Whites-Only City Employee Meeting in Seattle

What planet am I on? I need to re-ask that each day. Today, I'm on a planet where only the "white" employees of Seattle were invited to a meeting set up by the City of Seattle, apparently for the purpose of disrupting their employees' sanity. Here's an excerpt from a City Journal article titled: "Cult Programming in Seattle."

Last month, the City of Seattle’s Office of Civil Rights sent an email inviting “white City employees” to attend a training session on “Interrupting Internalized Racial Superiority and Whiteness,” a program designed to help white workers examine their “complicity in the system of white supremacy” and “interrupt racism in ways that are accountable to Black, Indigenous and People of Color.” . . .

At the beginning of the session, the trainers explain that white people have internalized a sense of racial superiority, which has made them unable to access their “humanity” and caused “harm and violence” to people of color. The trainers claim that “individualism,” “perfectionism,” “intellectualization,” and “objectivity” are all vestiges of this internalized racial oppression and must be abandoned in favor of social-justice principles. In conceptual terms, the city frames the discussion around the idea that black Americans are reducible to the essential quality of “blackness” and white Americans are reducible to the essential quality of “whiteness”—that is, the new metaphysics of good and evil.Once the diversity trainers have established this basic conceptual framework, they encourage white employees to “practice self-talk that affirms [their] complicity in racism” and work on “undoing [their] own whiteness.”

Seattle seems to be a City on the cutting edge of . . . something I'm still struggling to understand, but it seems to fit within the framework of a cult. There is a lot of troublesome information to digest in this article, including the reference to the new race-sensitive math curriculum being considered by the Seattle school district.

I'm wondering how much the Diversity Trainer was paid for the Seattle meeting and whether that Trainer's name was Syvester McMonkey McBean (from Dr. Suess' The Sneetches). Maybe that sarcasm is apt, given that Suess' book was written for little children. After all, even young children can easily understand that it is morally wrong to treat groups of people differently based on how they look.

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Recognizing and Escaping from Kafka Traps

Until now, I didn't realize there was a name a peculiar type of argument, but from now on I will recognize it as a "Kafka Trap":

In The Trial, Kafka presents a totalitarian world where a man is arrested by unspecified authorities and accused of an unspecified crime. Kafka traps occurs when people are accused of something but their denials are interpreted as absolute proof that the accusation is true. For example,

You are an liar!"
"No I am not."
"That proves it. Liars always deny they are liars!"

Kafka Traps seem to work because they are circular, thus evidence-free, thus unfalsifiable. You can expose the fallaciousness of Kafka Traps by making some simple substitutions, e.g.,:

"You are a jelly donut!"
"No, I am not."
"That proves it. Jelly donuts always deny they are jelly donuts!"

Now consider this argument:

" You are a racist!"
"No, I am not."
"That proves it.  Racists always deny they are racists!"

This argument that all white people are racists has been employed by Robin DiAngelo:

Yes, all white people are complicit with racism. There will be umbrage and upset. People will insist that they are not racist. That I don't know them ... 'I've traveled a lot. I speak lots of languages ... I had a Black roommate in college. I'm a minority myself.' This is the kind of evidence that many white people used to exempt themselves from that system. It's not possible to be exempt from it.

These Kafka Traps are fact-free pseudo-arguments that remind me of St. Anselm's alleged proof for the existence of God ("That than which nothing greater can be conceived") and St. Thomas Aquinas' Contingency proof for the existence of God ("even if the Universe has always existed, it still owes its existence to an uncaused cause. The only thing missing from these three fallacious arguments is the word "Abracadabra!"

To escape a Kafka Trap, you can also demand evidence for these extraordinary claims, then (after no evidence is produced) invoke Carl Sagan: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof."

If you are facing an evidence-free claim that you are a racist, simply flip the argument 180 by substituting "maker of false accusations" for "racist":

"You are a maker of false accusations!"
"No, I am not."
"That proves it. Makers of false accusations always deny they are makers of false accusations!"

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Reductionism vs. Complexity in the United States on the Issue of Race

The United States has an undeniably serious problem with racism. No doubt about that. We've seen this with more clarity since the election of Donald Trump, as the bigots among us have been more ever more willing to openly judge others based on physical appearance. It has been distressing to see this. We need to shame these people and prosecute them to the extent that they break the law. To the extent that governments and their agents act with bigotry, including police officers, we need to push back with even more vigor.

But the United States is an extremely complex case, so it would be wrong to judge the U.S. on any one of its many dimensions as a proxy for all of its many dimensions. Andrew Sullivan reminds us of both this reductionism and this complexity in "Is There Still Room For Debate?" Here is an excerpt:

That America is systemically racist, and a white-supremacist project from the start . . . This is an argument that deserves to be aired openly in a liberal society, especially one with such racial terror and darkness in its past and inequality in the present. But it is an argument that equally deserves to be engaged, challenged, questioned, interrogated. There is truth in it, truth that it’s incumbent on us to understand more deeply and empathize with more thoroughly. But there is also an awful amount of truth it ignores or elides or simply denies. It sees America as in its essence not about freedom but oppression . . . This view of the world certainly has “moral clarity.” What it lacks is moral complexity. No country can be so reduced to one single prism and damned because of it. American society has far more complexity and history has far more contingency than can be jammed into this rubric. No racial group is homogeneous, and every individual has agency. No one is entirely a victim or entirely privileged. And we are not defined by black and white any longer; we are home to every race and ethnicity, from Asia through Africa to Europe and South America.

And a country that actively seeks immigrants who are now 82 percent nonwhite is not primarily defined by white supremacy. Nor is a country that has seen the historic growth of a black middle and upper class, increasing gains for black women in education and the workplace, a revered two-term black president, a thriving black intelligentsia, successful black mayors and governors and members of Congress, and popular and high culture strongly defined by the African-American experience. Nor is a country where nonwhite immigrants are fast catching up with whites in income and where some minority groups now outearn whites. And yet this crude hyperbole remains . . .

The crudeness and certainty of this analysis is quite something. It’s an obvious rebuke to Barack Obama’s story of America as an imperfect but inspiring work-in-progress, gradually including everyone in opportunity, and binding races together, rather than polarizing them. In fact, there is more dogmatism in this ideology than in most of contemporary American Catholicism. And more intolerance. Question any significant part of this, and your moral integrity as a human being is called into question. There is little or no liberal space in this revolutionary movement for genuine, respectful disagreement, regardless of one’s identity, or even open-minded exploration.

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A Moment of Unity Slipped Through Our Fingers

I feel like we let a moment of unity slip through our fingers. It seems that when we collectively watched the killing of George Floyd, we were all horrified. I have friends across the political spectrum, and even those I most disagree with – the die hard Trump supporters – were as outraged by that murder as anyone. And then came the first peaceful protest, and it seemed that everyone was absolutely behind it. For a moment.

Protesters gather in downtown Minneapolis. Unrest in Minneapolis over the May 25th death of George Floyd.

Then on the fringes of the peaceful, heartfelt protests came the fringe elements – the violence, vandalism, looting. Even then, for a moment, it seemed that the facts and the narrative were that this was a few bad actors and a few bad cops causing a disturbance at an otherwise peaceful demonstration.

And then very quickly our politicians and the media, jumped in to divide us again. Inadvertently perhaps, but now we're not just divided, we're fractured. Now there are multiple "camps" within the left and right, all disagreeing with each other.

I believe this is because we have gotten so accustomed to having quick, easy answers to what's going on. We need to determine, before we have any facts, who is responsible for the rioting and looting. We demand to know and the media is compelled to fill the airwaves with something, anything, to fill our need to know. And politicians are eager to point blame at whatever entity will help to score points with their base. We collectively want to blame one group of people for this, and assign a single motive. That makes it easy.

  • Angry black people fed up with the way they're treated
  • White people who want to instigate and turn the protest violent to make black people seem out of control
  • Undercover police who want to further the narrative that these protesters should be handled with violence
  • Opportunistic people of any race who want to take advantage of the situation for whatever reason<
  • Radical left wingers who want to destroy our country
  • Radical right wingers who want to destroy our country

Maybe it's all of the above. Maybe there are far more reasons for it than we've heard. But it's still a small number of people amongst the masses of peaceful protesters. But now, because our focus is on the violence, that's the narrative. Now when we say "protester" we think burning buildings and looting. That's so not fair.

It is not fair to anyone, and detrimental to our unity, when we see some photos of white looters, and conclude that all the looters are white. It's not fair to anyone, to see images of black people looting and decide that all the looters are black. It's not fair to see images of cops being brutal to peaceful protesters and conclude that all cops are out of control. It's not fair to see images of some police kneeling with protesters and conclude that all cops are good and want to connect with their diverse communities.

All of that is happening, all at once. We have to open our minds to the idea that this is not something that we can wrap up in a neat package, put a label on it, and feel good that we have the answer. We don't. None of us do. This is complicated. We need to unify to resolve it.

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The Importance of Reaching Out to One’s Perceived Enemies

Everyone out there has good stories and lessons to share. It is my faith that it is one of our highest duties as human beings to reach out to connect with other human beings to identify and share those treasures within each other without exception and without judgment. Sometimes it's not easy and it takes some deep breathing to get past crusty exteriors of ourselves and others.

Over the past year I've reached out to have coffee with several local FB Friends who had bristled at my political views (and vice versa). In each case, over a couple hours of conversation we found common concerns and common dreams along with that willingness to connect. Later this week I'm going to join one of those men for coffee again. Aside from his staunch views that many would consider gun-loving libertarian/conservative, he is also a dog lover, brought almost to tears by the thought of dogs who suffer. He is also a dedicated family man, a cancer survivor and a man who, many years ago, pulled himself up (with unfathomable hard work) from a place that would seem to most of us to be an impossibility.

Over the past couple of months, I also reached out to a woman who (I'm certain) gets indigestion when I speak of things like single payor health care. She is a dedicated nurse who, over several decades, worked her way through a dozen challenges that might have crushed many of us. She generously gave me the gift of hours on the phone, during which she invited me to lean hard on her to help me process a situation that felt like an emotional bludgeoning. [More . . . ]

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