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?
Compelled speech is increasingly being portrayed as "education." A recent illustration has come to light. Last year, Sandia National Laboratories sent its executives to reeducation camp: The training materials and the context for the training were reported by Christopher Rufo, a filmmaker, writer, and policy researcher. On his website, Rufo states (and I agree):
It’s time to expose this taxpayer-funded pseudoscience and rally the White House and legislators to stop these deeply divisive training sessions. My goal is simple: we must pass legislation to “abolish critical race theory” in the federal government. Let’s push as far as we can.
Under economic threat (the potential threat to employment that would be felt by any employee asked to attend), this camp required the employees to listen to, and in many cases publicly acknowledge, racist and sexist absurdities, including the following:
It's the year 2020 and Christopher Rufo is about to file a civil rights complaint against Seattle's Office of Civil Rights. No, you didn't misunderstand me.
Rufo is the director of the Discovery Institute’s Center on Wealth & Poverty. He’s directed four documentaries for PBS and is currently a contributing editor for City Journal, where he covers homelessness, addiction, mental illness, crime, and other afflictions. He explains:
In the coming weeks, I will be filling an official civil rights complaint against Seattle's Office of Civil Rights.
They have created a new form of "institutional racism" that violates the core principle of "equality under the law."
It's time to fight back.
— Christopher F. Rufo (@realchrisrufo) July 29, 2020
Seattle’s Office of Civil Rights has developed a “race and social justice” curriculum for all 10,000 city employees.
I’ve obtained new documents from the city’s segregated “whites-only” trainings, which induct white employees into the cult of critical race theory.
The trainers require white employees to examine their “relationships with white supremacy, racism, and whiteness” and explain how their “[families] benefit economically from the system of white supremacy even as it directly and violently harms Black people.”
Under the banner of “antiracism,” Seattle’s Office of Civil Rights is now explicitly endorsing principles of segregationism, group-based guilt, and race essentialism—ugly concepts that should have been left behind a century ago.
Rufo has posted the training documents used by the Office on his website.
What if a person, citing relevant statistics by Princeton political scientist Omar Wasow, offers insights based on these statistics? Apparently, the best response is to get that person fired because such a Tweet would allegedly be "racist." That's what happened in the case of David Shor, as reported by Vox. The video posted above post-dates the firing of Shor, but I am posting it to illustrate.
Mass demonstrations work, in other words, but looting and disorder are counterproductive. This was Shor’s sin: repeating Wasow’s findings that marching is good but looting and vandalism are counterproductive.
...
Shor did not say that protesting is harmful; he said that rioting is harmful. And he didn’t say that data should dictate how people feel. And while one data scientist’s tweet of one political science paper should not be the last word on social movement tactics, the reasonable response to Shor would be to counter with some other form of evidence. Instead, the dialogue followed a pattern in progressive circles that often involves making evidence-free assertions about how members of various groups feel.
My concern is that we have entered an era where many people and institutions exuberantly accept feelings as a the best way to understand the world, and that feelings are more compelling than careful analysis of facts, even when the factual analysis is based on statistics. I am seeing ubiquitous examples where intelligent-seeming people declare that anecdotes are superior to careful analysis, both on the political left and right.
We seem to be entering a new Dark Age, where important conversations can no longer be had and where thoughtful people need to choose among these two options, where there are only these two options: A) Your need to express your thoughts freely in a nation created upon the assumption that people must talk with each other freely and B) Your need to not get fired from your job.
John McWhorter sees what might be a light at the end of the tunnel:
I hope McWhorter is correct. I seem to be losing 1% of hope each day.
What would you think if a Fortune 500 Corporation Human Resources Director walked up to a podium and announced the following to a big crowd: "Whiteness and white racialized identity refer to the way that white people, their customs, culture, and beliefs operate as the standard by which all other groups of are compared.”
Say what?
Assume further that this HR Director then announced that the following are the “common characteristics of most U.S. White people most of the time”:
White people are self-reliant;
White people are independent and they highly value autonomy;
White people use the Scientific Method, with objective rational linear thinking, cause-and-effect relationship and quantitative emphasis;
White people delay gratification and follow rigid time schedules.
White people believe the ideal social unit is the nuclear family of father, mother and 2.3 children;
The children of white people have their own rooms and they are independent;
White people believe hard work is the key to their success and they believe “work before play”;
White people plan for the future by delaying gratification and they follow rigid time schedules.
Upon hearing this list, you would strongly suspect that you were listening to a white supremacist or that you had unwittingly stepped into a time warp that threw you back 200 years. Upon reminding yourself that this is actually the year 2020, you would conclude that this big corporation should be sued out of existence based on civil rights violations for creating a hostile work environment for its Black employees.
How does one even begin to articulate the many problems with these ideas? How should concerned people respond when false information is being used to divide us. What is the solution when a public museum dedicated to African American history mocks the words of Martin Luther King?
I write this article fully acknowledges that racist conduct can still be found in many places in 2020 and that this bigotry should be dealt with aggressively through civil rights laws and social condemnation. We must condemn all real instances of racism, but we must simultaneously question the foundational concept of "race" from which the possibility or racism sprouts. In short, anyone who wants to eviscerate racism needs to fight a two-front war. NMAAHC's "Whiteness" page doubly fails to fight this two-front war on racism.
Advocating that we should treat people differently based on skin color (as NMAAHC is enthusiastically doing) is throwing gasoline on our racial fires. The "Whiteness" page is stunningly divisive and it is factually unhinged. I would no more expect NMAAHC to be teaching us to be racist than I would expect the American Museum of Natural History to be teaching us that the earth was created 6,000 years ago and that modern humans co-habited our planet with the dinosaurs.
It is demonstrably false that people are born color-coded such that others can determine their personalities, habits and skills by noticing their skin color. That's because immutable traits of individuals, such as skin color, do not determine personality, resilience, aesthetics, capacity for empathy, intelligence, aspirations, parenting skills or any of the other human traits discussed on the NMAAHC "Whiteness" webpage. Skin color doesn't dictate content of character any more than the many other things over which we have no control, things such as eye color, hair color, whether we have six toes, our birth date or the types of bumps we have on our heads. Constricting the way we evaluate people by using an Overton Window of black versus white uses the exact same flawed approach used by astrology and phrenology, which also proclaim content of character by reference to equally irrelevant observations.
Many of the human traits listed on the museum’s website ("work before play" and "rational thinking") are demonstrably not true of many “white” people. Many of these same traits are compellingly true of (and embraced as valuable by) many successful Blacks.
By analyzing the genes of present-day Africans, researchers have concluded that the Khoe-San, who now live in southern Africa, represent one of the oldest branches of the human family tree. The Pygmies of central Africa also have a very long history as a distinct group. What this means is that the deepest splits in the human family aren’t between what are usually thought of as different races—whites, say, or blacks or Asians or Native Americans. They’re between African populations such as the Khoe-San and the Pygmies, who spent tens of thousands of years separated from one another even before humans left Africa.
Nor is there any meaningful basis for declaring that there is any unified "white culture" or a unified "Black culture." No people of any color all think the same. Not even close. No person has been authorized by all whites or all Blacks to speak on their behalf. Not even close. "Race" is a stunningly unscientific concept.
[W]hen scientists set out to assemble the first complete human genome, which was a composite of several individuals, they deliberately gathered samples from people who self-identified as members of different races. In June 2000, when the results were announced at a White House ceremony, Craig Venter, a pioneer of DNA sequencing, observed, “The concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis.”
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