Here is another chapter in this series of how to be a human animal. This is Chapter 25, which is a nice time to stop and invite a guest, so to speak. I want to feature musician Daryl Davis, who is one of my heroes. You'll find a more detailed version of his story here. A few days ago, Daryl appeared on Joe Rogan's show. Here is an excerpt from the conversation, where Daryl lists five things every human being seeks, no matter who they are and no matter what they look like:
Joe Rogan:
You're a brilliant musician. And you have personally converted a number -- more than 200 -- Ku Klux Klan members, Neo Nazis. I mean, we talked about these guys giving you their their clan outfits and retiring because they met you. And just because you had reasonable conversations and made them realize how stupid these ideologies are that they had somehow or another been captivated by,
Daryl Davis:
I mean, at the end of the day, you know, a missed opportunity for dialogue is a missed opportunity for conflict resolution. It's as simple as that. But it's not just having a dialogue or a conversation or debate. It's the way that we communicate that makes it effective. For example, I've been to 61 countries on six continents I've played in all 50 states. All that is to say that I've been exposed to a multitude of skin colors, ethnicities, religions, cultures, ideologies, etc. And all of that has shaped who I've become.
Now, all that travel does not make me a better human being than somebody else. It just gives me a better perspective of the mass of humanity. And what I've learned is that no matter how far I've gone from our own country, right next door to Canada or Mexico, or halfway around the globe, no matter how different the people I encounter may be--they don't look like me, they don't speak my language, they don't worship as I do, or whatever. I always conclude, at the end of the day, that we all are human beings. And as such, we all want the same five core values in our lives. Everybody wants to be loved. Everybody wants to be respected. Everybody wants to be heard. We all want to be treated fairly. And we all basically want the same things for our family as anybody else wants for their family.
And if we learn to apply those five core values, when we find ourselves in an adversarial situation, or a culture or society in which we're unfamiliar, I can guarantee you that the navigation will be a lot more smoother.
In our latest video, FAIR’s Dana Stangel-Plowe discusses the issues surrounding a new academic theory called “Culturally Responsive Education.” While intended to connect students with their educational material on a deep level, Stangel-Plowe explains how this new method achieves the opposite by assuming people who superficially look like one another must also think like one another.
[T]he idea of providing kids books that feature characters who look like them feels intuitive as a way to connect them to the material; but building curriculum around students’ skin color, ancestry, or gender raises serious questions about the very purpose of education in our diverse and pluralistic nation.
By making assumptions about what will engage students based on race or immutable traits, CRE is racist. The idea that all people who share the same group identity would also share the same interests, experiences, or beliefs is reductive and demeaning to the unique human beings in that group.
Despite what some of its proponents would have us believe, CRE is much more than simply a framework for student-centered learning and a celebration of different cultures and cultural ways of knowing. CRE’s focus on “power dynamics,” “social change,” “liberation,” and “equitable outcomes” plainly reveal that critical pedagogy is baked into CRE. Critical pedagogy, popularized by Paolo Freire, is the Marxism-derived school of critical theory applied to education. Thus, it designates K-12 classrooms as the place to start a revolution to dismantle the dominant power structures—meaning our current systems of liberal democracy. Critical pedagogy is explicitly a political ideology—similar to other illiberal ideologies that focus on “liberation” and seek equality of outcomes—aiming to turn students into revolutionary activists.
With CRE becoming widespread, we must consider: Is there a better way to leverage student engagement for success across cultures? And, most importantly, how do we ensure that all students, regardless of their group identities, become “classroom insiders” without dehumanizing them or flattening them into stereotypes—and without replacing learning with activism?
It seems that we are mastering the art of slicing and dicing people culturally in much the same way that Google, Facebook and Amazon are using Billy Ball analytics on their customer bases. I see no problem categorizing people by their interests, such as knitting, pickle ball or art. The problem is with dividing people by irrelevant categories, such as the way they look or (often) the place where they were born. CRE assumes that people are "stuck" in these irrelevant categories and they they want more and more of the same. As Stangle-Plowe states, this is insulting and destructive. I'm proud to say that I am constantly learning many wonderful things from people who look different than me. I'm also proud to say that I don't obsess over what a person looks like. CLE is a well-meaning but destructive to the American Dream that we are one people who can work and play together. E pluribus unum.
Evaluating people based on superficial characteristics is inaccurate and lazy. We need to avoid all miscategorizations, of course. Because people are extremely complex, it makes no sense to judge them on "race," sex or national origin any more than it would to determine who they are based on astrology.
Our cultural dysfunction based on insanely off-target miscategorizations needs to be cut off at the root, as suggested by Sheena Mason:
a nonpartisan organization dedicated to advancing civil rights and liberties for all Americans, and promoting a common culture based on fairness, understanding and humanity.
Based on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Principles of Nonviolence
Exercise Moral Courage. Telling the truth is a way of life for courageous people. Peaceful change cannot happen without a commitment to the truth.
Build Bridges. We seek to win friendship and gain understanding. The result of our movement is redemption and reconciliation.
Defeat Injustice, Not People. We recognize that those who are intolerant and seek to oppress others are also human, and are not evil people. We seek to defeat evil, not people.
Don’t Take the Bait. Suffering can educate and transform. We will not retaliate when attacked, physically or otherwise. We will meet hate and anger with compassion and kindness.
Choose Love, Not Hate. We seek to resist violence of the spirit as well as the body. We believe in the power of love.
Trust in Justice. We trust that the universe is on the side of justice. The nonviolent resister has deep faith that justice will eventually win.
Tackling taboos is difficult, but necessary. Very often— MOST often— they are used not to shield strong and valid ideas from pointless attacks, but rather to protect weak ones from worthwhile criticism.
Reilly's statistics-rich discussion is now featured on FAIR's website: His article is titled, "The Broken Mirror: Media Narrative vs. Reality." The "news media" that leans politically to the Left is forcefully pushing a media is making people on the political Left unnecessarily angry (against police officers), but it should be making all of us angry (about the divisive narrative being pushed). Here is an excerpt:
In the representative year of 2018, inter-racial violent crime involving blacks and whites made up approximately 3 percent of all serious crime: there were only about 600,000 victim-reported incidents involving a black perpetrator and a white victim, or vice-versa, out of more than 20,000,000 total crimes. Further, of the violent inter-racial crime that does occur, more than 80 percent of reported incidents involved a black perpetrator and a white victim. The data tables in the 2018 Bureau of Justice Statistics Report include more than 500,000 black-on-white violent incidents, but well under 100,000 violent crimes that were white-on-black. While this finding is not necessarily surprising—there are far more whites than blacks, and whites, on average, have more money to be stolen—it would likely come as a shock to most upper-middle class Americans. As would another piece of data: according to the Washington Post, the total number of unarmed black men killed by police during the most recent year on record (2020) was not 10,000, or 1,000, but 17. That bears spelling out: in the year where America was supposedly inundated with white supremacist violence, where America was in the grips of a “racial reckoning” that included, in no small part, the acknowledgement of the “state-sanctioned murder” of young black men, only SEVENTEEN unarmed black men died at the hands of police officers.
This data leads us to an obvious question: why do so many smart people believe inter-ethnic violence is so much worse than it is? . . .Basic data about inter-racial violence often seem not merely ignored by mainstream media sources, but actively misrepresented.
In Taboo, I point out that about 75 percent of individuals fatally shot by police in a typical year are Caucasian whites or Hispanics. However, national media outlets devote less than 20 percent of their police violence coverage to these cases. A Google search for “well-known police shooting,” conducted in 2020 in connection with the book, turned up articles which covered two police shootings of Latinos, four police shootings of whites, and 36 police shootings of blacks. This level of over-representation of black victims in coverage (2,400 percent) could hardly be the result of anything but very conscious choice—and respected social scientists like John Lott have argued empirically that media treatment of a range of issues, from political extremism to mass shootings, follows a similar troubling pattern.
I'm not going to pretend that I could add anything to Reilly's detailed analysis, but reading his article did cause me to wonder whether part of the media strategy was to stir up conflict and hate, thereby selling ads and rewarding loyal followers. As I read Reilly's statistics, I can't help but think of Matt Taibbi's book, Hate, Inc., in which he argues "that what most people think of as 'the news' is, in fact, a twisted wing of the entertainment business.
In order for our country to truly address the vestiges of racism that still exist, it’s essential that the media provide a clear and honest picture of racial relations in contemporary America.
Do you agree with the Black way of seeing the world? Oh . . . wait a minute. There is not one "Black" way of seeing the world and this is one of my biggest problems with modern social justice/CRT rhetoric. This video illustrates the how misguided it is to try to shove people into ideological or political silos based upon immutable physical characteristics.
There is no evidence that Joe Rogan has ever used the N-Word as a racial slur. He has discussed the word and joked about the word, but there is no evidence he has ever used the word as a racial epithet.
CNN hires writers who refuse to acknowledge the use/mention distinction. It's a very bad thing to use the N-Word as a racial slur. There are valid and admirable reasons for mentioning the full N-Word. For instance, professors should be admired for mentioning the N-Word when teaching the brutal and despicable history of American slavery. Or when discussing language or culture. CNN must certainly understand this distinction between using a word and mentioning it, but acknowledging this very basic thing doesn't fit CNN's mission: dismantling Joe Rogan's big audience by pandering to CNN's increasingly woke but numerically dwindling audience. Many have suggested that CNN is doing this out of jealousy, given CNN's paltry audience numbers.
Or maybe CNN finds it much easier to attack Rogan for something trivial than to do the hard work of reporting real news, something CNN used to do.
Here's Coleman's tweet. I agree entirely with this sentiment and I enjoyed the entire thread of comments. Use of the N-Word as a racial slur is (and should be) socially and morally abhorrent. Mentioning the N-Word where it is not being hurled as a slur should not a big deal, but it is a big deal to those who believe in religious taboos. CNN apparently believes that the N-Word is like the word "V------." OK, I'll actually risk death by writing it out: Valdmort.
For an in-depth, riveting and enjoyable discussion of the use of the N-Word through U.S. history, consider reading linguist John McWhorter's excellent book, Nine Nasty Words (2021). Here is the description from Penguin's website:
One of the preeminent linguists of our time examines the realms of language that are considered shocking and taboo in order to understand what imbues curse words with such power–and why we love them so much.
Profanity has always been a deliciously vibrant part of our lexicon, an integral part of being human. In fact, our ability to curse comes from a different part of the brain than other parts of speech–the urgency with which we say “f&*k!” is instead related to the instinct that tells us to flee from danger.
Language evolves with time, and so does what we consider profane or unspeakable. Nine Nasty Words is a rollicking examination of profanity, explored from every angle: historical, sociological, political, linguistic. In a particularly coarse moment, when the public discourse is shaped in part by once-shocking words, nothing could be timelier.
BTW, I highly recommend the podcast of Coleman Hughes. He seems entirely too young to be as wise as he is on so many topics. Check him out!
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perspective of the mass of humanity. And what I've learned is that no matter how far I've gone from our own country, right next door to Canada or Mexico, or halfway around the globe, no matter how different the people I encounter may be--they don't look like me, they don't speak my language, they don't worship as I do, or whatever. I always conclude, at the end of the day, that we all are human beings. And as such, we all want the same five core values in our lives. Everybody wants to be loved. Everybody wants to be respected. Everybody wants to be heard. We all want to be treated fairly. And we all basically want the same things for our family as anybody else wants for their family.
