This is what I believe: No person should ever be judged based on how they look. To judge each other by the way we look destroys trust and hurts innocent people. To treat people differently based on any irrelevant factor is to embrace the bizarre "logic" of astrology and phrenology. There is only one human family and it consists of millions of exquisitely complex individuals who should be judged only on their individual merits. To all of the Dividers out there, we need to say "No More!"
Increasingly, American institutions — colleges and universities, businesses, government, the media and even our children’s schools — are enforcing a cynical and intolerant orthodoxy. This orthodoxy requires us to view each other based on immutable characteristics like skin color, gender and sexual orientation. It pits us against one another, and diminishes what it means to be human.
Today, almost 70 years after Brown v. Board of Education ushered in the Civil Rights Movement, there is an urgent need to reaffirm and advance its core principles. To insist on our common humanity. To demand that we are each entitled to equality under the law. To bring about a world in which we are all judged by the content of our character and not by the color of our skin.
It hurts so much that I have to decline your offer and several other great offers that I have received from elite universities and programs that used to be the dream schools for young people like me. I am simply very frustrated by ideology masquerading as objective science in today's higher ed. particularly humanity fields. Universities these days are trying to make young people like me feel guilty because we are white and because the whole system is filled with white racists, and me included. There is such strong moralization in the academy that is so certain that it has Science on its side in all of its proclamations. Frankly, today's academy’s ideological dogmatism is one of my major fear and hesitancies for entering it. I fear any work I do, especially in developmental or evolutionary psychology, would be evaluated not on its merit but instead on what is perceived as my politics based on how politically convenient my findings are. I have decided to move to [foreign country] to join a group of very creative and young [subject area redacted by me] on a [ibid.] research project. I want to spend the last 5 years in my 20s on something scientific, not political. But it seems that it is simply impossible to accomplish that goal in my own country.
In this January 2020 article, “Race as a Dynamic State: Triangulation in Health Care,”The Lancet has turned its Woke-powered spotlight toward “Asian-Americans.” According to this article, in a prestigious medical journal, all “Asians” are the same. Therefore, we can put all of them under one group heading and treat all of them inter-changeably, regardless of their country of origin, and regardless of how hard each “Asian-American” individual has studied in order to be successful in the health care field. And that is merely the first of the many shocking assertions of this article.
This Lancet article scolds “Asian-Americans” for their “privilege,” as if they unfairly achieved excellence merely by being born “Asian.” This article swipes at Asian American are racist in the most basic sense; it judges the characteristics, history and achievement of individuals by irrelevant immutable characteristics. Unfortunately, this sordid tactic passes as “social justice” in ever-increasing numbers of institutions, most notably in our sense-making institutions such as universities and in the conference rooms at publishers such as Lancet. I prefer to call this increasingly popular tactic “neo-racism” because it is the modern heavily-jargoned repackaging of good old-fashioned racism. It's the same despicable idea over which we fought a bloody Civil War. In the year 2021, then, Lancet is proudly promoting a completely discredited destructive approach for interacting with one another.
This Lancet article is preaching, not teaching. No open-minded person could have written this Lancet article. Tt presents a long string of obviously wrong-headed and highly controversial concepts as gospel, evidence-free. These issues raised by this article would have been discussed by any good-faith consideration of this topic of “racial” disparities in the healthcare field. Instead, the authors of this Lancet article intentionally avoided these many issues.
Back at Twitter, commenters had no problem spotting these many glaring problems instantly. I have selected and pasted in some of these comments below. The following comments below allow us to use the above Lancet article as a Wokeness case study:
According to this, Asians attending medical schools, are the "wrong" kind of diversity...
This is so incredibly racist. How does anyone stand for this degradation?
What happened? I thought we were NOT supposed to pick people . . . based on their color.. now that’s the top consideration!
This is their way of minimizing the data that shows Asian achievement being better than white people because they know that collapses their unifying white supremacy equation.
Essentially, they are telling them to recognize they are a “privileged” minority class because it makes other minorities (i.e. blacks) look bad... They mean because it destroys their narrative!!!
The tone and lack of self-awareness on part of writers is what shocks me, even more than the twisted content. They are simply telling people what to do. Extraordinarily patronising and controlling.
Didn't they put Asians in the "white" category recently? All to perpetuate their systematic racism myth.
“And what shall we do when we run out of enemies to destroy?” “Simple, we shall make more”
Yeah, but how did they become privileged? Was it magic?
Attacking the competent has always been a hallmark of Marxism. They won't stop until the starving are attacking the almost-starving.
I like the sentence just after your highlight. "They can consider what it feels like to be the non-model minority" So they are a minority, but a non-model one! "They can refuse to be used in statistics that flaunt “diversity” gains" Oh my... The best science for better lives. WTF!
“Model minority” Asians are a “model minority” and therefore outside of CRT models and therefore part of the problem bc they don’t fit the narrative of overcoming obstacles of oppression. Jews also defy CRT- as if their oppression doesn’t count.
Just wait until they start turning against Nigerian immigrants who are among the hardest working out there...
So “model minority” is a myth but “non-model minority” is not?
Mind you, this is entirely within the western world and not actually in Asia, for the most part. It's so unbelievably stupid.
We see the following threats to Open Inquiry within the academy today:
Across the political spectrum, we see protest and backlash against scholars that threaten a preferred narrative.
Expanding bureaucracies at many colleges and universities subject ever more of campus life to administrative oversight — and encourage people to resolve disputes through reporting, investigations, and academic reprisals rather than good-faith debate and discussion.
Concerns about placating donors, ensuring high enrollments or positive course evaluations can distort research and pedagogy — especially for the growing numbers of contingent faculty whose careers and livelihoods can be threatened by a single upset student, donor or colleague. Contingent faculty are statistically more likely to be women, people of color, and other equity seeking groups whose numbers are underrepresented in tenure track positions.
Many fear losing the esteem of, or being ostracized by, one’s peers for saying the “wrong” thing. Even in the absence of formal sanctions, social and professional isolation can make academic life difficult — and many prefer to self-censor rather than risk it. This is a significant concern among students, faculty, and administrators: our 2019 Campus Expression Survey found that roughly half of students, regardless of their political ideology, agreed that the climate on their campus prevents people from saying things because others may find them offensive.
To improve the quality of research and education in universities by increasing open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement. We aspire to create college classrooms and campuses that welcome diverse people with diverse viewpoints and that equip learners with the habits of heart and mind to engage that diversity in open inquiry and constructive disagreement.
We see an academy eager to welcome professors, students, and speakers who approach problems and questions from different points of view, explicitly valuing the role such diversity plays in advancing the pursuit of knowledge, discovery, growth, innovation, and the exposure of falsehoods.
Heterodox Academy (HxA) is a nonpartisan collaborative of thousands of professors, administrators, and students committed to enhancing the quality of research and education by promoting open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement in institutions of higher learning. All of our members embrace a set of norms and values, which we call “The HxA Way.”
All of HxA's members embrace the following statement:
I support open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement in research and education.
HXA proposes the "HxA Way" as the best way to support open inquiry. The four elements of the HxA Way are:
Make your case with evidence.
Be intellectually charitable.
Be intellectually humble.
Be constructive.
Be yourself.
Who would have ever thought we would need an organization to help us learn how to talk to each other on important issues at colleges and universities? Well, we do. That's why I joined HxA tonight in my capacity as a law professor. I'm looking forward to getting increasingly involved in all the HxA does.
Note: There is some overlap in the concerns and missions of HxA and FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education). If you support one of these organizations, you will probably also support the mission of the other.
I’ve followed Chloe Valdary on Twitter for many months. She is nuanced and kind-hearted, the diametric opposite of most advocates of critical race theory. In her hour-long discussion with journalist Christopher Rufo, Valdary compared and contrasted the typical training in critical race theory to the training Valdary developed, which she calls “Theory of Enchantment.” She describes her program as having the mission “to combat racism and bigotry by teaching society how to love.”
It’s not that CRT is ill-intended. CRT is good to the extent that it raises awareness of access of desperate people to material goods, jobs and healthcare. That said, Valdary accuses CRT of reducing human beings to their race. CRT claims that it is seeking equity, but it actually seeks “raw material power.” According to Valdary, CRT’s objectives are different than the objectives of the civil rights generation, which was interested in the inner lives of human beings that transcended race. For CRT, race is the “end all and be all.” CRT is defective in that it tries to reduce society to material things and disparities, ignoring transcendence—the capacity to feel empathy and the recognition of community bonding. CRT ignores the sacredness of life, the beauty of all human beings, and their imperfections and individuality that ultimately lead to “organic diversity.” Valdary points out that CRT claims to improve life, but it knows nothing about human flourishing and is thus “playing with fire.” CRT training is promoting hostile work environments that are “setting up companies for lawsuits.”
[What follows is a transcript I create for parts of the above interview. I cleaned up unnecessary or repeated words and phrases, but I have been careful to accurately preserve the flow and meaning of the conversation.]
Christopher Rufo:
Explain white fragility to me.
Chloe Valdary:
Okay, I will. I will caveat this by saying that a lot of these terms are completely incoherent. And so I will do my best to explain what my understanding of these terms are. But I think some of these are beyond explaining. White fragility is basically this idea that if you are a white person your very existence perpetuates white supremacy. You're living in a fundamentally white supremacist environment. If you disagree with any of that, then you are just demonstrating your fragility. And so disagreement is a double bind, essentially. Disagreement is proof that you are a racist. That's the cause of white fragility. It was made most popular by Robyn D'Angelo who wrote a book called white fragility. What happened was Robyn D'Angelo had a series of racist ideas about black people and projected them onto other white people. And she essentially said, oh, I'm having all these racist ideas about black people. I hardly know any black people. And she somewhat expressed that in some of her comments. It's like, I'm going to go and assume that every other person that looks like me, extensively, also has these views and projects them onto other people. And if you don't agree with it, then you just proved my point. It's a very, somewhat pathological disposition, I think.
Christopher Rufo:
It's like in high school, when one of your friends is like, Oh, yeah, man, you know, I'm feeling this way. Everyone feels that way, right? Everyone has this. Actually, no, it's just you.
Chloe Valdary:
Yeah. Yeah,
Christopher Rufo:
White fragility discourse is a way for progressive, elite institutional white people to, in a kind of critical language, center their own experience. The most important thing is happening is my own kind of internal experience, my own internal deal, my own internal shame and, in a way, elevate that experience above actually anything productive or tangible.
Chloe Valdary:
I set up what I like to think of as a practice. The purpose of the practice is to teach people that, from a psychological perspective, racism often flourishes or occurs when individuals are operating from a space that is informed by a lack of holiness. What I mean by that is on a very, I say, psychological spiritual level, what we perceive often of others is what we perceive of ourselves. What we do in our program, is we train people, first, how to develop that sense of inner contentment and inner wholeness based upon three principles. First principle is to treat people like human beings, not political abstractions. We help our clients work through what it actually means to be a human being, which sounds really obvious and cliche, but it's actually one of the most profound things, I think, one of the most beautiful things, most sophisticated things. How does one deal with this thing that is the human condition? How do you deal with vulnerability? How do you deal with mortality? How do you deal with imperfection? How do you make peace with these things so that they don't control you? And how do you deal with emotional regulation? We teach stoicism for example, in the course and how you reckon with your own potential. You are trying to live up to your own potential. So the first third of the full training is really about teaching people how to make peace with these things, make peace with themselves and the human condition
The remaining two-thirds is all about, okay, now that you know this about yourself, understand that every single human being you meet is dealing with these same issues, because this is what is universal. So human experience. Now we can work on developing that capacity for empathy, developing that capacity for compassion, for curiosity even for people you meet who don't look like you and have different opinions from you, because diversity comes in many different forms. Diversity is itself a very diverse thing, right? So that's really the process. And then the actual pedagogical experience is very rich because it uses pop culture to teach all these things. I believe in bringing the past with the present, having the past in conversation with the present. We use articles and essays written by James Baldwin, speeches from Dr. King, Maya Angelou, you know, folks who came before us who were part of that civil rights generation who had a lot to teach us, not merely about race, but about the human condition itself. And working through issues on race, being rooted in an understanding of the sacredness of the human being. This is what these great leaders brought to us. There's also stoicism. We also bring in a really multicultural, I'd say, curation of different things. So there's snippets of Disney films that folks have to say, in words, to understand human condition. There is music, a study of different aspects of theme song and hip hop. There's a rich conversation between the past and the present that transforms the client's relationship to both, transforms the client's relationship to themselves, and to their neighbors, and to those around them. That's what the process is like.
Christopher Rufo:
How do you how do you deal with race? This is a fraught concept, something that is difficult to discuss, and for most folks, even more difficult to discuss, as it's been highly politicized. How do you address it in a way that cuts through in a way that is rooted in the kind of the kind of philosophical foundation that you've described, but then actually gets to this as an issue.
Chloe Valdary:
We tackle race by specifically using texts. I'll just give you a quick example. James Baldwin's essays are taught in the very first part of the training. Our clients study the essays, which are on race, but are again, rooted in that understanding that something transcends race and that something is sacred about the human being. And that works through the challenges of race, through that paradigm of understanding the sacredness of the human being. By absorbing those texts by these individuals, knock on wood, James Baldwin doesn't get canceled by these individuals.
[More . . . ]
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