Introducing FAIR: Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism

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!"

For this reason I welcome the creation of FAIR: Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism

FAIR's Mission Statement:

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.

That’s where FAIR comes in.

If you agree with these principles, I invite you to sign the FAIR Pledge. 

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It’s Time to Carefully Examine Critical Race Theory Programs Imposed on our Students in the Classroom

In his most recent column at City Journal, Christopher Rufo points out the dishonest claim by NYT columnist Michelle Goldberg that opponents of critical race theory are supposedly refusing to discuss and debate the merits of CRT. Goldberg's claim is wildly untrue. As Rufo states:

For more than a year, prominent black intellectuals, including John McWhorter, Glenn Loury, Wilfred Reilly, and Coleman Hughes have challenged the critical race theorists to debate—and none has accepted. After Goldberg published her column, I called her bluff even further, challenging to “debate any prominent critical race theorist on the floor of the New York Times.” Predictably, none responded, catching the New York Times in a fib and further exposing the critical race theorists’ refusal to submit their ideas to public scrutiny.

Rufo then challenges those like Goldberg who vaguely describe CRT school programs as encouraging "social justice."

They present critical race theory as a benign academic discipline that seeks “social justice,” while ignoring the avalanche of reporting, including my own, that suggests that, in practice, CRT-based programs are often hateful, divisive, and filled with falsehoods; they traffic in racial stereotypes, collective guilt, racial segregation, and race-based harassment. The real test for intellectuals on the left is not to defend their ideas as abstractions but to defend the real-world consequences of their ideas.

Goldberg and Sachs should answer in specifics. Do they support public schools forcing first-graders to deconstruct their racial and sexual identities, then ranking themselves according to their “power and privilege”? Do they support a curriculum that teaches that “all white people play a part in perpetuating systemic racism”? Do they support telling white teachers that they are guilty of “spirit murdering” black children? Do they support telling white parents that they must become “white traitors” and advocate for “white abolition”? These are all real-world examples from my investigative reporting over the past two months, all of which the left-wing critics have deliberately ignored in their rebuttals.

Rufo also challenges Jeffrey Sachs who, along with Goldberg, claim that lawmakers working to restrict CRT training are impinging on free speech issue. Really?  All you need to turn the clock back to 1850 to make it clear that muzzling overt racism in a classroom is not a serious free speech issue.  Rufo explains:

To raise the stakes even further, we could also propose a counterfactual. If the Ku Klux Klan sponsored a public school curriculum that stated, “whites deserve to have the power and privilege” and “black culture is inherently violent”—a simple transposition of critical race theory’s basic tenets—would Goldberg and Sachs jump to the Klan’s defense? They would not—and for good reason. Racism, from the Right or from the Left, is wrong. However, for the critical race theorists, opposing racism is not categorical; it is instrumental. Official discrimination against blacks and Latinos is considered “bad”; official discrimination against whites and Asians is considered “good.”

I have seen many news reports (including Rufo's) that convince me that he is accurately portraying many modern attempts to teach "racial sensitivity" or "bias" or "social justice." That said, we need to be careful how we categorize these programs and those who are advocating for them.  There are some productive ways to talk about race, including the programs advocated by Chloe Valdary.  The programs I find offensive fall along a continuum. Some of these programs (e.g., programs based on the teachings of Robin DiAngelo) shamelessly argue that we ought to see people as "colors," which is a dysfunctional and destructive way to interact with others.  Other programs suggest that we strive to find differences in each other where there are not relevant differences, though they don't say it as explicitly. Every program is different and must be evaluated on its own merits. [More . . . ]

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The New York Times Finally Wakes Up to the Dangers and Dysfunctions of Wokeness

After a long deep sleep, the NYT is finally starting to acknowledge the dysfunctions and dangers of Critical Race Theory. Or maybe I'm being too charitable. This has been a newspaper in deep denial, paralyzed by the fear of being called names by hostile people who mislabel themselves as "liberal" and who falsely claim to have solutions to "racism."  I've been reading and writing about these dangers for the past year, yet this is only the second article I've seen by the NYT that acknowledges obvious dysfunction in many of our colleges (the other was last week's article about Smith College). Here's an excerpt from Brett Stephens Op-Ed, "Smith College and the Failing Liberal Bargain: Absolution is off the table. And liberal ideals themselves are up for renegotiation": 

Why is it that racial tensions keep boiling over at some of the nation’s most emphatically progressive-minded institutions, whether it’s at Smith, Yale, Northwestern, Bryn Mawr or the Dalton School? Why does the embrace of social justice pedagogies seem to have gone hand in hand with deteriorating race relations on campus?

One answer is that if many students are enjoying a diet of courses on critical race theory, and employees are trained on the fine points of microaggressions, they might take to heart what they are taught and notice what they have been trained to see. Another answer is that if those who report being offended gain sympathy, attention and even celebrity, more accusations may be reported. . . .

In place of former notions of fairness toward individuals regardless of race, the Woke left has new ideas of “restorative justice” for racial groups. In place of traditional commitments to free speech, it has new proscriptions on hate speech. In place of the liberal left’s past devotion to facts, it demands new respect for feelings.

All of this has left many of the traditional gatekeepers of liberal institutions uncertain, timid and, in many cases, quietly outraged. This is not the deal they thought they struck. But it’s the deal they’re going to get until they recover the courage of their liberal convictions."

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The Appeal and Danger of “White Math”

Sergiu Klainerman is prestigious professor of mathematics at Princeton who recently guest-authored an article at Common Sense with Bari Weiss.

Who is it hurting to "deconstruct" math, deny its objectivity and claim that insisting on right and wrong math answers is racially biased? Klainerman has

witnessed the decline of universities and cultural institutions as they have embraced political ideology at the expense of rigorous scholarship. Until recently — this past summer, really — I had naively thought that the STEM disciplines would be spared from this ideological takeover.

Klainerman notes that Woke ideology that insists on the existence of "white" math has found effective means to spread widely to colleges, political institutions and businesses through social shaming, mob punishment, guilt by association and coerced speech.  Ideology can thus flourish quite well even in the absence of the harsh methods he witnessed while growing up in Romania.

Equally important, the Woke declaration that tradition math is unfair to "racial" minorities is hurting students:

[T]he woke approach to mathematics is particularly poisonous to those it pretends to want to help. Let’s start with the reasonable assumption that mathematical talent is equally distributed at birth to children from all socio-economic backgrounds, independent of ethnicity, sex and race. Those born in poor, uneducated families have clear educational disadvantages relative to others. But mathematics can act as a powerful equalizer. Through its set of well-defined, culturally unbiased, unambiguous set of rules, mathematics gives smart kids the potential to be, at least in this respect, on equal footing with all others. They can stand out by simply finding the right answers to questions with objective results.

There is no such thing as “white” mathematics. There is no reason to assume, as the activists do, that minority kids are not capable of mathematics or of finding the “right answers.” And there can be no justification for, in the name of “equity” or anything else, depriving students of the rigorous education that they need to succeed. The real antiracists will stand up and oppose this nonsense.

See also, here, here, here and here.

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