Exposing the Pretendians

Peter Boghossian Reports on the "Pretendians." An excerpt from Peter's article:

There is an epidemic of primarily white people—and white women in particular—who are pretending to be Native Americans for professional gain. Dubbed “Pretendians,” these individuals are predominantly active in academia and hold tenured faculty positions or even department chairs.

To be sure, this is a cultural oddity. It is not, however, particularly surprising given the career advantages the academy confers on Native Americans. What is bizarre is that once a university finds out that one of its faculty is pretending to be Native American, they do nothing about it. Nothing.

I invite you to ponder this: The same institutions that start meetings with land acknowledgments, champion Native American history, obsess over equity-based racial solutions to contemporary ills, and perseverate on historical tragedies, completely ignore known instances of fraud by white people who are pretending to be indigenous and who receive direct financial reward as a result. I cannot believe that the Pretendian scam is not a bigger story. It is a clear example of staggering hypocrisy on multiple levels.

Here is Peter's interview with Jacqueline Keeler, a Native American author and journalist who has explored the phenomena of Pretendians.

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Pay No Attention to that Rent-Seeking Anti-Racist Behind the Curtain

Is the enormous amount of money spent on DEI programs helping America's poor and disenfranchised. Connor Friedersdorf doesn't think so. Here's an excerpt from his article at The Atlantic:

"The DEI Industry Needs to Check Its Privilege: The worst of the industry is expensive and runs from useless to counterproductive."

[T]he DEI-consulting industry is social-justice progressivism’s analogue to trickle-down economics: Unrigorous trainings are held, mostly for college graduates with full-time jobs and health insurance, as if by changing us, the marginalized will somehow benefit. But in fact, the poor, or the marginalized, or people of color, or descendants of slaves, would benefit far more from a fraction of the DEI industry’s profits . . .

[T]he reflexive hiring of DEI consultants with dubious expertise and hazy methods is like setting money on fire in a nation where too many people are struggling just to get by. The professional class should feel good about having done something for social justice not after conducting or attending a DEI session, but after giving money to poor people. And to any CEO eager to show social-justice-minded employees that he or she cares, I urge this: Before hiring a DEI consultant, calculate the cost and let workers vote on whether the money should go to the DEI consultant or be given to the poor. Presented with that choice, I bet most workers would make the equitable decision.

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Jettison Your Tribal Politics!

I’ve repeatedly expressed my concern with the idea of a “political spectrum.  In their book, The Myth of Left and Right: How the Political Spectrum Misleads and Harms America Verlan Lewis and Hyrum Lewis argue that the notion of a “political spectrum” is the root of much of our political dysfunction. I agree and I would recommend reading their article at Heterodox Academy. Here are a few excerpts from their article:

For most of our history, Americans didn’t think in terms of a spectrum. They just saw (accurately) that America had a two-party system and that each of these parties stood for a bundle of unrelated positions. This all started to change after World War I when Americans imported the left-right model that had arisen in Europe during the French Revolution. Since then, the use of the spectrum has grown exponentially and actual policy has been obscured as Americans have become accustomed to placing every person, institution, or group somewhere on a left-right scale (with radicals on the far left, progressives and liberals on the center left, reactionaries on the far right, and conservatives on the center right). The political spectrum is, without question, the most common political paradigm in 21st-century America.

The central problem with this model is that it’s inaccurate for the simple reason that there’s more than one issue in politics and a spectrum can, by definition, measure only one issue. There are a multitude of distinct, unrelated political policies under consideration today (e.g., abortion, income taxes, affirmative action, drug control, gun control, health care spending, the minimum wage, military intervention, etc.), and yet our predominant political model presumes that there is just one.

So if there is more than one issue in politics, why do Americans use a unidimensional political spectrum to describe politics? Generally, it’s because they are convinced that there is one essential issue that underlies and binds all others, such as “change,” and therefore the political spectrum accurately models where someone stands in relation to this essence

We contend that this is exactly backward. There is no essential issue underlying all others—abortion and tax rates really are distinct and unrelated policies—and socialization, not essence, explains the correlation between them. People first anchor into a tribe (because of peers, family, or a single issue they feel strongly about), adopt the positions of the tribe as a matter of socialization, and only then reverse engineer a story about how all the positions of their tribe are united by some essential principle (e.g., progressivism or conservatism) . . . Left-right ideology is the fiction we use to justify and mask our tribal attachments.

. . .  Would it be useful for medical doctors to model all illnesses, treatments, and patients on a spectrum? Obviously not because medicine is multidimensional and trying to model all medical issues using a single dimension would do great harm. The same is true of politics. Doctors get along just fine by talking about specific illnesses and treatments (lung cancer, fractured tibia, bronchial infection, chemotherapy, bone setting, antibiotics), and political discourse would be much more productive if we simply talked about specific political problems and policies (crime, poverty, inflation, gun control, welfare spending, interest-rate tightening).

Yes, all models are simplifications of reality, but those models must also be accurate such that they improve rather than hinder our understanding of the matter in question. A bad model is actually worse than no model at all (as the four humors theory of disease makes clear), and the political spectrum is a bad model. It is a tool of misinformation, false association, and hostility.

. . .  Talking in terms of a spectrum serves no informational function, but it does serve to elevate the temperature of debate and make the public really angry about the “commies” or “fascists” on the other side.

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Back in 2020 When “No One Was Safe”

Matt Orfalea takes us back to March 2020:

Across the media landscape, the already hyperbolic phrase was often cut short to “Nobody is safe.”

“Nobody is safe.” - Chris Cuomo, CNN (10/23/20)

“Nobody is safe.” - Rob Scmitt, Fox News (3/30/20)

“This virus is raging everywhere and no one is safe” - Senator Bob Casey, CNN (11/20/20)

By August 2021, NPR’s Tamara Keith told CBS News that the phrase had “almost become cliche”.

While the world was told “Nobody is safe from COVID-19” the actual infection fatality rate (IFR) was less than 0.5%. In other words, the natural immune systems of approximately 99.5% would defeat the original Alpha COVID variant without a vaccine. For children, the risk of dying is 0.0%. But the constant “Nobody is safe” mantras led citizens to believe the virus was more deadly than it actually was, spreading a man-made pandemic: a hyperpolarizing pandemic of fear.

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