What would you think if a Fortune 500 Corporation Human Resources Director walked up to a podium and announced the following to a big crowd: “Whiteness and white racialized identity refer to the way that white people, their customs, culture, and beliefs operate as the standard by which all other groups of are compared.”
Say what?
Assume further that this HR Director then announced that the following are the “common characteristics of most U.S. White people most of the time”:
- White people are self-reliant;
- White people are independent and they highly value autonomy;
- White people use the Scientific Method, with objective rational linear thinking, cause-and-effect relationship and quantitative emphasis;
- White people delay gratification and follow rigid time schedules.
- White people believe the ideal social unit is the nuclear family of father, mother and 2.3 children;
- The children of white people have their own rooms and they are independent;
- White people believe hard work is the key to their success and they believe “work before play”;
- White people plan for the future by delaying gratification and they follow rigid time schedules.
Upon hearing this list, you would strongly suspect that you were listening to a white supremacist or that you had unwittingly stepped into a time warp that threw you back 200 years. Upon reminding yourself that this is actually the year 2020, you would conclude that this big corporation should be sued out of existence based on civil rights violations for creating a hostile work environment for its Black employees.
Unfortunately the source of these words and ideas [1] is a webpage of the National Museum of African American History & Culture [2], a Smithsonian museum supported by U.S. taxpayer [3]s. Here is separate image of the “Whiteness” infographic. [4]
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How does one even begin to articulate the many problems with these ideas? How should concerned people respond when false information is being used to divide us. What is the solution when a public museum dedicated to African American history mocks the words of Martin Luther King?
I write this article fully acknowledges that racist conduct can still be found in many places in 2020 and that this bigotry should be dealt with aggressively through civil rights laws and social condemnation. We must condemn all real instances of racism, but we must simultaneously question the foundational concept of “race” from which the possibility or racism sprouts. In short, anyone who wants to eviscerate racism needs to fight a two-front war. NMAAHC’s “Whiteness” page doubly fails to fight this two-front war on racism.
Advocating that we should treat people differently based on skin color (as NMAAHC is enthusiastically doing) is throwing gasoline on our racial fires. The “Whiteness” page is stunningly divisive and it is factually unhinged. I would no more expect NMAAHC to be teaching us to be racist than I would expect the American Museum of Natural History to be teaching us that the earth was created 6,000 years ago and that modern humans co-habited our planet with the dinosaurs.
It is demonstrably false [6] that people are born color-coded such that others can determine their personalities, habits and skills by noticing their skin color. That’s because immutable traits of individuals, such as skin color, do not determine personality, resilience, aesthetics, capacity for empathy, intelligence, aspirations, parenting skills or any of the other human traits discussed on the NMAAHC “Whiteness” webpage. Skin color doesn’t dictate content of character any more than the many other things over which we have no control, things such as eye color, hair color, whether we have six toes, our birth date or the types of bumps we have on our heads. Constricting the way we evaluate people by using an Overton Window [7] of black versus white uses the exact same flawed approach used by astrology [8] and phrenology [9], which also proclaim content of character by reference to equally irrelevant observations.
Many of the human traits listed on the museum’s website (“work before play” and “rational thinking”) are demonstrably not true of many “white” people. Many of these same traits are compellingly true of (and embraced as valuable by) many successful Blacks.
NMAAHC’s suggestion that we bifurcate people into “white” and “black” is based on an enormous falsehood. There is no meaningful way to distinguish who is white and who is black, [10] because we are all varying degrees of brown, we are all from Africa [11] (and see here [6]) and we are all interrelated. [12]Trying to determine who is more closely related to whom by physical appearance is often counter-intuitive: [6]
By analyzing the genes of present-day Africans, researchers have concluded that the Khoe-San, who now live in southern Africa, represent one of the oldest branches of the human family tree. The Pygmies of central Africa also have a very long history as a distinct group. What this means is that the deepest splits in the human family aren’t between what are usually thought of as different races—whites, say, or blacks or Asians or Native Americans. They’re between African populations such as the Khoe-San and the Pygmies, who spent tens of thousands of years separated from one another even before humans left Africa.
Nor is there any meaningful basis for declaring that there is any unified “white culture” or a unified “Black culture.” No people of any color all think the same. Not even close. No person has been authorized by all whites or all Blacks to speak on their behalf. Not even close. “Race” is a stunningly unscientific concept [6]. There is more genetic diversity within a “race” than between “races.” [13]. Further, “there is no homogeneous African race” and “there is more diversity in Africa than on all the other continents combined” (see graphic under this title here [6]) . As reported by National Geographic in an article titled, “There’s No Scientific Basis for Race—It’s a Made-Up Label,” [6]
[W]hen scientists set out to assemble the first complete human genome, which was a composite of several individuals, they deliberately gathered samples from people who self-identified as members of different races. In June 2000, when the results were announced at a White House ceremony, Craig Venter, a pioneer of DNA sequencing, observed, “The concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis.”
All of us are essentially the same in many hundreds of ways, [14] as anthropologist Donald Brown has pointed out in his 2017 book, Human Universals. [15] Dividing people into colors has proven so incredibly divisive through history that any anyone trotting out this false dichotomy yet again should be presumed to be either confused or having ill-motives. Yet here we have a national tax-funded museum actively trying to convince us that we are forever condemned to divide each other by “race” and, even worse, that we should divide each other by race. Perhaps this “Whiteness” webpage should be renamed: “Sartre’s No Exit.” [16]
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NMAAHC’s claims concerning “white people” fail the foundational principles of math, biology and the social sciences, but that is apparently OK because science and math (see the chart, above) are merely things that “white people” do. Those people at NASA are thus unduly stressed to the extent that they try so very hard to get their “white people” math so precisely correct. Perhaps they should consider ethnomathematics [18] next time they launch a rocket. And how unfortunate that so many Black women were forced to use “white people” math [19] to calculate rocket trajectories for NASA in the 1960’s. Truly, why is a national museum spending any time or energy suggesting that the many Blacks who have drawn accolades for their work in STEM fields [20] have been “acting white [21]“?
These are not abstract issues. This is the kind of thing that happens when we cease to study math as a rigorous yet universally applicable set of principles.”
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What is motivating NMAAHC’s decision to publish this page on “Whiteness”? NMAAHC’s ideas on “White Culture” stem from a newly re-energized movement called critical race theory., [23] which is also being promoted in many other places these days. By disparaging the things that “white people” do, by smearing the foundations for STEM (science, technology, engineering and math), this clears the way to make up new “facts” out of whole cloth for political purposes. To the extent that society adopts the NMAAHC approach, we will no longer need to deal with those pesky scientists and statisticians. We can make up our own “facts” whenever we make claims about “race,” policing, social science or anything else. To the extent that we can purge our classrooms of all of these “white” things painstakingly learned during The Enlightenment- [24]-things such as focusing on individuals over groups and the sovereignty of rigorous evidence-based reason–every claim of fact will become arguably as good as every other claim, and raw political power will be sucked into this intellectual vacuum to become the only real-world method “testing” what is true. Make no mistake: NMAAHC is advocating that we turn clocks back 400 years so that we can silence modern day Galileos. [25] This makes a mockery of education.
Who could possibly deliver this strange message of NMAAHC better than Robin DiAngelo, whose 22-minute video decorates this same NMAAHC webpage. DiAngelo’s lucrative career depends on A) convincing people that we should divide each other into Blacks and whites and [26] B) that the best way to get to know people is by our “colors,” not by a patient exploration and celebration of each others’ character, experience and accomplishments. DiAngelo’s idea that you can use skin color as a proxy for inner character is something we’ve seen somewhere before in earlier times, and I’m not referring to that classic work by Dr. Suess, The Sneetches, though it’s worth a pause to remember the lesson of the Sneetches. Essentially, a con artist comes to town to exploit a glaring weakness: the willingness of the citizens to act out of bigotry.
In the Dr. Seuss version, a con man (also known as the “Fix-it-Up Chappie”) charges the Sneetches lots of money to walk through his “star-on” and “star-off” machines. Because the Sneetches are vulnerable to obsessing about groups rather than individuals, they empty their wallets in their quests to become the superior in-group. Fix-it-Up Chappie’s endgame was to stir up bigotry in order to make a financial killing. Suess’ masterpiece ends with this:
Then, when every last cent
Of their Money was spent,
The Fix-it-Up Chappie packed up
And he Went.
Dr. Suess captured DiAngelo’s schtick perfectly. The sad irony is that DiAngelo’s followers are channeling people who advocated for a peculiar and demented approach to commerce hundreds of years ago. I’m referring to those people who claimed that it was OK to own other people. Admittedly, these are harsh words for the DiAngelo, but she has worked hard to deserve them. I have little patience for highly educated people who should know better than to instill self-loathing in many well-intentioned white people and to offer only “pitilessly dehumanizing condescension toward Black people.” [27]
NMAAHC embraces the concept of “anti-racism” on its “Whiteness” webpage, failing to acknowledge that “anti-racism” is not about being against racism. “Anti-racism” is racism. “Anti-racism encourages people to obsess about race all the time. To engage in “anti-racism” is to fall prey to the focussing illusion: “Nothing In Life Is As Important As You Think It Is, While You Are Thinking About It. [28]” Racism completely dominates the thought processes of the Woke because they refuse to allow themselves to consider the overwhelming complexity of human beings. Life is about thousands of things, most of which have nothing to do with race. “anti-racism” also ignores overwhelming evidence that in many parts of the world people of the various “races” share communities where they get along pretty damned well much of the time.
Woke Culture is spreading like a virus [29] and it hurts people by needlessly turning them against each other. It is disheartening to such an ignorant attack on science and unity on the NMAAHC “Whiteness” webpage. [1]The cure for racism is not more racism.
I took a screen shot of the NMAAHC “Whiteness” webpage [30] because I’m holding out hope that NMAAHC will soon realize that it was an inexcusable lapse in judgment to include such pernicious misinformation on its website. The Emperor Has No Clothes.
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