A Giant Leap Backwards for Humankind: What the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History & Culture Thinks About White People

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.

Unfortunately the source of these words and ideas is a webpage of the National Museum of African American History & Culture, a Smithsonian museum supported by U.S. taxpayers. Here is separate image of the “Whiteness” infographic. 

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.

NMAAHC's suggestion that we bifurcate people into "white" and "black" is based on an enormous falsehood. There is no meaningful way to distinguish who is white and who is black, because we are all varying degrees of brown, we are all from Africa (and see here) and we are all interrelated.Trying to determine who is more closely related to whom by physical appearance is often counter-intuitive:

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.

There is more genetic diversity within a “race” than between "races.". Further, "there is no homogeneous African race" and "there is more diversity in Africa than on all the other continents combined" (see graphic under this title here) . As reported by National Geographic in an article titled, "There’s No Scientific Basis for Race—It's a Made-Up Label,"

[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.”

Continue ReadingA Giant Leap Backwards for Humankind: What the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History & Culture Thinks About White People

Robin DiAngelo Needs Help

This cleverly edited video (click the image), attributed to Robert Weide and Larry David, intersperses excerpts from a Robin DiAngelo lecture with a podcast where DiAngelo's book was discussed by Glenn Loury and John McWhorter (the DiAngelo video was not part of the podcast). For anyone offended by this video, I'd recommend that you take the time to read DiAngelo's book so you can see for yourself that she is in need of some serious coaching and should not be lecturing others on how to deal with race issues. Here is the entire July 2 podcast featuring Glenn Loury and John McWhorter.  Topic:  "The Unraveling." As always Loury and McWhorter offer an invigorating analysis of Woke culture.

Continue ReadingRobin DiAngelo Needs Help

Andrew Sullivan Leaves New York Magazine as the Overton Window Keeps Shrinking: “We All Live on Campus Now”

I have admired Andrew Sullivan for many years, ever since the 1990s. I encountered him when he was the editor of The New Republic. An excellent and probing writer, Sullivan's thoughts cross-cut traditional political trenches. His voice is challenging yet inviting. Even where I disagree with him, I always find Sullivan to be thoughtful and good-hearted.

In the current issue of New York Magazine, Sullivan has announced that he is leaving in order to write for his own publication, The Weekly Dish, a re-ignition of Sullivan's earlier publication, The Daily Dish. It's not that Sullivan has outgrown New York Magazine. Based on Sullivan's good-bye column, the literary breadth of NYMag has shrunk significant to accommodate the loud and incessant demands of critical theory.  Sullivan is leaving because his thoughts no longer fit inside of an increasingly small Overton Window. He is returning to an environment where he is free to spread his "conservative" wings.  Here is an excerpt from Sullivan's final column at NYMag: 

A critical mass of the staff and management at New York Magazine and Vox Media no longer want to associate with me, and, in a time of ever tightening budgets, I’m a luxury item they don’t want to afford. And that’s entirely their prerogative. They seem to believe, and this is increasingly the orthodoxy in mainstream media, that any writer not actively committed to critical theory in questions of race, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity is actively, physically harming co-workers merely by existing in the same virtual space. Actually attacking, and even mocking, critical theory’s ideas and methods, as I have done continually in this space, is therefore out of sync with the values of Vox Media. That, to the best of my understanding, is why I’m out of here.

Two years ago, I wrote that we all live on campus now. That is an understatement. In academia, a tiny fraction of professors and administrators have not yet bent the knee to the woke program — and those few left are being purged. The latest study of Harvard University faculty, for example, finds that only 1.46 percent call themselves conservative. But that’s probably higher than the proportion of journalists who call themselves conservative at the New York Times or CNN or New York Magazine. And maybe it’s worth pointing out that “conservative” in my case means that I have passionately opposed Donald J. Trump and pioneered marriage equality, that I support legalized drugs, criminal-justice reform, more redistribution of wealth, aggressive action against climate change, police reform, a realist foreign policy, and laws to protect transgender people from discrimination. I was one of the first journalists in established media to come out. I was a major and early supporter of Barack Obama. I intend to vote for Biden in November.  It seems to me that if this conservatism is so foul that many of my peers are embarrassed to be working at the same magazine, then I have no idea what version of conservatism could ever be tolerated.

If you'd like to follow Andrew Sullivan going forward, you can sign up here, at Substack.  His new business model is simpler. People who want to support him do so with direct contributions and he writes freely.  This provides him some cancel-culture insurance, much like many other current writers who write through their own publications, such as Jesse Singal and Matt Taibbi.  This is also the business model of podcasters such as Sam Harris (who is subscription-based with an exception for anyone who is struggling financially). These intellectuals want to make certain that their thought processes are not crimped by connections between their work product and the largess of advertisers.

It appears that this is becoming the go-to approach for those who seek a free and vigorous exchange of ideas while making a living at it. It's good to see other writers who have figured out how to fund their writing through direct contributions from readers to maintain their intellectual independence. I'm not at that point yet. Perhaps I'll never be.  I fund my own writings through my earnings as an attorney,  My plan is to do more of the same, keeping Dangerous Intersection ad-free in the process.

Continue ReadingAndrew Sullivan Leaves New York Magazine as the Overton Window Keeps Shrinking: “We All Live on Campus Now”

Joe Rogan Discusses Unwarranted Transgendering of Young Girls with Author Abigail Shrier

Abigail Shrier is an author, journalist, and writer for the Wall Street Journal. Her new book is "Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters." At the outset, Shrier makes it clear that she has no issue with adults making decisions to transgender. Despite a higher level of suicide by transgendered adults (compared to the population at large), many transgendered adults are in a better place after transgendering. This is a very different situation from teenaged girls, where the decision to transgender is often driven unwittingly by intense social pressures by friends (groups of teenage girls often transgender together), loneliness and a misreading of the causes of one's anxiety or teenage unhappiness.

In the discussion with Joe Rogan, Shrier is concerned that most transgendering decisions of teenaged girls is a mistake with horrific consequences. The problem is that most of these teenaged girls are not mis-gendered. They are often confusing other issues, such as generalized anxiety (exacerbated by social media) and high-functioning autism, for misgendering. All the while, they (most of them come from left leaning households) receive high praise and attention from their peers and families, who are viewing these decisions, even by young girls, as a "civil rights" issue. To make things worse, testosterone is being handed out like candy (including by Planned Parenthood) based often upon self-diagnoses. Some surgeons will readily perform transgender surgery on girls without even requiring a psychological consult.

What are the numbers?

Shrier:

Gender dysphoria used to afflict 0.01 percent of the population, so one in ten thousand people so probably no one you went to high school with, but today we already know that two percent of high school students are identifying as transgender and two percent of high school students, you're talking about 1.1 million teenage high school kids in America.

Joe: Two percent? . . . Most of them are girls

Joe: Most of them are girls.

Shrier: We can just look at the number of gender surgeries and we see that in 2060 between 2016 and 2017 the number of gender surgeries for biological females quadrupled, so we know they are the biggest and fastest growing population

Joe: Wow - that's a stunning number, two percent.

Shrier: You go from 0.1% of the whole population to two percent of high schoolers and the vast majority of them are teenage girls. I can give you a bunch of other statistics. One of the reasons it's hard to know exactly how many, aside from the fact that we don't have a centralized control of this, is because you don't need an actual diagnosis of gender dysphoria to get testosterone, so you just go in and get it you don't need the diagnosis. In England, where you have a centralized medical care, and there you do need a diagnosis, they know that the numbers for adolescent girls are up over 4,000 percent.

Joe: Holy shit. So you knew all this stuff before you wrote the book?

Shrier: No, it came out in the course of writing it.

Joe: So that had to kind of affirm your idea that this was a real problem.

Continue ReadingJoe Rogan Discusses Unwarranted Transgendering of Young Girls with Author Abigail Shrier

2020 Attitudes About Transgendered Peoples’ Access to Restrooms, Sports Competition and More

To what extent should transgendered people should have access to restrooms? To what extent should they be allowed to participate in sports? Why guess.  Here are YouGov's survey results from the UK:

Continue Reading2020 Attitudes About Transgendered Peoples’ Access to Restrooms, Sports Competition and More