As it is usual, do you have a cite that the policy or the faculty is following what CRT researchers dictate?
Seems to me that, as Left_Hand_of_Dorkness says, the faculty and the policy is based on morals and respect. Things that were present ages even before diversity, affirmative action ot CRT came into the picture.
No, because as far as you’ve demonstrated, no professor in the history of the college has ever sent such a disrespectful email before this one. If you disagree, show me the other emails that UCLA professors have sent that are just as rude but weren’t disciplined.
You may read that and decide that it’s a frivolous and disingenuous demand for a cite. You’d be correct. You may then reflect on your own demands for cites, and realize something important.
I am neither holding my breath nor counting on continuing this discussion; I don’t see it as being productive. As with Damuri, I invite you to enjoy the sense of victory you may feel.
I held that out as a metaphysical possibility in my very first post about the topic. That you (purport to) believe it’s the more parsimonious explanation will stand on its own.
That’s your takeaway, huh? Glad I didn’t hold my breath :).
Is it your position that no other professor in UCLA history has sent a snarky email? In response to such a ridiculous request?
It’s certainly possible that no professor has previously sent such an email. But which do you think is more likely?
Or are we saying that your positions require a reasonable basis and Zoster’s positions require conclusive proof?
“Just because we don’t have a policy specifically forbidding something doesn’t mean we can’t give an employee a warning for doing something wrong.” – My boss three weeks ago.
Odds are good that they have a code of conduct faculty and staff are expected to adhere to. i.e. At my place of employment we don’t have any rules specifically stating that you can’t call a garage attendant an asshole. But we can give that employee a warning when he calls a garage attendant an asshole anyway.
OK. But if your workplace has been around since before the invention of garages and has thousands of employees, and we all agree that your employees call people assholes all the time, and the only one who has ever been disciplined for it is the one who called a garage attendant an asshole in June 2020 despite a long tradition of calling people assholes before and since, then you do not have an “anti-calling people assholes” policy, you have a “pro-garage attendants policy.” The wisdom of respecting garage attendants doesn’t change that.
As another example of an answer to the question at hand: Critical race theory is when you cannot conceive of any framework for a thorny ethical question such as “who should be prioritized in vaccine distribution” besides “how can we make this a white v. black zero-sum game.”
Any reason why you’re linking some Twitter screenshots instead of the actual article you have a problem with, so we can read it in full and see whether Jason Compson III has a point or not?
Here’s a link to the NYT article. I’ve taken the liberty of excerpting the quotes featured in the twitter thread for ease of reference.
Harald Schmidt, an expert in ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, said that it is reasonable to put essential workers ahead of older adults, given their risks, and that they are disproportionately minorities. “Older populations are whiter, ” Dr. Schmidt said. “Society is structured in a way that enables them to live longer. Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already had more of them, we can start to level the playing field a bit.”
Marc Lipsitch, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, argued that teachers should not be included as essential workers, if a central goal of the committee is to reduce health inequities. “Teachers have middle-class salaries, are very often white, and they have college degrees,” he said. “Of course they should be treated better, but they are not among the most mistreated of workers.”
Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, disagreed. Teachers not only ensure that children don’t fall further behind in their education, she said, but are also critical to the work force at large. “When you talk about disproportionate impact and you’re concerned about people getting back into the labor force, many are mothers, and they will have a harder time if their children don’t have a reliable place to go,” she said. “And if you think generally about people who have jobs where they can’t telework, they are disproportionately Black and brown. They’ll have more of a challenge when child care is an issue.”
Jason Compson’s conclusion (which I’m not saying I necessarily agree with) is:
So to sum up, in this single article by @JanHoffmanNYT three experts–Schdmit, Lipsitch, and Gould-- say that more white people dying will “level the playing field”, teachers are “too white” to deserve a vaccine, but that their “Black and Brown” students make them deserving.
The essence of Critical Race Theory is that all inequalities in society are race-based. This is a flawed paradigm, and it incentivizes otherwise intelligent people to concoct absurd solutions to obvious problems. A good example of this comes from Thursday’s online edition of The Nation:
The Votes of Black Americans Should Count Twice
Here, the author (a law professor, so most likely not an idiot) considers the real and obvious problem of the lopsided representation of rural (and, therefore, mostly white) votes in General Elections, but chooses to do so exclusively through the prism of race. Because of this, he glosses over the simplest solution - abolishing the Electoral College - in favor of a bizarre scheme to literally count black voters’ ballots twice.
The more I look into it, the more convinced I become that Critical Race Theory is, at least in part, an engine for the manufacture of bad ideas that don’t map accurately onto the real world. Worse, it also gives its adherents permission to believe these ideas are not only workable, but more ethical than any other. Its spread should be strongly discouraged.
Any reason you’re wasting everyone’s time implying the quotes are fabricated when you could have found the NYTimes article on Google in less time than it took to type this post? Please just find a way to defend using vaccines to decide which people live or die based on race instead of going through the motions of this tendentious nonsense.
I didn’t imply they are fabricated. I implied they are taken out of context. Which, surprise, is true.
Look, at the end of the day, I do believe that a lot of racial issues impacting this nation are economic issues in disguise. I believe the best thing we could do for Black Americans is lift all Americans out of poverty, and disproportionately impact Black Americans (with the most impact going towards the poorest Black people, so a win-win). We might be able to find lots of common ground there.
But people screeching about “cRiTiCaL rAcE tHeOrY” destroying the nation need to get their heads out of their own asses and realize it’s ok if a policy benefits someone other than already rich whites.
And yet.
Assuming the article isn’t just a troll - He’s not just ignoring the impracticalities, massively illegal nature, and consequences (total delegitimization of the democratic system likely the point of of civil war) that would occur if such an extreme proposal were implemented. He’s also missed the fundamental reason that “oppression of minorities by majorities” will occur in a system based purely on voting power without additional moral or legal safeguards, which is the basic arithmetic. There are 7 non-black people in the U.S. for every black person. Of course if you don’t want people voting to exploit the black population without reservation, you need either:
*Constitutional protections for minority rights and courts willing to enforce them
*Higher bodies willing to enforce minority rights (e.g. the Justice Department policing local governments or an international body intervening on the federal government), or
*A moral compass in the majority non-black population that compels them to recognize black rights even if they can’t be forced to
And this applies to any group that comprises less than 50% of the voters. In this case his CRT lens can’t even allow him to see that 85% is greater than 15% without looking for a racial explanation.
The “policy” in question being “public health administrations deciding who gets to live and who dies,” in case anyone has forgotten.
I didn’t see anything in the assertion that “old people tend to be whiter, therefore we should withhold the vaccine from them and abandon them to die” or “teachers tend to be whiter, therefore we should withhold the vaccine from them and abandon them to die” that backs up the idea that these groups are “richer” as well. CRT analysis generally seems to be fairly disjoint from Marxist class conflict approaches and would definitely maintain with a straight face that e.g. Michael Jordan and Beyonce are more oppressed than a white homeless person.
cite for any policy makers holding these opinions? Or are we going from ‘college professor writing into an opinion piece’ to ‘national policy’ at the wave of a magic wand?
From the article:
An independent committee of medical experts that advises the C.D.C. on immunization practices will soon vote on whom to recommend for the second phase of vaccination — “Phase 1b.” In a meeting last month, all voting members of the committee indicated support for putting essential workers ahead of people 65 and older and those with high-risk health conditions.
Historically, the committee relied on scientific evidence to inform its decisions. But now the members are weighing social justice concerns as well, noted Lisa A. Prosser, a professor of health policy and decision sciences at the University of Michigan.
“To me the issue of ethics is very significant, very important for this country,” Dr. Peter Szilagyi, a committee member and a pediatrics professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said at the time, “and clearly favors the essential worker group because of the high proportion of minority, low-income and low-education workers among essential workers.”
That position runs counter to frameworks proposed by the World Health Organization, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, and many countries, which say that reducing deaths should be the unequivocal priority and that older and sicker people should thus go before the workers, a view shared by many in public health and medicine.
It’s an advisory committee, so the CDC can reject their recommendations. But they are advising on national policy.
From the CDC’s own site, here is the decision they made, and the 4 groups offering them guidance:
So clearly the CDC isn’t listening to these ideas.
ETA: and from the linked guidelines on who is an essential worker,
No it isn’t.
The amount of just sheer misinformation being spread in this thread, with no regard for accuracy, is appalling.
We’re asking if you, and if critical race theorists, believe that vaccine distribution should be decided in order to make sure people of the wrong race die. The topic is your beliefs and the beliefs of CRT devotees more generally. Whether these beliefs are currently being implemented is logically irrelevant to that discussion and no one asked you to account for it.
Please answer this question directly without reference to who the CDC does or does not agree with: Do you believe that decisions about who gets the covid vaccine first should be made in order to ensure that people of certain races die?