The New York Times Finally Wakes Up to the Dangers and Dysfunctions of Wokeness

After a long deep sleep, the NYT is finally starting to acknowledge the dysfunctions and dangers of Critical Race Theory. Or maybe I’m being too charitable. This has been a newspaper in deep denial, paralyzed by the fear of being called names by hostile people who mislabel themselves as “liberal” and who falsely claim to have solutions to “racism.”  I’ve been reading and writing about these dangers for the past year, yet this is only the second article I’ve seen by the NYT that acknowledges obvious dysfunction in many of our colleges (the other was last week’s article about Smith College). Here’s an excerpt from Brett Stephens Op-Ed, “Smith College and the Failing Liberal Bargain: Absolution is off the table. And liberal ideals themselves are up for renegotiation”: 

Why is it that racial tensions keep boiling over at some of the nation’s most emphatically progressive-minded institutions, whether it’s at Smith, Yale, Northwestern, Bryn Mawr or the Dalton School? Why does the embrace of social justice pedagogies seem to have gone hand in hand with deteriorating race relations on campus?

One answer is that if many students are enjoying a diet of courses on critical race theory, and employees are trained on the fine points of microaggressions, they might take to heart what they are taught and notice what they have been trained to see.
Another answer is that if those who report being offended gain sympathy, attention and even celebrity, more accusations may be reported. . . .

In place of former notions of fairness toward individuals regardless of race, the Woke left has new ideas of “restorative justice” for racial groups. In place of traditional commitments to free speech, it has new proscriptions on hate speech. In place of the liberal left’s past devotion to facts, it demands new respect for feelings.

All of this has left many of the traditional gatekeepers of liberal institutions uncertain, timid and, in many cases, quietly outraged. This is not the deal they thought they struck. But it’s the deal they’re going to get until they recover the courage of their liberal convictions.”

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Erich Vieth

Erich Vieth is an attorney focusing on civil rights (including First Amendment), consumer law litigation and appellate practice. At this website often writes about censorship, corporate news media corruption and cognitive science. He is also a working musician, artist and a writer, having founded Dangerous Intersection in 2006. Erich lives in St. Louis, Missouri with his two daughters.

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    Erich Vieth March 2, 2021 Reply

    From “Should I Get Canceled for Telling the Emperor He Has No Clothes On?”:

    On the other hand, the experience I have had in America regarding ethnic studies has been the opposite, in that differences based on race and ethnicity are elevated as overarching factors of group identities, power, and privilege. But it is ironically similar to my experience in China because political indoctrination also plays an important role in streamlining American ethnic studies. The sweeping movement to institutionalize ethnic studies in California is a prime example of both racial tribalism and political indoctrination.

    The current form of ethnic studies in California, the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC), stokes racial divisions and animosity by subjugating our society to a binary, race-based lens and by perverting our nation’s complex history with a narrow framework of identity politics. Racial balkanization, the toxic practice of separating individuals into hostile racial boxes, has fueled this paradigm. Marxism is also referenced here, not to inspire collectivization of all ethnicities to serve “proletariat” governance, but to exaggerate disparities for a clear-cut, race-based “oppressor-victim” dichotomy.

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