti-racist: “If this action doesn’t IMMEDIATELY END ALL RACISM, then what’s the point? You’re just being dramatic!”
This reminds me of a common joke among the more sardonic in the Jewish community. Goes something like this: Everyone was elated when they heard that Bernie Madoff was finally convicted for his financial crimes and grift. Everyone except for the Rabbi. When the congregants asked him why he didn’t seem as happy as the rest of them that this ganneff, this crook, finally got his comeuppance, the Rabbi replied, “I’m happy, I’m happy. But how will this affect Israel?”
I can see why people object to this theory.
Racial inequity is when two or more racial groups are not standing on approximately equal footing.
A racist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity between racial groups. An antiracist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial equity between racial groups.
Sounds nice, but let’s look at an example. In the UK, 15% of lawyers are of Asian ethnicity, but Asians only constitute 8% of the population. That’s racial inequity according to Kendi’s definition. And any policy that allows this state of affairs to continue - like doing nothing - is a racist one. So are we supposed to start discriminating against Asians entering the legal profession until the percentages even out? That’s nuts.
His theories would also say the old Jewish quota at Harvard was an anti-racist policy. Which is clearly bullshit. It’s exactly the opposite. Something is very wrong here.
Nope - that WOULD be nuts. Instead we are supposed to dig into the root causes of WHY other race groups aren’t producing a bunch of lawyers and see what we can do to address those root causes.
The people following his theories seem happy to ignore root causes and go straight to positive discrimination like affirmative action, quotas, and abolishing entry tests in other areas.
Besides, everyone knows the root cause: Asian parents encourage their kids to become lawyers because it’s a high status, well paid, and secure job. Why is this a problem? If other races were not becoming lawyers due to discrimination (and it actually may be an issue for some) then we should deal with that. But we can’t tell that just from looking at the percentages. The causes may or may not be racist, but different percentages are not racist in and of themselves.
And this is what, because Asians have a “good parent” gene? They are the Superior Parenting Race?
Lol. Most Asians in the UK are immigrants or children of immigrants, and they brought their cultural traditions with them. This would be one of them (of course this hides the fact there are different groups within the ‘Asian’ category, but the statistics don’t separate them anyway). Other parents presumably have different priorities for their kids, for example that they get a job they find fulfilling.
Great! Now you’re thinking about things in a “woke” way. Note how you earlier said:
But as you’ve recognized, that’s not a root cause. That’s an effect caused by other root causes that have to do with immigrant culture, etc. You could go further and look into what it is about immigrant cultures that has this effect. You can then take what you learned to try and improve the lot of struggling communities.
This comes straight back to your not granting charitable readings to your opponents. This is a completely inaccurate take of Kendi’s work.
Is the NBA something that needs looking into? Or is it okay to recognize that the racial imbalance has a root cause that while certainly is linked to certain socio-economic realities, it can probably left alone without the need for meddling:
The composition of race and ethnicity in the National Basketball Association (NBA) has changed throughout the league’s history. The first non-white player to play in the league was an Asian American, Wataru Misaka, in 1947.[1] African Americans entered the league beginning in 1950. According to racial equality activist Richard Lapchick, the NBA in 2015 was composed of 74.4 percent black players, 23.3 percent white players, 1.8 percent Latino players of any race, and 0.2 percent Asian players.[2]
By 2020, 81.1% of players in the NBA are black (if mixed are also counted as black), 17.9% white, 12.5% mixed race (mostly half-black half-white), and 1.1% of other races.[3][4] The league has the highest percentage of black players of any major professional sports leagues in the United States and Canada.[5] In 2020, NBA’s viewership appears to be predominantly black and hispanic.[6]