Arkansas HB1218 And HB1231: Flawed, Possibly Unconstitutional, But A Necessary Discussion

 I first became aware of Arkansas House Bills HB1218 and HB1231 when Arkansas Council for the Social Studies (ACSS) President Olivia Lewis posted an open letter to the state legislature regarding those bills:

(Sorry about the formatting, but I don't see an easy way to fix this at the moment.) Bill sponsor Mark Lowery (R-Maumelle) has said

“The intention is - so that students, especially K-12 that are captive, are not subjected to humiliation in terms of trying to make a statement about whether there is inequality or inequity and that's been happening in some of these programs using critical race theory,” said Lowery.

He added, the inspiration behind the bill is a certain classroom activity he claims is being taught in some Arkansas schools.

"One of the specific examples is what is called the privilege walk - where all the students start in one line and a number of questions are asked,” said Lowery. “Do you have two parents, do you parents own their home, take steps forward and what it does then - it gives this definition of showing which students are supposedly privileged and which ones are not."

So there's really two things going on here: the first is the use of the 1619 Project materials in classrooms (HB1231), and the second is teaching of the "social justice" approach to race relations (HB1218).

The Flawed, Tendentious 1619 Project

The 1619 Project has drawn numerous criticisms for its shoddy, motivated scholarship. In Cathy Young's able essay at The Bulwark, she wrote that despite "includ[ing] some indisputably excellent material" it amounts to "bad history and misrepresented facts". She goes on to attack central author and promoter Nikole Hannah-Jones for

...mak[ing] several claims that radically disparage the rest of the American narrative. She asserts, for instance, that “for the most part, black Americans fought back alone,” a casual erasure of decades of abolitionist activism. The problem isn’t that white people aren’t getting enough credit; it’s that Hannah-Jones’s assertion is simply not true (“for the most part” is doing some very heavy work in that sentence) and that it strips the history of black America of its legacy of interracial solidarity. Dismissing it in one throwaway sentence is both inaccurate and unconstructive.

The central flaw of 1619, though, is in Hannah-Jones' claim that the colonies principally fought for independence in order to continue the institution of slavery. Young systematically dismantles all of this, citing approving correspondence from Benjamin Franklin of "antislavery sentiment as far south as Virginia" (quoting historian David Waldstreicher), and the "monumental ruling by the Massachusetts Supreme Court in the Quock Walker cases." It's clear that Hannah-Jones rewrote history to fit her narrative, omitting inconvenient facts.

But perhaps more stinging — coming as it did from a New York Times colleague — is Bret Stephens' October 9 rebuke in the Opinion section. Journalists, he wrote, "are best when we try to tell truths with a lowercase t, following evidence in directions unseen, not the capital-T truth of a pre-established narrative in which inconvenient facts get discarded." Hannah-Jones went on a tweet-discarding rampage shortly before his essay was published, with the Times rewriting embarrassing online materials containing blatantly indefensible claims. Stephens declared Hannah-Jones' embrace of "[m]onocausality" a central flaw of the project:

The 1619 Project is a thesis in search of evidence, not the other way around. Nor was this fire from the right: Both [Princeton historian Sean] Wilentz and [Northwestern historian Leslie M.] Harris were at pains to emphasize their sympathy with the project’s moral aims.

Yet, aside from a one-word “clarification” issued in March — after months of public pressure, The Times conceded that only “some” colonists fought for independence primarily to defend slavery — the response of the magazine has been, in effect, “nothing to see here.” In a pair of lengthy editor’s notes, [NYT Magazine editor Jake] Silverstein has defended much of the scholarship in the project by citing another slate of historians to back him up. That’s one way of justifying the final product.

The larger problem is that The Times’s editors, however much background reading they might have done, are not in a position to adjudicate historical disputes. That should have been an additional reason for the 1619 Project to seek input from, and include contributions by, an intellectually diverse range of scholarly voices. Yet not only does the project choose a side, it also brooks no doubt.

All of which is to say, the 1619 Project is, in the end, mainly a piece of agitprop rather than a sober reflection of the causes of the American Revolution and the founding of our nation. How did we get to this point?

Critical Race Theory, Social Justice, And The Academy

The answer, of course, is the overwhelming influence of Critical Race Theory (CRT hereafter) on the 1619 Project, something James Lindsay wrote about in his review at New Discourses. This is part of the larger project of academic historical revisionism under the aegis of CRT, described in Lindsay's and Helen Pluckrose's 2020 book, Cynical Theories. Their chapter on CRT outlines the history of the intellectual movement, with postmodernist theory predominating from the mid-1990s onward.

For the applied postmodernists … the focus on discourses is primarily concerned with positionality — the idea that one's position within society, as determined by group identity, dictates how one understands the world and will be understood in it. …

[The] core tenets [as advocated in Critical Race Theory by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic] unambiguously assert what is going on in critical race Theory — racism is present everywhere and always, and persistently works against people of color, who are aware of this, and for the benefit of white people, who tend not to be, as is their privilege.

The point of all this is the rejection of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I have a dream" speech centered on character rather than identity. Instead, "[i]dentity politics restores the social significance of identity categories in order to valorize them as sources of empowerment and community". Influential Theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw "explicitly rejected universality in favor of group identity, at least in the political context in which she wrote…." The related concept of intersectionality binds up people in racial, sexual, sexual preference, immigration status, and religious categories (among others!) into a binary caste system of oppressed and oppressors based on (mainly) properties of birth. "Social Justice", Pluckrose and Lindsay continue, "in the contemporary sense is therefore markedly different from the activism for universal human rights that characterized the civil rights movements."

These movements arose in the academy, but have gained terrifying traction outside it. Propagated with every government "diversity" edict and department, university assistant dean, and corporate diversity officer, CRT is widespread, and expanding rapidly outwards. Journalist Christopher Rufo has documented a Bay Area elementary school forcing students to rank themselves according to "power and privilege", instances in San Diego and Seattle of browbeating white pupils for "spirit murdering" black and/or native American people, and a Springfield, Missouri middle school where teachers were required to "locate themselves on an 'oppression matrix'”. It's clear that CRT practitioners "see racism as omnipresent and eternal, which grants it a mythological status, like sin or depravity", according to Cynical Theories.

The Problem With HB1218 And HB1231

So to the supposed solutions, HB1218 and HB1231. Both are crude bans, which the courts largely have not supported in legislation. Julie Underwood's piece in The Phi Delta Kappan on the state of curriculum jurisprudence catalogs a number of cases:

States have some authority over curriculum as well, insofar as they often set minimum curricular requirements for school districts. However, the courts have ruled that this authority is bounded by the constraints set by both the federal and the given state’s constitution. For example: 

In Meyer v. Nebraska (U.S. 1923), the U.S. Supreme Court found a state law prohibiting foreign language instruction in any school to be unconstitutional under the Due Process Clause as it was against the interest of private school foreign language teachers’ need for employment and parents’ desire for their children to learn foreign languages. 

In Epperson v. Arkansas (U.S. 1968), an Arkansas statute that made the teaching of evolution in public schools illegal was held to be a violation of the Establishment Clause.  

Similarly, in Edwards v. Aguillard (U.S. 1987), the U.S. Supreme Court found a Louisiana statute, which required the “equal treatment” of evolution and creation science in state classrooms, to be unconstitutional.  

And in Gonzalez v. Douglas (D. Ariz. 2017), a federal District Court ruled that two Arizona curricular statutes banning ethnic studies courses were unconstitutional. The court found an Equal Protection violation in that there was evidence of racial animus in the creation of the statute, and it found Free Speech violations in that there was no legitimate pedagogical rationale behind the statute. 

Underwood concludes that "courts generally defer to educational decision makers, while preferring to expand, rather than contract, the body of knowledge presented within schools." This makes both proposed bills look vulnerable to a First Amendment challenge.

The Timing Problem, And The Discussion We Need To Have

Remember #GamerGate? It seems a century ago. Ken White wrote a very good piece on the subject, with much wider applicability. Particularly, his point about timing resonates:

If, immediately after the shooting of Michael Brown, I started a vigorous campaign calling on society to protect convenience-store clerks from assault, people would reasonably suspect that I had a political agenda related to the shooting, not a sincere concern for the welfare of convenience store clerks.

The ACSS open letter mainly talks in generalities: the importance of "exposure to different cultures, groups, and viewpoints while in a school setting", or concerns that "secondary interpretations of history from different perspectives" will suddenly be eliminated. What's missing from all of this is an explanation of the Critical Race Theory animating much of 1619, and some of the more disturbing aspects of CRT pedagogy in the news. It is as if the Council is not particularly interested in answering any of the real objections parents might have about why public schools would want to use such divisive, biased, and politically charged materials.

The First Amendment case against HB1218 and HB1231 would seem fairly clear, but it gets murkier once you start to look more closely at CRT. John McWhorter in 2015 wrote a fine piece about the religious nature of CRT, loaded as it is with unfalsifiable first principles, carrying "clergy, creed, and also even a conception of Original Sin". But unlike Christianity, CRT offers neither grace nor atonement. Instead, "Ritual 'acknowledgment' of White Privilege is, ultimately, for white people to feel less guilty." The point is to think the right things and say the right words  — in other words, indoctrination. As Epperson v. Arkansas ironically makes clear, religious instruction in the public schools is a no-no.

But even if the courts ruled against both bills, we cannot escape the cynical, malign intent of CRT and its progeny, antiracism. Dogmatic and intolerant, the stories of Maoist struggle sessions in even elementary schools make for disturbing reading. Even if you legitimately wanted to end racism — yes, it still exists — antiracist instruction will have the opposite effect. Bullying of this sort has no place in the schools, least of all by those charged with teaching.

Is Feminism or Racism The More Profitable Grievance? Jezebel vs. The Root

I have been somewhat curious for a long while to determine which of the grievance studies disciplines are the more profitable in the private sector. While there's no good, simple way to determine this, it seemed likely that the commercial websites in this space might serve as a decent proxy for broader data. Particularly, it occurred to me after I wrote my analysis of TechCrunch's diversity problems that there might be other profitable avenues to explore among the grievance studies candidates in the private sector.

Sure enough, Jezebel and The Root have some interesting numbers once you dig down to the About pages. Particularly, among writers and editors listed as either active or emeritus (ignoring video editors, who won't get written bylines very often, and will serve to drag down the totals in both cases):

• Jezebel: 31,178 bylines over 12 (now nearly 13) years, written by 21 individuals, with an average of 1,484 bylines per writer. The most prolific: Kelly Faircloth, writing since November 21, 2013, with 3,460 bylines.
• The Root: 13,918 bylines over about 10 years, written by 14 writers, with an average of 994 bylines per writer. The most prolific: Stephen A. Crockett, Jr., with 2,020 bylines (the last in August, 2019).

So there you have it: Jezebel has 50% more writers (21% more if you remove emeritus staff), has been active two and a half years longer, and sports more than double the bylines. Presumably all of them are compensated, which strongly suggests that feminism wins hands down in the battle of the clicks. Supporting source material may be found here.

Nike's Cynical Kaepernick Calculation

Let us take as a given that Colin Kaepernick's national anthem protests are legitimate.

1. Without an actual organization, with concrete aims, to capitalize on the attention this is giving to the issue of young black men being killed by police, it is highly unlikely the situation will change.
2. This actually benefits Nike, in the same way that legalized abortion benefits anti-abortion crusaders on the right. Just as the latter can campaign on ending abortion without delivering, so can the former keep selling sneakers (and keep the public's eyes away from their Asian sweatshops) without moving the bar toward less deadly police encounters.

Whatever Kaepernick might have intended to change is now more entrenched, not less, with an even murkier path toward redemption.

The Sad, Futile, Career-Ending Gesture Of Colin Kaepernick

Everywhere today blared the news that Nike continued to pay Colin Kaepernick since his banishment from football.

Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything. #JustDoIt pic.twitter.com/SRWkMIDdaO

— Colin Kaepernick (@Kaepernick7) September 3, 2018

 Kaepernick, born of a white mother and a black father, and raised in California's Central Valley by white adoptive parents,  protested a number of controversial police shootings of blacks on social media, calling Alton Sterling's death a "lynching". In protest, he famously took a knee rather than stand for the national anthem, an act copied by many other players. And yet, if you were to look at his foundation and try to estimate what their aims were, you would find yourself stymied to make any sort of connection to ending senseless police shootings of young black men, besides the most tenuous ones. "Know Your Rights Camp" takes as its mission statement "to raise awareness on higher education, self empowerment, and instruction to properly interact with law enforcement in various scenarios." Aside from my universal banishment of all charities whose principal aim is "awareness", does this not seem like weak tea, the product of a meeting with lawyers and public relations types? If you were going to immolate your career for something, shouldn't it be more concrete and take direct action — such as political activism aimed to demilitarize the police (say)? As phrased, this sounds like "how to avoid being lynched" lessons.

Update 2018-09-04: Nike shares are down 4% following the news. This announcement may well prove disastrous to the sneaker manufacturer:

"The fallout was no surprise but Nike may be betting that the upside of a Kaepernick endorsement is worth angering conservative Americans and supporters of President Donald Trump," writes Bloomberg.

That might prove to be a bad bet, however. As Bleacher Report notes, a recent NBC News/WSJ poll found that a majority of voters (54%) thought Kaepernick's protest movement was "inappropriate," while just 43% said it was "appropriate."

Raising The Curtain On Peggy McIntosh

I have mentioned elsewhere Peggy McIntosh's seminal rant-disguised-as-an-academic-exercise, "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible KnapsackPeggy McIntosh" (PDF). It has received an unusual number of citations (3,895 by Google Scholar's count), i.e. more than one, and with good reason: it is foundational to the enterprise of intersectional politics, i.e. the scaffolding supporting the entire parasitic operation. Yet not enough attention has been paid to the woman herself, an oversight happily rectified today by William Ray at Quillette. McIntosh, it turns out, benefited mightily from wealthy parents and deep, aristocratic connections:

So central has this doctrine [of intersectionalism] become to progressive politics, pedagogy, and activism, that to even question its validity is to invite the inquisitorial wrath of ‘social justice’ radicals. But it is for this very reason that it is important to subject McIntosh’s ideas to scrutiny.

Peggy McIntosh was born Elisabeth Vance Means in 1934. She grew up in Summit, New Jersey where the median income is quadruple the American national average—that is to say that half the incomes there are more than four times the national average, some of them substantially so. McIntosh’s father was Winthrop J. Means, the head of Bell Laboratories electronic switching department during the late 1950s. ...

Elizabeth Vance Means then attended Radcliffe, a renowned finishing school for the daughters of America’s patrician elites, and continued her private education at the University of London (ranked in the top 50 by the Times Higher Education World University Rankings), before completing her English Doctorate at Harvard. Her engagement to Dr. Kenneth McIntosh was announced in the New York Times‘s social register on the same page as the wedding of Chicago’s Mayor Daley. McIntosh’s father, Dr. Rustin McIntosh, was Professor Emeritus of Pediatrics at Columbia University. His mother was President Emeritus of Barnard College, an institution in the opulent Morningside Heights district of Manhattan, famous since 1889 for providing the daughters of the wealthiest Americans with liberal arts degrees. This was once the stomping ground of American cultural luminaries like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Cecil B. DeMille, and several Supreme Court Justices. Kenneth McIntosh was himself a graduate of the Phillips Exeter Academy, which boasted alumni including Daniel Webster, the sons of Presidents Lincoln and Grant, and a number of Rockefeller scions. He later completed his elite education at Harvard College and the Harvard Medical School. By the time of his marriage to Elizabeth, Kenneth McIntosh was a senior resident at the prestigious Brigham Hospital in Boston, founded by millionaire Peter Bent.

In other words, Peggy McIntosh was born into the very cream of America’s aristocratic elite, and has remained ensconced there ever since. Her ‘experiential’ list enumerating the ways in which she benefits from being born with white skin simply confuses racial privilege with the financial advantages she has always been fortunate enough to enjoy.

"One is left to wonder why," Ray continues, "given her stated conviction that she has unfairly benefited from her skin color, there seems to be no record of her involvement in any charity or civil rights work." If you are your movement's Moses, your reputation is already secure.

Sarah Jeong Gets A Job At The Racial Animosity Factory

It's hard to say anything of substance about the Sarah Jeong story without duplicating things everyone else has said, so I here succumb to the temptation to link dump, mostly. The basic story is by now well-known; Jeong got hired to write unsigned editorials for the New York Times after a stint at The Verge and Harvard Law. Her tweets — literally, years of them — "reveal a vicious hatred of an entire group of people based only on their skin color" as Andrew Sullivan put it. Those of us on the receiving end of her nasty rhetoric (including expressions of "eliminationist" wishes — "#cancelwhitepeople") must understand that all this is just fine:

Jeong definitionally cannot be racist, because she’s both a woman and a racial minority. Racism against whites, in this neo-Marxist view, just “isn’t a thing” — just as misandry literally cannot exist at all. And this is because, in this paradigm, racism has nothing to do with a person’s willingness to pre-judge people by the color of their skin, or to make broad, ugly generalizations about whole groups of people, based on hoary stereotypes. Rather, racism is entirely institutional and systemic, a function of power, and therefore it can only be expressed by the powerful — i.e., primarily white, straight men. For a nonwhite female, like Sarah Jeong, it is simply impossible. In the religion of social constructionism, Jeong, by virtue of being an Asian woman, is one of the elect, incapable of the sin of racism or group prejudice. All she is doing is resisting whiteness and maleness, which indeed require resistance every second of the day.

That’s why Jeong hasn’t apologized to the white people she denigrated or conceded that her tweets were racist. Nor has she taken responsibility for them. Her statement actually blames her ugly tweets on trolls whose online harassment of her prompted her to respond in turn. She was merely “counter-trolling.” She says her tweets, which were not responses to any individual, were also “not aimed at a general audience,” and now understands that these tweets were “hurtful” and won’t do them again. The New York Times also buys this argument: “her journalism and the fact that she is a young Asian woman have made her a subject of frequent online harassment. For a period of time, she responded to that harassment by imitating the rhetoric of her harassers.”

Sullivan, who rightly called this excuse "the purest bullshit", found himself shortly thereafter attacked by the usual dimwits, including Ezra Klein, who stupidly used the fact that one of her tweets was about Sullivan to dismiss any criticism of it. (This was also picked up by Tyler O'Neil, who noted that Jeong used the tweet to whip up anti-Sullivan sentiment.) The Federalist had good responses from Warren Henry ("The scandal is not that the NYT hired Sarah Jeong. The scandal is that so many progressives cannot conceive of it being scandalous.") and Sumatra Maitra, for whom this graf stands out (emboldening mine):

One cannot possibly imagine how superficially polite but internally toxic and Stasi-esque the environment of a New York Times editorial meeting is, unless of course, you accept that all the men and women who work at The New York Times are groveling, self-hating cowards. It would be a great social science experiment to take an anonymous survey of the New York Times office to unearth what people really feel about their co-workers.

Likewise Jonah Goldberg in National Review; do we really have to spell out that racism against white people can be a thing? I guess so:

If all you need to know about Oscar Wilde is that he was a gay dude, just like Richard Simmons or Milo what’s-his-name, you’re a bigot. If Meyer Lansky and Albert Einstein are merely two Jews to you, you’re an anti-Semite. If Margaret Thatcher, Joan of Arc, and Lizzie Borden are just three chicks, you’re a sexist.

...But for some bizarre reason, for many people, this idea evaporates like water off a hot skillet when you replace any of these categories with “white” or, very often, “male.”

Suddenly fancy words and phrases fly like sawdust from a wood chipper: “structures of oppression!” “decontextualized!” “ahistoricized!” etc. It’s all so clever and complicated. The same people who take to the streets at the slightest suggestion that Muslims can be judged by the evil deeds of other Muslims will lecture and harangue you for hours, mob you on Twitter, or condescendingly dismiss you for not understanding that all white people have it coming.

A coda from David French:

...[T]his argument confuses the gravity of an offense with the existence of the offense. A powerless person’s hate may not harm the powerful, but it is still hate. A powerless person’s hate may even be grounded in specific experiences, but it is still hate. The essence of bigotry is to look at the color of a person’s skin and, on that basis alone, make malignant judgments about his character or worth.

A corollary illustrating how stupid the left's position here is that racism is geographic. If racism only exists in the contexts of power, and if you don't happen to be among the powerful majority, then a white person can't be racist in China, and a Chinese can't be racist in the west. Claire Lehmman credited the addled thinkers excusing Jeong with "[having] to defend their bailey position (racism=power+prejudice) rather than simply retreating to their motte position (dictionary definition of racism)", but so far as I have seen, this hasn't happened. The definition of racism got a good working over at Slate Star Codex:

So we have a case where original coinage, all major dictionaries, and the overwhelming majority of common usage all define “racism” one way, and social justice bloggers insist with astonishing fervor that way is totally wrong and it must be defined another. One cannot argue definitions, but one can analyze them, so you have to ask – whence the insistence that racism have the structural-oppression definition rather than the original and more commonly used one? Why couldn’t people who want to talk about structural oppression make up their own word, thus solving the confusion? Even if they insisted on the word “racism” for their new concept, why not describe the state of affairs as it is: “The word racism can mean many things to many people, and I suppose a group of black people chasing a white kid down the street waving knives and yelling ‘KILL WHITEY’ qualifies by most people’s definition, but I prefer to idiosyncratically define it my own way, so just remember that when you’re reading stuff I write”? Or why not admit that this entire dispute is pointless and you should try to avoid being mean to people no matter what word you call the meanness by?

The answer to that should by now be obvious: the people behind it want institutional power and this is a way to get it without accountability. "If you can't be racist against white people, then why are you trying so hard?"

Cathy Young:

So, what is the final lesson of the controversy over Jeong? Some conservative critics have slammed the New York Times for a “racial double standard” in standing by her, while others have denounced her tweets while agreeing that she shouldn’t be fired. But, interestingly, there has also been some angry reaction on the left. On Splinter News, Libby Watson called the Times’ handling of the incident “pathetic”; the newspaper’s statement, she fumed, not only validated “bad faith” right-wing complaints about Jeong but seemed to endorse the view that “being flippant about white people” was “comparable to actual racism.”

The Jeong controversy has revealed to what an extent a toxic form of identity politics is prevalent on the left today. The silver lining is that both the New York Times and Jeong have agreed that white-bashing is bad. Perhaps we can start a new conversation from that point.

Yes, especially given that Asian-American families out-earn their white counterparts by about 28% (PDF), it's hard to see how someone like Jeong, educated at an elite school, gets to make snotty comments about "all white people" — a group that includes a lot of Appalachian poverty. Jeong's tweets, it seems to me, amount to a sort of argot that provides a passkey to the cool kids hangout in the upper tiers of American society. They may not be meant seriously, but they not only did not cost her her job at The Verge, they got her an upgrade at the NYT.

Inkoo Kang at Slate essentially told white people to shut up, chiding the Times for "how protective it’s being of white feelings at a time of renewed and active discrimination against people of color", as though somehow being actually considerate toward others wasn't part of the process of convincing them to your point of view. But in keeping with the argot theory of Jeong's tweets, Jeong's job at the Times isn't one of convincing people so much as telling them the right thing to think. In fact, as Yascha Mounk (also in Slate) put it,

But while I do not think that Jeong should be fired for her tweets, I am depressed by the extent to which they are now being celebrated. This is true both because the content of her tweets is, from a liberal perspective, much worse than her defenders want to admit and because the kind of rhetoric in which she engaged is detrimental to the prospect of building a just society.

The core of the Times’ defense of Jeong is that she “responded to … harassment by imitating the rhetoric of her harassers.” In the most obvious reading of the statement, this is simply untrue. If Jeong had been imitating the rhetoric of her harassers, we would expect most instances of it to come in direct response to trolls. But in reality, she took aim at “white people” in standalone tweets on a wide range of subjects, from food to television.

The only tenable interpretation of the Times’ statement is therefore much broader: Because Jeong has frequently encountered abuse from white social media users—something that is, sadly, beyond doubt—she imitated their style and rhetoric when tweeting about white people in general, even when unprompted by any specific incident of harassment.

It seems incredible that Mounk needs to make the obvious point that, "the defensive inversion of bigotry ... is also a massive gift to the very people who are most intent on doing harm to them." That is to say, it is a kind of political suicide, one that reminds me of Freddie deBoer's response to the "magic words" concept.

Update 2018-08-09: Reihan Salam in The Atlantic:

In some instances, white-bashing can actually serve as a means of ascent, especially for Asian Americans. Embracing the culture of upper-white self-flagellation can spur avowedly enlightened whites to eagerly cheer on their Asian American comrades who show (abstract, faceless, numberless) lower-white people what for. ... <

Think about what it takes to claw your way into America’s elite strata. Unless you were born into the upper-middle class, your surest route is to pursue an elite education. To do that, it pays to be exquisitely sensitive to the beliefs and prejudices of the people who hold the power to grant you access to the social and cultural capital you badly want. By setting the standards for what counts as praiseworthy, elite universities have a powerful effect on youthful go-getters. Their admissions decisions represent powerful “nudges” towards certain attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors, and I’ve known many first- and second-generation kids—I was one of them—who intuit this early on.

Consider the recent contretemps over Harvard’s undergraduate admissions policies. Critics argue that the university actively discriminates against high-achieving Asian American applicants by claiming that a disproportionately large number of them have lackluster personalities. One obvious reaction to this charge is to denounce Harvard for its supposed double standards. This reaction might be especially appealing to those who see themselves as the sort of people who’d be dismissed by Harvard’s suspect screening process, and who’d thus have every reason to resent it. ...

So what if you’re an Asian American who has already made the cut? In that case, you might celebrate Harvard’s wisdom in judiciously balancing its student body, or warn that Harvard’s critics have a darker, more ominous agenda that can’t be trusted. This establishes you as an insider, who gets that Harvard is doing the right thing, while allowing you to distance yourself from less-enlightened, and less-elite, people of Asian origin: You’re all being duped by evil lower-whites who don’t grok racial justice.

The NEA Ignores Obama’s Advice On Race

Ex-President Obama recently gave a speech in which he said,

Democracy demands getting inside "the reality of people who are different than us."

"You can't do it if you insist that those who aren't like you because they're white, or because they're male...that somehow they lack standing to speak on certain matters."

This bit of obvious advice seems to have escaped the mandarins at the NEA, who recently published their 2018 statement of resolutions, which includes this howler:

White Supremacy Culture
The National Education Association believes that, in order to achieve racial and social justice, educators must acknowledge the existence of White supremacy culture as a primary root cause of institutional racism, structural racism, and White privilege. Additionally, the Association believes that the norms, standards, and organizational structures manifested in White supremacy culture perpetually exploit and oppress people of color and serve as detriments to racial justice. Further, the invisible racial benefits of White privilege, which are automatically conferred irrespective of wealth, gender, and other factors, severely limit opportunities for people of color and impede full achievement of racial and social justice. Therefore, the Association will actively advocate for social and educational strategies fostering the eradication of institutional racism and White privilege perpetuated by White supremacy culture.

Of course, no evidence is given for this, but none ever is; the power and ubiquity of racism is taken as axiomatic, and unstoppable. Even if Obama — or, if you have that limber an imagination, Hillary Clinton — had said something to this effect in 2016 (as some of the commenters in the thead in Cathy Young’s tweet suggested), it’s hard to imagine how those words wouldn’t be drowned out by “deplorables” and the sheer mass of the diversity-industrial complex within the Democratic Party.

Friday Links

• In reaction to Betsy DeVos rescinding the "Dear Colleague" letter, 29 US Senators have signed a letter condemning this action. The Constitution still isn't popular.
• Ross Douthat has a decent reaction to Ta-Nehisi Coates' essay about race's role in the 2016 Presidential election, accusing Coates of attacking a straw man (emboldening mine):
  

  Certainly there are many Americans whose beliefs fit Coates’ description, who regard Trump’s racial vision as basically benign if occasionally insensitive, who think he’s an unjust victim of the liberal media’s race card, and so forth. These Americans are Trump supporters, for the most part, plus a smattering of left-wing gadflies and other contrarians. But Coates is very clearly not arguing with Fox-watching Trump supporters in his essay: His piece quotes and critiques anti-Trump conservatives and Democrats and liberals, not Sean Hannity or his epigones, and his examples of the supposed “race is incidental” consensus are figures like Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, Mark Lilla and my colleague Nick Kristof, Charles Murray and Anthony Bourdain. His great complaint is not that Trump backers deny their own racist impulses, in other words, but that the “collective” of Trump opponents barely acknowledge the role of race and racism in his rise.

  Douthat repeats the same error that marred Coates' essay, namely, its refusal to look at anything resembling polling data, but it still represents a step up from that "caricature" in that it seeks to understand individuals who might have voted for Trump for reasons wholly (or even mostly) divided from racism or sexism.
• One potentially underreported cause of anti-Clinton sentiment: military voters (or people with family members in the military). Glenn Greenwald sets out a case (not as strong as he thinks) for a significant stream of such people making a difference in November:
  

  A study published earlier this year by Boston University political science professor Douglas Kriner and Minnesota Law School’s Francis Shen makes the case quite compellingly.
  

  
  

  Titled “Battlefield Casualties and Ballot Box Defeat: Did the Bush-Obama Wars Cost Clinton the White House?,” the paper rests on the premise that these wars have exclusively burdened a small but politically important group of voters — military families — and that “in the 2016 election Trump was speaking to this forgotten part of America.” Particularly in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan — three states that Clinton lost — “there is a significant and meaningful relationship between a community’s rate of military sacrifice and its support for Trump.” Examining the data, the paper concludes that “inequalities in wartime sacrifice might have tipped the election.”

• Why does Hillary Clinton think comparisons to Cersei Lannister is a good idea?
• Anita Sarkeesian's censorious tendencies perhaps have a limit.  
• Amber Tamblyn apparently has a long-ago beef with actor James Woods, who tried to pick her up as a teenager. She writes an open letter to Woods (who disputed the charges on Twitter) in the pages of Teen Vogue, and wishes for a world in which women's charges would just stick regardless of corroborating evidence or testimony:
  

  The saddest part of this story doesn't even concern me but concerns the universal woman's story. The nation's harmful narrative of disbelieving women first, above all else. Asking them to first corroborate or first give proof or first make sure we're not misremembering or first consider the consequences of speaking out or first let men give their side or first just let your sanity come last.

  Because false accusations never happen? Because memory is selective and frequently faulty? This coming from a political magazine in heels is par for the course, but it points at a dystopia.
• Update 2017-09-16: Okay, so no longer Friday, but too lazy to open a new post. Here's Jason D. Hill in Commentary responding to Ta-Nehisi Coates' recent essay:

  In the 32 years I have lived in this great country, I have never once actively fought racism. I have simply used my own example as evidence of its utter stupidity and moved forward with absolute metaphysical confidence, knowing that the ability of other people to name or label me has no power over my self-esteem, my mind, my judgment, and—above all—my capacity to liberate myself through my own efforts.
  
  On this matter, you have done your son—to whom you address your book—an injustice. You write: “The fact of history is that black people have not—probably no people ever have—liberated themselves strictly by their own efforts. In every great change in the lives of African Americans we see the hands of events that were beyond our individual control, events that were not unalloyed goods.”
  
  I do not believe you intended to mislead your son, but in imparting this credo, you have potentially paralyzed him, unless he reappraises your philosophy and rejects it. In your misreading of America, you’ve communicated precisely why many blacks in this country have been alienated from their own agency and emancipatory capabilities. The most beleaguered people on the planet, the Jews, who have faced persecution since their birth as a people, are a living refutation of your claim. ...

Shelby Steele On The Exhaustion Of American Liberalism

One of the better writers on the subject of race, Shelby Steele, earned a great deal of notoriety with his The Content Of Our Character (1998). He returns with an essay appearing in the Wall Street Journal on that same subject, "The Exhaustion of American Liberalism". Key passage (emboldening mine):

White guilt is not actual guilt. Surely most whites are not assailed in the night by feelings of responsibility for America’s historical mistreatment of minorities. Moreover, all the actual guilt in the world would never be enough to support the hegemonic power that the mere pretense of guilt has exercised in American life for the last half-century.

White guilt is not angst over injustices suffered by others; it is the terror of being stigmatized with America’s old bigotries—racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia. To be stigmatized as a fellow traveler with any of these bigotries is to be utterly stripped of moral authority and made into a pariah. The terror of this, of having “no name in the street” as the Bible puts it, pressures whites to act guiltily even when they feel no actual guilt. White guilt is a mock guilt, a pretense of real guilt, a shallow etiquette of empathy, pity and regret.

It is also the heart and soul of contemporary liberalism. This liberalism is the politics given to us by white guilt, and it shares white guilt’s central corruption. It is not real liberalism, in the classic sense. It is a mock liberalism. Freedom is not its raison d’être; moral authority is.

"Mock guilt" is what drives the "check your privilege" nonsense, words mouthed to evade actual accountability for the things real world encounters with politics inflict on people. Here, I am thinking of David Simon's inexplicable, apparently branding-driven endorsement of the execrable Martin O'Malley, or the belief of Hillary voters in her moral superiority on matters of race. Privilege (despite the absurd and obvious problems with its explanatory power) in this reading is merely a catalyst for public displays of guilt  — but one need never actually do anything about whatever it is that makes one guilty.

Steele's essay is not without its flaws, and it has some gaping ones, particularly his insistence that "we all... know that [Donald Trump] isn’t [racist]". Trump's handling of his father's apartment complexes is enough to excite the charge, at least, and the Nixon-era DOJ was hardly radical. But overall, some excellent points.

The Annie Wilkes Model Of Culture

I had read in various corners about Tim Burton's supposed racist comments in the context of his new film, Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children, contained in an interview in The Bustle, as to why his movies are so, so white:

“Nowadays, people are talking about it more […]things either call for things, or they don’t. I remember back when I was a child watching The Brady Bunch and they started to get all politically correct, like, OK, let’s have an Asian child and a black — I used to get more offended by that than just — I grew up watching blaxploitation movies, right? And I said, that’s great. I didn’t go like, OK, there should be more white people in these movies.”

This, of course, met with howls of protest from people for whom "diversity" is really code for "must make movies in exactly the way I want them made" — as for instance this:

To add insult to injury, you claim that “things” (movies and other shows?) either call for “things” (diversity), or they don’t. Ok, whatever, I’ll bite. If that’s so, then why did the role of a villain call for a black man? It sends kind of a questionable message. This is the first time you’ve had a person of color in a major role in any of your movies, and according to you, things either call for diversity or they don’t, so you felt the role of a particularly awful villain (we’ve both read the book, I’m sure. That guy is just the fucking worst.) called for a black actor. The only time your films have called for any significant diversity so far has been when you needed someone to be the worst kind of evil? That’s not a good look, buddy. It leaves a horrible taste in my mouth about you that watching “Sweeney Todd” and “Edward Scissorhands” on loop just won’t wash out.

So in other words, it's not enough to cast a black man in his films — no, blacks must be cast in the roles the author wants, have the qualities the author wants, etc. For his part, Samuel L. Jackson appeared to think the whole thing was a nothingburger:

With”Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children,” Samuel L. Jackson will be the first black actor to play a leading role in a Burton movie, according to Bustle.  “I don’t think it’s any fault of his or his method of storytelling, it’s just how it’s played out,” Jackson told Bustle. “Tim’s a really great guy.”

This represents yet another instance of the narcissistic view that creators must make stories for fans in exactly the way the fans want them, and with exactly the right political overtones. As Joss Whedon found out, even tiny diversions from orthodoxy are met with shrieking. We see the echoes of this with the Sad Puppies Hugo slate and the Ghostbusters reboot lynch mob: both involve orchestrated attempts by loud minorities to manipulate public opinion by shaming, and both face titanic uphill battles. The more vicious of these recall Annie Wilkes from Misery: they plan on bludgeoning creators until they get it right, for some value of "right".

How Black Lives Matters Entryism Shut Down The Toronto Pride Parade

Walter Olsen, whose Overlawyered blog is on my sidebar, today comes to us with a Storify link to his tweets of Sunday's takeover by Black Lives Matter protesters. The most disturbing part is Black Lives Matters was asked to lead the parade:

"BLM said they did not tell organizers about their plan to hijack the parade, an act that has since been called a “win” by the group, but widely criticized by many others.

Pride president Mathieu Chantelois called BLM's hijacking of the event the mere opening of negotiations:

“Yesterday, we agreed to have a conversation about this. We agreed that we will bring this to the community and to the membership, but at the end of the day, if my membership says no way, we want to have police floats, they decide.”

 Unsurprisingly, this has resulted in a flood of hate mail aimed at BLM, whose behavior is simply inexcusable and childish. BLM went on to complain about this as "pink-washing":

Charges of "pinkwashing" are invariably some mixture of eyewash, brainwash, and hogwash. #PrideTO https://t.co/90V9Y8su0k

— Walter Olson (@walterolson) July 6, 2016

Relations between the petulant BLM protesters and city hall appear to be still surprisingly good, as the city planned on giving them a race relations award, part of a pattern of collapse in the face of organized protest, no matter how childish.

The short history of Black Lives Matter in Toronto proves that so long as you’re the victim group du jour, bullying and intimidation can win you obeisance from officials, to say nothing of reverential coverage in the media. When they staged a sit-in outside police headquarters to protest police racism, the Toronto Star depicted them as freedom fighters. After they demonstrated outside the home of Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne, she met them on the steps of Queen’s Park and declared, “I believe we still have systemic racism in our society.” When they accused the city of racism for shortening the schedule of an African music festival (the neighbours had complained about the noise), the city hurriedly restored it. In response to their demands, both the city and the province have called for investigations into the racist practices of the police – despite the obvious fact that Toronto is one of the most racially peaceable cities in all of North America.

As much as I'd like to think the Pride organizers will win this one over time, I'm not entirely convinced.

The Ouroboros: Black Lives Matter Shakes Down Toronto Pride

The Toronto Pride festival yesterday ground to a halt for half an hour for a Black Lives Matter protest. "The parade didn't re-start until after Pride Toronto executive director Mathieu Chantelois signed a document agreeing to the group's demands." Those demands are interesting to read:

Among the nine, three explicitly cite funding, while the rest (save #8) are implicit funding demands, either through hiring/staffing demands or expenditures (as for "community spaces", "community full control over hiring", "increase community stages/spaces", etc.). It is hard to see how this can possibly stick; Chantelois signed an agreement under duress, i.e. the Black Lives Matter leaders forced him to submit or else they would not allow the parade to continue. So if this gets to court, it's very hard to imagine how this would be enforceable. Moreover, kicking police out of Pride activities sends a terrible message: it really is Us vs. Them, with no dialogue possible.

Already, Pride has backed off the idea that the police ban will remain in force in future events, saying,

"Pride Toronto never agreed to exclude police services from the Pride parade... We have had, and will continue to have, discussions with the police about the nature of their involvement as parade participants," the organization said in a statement.

"Frankly, Black Lives Matter isn't going to tell us there's no more floats in the parade," Pride Toronto executive director Mathieu Chantelois told CP24 earlier in the day.

One wonders just how much longer they will adhere to the other, less visible but still significant terms inflicted on them. While the tantrum's outcome drew praise from many quarters, it appears from this vantage that it was nothing short of a commercial shakedown of the sort American race hucksters have engaged in for decades. Intersectionalism means there's always someone more privileged than you, if you just try hard enough; converting that to money and power is always the goal.

The Embarrassing Old Men Of Atheism

I wrote a while back about how some of the atheists had conflated civility and "safety", i.e. ideological conformity; apparently the shunning has begun in earnest, now that "there's an excellent chance that the top of your head came off" when thinking about the awful, sexist, racist, every other -ist Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. Already, they're casting the wrongthinkers out of the tent:

Thirdly (and you knew I would get to this) there are conflicts within the atheist movement. We often neglect to assume best intentions, which is a strategy necessary for healthy collaboration. But assuming best intentions with our fellow atheists is a challenge when there is a small cadre of atheists whose intentions are not kind or respectful but threatening and abusive, specifically towards women who identify and criticize sexism. There are also a substantial number of community members, many of whom I call friends, who don't always differentiate that cadre's hateful and violent speech from respectful disagreement. This has led to a ever-widening chasm between the "let's all get along" folk and a number of prominent atheist feminists.

The hateful cadre? They can go to nonexistent hell. No one who makes any kind of threat belongs in the atheist community. The rest of us would benefit from figuring out how to work together. That would require the "let's all get along" folk to stop referring to threats and hate speech as "disagreement." And it would require us feminists to be very careful ourselves about not mistaking disagreement or ignorance for unforgivable bigotry. As Bernice Johnson Reagon said, "a coalition is not a home"; we should not need to agree or even feel comfortable with each other to work together.

Except, of course, when they should. Just as a reminder, one of the many things that set off the prior round of atheist exorcism was Dawkins retweeting a woman questioning the existence of sexism within atheist groups (and positing a reason why so many do find it):

I'm a woman & an atheist blogger, & never experienced sexist abuse from fellow atheists. Maybe because I don't assume they're misogynists?

— Lucy Wainwright (@Whoozley) August 27, 2012

 Well, of course, burn the witch, &c. I don't doubt Dawkins can be pugilistic; it seems a fairly defining feature of modern atheistic discourse. But the insane equivalence of legitimate disagreement with "hate speech" shows just how petty and juvenile the movement has become.

On Privilege

Because it keeps coming up, and I have wanted to write a brief something on this topic, a meditation on the concept of "privilege". As commonly used in feminist and racial contexts, e.g. Peggy McIntosh's tiresome "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" or John Scalzi's dumb, tendentious, and insulting essay, "Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is", "privilege" is an unearned benefit derived from birth status, e.g. the condition of being male, or white. In my experience, "privilege" is really two things, one trivially (in the sense of inarguably) true, and the other demonstrably false:

1. That certain people have it easier in the world than others as a consequence of birth.
2. That all subsequent success such people have are in fact directly derived from those advantages.

 I came across a clickbait-headlined cartoon recently that promised to "forever change the way you look at privilege", but in fact was a pretty standard review of how "privilege" is alleged to work. A couple remarks before diving in:

 

Does there exist, anywhere in this nation, a school district that confesses they are anything but terribly underfunded? I have yet to hear of it. And yet. Pushing on:

Here we go: item 2, FTW! All success can be ascribed to birth status, in some large measure. Q.E.D.

Except where that's wrong. Ultimately, privilege is a motte-and-bailey tactic as described by Nicholas Shackel in his paper, "The Vacuity Of Postmodernist Methodology" (PDF). A motte-and-bailey is a kind of bait-and-switch: the first part is easily defensible (birth can confer unearned advantages), but the second, radical part (all success thereafter is also due to unearned advantages) is not. By shifting definitions, and refusing to look at failures as well as success, we see that "privilege", animated by jealousy, is a toy philosophical theory that has almost no explanatory power.

I encountered (what might well be) a good example of this latter at Medium a number of weeks back in Umar Haque's essay, "The Asshole Factory". The only thing of importance for my purposes here is the first two sentences:

My good friend Mara has not one but two graduate degrees. From fine, storied universities. Surprise, surprise: the only “job” she was able to find was at a retail store.

Let that sink in for a bit: this person has two graduate degrees, and is obliged to work retail? It's entirely reasonable to infer a couple things here:

1. Her parents have considerable money to put her through multiple postgraduate programs.
2. She has never previously had to give much thought to how she was going to make a living.

Yet, despite these advantages, she's ... working retail for a crummy employer who spies on her every second of her work day, comparing her performance against her daily sales quota in real time, etc. In privilege theory, none of this should have happened, and she should have ridden off into the sunset with a big bag of money. Or something. Now, I'll grant you I don't know if Mara is white, or even real, but that story is one that's getting repeated time and again because of the painfully false belief that college is necessary for everyone. Being white doesn't get you out of college debt. "Privilege" doesn't address failure and hardship; as a theory for how society works, it deserves only ridicule.

Update: Just came across David Greenberg's "What In The World Is 'Privilege'?" at The College Conservative, which addresses the matter from its Marxist origins.