has written a piece about Robin DiAngelo’s ant-racist workshops. She is the bestselling author of What Does it Mean to be White, and more recently White Fragility: Why is it so Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. Chait’s conclusion states,
“But one 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 this true, and if so, how might we know? Well, humour is pretty good way…
tildeb
Questionable Motives 
I’m SO TIRED of “movements”! Movement infers recent awareness. WTF? MLK and Brad and Chad are playing an angle. Ad nauseum regurgitation of serious social issues, courtesy glib click bait social media nincompoops Brad and Chad strikes me as utter nonsense. These two are idiots! A feeble attempt at comedy that woefully misses the mark.
Comment by Notes To Ponder — July 21, 2020 @ 2:14 am |
You may be tired of movements but so what? Other than the fact these guys are quoting anti-racist positions that are in fact racist (as the comparison shows) but are essential components of critical race theory, which is what DiAngelo is selling and what is being adopted as policy by campus administrations across the country, businesses, and now local governance. This is what is a very serious issue, that in the name of promoting social justice regarding race, we end up with institutionalized injustice regarding race.
I don’t know about you but establishing racist polices to ‘combat’ racism seems to me to be far, far, far more idiotic nonsense than an attempt to make fun of the idiocy.
Comment by tildeb — July 21, 2020 @ 8:19 am |
Tildeb, I can definitely appreciate the satire of this clip. It drives home the bigger, more profound point. 👍🏼 Certainly off topic, but another example of the power of satire, is this hilarious clip I always enjoy… regarding (fake) piety in dating and “no sex before marriage” B.S. 😉 … ChristianTingle.com:
Second video follows below. 🤣
Comment by Professor Taboo — July 21, 2020 @ 6:58 pm
Have you seen these? 😛
Comment by Professor Taboo — July 21, 2020 @ 6:59 pm
Whenever I hear the term “woke” I immediately think “wack”, as in “wacko” — as in nuckin’ futs.
Comment by Ron — July 21, 2020 @ 9:57 am |
Yet it IS the NYT. It IS new business polices.It IS new bylaws and state and federal laws. And it’s not going away. It’s growing.
Comment by tildeb — July 21, 2020 @ 10:12 am |
Yes. It’s too late to alter course, because at least two or three generations have been indoctrinated to embrace this madness in public schools. And once those graduates acquire positions of influence and power in academia, government, the MSM and business — your’re pooched.
Comment by Ron — July 25, 2020 @ 11:11 am
“Woke”? “Wack”? “Wacko”?
Well, these words also make me think of… umm, Wack-off? 🚀😈 I guess that could be interpreted as Nuckin’ futs too, yes? 😁
Comment by Professor Taboo — July 21, 2020 @ 7:04 pm |
The ‘movement’ is underway. It is a series of coups in the mainstream media that is reshaping reality to try to fit a unreasonable narrative. For example, how many black unarmed civilians are killed by police in the US? We are told by media that is a daily occurrence. That’s not true. In fact, it’s not even one per month. Yet entire police forces are under pressure to respond to the narrative and make fundamental changes rather than respond reasonably to reality, which centers around the use of unreasonable police brutality. Criticism of the movement matters IF you actually want to address REAL problems, IF you actually want to ensure our common liberal values are not swept away in the name of this progressive ‘social justice’ and replaced by values that are GUARANTEED to institutionalize injustice.
A good exploration of just how insane the current social movement is unfolding is here (long but enlightening):
Comment by tildeb — July 21, 2020 @ 10:04 am |
Tell me something, tildeb … what, exactly, do you envision when you think of how you would like the world to be? I’m curious and it is a genuine question. Thank you.
Comment by jilldennison — July 21, 2020 @ 5:44 pm |
Having spent time in totalitarian states – religious and political – I can say unequivocally that classical liberal values are superior in every way. It is a framework to grant the largest number of people maximum freedom and equality and vastly improve the welfare of humanity over time. It’s not the best system but it is better than anything else. When public policies respect these values, they can then can regulate the extremes and offer a social safety net to the benefit of the entirety. And because the base unit is the individual, the individual – that shared state all of have – must hold supreme authority and respect in law.
Comment by tildeb — July 21, 2020 @ 5:57 pm |
Tildeb, could you give past and living models, representatives, personalities of Classical Liberal Values? I am very curious about them as well. Thank you Sir. 🙂
Comment by Professor Taboo — July 21, 2020 @ 7:07 pm |
Those who hold classical liberal values are many. It’s anyone who places their highest values on personal rights and freedoms and responsibility, meaning advocacy for all people’s individual autonomy, equality, and security for the liberty of the individual combined with a social responsibility to the dignity of all. If I have any one as a favorite, I think I may have to select Lincoln (I have a large collection including many 1st editions of books about him) but there are many others whose writings and speeches demonstrate this liberal framework. Certain outstanding defenses of these principles bring to mind people like ML King in his defense of equality rights, Hitchens in his Toronto defense of free speech. Mills stands out with his essay On Liberty… which is a classic defense every human being who cares about liberty should read and have to pass a test to receive voting rights! Jefferson on religious freedom and what that really means. The list is huge and the writers are from across the political and social divides that today mar any reasonable accommodation and/or foreseeable unity. I might argue that most of them might pragmatically be drawn to today’s radical centrism’ model considering the effect information technology has had on the world. Anyway, Prof, there are lots. The key point is that using the individual as the supreme unit that holds political consent means every single person shares the same value of worth, and that this framework unifies all of us into an Us and not today’s sick partisan and caustic version of Us v Them.
Comment by tildeb — July 21, 2020 @ 11:24 pm
Mmmm, On Liberty by John Stuart Mill, eh? I shall grab that one. 🙂
Well, feel free to share one or two more prime examples and their works. I’d very much like to know and read.
Yes, talk about unintended consequences of IT on the world, but especially in the U.S.! I am constantly amazed and disappointed how many Texans—that is, Texans with poor or no critical-analytical skills & tools learned in primary and secondary education here—CANNOT equitably compare and contrast various sociopolitical issues, much less do the same on news broadcasts/articles or worse, on social-media like Facebook. The majority of Texans are ridiculously gullible (or intentionally deny – ostrich head in sand) and therefore are almost always more comfortable (safe) with confirmation bias. 🙄
Tildeb, I wish there was a silver bullet for a fix because the correction and RE-education of Texans/Americans is a lot harder, much longer road. 😞
Comment by Professor Taboo — July 22, 2020 @ 11:02 am
Well, Prof, a recent example is Steve Pinker’s Enlightenment Now. In it, he highlights with facts and figures why a bleak assessment of the world under classical liberalism (this is the foundation of values and principles upon which modern western civilization has emerged) is “wrong. And not just a little wrong – wrong wrong, flat-earth wrong, couldn’t-be-more-wrong.” This understanding of how classical liberalism has affected the world and brought about massive and unprecedented increases in human welfare is the right backdrop to understand just how ludicrous is today’s social justice movement that tries to replace these values with tried-and-true-and-disastrous Marxist (post-modern) values (the foundation of which is group identity, class membership, power structure hierarchy, and so on). The groundwork for a Trump, for stark partisanship, needs a belief in a narrative that elevates pessimism and cynicism about the world – particularly the historical role of the United States (because it is the flagship of classical liberalism) – to replace reality that conditions are constantly improving by every metric regarding the welfare of humanity. Not fast enough for some, I will grant, but certainly the very opposite of a downward spiral. And the whipping horse for this belief to take root is classical liberal values because THOSE values in the autonomy of the individual is diametrically opposed – as are their astounding successes – to the cult belief in the post-modernism/social justice narrative.
Comment by tildeb — July 22, 2020 @ 12:18 pm
Art Keller, a former CIA analyst, offers I think keen insight into why this social justice movement (that has taken on boad Critical Race Theory (CRT) that underpins Black Lives Matter (BLM)) is racist to its core and cult-like in its methods. Follow the reasoning:
“An additional trait of CRT that likens it to cult environments is the hyper-attentive focus on the central idea of the cult doctrine: systemic racism, which is believed to pervade everything, be “ordinary,” and is considered permanent. According to many CRT advocates, including the bestselling Robin DiAngelo, racism is present in and relevant to every interaction and circumstance. The question, she says, must move away from “did racism take place?” to “how did racism manifest in this situation?” For her, every situation and interaction contains racism, and the devotee of her program is to focus obsessively on finding it and calling it out.
Moreover, CRT establishes an identity cult, as opposed to, say, a cult of personality around some charismatic figure. Under CRT, every Critical Race Theorist who is also a racial minority becomes his or her own cult personality. It therefore proceeds with an “identity first” model that says “I am Black,” for example, means something more and more important than “I am a person who happens to be black.” The capitalized B in “Black” here indicates the CRT-defined politically Black identity that is key to cult identification and cult participation. (Edit: See Titania’s latest offering about capitalizing the B in Black but keeping the w in white lower case… and this is the ‘recommendation’ for all media publications. That’s CRT in action in the public domain.)
Under CRT, then, race is expected to be given ultimate social significance and racism is believed to pervade every possible occurrence and interaction. Thus, race and racism are always of central relevance to CRT thought, which dramatically increases and focuses the control-based elements of the BITE model (BITE is the acronym for cult indoctrination and control: Behaviour, Information, Thought, Emotion). All behavior must be CRT-appropriate. So must the information one takes in and communicates, the thoughts one has, and the emotions one expresses because anything else signals racism that must be “interrogated” and “dismantled.”
To care that racism is reduced in reality therefore necessarily means taking the fight against racism out of the hands of the Critical Race Theory advocates. Not only do they operate in bad faith—meaning from the Critical Theory approach—and do so using cult mind control language; they’re also deforming the institutions that are the foundations of our society.“
Comment by tildeb — July 22, 2020 @ 8:00 pm |