Life in a Woke Upscale Progressive Private School

How are things going in one upscale private progressive school in NY for the children of a Jewish woman and her Black husband?  This is an excerpt from "My Kids and Their Elite Education in Racism: How Rye Country Day School reflects the madness of our times," by Naomi Schaefer Riley:

I fear that the message currently emanating from teachers and administrators and politicians and pundits will harm [ ] relationships. The new anti-racism, with its endless cycles of victimization and demands for reparations—as opposed to the model of teaching people to aspire to colorblindness and providing everyone with equal opportunity—requires all of us (and children in particular) to see race all the time. This new model will turn what would otherwise be ordinary, healthy relationships—friendships, even—into dramas with racially defined roles for all the characters.

The good people of my community and others around the country are told that no matter how welcoming they are, how well they treat others, there is nothing they can do to make up for systemic racism. Will they begin to fret over every interaction, fearing that they could say or do the wrong thing? . . .

I worry that the message is already trickling down. Advice columns in recent years have featured parents asking whether it’s okay for them to adopt children of another race, or whether people can ever truly understand someone of another race enough to marry that person, or whether it wouldn’t be easier for same-sex couples to use the white partner’s egg so as not to have the insurmountable task of handling a black child. Could white supremacists of 50 years ago have dared to dream of such attitudes among people who call themselves liberals?

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Jonathan Haidt Discusses Two Versions of Identity Politics: “Common Enemy Politics” and “Common Humanity”

I've followed Social Psychologist Jonathan Haidt closely for many years (as you can see by searching for his name at DI). He is the author of several excellent books, including The Happiness Hypothesis, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion and The Coddling of the American Mind. Haidt's thought process crosscuts the prevailing two wings of political thought in the United States. In this extended interview with Joe Rogan, Haidt dissects many topics, including identity politics. He urges that this phrase encompasses two separate approaches, "Common Enemy Politics" and "Common Humanity."

Haidt also distinguishes between two prevalent types of conversations, two types of "games" being played that often make conversations frustrating. Many of us insist upon playing the "truth seeking game," while others play a game that assumes a Manichean battle where A) no one gains except at the expense of someone else, B) where people are not seen as individuals but a members of groups, and C) you can tell who someone is merely by their appearance. Much of the fruitless dialogue on social media and elsewhere makes a lot more sense once we realize that these two approaches have virtually nothing in common--they serve entirely different purposes. Just because we exchange words does not mean we are, in any meaningful way, communicating.

I'm strongly in agreement with Haidt's analysis.

Haid's distinction parallels David Sloan Wilson's distinction between science-oriented "factual realism" and group-survival-oriented "practical realism."

In addition to embedding the video of the interview, I invested some time to create a transcript of several sections of this interview, from about Min. 33 - 55. I have cleaned up the wording to omit throat-clearings and false starts, but I have worked hard to be true to the substance of the conversation.

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Haidt – Rogan Interview

33:18 JH: You have to look at different games being played. Yale was a place that taught me to think in lots of different ways and it was constantly blowing my mind when I took my first economics course. It was like wow, here's a new pair of spectacles that I can put on and suddenly I see all these prices and supply. I never learned to think that way, where I learned about Freud in psychology or sociology. A good education is one that lets you look at our complicated world through multiple perspectives. That makes you smart. That's what a liberal arts education should do. But what I see increasingly happening, especially at elite schools, is the dominance of a single story, and that single story is life is a battle between good people and evil people, or rather good groups and evil groups, and it's a zero-sum game. So if the bad groups have more, it's because they took it from the good groups, so the point of everything is to fight the bad groups. Bring them down create equality and this is a terrible way to think in a free society. That might have worked you know in biblical days when you got the Moabites killing the Jebusites or whatever, but you know we live in an era in which we've discovered that that the pie can be grown a million-fold. So to teach students to see society as a zero-sum competition between groups is primitive and destructive.

34:22 JR: In your book, you actually identify the moment where these micro aggressions made their appearance and they were initially a racist thing.

JH: Yeah. The idea of a micro aggression really becomes popular in a 2007 article by Derald Wing Sue at Teachers College. He talks about this concept of microaggressions. There are two things that are good about the concept, that are useful. One is that explicit racism has clearly gone down--by any measure explicit racism is plummeted in American across the West—but there could still be subtle or veiled a racism.

37:27 JR It's ultimately for everyone's sake, I mean, even for the sake of the people that are embroiled in all this controversy and chaos. It would be fantastic across the board if there was no more sexism, there was no more racism, there was no more any of these things. It would be wonderful. Then we could just start treating humans as just humans. Like this is just who you are you're just a person. No one cares. What a wonderful world we would live in if this was no longer an issue at all.

JH: Beautifully put.

JR: How does that get through?

38:01 JH: We were getting there, okay? That's what the twentieth century was. We were shaped by the late 20th century. The late 20th century was a time in America in which, you know, earlier on there was all kinds of prejudice. I mean, when I was born, just right before you were born, it was legal to say you can't eat here because you're Black and so that changed in 1964-65. But it used to be that we had legal differentiations by race and then those were knocked down. But we still had social [discrimination] and it used to be that if you were gay that was something humiliating. It had to be hidden. If you look at where we were in 1960 or ’63, when I was born and then you look at where we got by 2000, the progress is fantastic on every front, so that's all I mean when I say we were moving in that direction.

Continue ReadingJonathan Haidt Discusses Two Versions of Identity Politics: “Common Enemy Politics” and “Common Humanity”

How to Become an Award-Winning Woke Researcher Overnight, and Why this is a Terrible Thing for Civil Rights in America.

How to become an award-winning Woke all-star author instantly, and why the success of this pranking-seeming project is a terrible thing for civil rights in America. Special Honor to physicist Alan Sokal for pioneering this approach to pouring sunshine on nonsense. James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose did the hard work to make this happen.

Continue ReadingHow to Become an Award-Winning Woke Researcher Overnight, and Why this is a Terrible Thing for Civil Rights in America.

Brett Weinstein’s Podcast Hosts Roundtable of Black Writers and Intellectuals

Based on the protests raging on the streets, one might mistakenly think that there is only Black viewpoint and that it is represented by the purported political aims of Black Lives Matter.

Brett Weinstein is an evolutionary biologist who, on his DarkHorse Podcast, has made a habit of doing deep dives into thorny topics. On this episode, Weinstein hosts a roundtable with seven highly accomplished Black writers and intellectuals. If you like good-natured self-critical discussions where the facts matter and where the participants actively seek to learn from each other, you are going to find this two-hour discussion fascinating. I found myself taking notes throughout and having my faith in humanity restored as this lively discussion unfolded.

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Blind Orchestra Auditions Alleged to Be Unfair Based Purely on Optics

I'll open this article with a tweet by "The Science Femme, Woman in STEM":

Blind auditions were introduced in order to focus on talent, not what a musician looks like. In his book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell celebrates blind auditions:

The world of classical music – particularly in its European home – was until very recently the preserve of white men…But over the past few decades, the classical music world has undergone a revolution…Many musicians thought that conductors were abusing their power and playing favorites. They wanted the audition process to be formalized…Musicians were identified not by name but by number. Screens were erected between the committee and the auditioner, and if the person auditioning cleared his or her throat or made any kind of identifiable sound…they were ushered out and given a new number. And as these new rules were put in place around the country, an extraordinary thing happened: orchestras began to hire women. [pp. 249-250]

Musician and educator James Boldin concurs."The ability of even highly trained musicians to make split-second evaluations of a player’s skill is compromised [by the way they look]."

In the referenced NYT article dated July 15, 2020, writer Anthony Tommasini urges that blind auditions are not fair ("The status quo is not working"), because (he argues) there are not enough Blacks playing for major orchestras. It is stunning that Tommasini makes this allegation of impropriety without offering any statistics showing the extent to which Blacks listen to classical music while growing up, the extent to which they aspire to be classical musicians or the extent to which they apply to and graduate from classical music programs. Why has he failed to tell us the extent to which Blacks aspire to be classical musicians?  These numbers (which I haven't been able to track down) bear strongly on what I think about Tommasini's numberless conclusions.  If Blacks, as a percentage of the population, are less interested in classical music, the small numbers of Blacks in major orchestras might reflect that lack of interest in classical music, not anything nefarious.

Tommasini argues "over the past century of increasingly professionalized training, there has come to be remarkably little difference between players at the top tier."  He is arguing that there is so little difference among the musicians in the top tier that they are all good and there is thus no need for auditions. Apparently, according to Tommasini, orchestras should should simply assemble the musicians that are merely passable, then completely dispense with the meritocracy.

American culture is at an intense impasse. Many of us strongly believe that professions ought to be staffed by those who are best at doing the tasks demanded by the profession. Most of us want the best possible surgeon operating on our children and we want the best pilots flying our airplanes.  Increasingly, however, other people are making arguments that there is something wrong with any profession where the practitioners are not representative of society as a whole. They argue that bad optics constitute a prima facie case of unfairness.  I strongly disagree with the latter viewpoint unless it can be shown that participants are being excluded because because of the way they look.

When I attend classical concerts (I attend about one per year), I notice that the percentage of Asian musicians is much bigger than the general population of the U.S.  I assume that Asians* are "overrepresented" because they have more interest in classical music than the population at large.  This article from 2012 sets forth the numbers offered by Slate:

Asians make up just over 4 percent of the U.S. population, but 7 percent of U.S. orchestra musicians are Asian, and the figure rises to 20 percent for top orchestras such as the New York Philharmonic. At the elite Julliard School for music, one in five undergraduates—and one in three Ph.D. students—is Asian.

I have never seen any evidence that there is a pro-Asian hiring bias by orchestras.  I assume that Asian musicians excel at blind auditions because they make better-sounding classical music according to the people who hire classical musicians.

Why did Tommasini fail to interview those who hire musicians for major orchestras as part of his article?  Is it possible that those who do the hiring would A) argue that even at the highest levels of performance, there are noticeable differences in music quality among professional musicians, and B) they support blind auditions because this allows them to hire solely on the quality of the music?  I wonder even more, why would a person who hires musicians for a professional orchestra consider stepping into the current maelstrom of Wokeness in which Tommasini indulges by stating, on the record, that they hire the best musicians blindly, thereby putting targets on their backs for attacks based on implied or institutional racism? What would those who hire classical musicians have to gain by contributing to this type of article, which declares unfairness without considering extent of interest in classical music by the various demographic groups? Without this information, this type of article written by Tommasini is a cheap shot based upon innumeracy (or worse) and one-sided evidence.

I choose my own music based on sound. I rarely know what the instrumentalists look like when I listen to new music on internet "radio."  I like what I like and I could care less what the musicians look like. Blind auditions sound like a good idea for me because I do it all the time when I hear new music and then make an intuitive judgment as to whether I like that music.

I believe that the NYT needs to be avoid assuming that there is something wrong just because membership in a profession doesn't reflect the population at large. This argument, which is increasingly putting the focus on every profession, and which claims that every profession and college class must be representative is growing into an obsession these days. Where else should we apply it?  Is there something wrong when those who are gospel choir singers, professional football and basketball players, jazz musicians and hip hop musicians lack the proportion of whites (or Asians) that one finds in the general population?  The logic applied by the NYT article is the same logic that would conclude that police officers are sexist because 73% of people arrested in the U.S. are men. Men are arrested more often because then commit more crimes than women.  Why aren't there more men teaching kindergarten?  Why are there not more women car mechanics?  Why are only 43% of college students men? It is not surprising that demographics of every group don't represent the U.S. population at large.

I applaud organizations that take a special interest in offering education and training to Blacks who aspire to become professional classical musicians. It would be great if everyone who is interested in classical music had the opportunity to be exposed to that genre along with opportunities to perform and excel.

*I don't like to use the term Asians, in that it awkwardly and crudely lumps together people from many different countries.  But this is the term used by the Slate article.  I also consider it destructive to lump people into the cartoonish categories of "black" and "white."  See also here.  I need to also make it clear that while I think racial categorization of any type of pernicious, I am aware that bigotry exists in many places--many people do categorize others in these ways and discriminate against them based on these categories. Wherever bigotry exists, it should be vigorously prosecuted and socially condemned.

Continue ReadingBlind Orchestra Auditions Alleged to Be Unfair Based Purely on Optics