Glenn Loury: It is Our Country, Not Their Country

Glenn Loury raises many "unspeakable truths" in his talk. His conclusion:

As a black American intellectual who loves his country, I can say without equivocation in the year 2021 that the Fourth of July-- like Shakespeare like Balzac, like Einstein--is ours. It belongs to me every bit as much as it does to you.

The question confronting we black Americans today then is not whether we are included within the body politic of the United States of America. What a ridiculous question! We most emphatically and obviously are. Today's question is not how to end our oppression. Rather, it is "What shall we do with our freedom?" What will we make of the enormous inheritance that is our birthright: citizenship in history's greatest republic?

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Scientific American Publishes False Information, Recklessly Stoking the Culture Wars

Three alleged specialists in communications who wrote this article at Scientific American could not be bothered to look up the easily available text of a Wisconsin bill that they are falsely criticizing. This is deeply troubling. This is magazine that purports to celebrate science, yet this article, which has nothing to do with science, blatantly misrepresents the facts (the text of a Wisconsin) bill in order to score political points. Here's the false information:

A bill passed by the Wisconsin Assembly, for instance, bans any books, educational materials, or classroom discussions that include terms like “racial prejudice,” “patriarchy,” “structural inequality,” “intersectionality” or, ironically, “critical self-reflection.”

It only takes 5 minutes to read Wisconsin bill 411 and clearly and immediately know that none of the above claims are true.  Jesse Singal comments.

I'm not taking a position on the above Wisconsin bill. Rather, I'm criticizing well-educated people in high places who deceive others from their perches in order to feel better about themselves.

This is not the first time Scientific American has run off the rails on cultural issues. See here, here and here.

RIP Scientific American.  I used to read and admire you because you tried to get your facts right and you wrote about science.

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What Shall We Call Your Social Movement, [CRT]?

From Freddie Boer:

You know personally I’ve been achingly specific about my critiques of social justice politics, but fine - no woke, it’s a “dogwhistle” for racism. (The term “dogwhistle” is a way for people to simply impute attitudes you don’t hold onto you, to make it easier to dismiss criticism, for the record.) But the same people say there’s no such thing as political correctness, and they also say identity politics is a bigoted term. So I’m kind of at a loss. Also, they propose sweeping changes to K-12 curricula, but you can’t call it CRT, even though the curricular documents specifically reference CRT, and if you do you’re an idiot and also you’re a racist cryptofascist. Also nobody (nobody!) ever advocated for defunding the police, and if they did it didn’t actually mean defunding the police. Seems to be a real resistance to simple, comprehensible terms around here. . . . And for fuck’s sake, give me a simple term to use to address you. Please? Because right now it sure looks like you don’t want to be named because you don’t want to be criticized.

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The Relevant Divide is Mostly About Economic Class, not Race

Newsweek's Batya Ungar-Sargon, author of Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy, speaks with CNN's "Reliable Sources" about how the media covered the Virginia gubernatorial election.

We are hiding a class divide in America," she said. "We are hiding disgusting levels of income inequality in America. We are hiding the total dispossession of the working class of all races by focusing on a very highly specialized academic language about race.

Louis Gates, writing at the NYT in 2016:

The Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson calls the remarkable gains in black income “the most significant change” since Dr. King’s passing. When adjusted for inflation to 2014 dollars, the percentage of African-Americans making at least $75,000 more than doubled from 1970 to 2014, to 21 percent. Those making $100,000 or more nearly quadrupled, to 13 percent (in contrast, white Americans saw a less impressive increase, from 11 to 26 percent). Du Bois’s “talented 10th” has become the “prosperous 13 percent.”

But, Dr. Wilson is quick to note, the percentage of Black America with income below $15,000 declined by only four percentage points, to 22 percent.

In other words, there are really two nations within Black America. The problem of income inequality, Dr. Wilson concludes, is not between Black America and White America but between black haves and have-nots, something we don’t often discuss in public in an era dominated by a narrative of fear and failure and the claim that racism impacts 42 million people in all the same ways.

More statistics from a 2016 NYT article: "Class Is Now a Stronger Predictor of Well-Being Than Race"

Here’s a true statement: America’s historical mistreatment of blacks was uniquely evil and continues to depress the fortunes of African-Americans. Here’s another true statement: Class has become a stronger predictor of wellbeing than race. . . .

Social class “is the single factor with the most influence on how ready" a child is to learn when they start kindergarten, according to the liberal Economic Policy Institute. Low-income white kids score considerably lower in reading and math skills than middle-class white kids. Add race to the mix, and class still remains the Great Divide when it comes to school readiness.

America has hurt blacks grievously; their progress remains dismally slow. But working-class whites are in free fall. The educational achievement gap is now almost two times higher between lower and higher income students than it is between black and white students. That’s a big change from the past: In 1970, the race gap in achievement was more than one and a half times higher than the class gap. Since then, says Stanford University’s Sean Reardon, the class gap has grown by 30 to 40 percent, and become the most potent predictor of school success.

While single parent families are far more common among African-Americans than whites, less educated whites — who also tend to be lower income — are seeing an unprecedented dissolution of their families. Seventy percent of whites without a high school degree were part of an intact nuclear family in 1972; that number plummeted to 36 percent by 2008. (The comparable numbers for blacks were 54 percent and 21 percent.)

One more set of statistics regarding income of blacks (from Wikipedia).

27.3% of black households earned an income between $25,000 and $50,000, 15.2% earned between $50,000 and $75,000, 7.6% earned between $75,000 and $100,000, and 9.4% earned more than $100,000.

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Sizing up Diversity Training: Is it Education or is it Indoctrination?

At Counterweight, Chuck Almdale has offered a thoughtful list of ten warning signs in his article at Counterweight: "Ten Signs your Diversity Training Session is CSJ Indoctrination."

Here are the titles to the ten warning signs:

1. It’s mandatory.

2. “Listen with curiosity, without judgment.”

3. “Check your privilege.”

4. “How do you identify?”

5. “What are your pronouns?”

6. Black Allyship.

7. No humor.

8. Shaming for disagreement or critical questions.

9. Diversity of race, gender and ethnicity but not of thought or speech.

10. New terms, rarely supported or defined.

Here's an excerpt on point 8:

Questions are permitted only to increase your shame and acquiescence to their program, as in “How do I stop behaving as a privileged white woman?” Critical questions about their statements or behavior are not permitted. They’ll say, “You’re pulling a power play”—trying to resist them, trying to influence others, subverting the training, and your disagreement proves your racism, that you are “on the wrong side of history”; the future belongs to the Woke. Want to belong? “Do the Work.”

Don’t believe them if they say that the “still, small voice” of your inner self is your White Fragility, panicking at vanishing. If they succeed at inhibiting that voice, your psychological recovery from Wokeness becomes very difficult, as some psychological therapists and others have discovered. Psychotherapist Seerut K. Chawla, practicing in London, dislikes Wokeness for the damage it has caused to many of her patients. Mike Brooks writes in Psychology Today about how Woke shaming destroys compassion. Also in Psychology Today Rupert W Nacoste writes that name-calling is bigotry, not social justice. The pressure to conform from facilitators and other trainees can be overwhelming. Your ounce of resistance is worth a pound of cure. Resist. Question. Tell a joke. Humor subverts Wokeness. One voice of resistance can unleash a chorus of support.

I would add the following. If you are forced to attend such an indoctrination session, go in knowing that you are going to make a lot of people irritated by committing the sin of being honest.  You will be called names and you will be shamed.  You will survive and live another day.  In the middle of the shamefest remember that Martin Luther King put up with abuse a thousand times worse for a period of decades.  Talk loud, hold your head high and know that there are a lot of quiet people in that room who are proud of you and relieved that you are speaking up.

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