Babygate: Where People Allow Skin Color to Interfere with Basic Human Kindness

Have you heard about "Babygate"? The crux of the problem is that a white man affectionately held a Black friend's Black baby on his lap, at the friends's request during a meeting of the NYC Community Education Council. Members of the Council complained, indicating that this was "harmful" and that it "hurts people." The formal written accusation contained the following:

The letter characterized the lap incident as harmful: “Imagine the insult and emotional injury any thinking person, especially a person of color, suffered when they witnessed this scene and heard that comment,” it stated, calling them “shocking, disgusting, offensive, and racially incendiary.” It demanded that Wrocklage resign, claiming that allowing such incidents to continue without consequences “will only further empower the perpetuation of similar racist behaviors.

When the man who held the baby was called out, he challenged the accusers to state why this was racist. The accusers could not explain why this was racist. They told him that he needed to read Robin DiAngelo. This incident illustrates how crazed we are getting. "Anti-racist" ideology is has successfully turned innocent human kindness into a bad thing.

This recent incident and its aftermath were described in detail, then analyzed by Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic in an article titled "Anti-racist Arguments Are Tearing People Apart: What a viral story reveals about contemporary leftist discourse." An excerpt:

Folks who have different ideas about how to combat racism should engage one another. They might even attempt a reciprocal book exchange, in which everyone works to understand how others see the world. A more inclusive anti-racist canon would include Bayard Rustin, Albert Murray, Henry Louis Gates, Zadie Smith, Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, Danielle Allen, Randall Kennedy, Stephen Carter, John McWhorter, Glenn Loury, Barbara and Karen Fields, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Adolph Reed, Kmele Foster, Coleman Hughes, and others.

As long as sharp disagreements persist about what causes racial inequality and how best to remedy it, deliberations rooted in the specific costs and benefits of discrete policies will provide a better foundation for actual progress than meta-arguments about what “anti-racism” demands.

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Private Thought, Public Talk

Tweet from Bo Winegard:

This public/private divide in honest communications is ubiquitous in the outside world too. If only we could force everyone to install devices on their heads that would, at random times throughout the day, broadcast their actual thoughts. We would take extra pains to make all people wear these devices in churches, political gatherings and wherever people feel pressure to please their in-groups.  Doing this would be revolutionary in our hypocrisy-permeated world. Mind-blowingly revolutionary. If we made people wear these devices for even a month this would train us to say what we are actually thinking and to clearly admit when we don't actually know things.

OK, yes. It this would also cause serious chaos as our hidden romantic/sexual secrets are made public at inopportune random times. This thought experiment is a work in progress . . .

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Meanwhile, in Portland, Oregon, Violence Continues

Violence on the street every night in Portland, Oregon, despite the departure of federal law enforcement two weeks ago. The senseless destruction and violence is described in detail by the Washington Post. Here's an excerpt:

The weeks of destruction and intense clashes with police following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in late May have spurred angry backlash from Portland officials and some residents. Tensions have risen in recent weeks following a period of relative calm after federal law enforcement left Portland last month. . . . Tuesday night’s fire damaged important county resources that have nothing to do with policing, officials said, including the county’s Office of Community Involvement, which aims to engage historically marginalized communities in local political decisions about social services and the distribution of public resources.

“The lobby where the first same-sex marriage in Oregon took place, and where millions of pieces of personal protective equipment are being distributed to help our community battle covid-19, was damaged,” Multnomah County Chair Deborah Kafoury said in a statement.

Total silence from the New York Times for two weeks. Nothing from NPR for the past 10 days. It's like Portland doesn't exist . . . or perhaps these stories don't fit the official narrative.

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Concern with Obesity, Fat-Shaming and Racism

People who don't know me well sometimes assume that it's easy for me to keep my weight down.  This is completely untrue.  I constantly watch what I eat. I constantly force myself to exercise and I make myself get on the scale several times each week.  If I don't do these things I will gain 2 or 3 pounds per month.  I've repeatedly and unwittingly run the experiment of not paying attention to my weight during my life. Each time I fall off the rails, I have had to call a stop to the nonsense and declare war on my fat. Over the past 30 years, this has led me to begin ever new rounds of weight loss boot camp (on my own, at home) where I've worked hard to lose 35, 20, and 20 pounds, as well as various smaller amounts of weight. I'm currently in yet another (minor) boot camp that will end when I lose 5 more pounds. This is my plight, my burden and my opportunity if I am going to maintain a body that  feels good and fits my clothes. I also want to avoid risks of diabetes, cancer, heart disease, strokes and other illnesses associated with excess weight.

Whenever I find out that friends are trying to reduce their size, I encourage them and celebrate their successes with them. I silently applaud when I see obese people I don't know exercising at the park  Good for them! I hope they reach their goals!

Increasingly, however, the excesses of the "body positivity" movement invade my thought process, occasionally making me do mental double-takes. Body positivity is a double-edged sword:

On the one hand, body positivity—the attitude associated with the movement—aims to try to help overweight and obese people (especially women—see also, fat feminism—and sometimes, when intersectionally analyzed, specifically black women) accept themselves and their overweight status as they are so that negative emotions are not tied up with it. This, of course, has the direct benefit of helping people not feel bad about themselves for a state of facts about the world (weight, BMI, body fat percentage, etc.), which can be demotivating and hinder weight loss attempts (or, which can just be mean and bullying—see also, fat shaming).

On the other hand, body positivity tends to rather aggressively deny any connection between weight status, including obesity, and health (see also, healthism). It rejects such connections as a “medicalized narrative” (see also, regulatory fiction). This rejects mountains of medical evidence suggesting otherwise, that being overweight and especially obese correlates strongly with and causes a number of serious health issues. This view relies upon seeing body weight status and obesity ultimately as a social construction that is used to create an unjust power dynamic that discriminates against and oppresses fat people. Activism in the body-positive movement often encourages overweight people not to want to lose weight (sometimes as a means of identity politics—see also, identity-first), which is irresponsible, at best (e.g., a book in the movement is titled You Have the Right to Remain Fat).

I agree with the benefits of body positivity described above.  Overweight people should not be shamed.  They should not be shunned.  Doing these things is cruel and destructive.  We should recognize every other person to be a precious human being. It all starts with I and Thou, Martin Buber's version of the golden rule.

That said, how can it possibly be bigoted when I work hard to be healthy and look better by losing weight. How can I possibly be acting out of bigotry to the extent that I encourage others to reach their weight loss goals?  It's not.  For background, see this article on Woke attitudes toward obesity at New Discourses. This is shut-up ("Woke") culture doing what it does best: halting important and necessary conversations under the guise of combating alleged discrimination. Today's excess is an article by CBS featuring a sociology professor who claims that concern with obesity is veiled racism.

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