In his authoritative baritone, which came through even in telephonic oral arguments, Garner walked the justices through his arguments on what statutory wording really meant and how it should be applied to Facebook’s wrongdoing. As Garner nimbly led the justices through a discussion of adverbial modifiers, “viperine” interpretation of statutes, and conjunctive versus disjunctive distinctions, the justices appeared content to assume the position as students in Garner’s classroom.
Linguist John McWhorter discusses his personal struggle to get used to "they" as a singular third person pronoun in this article at The Atlantic, "Call Them What They Wants: As more English speakers adopt the singular they and reject the gender binary, resisters will have to accept that language changes over time." McWhorter wrote this article all the way back in 2018. I timidly entered those third-person-singular waters back after reading this article in 2018 and now I'm rather comfortable with it. In fact, I find it liberating. How convenient to get rid of the cumbersome pronoun dyad "he or she" cluttering up the ends of my sentences! What a difference a couple of years make.
McWhorter's article covers more ground than simply this one usage. He gives us a robust reminder that language is always morphing, always on the move, just like the people who use language. Here's an excerpt from McWhorter's article:
It is certainly the most challenging change in language I have dealt with in my lifetime. Ever more people, rejecting the gender binary, are requesting to be referred to as they rather than as he or she. That is, we now say: Ariella isn't wearing the green one. They think it's time to wear their other one. I expect to get some new practice using they this way as school starts back up, with more students at universities such as the one where I teach requesting they.
Yes, practice—I am trying my best to master this new way of using they despite the fact that, make no mistake, it's hard. In contrast to the deliberateness of writing, speaking casually is a largely subconscious, not to mention very rapid, act. In addition, pronouns, like conjunctions and suffixes, are a very deeply seated feature of language, generated from way down deep in our minds, linked to something as fundamental to human conception as selfhood in relation to the other and others. I've been using they in one way since the late 1960s, and was hardly expecting to have to learn a new way of using it decades later. I thought I had English pretty much under my belt.
However, just as words’ meanings are always changing—what Shakespeare meant by generous was “noble,” not “magnanimous”—pronouns never sit still. What kind of sense does it make that in Italian, lei means both she and the polite you? Isn’t it even more senseless that in German, sie (or Sie) means she, polite you, and they? Or what kind of sense does it make that in English, we use you in both the singular and the plural? Nothing feels more natural today, but in earlier English, thou was the second-person-singular form, and you was used only for two or more people.
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 . . . ]
I read this article in The Atlantic and couldn't agree more with Christine Sommers' Tweet. This article won't give you any idea about the real issues at play:
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