“To Fight Racism, Should White Children Be Made ‘Uncomfortable’?”
That’s the title of this article.
The simple answer is “no.” The more forceful answer is “no, no, a thousand times no.”
The first reason is a very basic one that actually has nothing to do with race, but is a general rule: no member of a racial group bears group responsibility, especially children, even if the premise of the accusation is true for a large number of people in that group. Responsibility is an individual matter and we are responsible only for our own acts.
However, there are more objections than that to the “systemic racism” “whites are privileged” “anti-racism” game. And it is a game, a high-stakes one, with power and money available for those promoting it, and with the indoctrination of generations of children in leftist racialism and inverted racism the additional goal.
From the article:
Examples abound in CRT theory and popular writing about how overcoming white fragility requires of white people that they sit with their guilt, shame, and unease. Take this example from an NPR report: “‘It’s going to be uncomfortable and you’re going to have legitimate fear,’ if you choose to engage in racial equity dialogue, said Kwame Christian, director of the American Negotiation Institute in Ohio.”
Or this from The New Yorker describing “antiracist” author Robin DiAngelo’s approach: “One has the grim hunch that such an approach has been honed over years of placating red-faced white people, workshop participants leaping at any excuse to discount their instructor.”
Rather than debate their own theory on the merits, the “anti-racist” crowd has adopted a clever tactic that seemingly makes their approach unanswerable. It goes like this: the more you argue with me, the more it proves me right. There must be a name for that sort of fallacious argument in terms of logic, but in terms of psychology it is somewhat like (although not exactly the same as) a double bind. If the person wants to disagree with the trainer, then that person is automatically wrong, even if the person’s arguments are good in the logical or factual sense:
The double bind occurs when the person cannot confront the inherent dilemma, and therefore can neither resolve it nor opt out of the situation.
Agreement is the only response to CRT allowed.
In addition:
(1) “Systemic racism” is an assertion that not only has not been proven but which is impossible to prove or disprove because it is both vaguely and broadly defined as the cause of any disparity between the races. And yet systemic racism is the support for the entire anti-racism movement and without it there is no CRT movement.
(2) Critical Race Training has not been proven to help the matter, even if one accepts some of its premises of Critical Race Theory. In fact, there are indications (see also this) that such training may make things worse.
Critical Race Theory and Critical Race Training are among the most pernicious of modern philosophies, all the more destructive because they cloak themselves in seeming righteousness and exploit people’s wishes to be good and to self-flagellate in the process of self-betterment. It appeals both to many of those who have cast off religion (it’s a religion-substitute sneaking in through the back door, as it were) and also to many of those who embrace religion and want to be purer than pure in motive and deed and who seek penance. CRT is a leftist philosophy that cleverly substitutes race and power for the old class and power focus of Marxism, and in this new guise has threatened the work that generations of actual anti-racists believed they had accomplished.
I have searched for a truthful way to respond if asked some form of question regarding what “lives” matter or a test of my “allyship.” I listen to writer and pundit, (and political changer) Andrew Klavan’s podcast, and his philosophical musings have led me to an approach I think I will use, should the occasion arise.
“My religious faith instructs me that all humans are made in the image of God.”
If that doesn’t get the questioner to change the subject, or stop their interrogation I will repeat the phrase, and only that phrase, like a POW reciting name, rank and serial number.
The main reason I like it is because it is the truth. It’s not a dodge. But, also, I assume it will be a bit like exposing a vampire to sunlight and the interrogator will leave me alone.
I don’t recall where I first heard the theory, but it makes good sense. As neo writes in her final sentence; Marxism needs conflict to succeed. Class envy was an effective tool in Europe because Europe was very much a class based society. They tried the same tactic in the U.S., but the U.S. had so much economic mobility between generations that it was not as effective here.
So they flipped it to race.
“Responsibility is an individual matter” should be regarded as axiomatically true, but it is considered such only, with very few exceptions, by conservatives or by those on the right. Most on the left are collectivists and privilege the group over the individual within the paradigm of oppressor/oppressed, especially the “wokerati”, who are happy to assign responsibility to whites for their “racism” but withhold such from non-whites (as one can determine from the recent attempts to blame random attacks on Asian-Americans, committed almost without exception by blacks, on “white supremacy”). There also exist many leftists who deny the existence of any kind of free will (without which there can be no personal responsibility), in which case no-one, white or black, can ever he held accountable, since all are equally lacking in agency.
j e,
I’m not sure I agree that it is obviously, axiomatically true, but I do think most people can understand that personal responsibility is a necessary component of personal freedom. If one wants to be free to live as one wants one must also accept personal responsibility for one’s choices. It doesn’t take too many sentences to explain that axiom and I think most people will admit that it is true, when pushed. Young folks still in school; especially in High School and College, usually instantly grasp this when discussing grades.
This is all socially sanctioned aggression. It doesn’t surprise me that teachers’ colleges and social work programs spit out people whose avocation is socially-sanctioned aggression and it doesn’t surprise me that feckless politicians allow them to do this. Question, why are business executives allowing HR and corporate communications types to indulge their socially-sanctioned aggression on company time?
The rapidly metastasizing CRT cult has been a Herculean challenge for conservatives (and punch-drunk liberals) to successfully respond to. As Neo points out, the trick among the high priests/hucksters of this cult is to make everything they spew theoretically unfalsifiable. Anyone who protests, argues, questions or tries to engage in any way is exhibiting ‘white fragility’ and only proving all the points of CRT.
Neat, huh?
There is, I believe, a response that is likely to be successful (and I say this as a state employee in a deep blue state, where I expected this garbage to be mandatory for all state workers very soon). It is: no response at all. Like all bullies, these CRT crackpots want a response, any response; that’s the whole point. One can affirm and praise them, argue and yell at them or mock and heckle them; all are responses and all validate them and their ‘arguments’.
I respect Jodi Shaw in all of her brave efforts, but even what she did was still a response. Don’t do that. Sit there stone faced (or maybe with a friendly smile) and say nothing. Don’t even state you aren’t participating, like Shaw did. Just stay silent. Trust me, that will frustrate, confuse and infuriate them.
I realize this is far harder for children to accomplish. I realize, in general, it is a highly challenging task when being barraged, berated, degraded and provoked by professional agitators. But it is, by far, the best course of action
“To Fight Racism, Should White Children Be Made ‘Uncomfortable’?”
Neo’s reply: The simple answer is “no.” The more forceful answer is “no, no, a thousand times no.”
That concurs with my childhood experience. First, children who act in ways that may be construed as racist are probably doing so from feeling discomfort from encountering an “other.” Making children comfortable in the presence of an “other” will tend to reduce acts or attitudes that may be construed as racist.
There was a black in my class in rural NE. Because I saw that my parents and family friends treated my classmate or any members of the classmate’s family like just another neighbor, I became comfortable with my classmate. Result: decades later my classmate told me that I was only one of three classmates “who treated me like a human being.” As the classmate still lives in town, the classmate made the conclusion in later years that that group of three had greatly expanded.
Discomfort with a stranger is often the default reaction of a child. At a hotel in Argentina, a toddler started screaming at me when I was only ten? or so feet away. After a week or so, the toddler, the son of the hotel manager, became comfortable with me- probably because he saw that his mother was comfortable with me. In retrospect, the toddler reacted thusly because I was different in appearance from what he was accustomed to: eyeglasses, light-complexioned, dirty blonde hair, and blue eyes, in contrast to the Mestizos he lived among.
Defuse a child’s discomfort- don’t make the child uncomfortable.
Art Deco:
I read somewhere that the original motive for companies was that they felt it would protect them against lawsuits for racial discrimination, if they could prove they’d had these trainings. Companies often first instituted the practice after lawsuits on the basis of race.
Rufus T. Firefly, I think that is the right approach, and I will follow it.
If they’re going to teach people to hate each other, they should expect violent results. That may be their aim, but it strikes me as stupid, since people of African ancestry are still a minority.
It also strikes me as evil. Teaching children to hate other children is clearly evil.
How do people not see how this ends? Tell white people to think of themselves as a racial category because you want them to eat crap for discrimination real and imagined and eventually they will think of themselves as a racial category, one just waiting for someone to come around and tell them they don’t need to eat crap anymore.
In a society where there are five times as many whites and blacks (and the difference grows to six times if you combine whites and Latinos), there is literally no other direction for this to go.
Mike
For some time now, I have closed each outgoing email with this signature, which states my unequivocal belief:
“The most effective way to achieve racial justice is for each person to treat all others as individuals with all of the courtesy and respect they deserve. The surest way to guarantee perpetual racial animosity is the path we are on.”
No one has ever commented on this either way; so I have no idea how it is received. I guess I really don’t much care.
I have commented before that I grew up in the South in the 1940s and ’50s. I was casually prejudiced; although I bore no ill will to any individual. Even then, and certainly since, I have faithfully followed the first precept from the above statement. I will continue to treat each individual the same; but, I readily confess that I carry a load of resentment toward the militant tribalism that characterizes the moment.
Ackler,
Wait until you get to the training…
They anticipated your approach. That’s why the trainings have breakouts into small groups of 2,3 or 4 people, each with assigned roles one must perform. And then reforming as a larger group and direct questioning about what your group learned, etc… And there are individual writing assignments.
And, of course, there is always, “I notice you have been quiet so far this morning, Ackler. Can you share with the group a time when you have felt marginalized…”
Silence is not permitted.
Kate,
It is even more evil to teach small children they are lesser. We all, everyone of us, is a descendant of slaves. Why do they only want black children to see themselves in that lowly image?
Rufus T Firefly, that is exactly where I landed and like you stated, the truth as I understand it. I don’t see God giving anyone a pass to “hate” and hate has been a big motivator over time as social media has taken over the community paradigm. Hating a behavior is very different than hating a person. It may be hard to distinguish between the 2 when one has been personally wronged, but the outrage that accompanies people’s opinions these days exceeds a position arrived at by principles or standards. Some time ago a commenter stated that tua culpa replaced mea culpa as a societal stance. Afterall, we can only change our own behavior and if people did so en masse in conformance with the things they claim are important and necessary, we would be in a far different state.
“It goes like this: the more you argue with me, the more it proves me right. There must be a name for that sort of fallacious argument in terms of logic, but in terms of psychology it is somewhat like (although not exactly the same as) a double bind.”
There is a name for it. It’s a kafkatrap.
Rufus, I too decided last June that CRT is against my religious beliefs–I am Catholic–and I will not ever be participating in any training, seminars, consciousness raising that classifies my brothers and sisters in Christ by the color of their skin.
Soon as you start getting lawsuit awards due to crt, it will stop…
At the moment these activists are benefiting by hyperinflating the currency of racism. Most people who didn’t graduate from college in the last ten years think that racism is a personal moral failing. However, now that “racism” is being hyperinflated into disparate impacts that no single human has the ability to do anything about, in the near future no one is going to feel bad about being accused of “racism”.
So they have this short window in which people are still accepting the currency of the charge of “racism” at face value.
What they will do with this window is similar to what was done with environmentalism. They make everyone feel bad about what no one can help, and then they will give you meaningless token exercises to make you feel personally virtuous, while at the same time they will siphon off tax money into boondoggles that also don’t affect the root cause in any meaningful way, but do provide a living for the clients of politicians, who will collect votes from people who enjoy feeling virtuous without having to make any real effort (i. e. a majority in practically any electorate).
Soon as you start getting lawsuit awards due to crt, it will stop…
Worked real well in re AA.
Defuse a child’s discomfort- don’t make the child uncomfortable.
Make children uncomfortable for their actual offenses and short-comings, not for fictions dreamed up by asinine (and deeply mediocre) people.
Forced busing played a significant role in killing working class support for the Democrats the 1970s. Turns out, people really don’t like it if you put their children at risk.
It looks like deja vu all over again.
I read somewhere that the original motive for companies was that they felt it would protect them against lawsuits for racial discrimination, if they could prove they’d had these trainings. Companies often first instituted the practice after lawsuits on the basis of race.
One of the participants in a forum I frequent is recently retired from a corporate GC’s office. He denied that his office was the source of it at his company and he said the ‘c-suite’ people weren’t paying much attention to their lawyers at all. He averred it was coming from HR and corporate communications and the c-suite people were not evaluating the bilge from HR and communications with any critical distance. I’m going to offer a different hypothesis: the process by which promotions are cadged in contemporary corporate culture rewards people with particular properties. These properties are positively correlated with a different set of properties. That second set of properties is what generates shallow fad-chasers.
It’s just a subspecies of an ad hominem argument implicitly folded as a conclusion into a superficial dilemma. A nice touch of insulting racial mockery and derision. i.e., “red faced” which was seen in South African racial invective rhetoric is added by the rather parchment or manila toned D’Angelo, for effect.
-You are a defensive recipient of (undeserved and illegitimate) white privilege.
– It is the nature of those guilty to deny their guilt.
Therefore, If you admit your guilt you are Guilty. If you deny your guilt, it is further proof that you are guilty. Either way you are guilty (and undeserving and an illegitimate beneficiary – after all “you didn’t build that”)
Dilemmas are not subject to direct refutation because it is the hidden assumptions and suppressed premisses that do the work. Dilemmas can only be parodied, analyzed as logically empty, or rhetorically broken by a rude in-your-face challenge to the implicit assumptions.
Of course, those subject to Critical Race Theory harangues are already in a subservient and dependency position and unlikely to respond with the last. They are not free in principle to defend themselves; as they are functionally in a master-servant relationship with the employer, and are just being given a reminder by the employer of how un-special their bought and paid for status really is.
The horns of the white privilege indictment dilemma, is one that cannot be as comically leaped as the old Greek Mother’s warning dilemma posed to discourage her civic minded son’s participation in politics: “If you do what is right you will be hated by men, if wrong you will be hated by the gods.”
The son famously responds that he will indeed go into politics, because: “If I do right I will be loved by the gods, if wrong, I will be loved by men”
In the case of BLM and critical race theory it is the assumptions, some of which I have place in parentheses, and which refer to unexamined platitudes, which do the work.
If someone were to say to you that “Black Lives Matter”, what would they say if you responded: “Why”; or, “To whom”.
Or what if you said, “Maybe, but as you are white I don’t see how yours necessarily does”
These of course are rude remarks which crack the foundations and require the claimant to explain himself if he wishes to maintain the facade of reasonableness. And of course if you are concerned with backlash or losing visitation privileges to your grandchildren or being shunned by that sandal wearing, shuffling, perpetually banjo-eyed simp of a neighbor in the boonie hat, then you are going to have to figure out another angle.
Forced busing played a significant role in killing working class support for the Democrats the 1970s. Turns out, people really don’t like it if you put their children at risk. It looks like deja vu all over again.
Note, the youth were at risk because the sort of people who engage in witless social engineering schemes (see Arthur Garrity for exhibit A) are the same sort of people who actively interfere with the efforts of sensible people to formulate and enforce impersonal standards of academic performance and common standards of personal conduct. They shuttle youngsters from one end of town to another (rather than do something mildly sensible like make some adjustments in the boundaries of service catchments), they refuse to sequester trouble-makers, and they refuse to sort students into performance tracks. Liberals damage everything they touch.
I’m considering using the polite Southern Lady approach to anyone that attempts to school me on CRT or white fragility – “That’s nice, hon.”
@DNW:And of course if you are concerned with backlash or losing visitation privileges to your grandchildren or being shunned by that sandal wearing, shuffling, perpetually banjo-eyed simp of a neighbor in the boonie hat, then you are going to have to figure out another angle.
What most working people are concerned with is keeping food on the table and paying the rent or the mortgage, often because they have a family counting on them to do those things. Really spectacular defiance could make someone unemployable for years. As you say,
Of course, those subject to Critical Race Theory harangues are already in a subservient and dependency position and unlikely to respond with the last. They are not free in principle to defend themselves; as they are functionally in a master-servant relationship with the employer, and are just being given a reminder by the employer of how un-special their bought and paid for status really is.
Yeah… yeah. And if more of us were young and single and able to start over without consequences for our dependents more of us would find it easier to be free. Or maybe not.
The goal is not to make white children “uncomfortable” the goal is to make them Janissaries. The racial makeup of the majority of Antifa members is a preview of the left’s planned American red guards. The left wants millions of them not just hundreds or thousands.
“My religious faith instructs me that all humans are made in the image of God.” Rufus T. Firefly
Since in general, advocates of CRT don’t believe there is a God (Christianity’s tenets being antithetical to CRT’s propositions) they view Christianity as inherently discriminatory and even racist. Your response will be seen as absolute confirmation of racist discrimination.
You will be canceled.
“If one wants to be free to live as one wants one must also accept personal responsibility for one’s choices.”
Ah but you don’t have the right to individual choices that affect the group and everything we do… affects the group.
Ackler,
“Silence is violence.” As Rufus points out, “You will not be permitted to be silent.”
Many will go along, to get along. In effect, deciding that man does live by bread alone.
Some will refuse to submit. Because a life without liberty is a living death.
Frederick on May 11, 2021 at 6:47 pm said:
And, what can they count on their family for, in return?
Apparently, not much to nothing, in many cases.
And of course, “employable” is a key word here, as it is not precisely synonymous with getting a living.
So, just as we should bear in mind some of the potential costs of being free, so too we ought to face facts when it comes to explaining to ourselves what it is we are purchasing in return for our voluntary subservience.
I agree with Roger Simon, CRT uses EST methods ramped up to infinity. Join the cult or be banished from society, branded outlaw, in the old sense.
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/449174/
Hi Rufus.
Can you expand what you mean by that rather puzzling remark?
}}} it is both vaguely and broadly defined as the cause of any disparity between the races.
ALMOST accurate:
If there’s a disadvantage for whites, that’s “only justice coming home to roost”.
>:-/
Another apt question might be what to do with people who, in service to an overtly racist agenda, repeatedly make children uncomfortable.
However one might answer, the obvious underlying reality is that CRT advocates are at war with conventional society. Should we respond or stand down like so many blue cities do when woke mobs attack?
}}} Hating a behavior is very different than hating a person.
Anger and hatred are often conflated — this is a huge mistake.
Anger has a cause
Remove the cause, the anger fades. It loses its fuel source.
Hate has a target
Even if you eliminate the target, usually, the hatred still burns on, because it’s feeding off your soul. It just finds a new target.
Short of some truly despicable behaviors (rape, child abuse), most behaviors lead to anger, not hate.
Yes, I’m a racist, but much worse. I have instincts acquired from Africa 300,000 years ago telling me that I am to be vicious and brutal to anyone who is a stranger to me and is different in any way from my group.
@DNW:what can they count on their family for, in return?
Apparently, not much to nothing, in many cases.
Yeah, I should find some way for my 9-year-old to help me make the mortgage.
we ought to face facts when it comes to explaining to ourselves what it is we are purchasing in return for our voluntary subservience.
I agree, and I’m trying really hard not to read a sneer into what you have here. In theory yeah we could all be self-starting enterpreneurial go-getters if the crony capitalists will stop regulating that option away, and perhaps it’s a failing on our part that more of us are not trying to avoid a salary or a wage.
Rufus,
I don’t doubt you at all. Like all cult leaders, the CRT grifters are masters of emotional manipulation and intimidation. I’m sure another tactic they likely employ is getting others in the group to publicly and repeatedly denounce the silence of any white person who refuses to participate (‘silence is violence’, after all). I understand it will be tremendously difficult to stay silent in the face of such onslaught. I am not sure I will be able to do so. But I have little doubt it is the best course of action.
Arthur Koestler, himself a former Communist, wrote about the nature of intellectually closed systems:
‘Within the closed system of Freudian thought you cannot, for instance,
argue that for certain reasons you doubt the existence of the so-called castration complex. The immediate answer will be that your arguments are rationalisations of an unconscious resistance which betrays that you yourself have such a complex. You are caught in a vicious circle from which there is no logical escape. Similarly, if you are a Marxist and if you claim that Lenin’s
order to march on Warsaw in 1920 was a mistake, it will be explained to you that you ought not to trust your own judgment because it is distorted by vestiges of your former petit-bourgeois class-consciousness”
“The absence of objectivity in debate is many times
compensated by its fervour. The disciple receives a thorough indoctrination, and an equally thorough training in the system’s particular method of reasoning. As a result of this training, he acquires a technique of argumentation which is mostly superior to that of any opponent from the outside. He is thoroughly acquainted with the great debates of the past between the apostles and
the unbelievers; he is acquainted with the history of heresies and schisms; he knows the classic controversies between Jansenites and Jesuits, between Freud and Jung, between Lenin and Kautsky. Thus he recognises at once the type and attitude of his opponent, is able to classify the latter’s objections according to familiar categories; knows the questions and answers as though
they were the opening variants of a chess game.
The trained, “close-minded” theologian, psychoanalyst, or Marxist can at any time make mincemeat of his “open-minded” adversary and thus prove the superiority of his system to the world and to himself”
Frederick on May 11, 2021 at 7:42 pm said:
@DNW:
I did not realize we were talking about your particular circumstances. To requote the specific text I was addressing:
So, as you were speaking in broad terms, I was responding in generalized terms hypothesizing the difference a supportive wife, and supportive and understanding offspring might have. For those struggling to make ends meet, and with no alternative financial option other than family disintegration, or consigning the children to drug infested and racially hostile schools, there might not be much selection.
That does not mean however, that everyone complaining about these pressures has infant children, a psychologically fragile wife, and gently senile impoverished parents relying on that lone faithful son to do their shopping and take them to the doctors after putting in 10 hours on the welding shop floor in a job he cannot afford to lose and a town he cannot in good conscience abandon.
One of the discoveries that completely baffled me in life, was the somewhat belated revelation that there were people who did act just like the social dramatists and various playwrights of the past suggested in their by and large overwrought melodramas. There are, and dwelling within the free market, certain psychopathically exploitative and conscienceless manipulators and users who will actually try and keep some people down or from moving ahead if they can. This so they do not lose the advantage they gain from labor power they insufficiently reward, and whose prospects for advancement they will even sabotage if possible.
So yes, some people of good will and talent are screwed by a combination of circumstances and the malice of others, and their choices radically limited if they have accepted or taken on the role of caregiver, etc.
No. And in the fullness of time the Rope for the perpetrators.
They’re going for the very young children now because it’s dawned on them that the indoctrination doesn’t work very well if started in high school; it works OK on the sheep and the dysfunctional, but that leaves a bunch of cussed rebellious kids who insist on describing the Emperor’s New Clothes in unflattering terms.
Go forth and read the Chans and see what compulsory Anne Frank / Schindler’s List + TKA Mocking Bird / Saint Harriet Tubman hammering of the Original White Sin Meme in the schools has done to Generation Z — there’s been a.. well… let’s call it.. a Reaction. The Progs can’t grasp that making people feel alienated, atomised, and bad about themselves might work for a Calvin or a Zwingli, but it’s no way to achieve their long-term objectives in the here and now. So naturally they’re going to double down. It’s all they know.
@ Foster.
I believe you have provided that Koestler insight before. It is good you have done so again; and will probably pay semi-regular visitation as the threads move along.
The “Freudian” characterization of the general mode of analysis is particularly striking and in my view, acute.
I watched about 5 minutes of a review conducted by that Sargon guy and a pal, of council elections in England.
Apparently the Labor Party wound up in the toilet.
One or the other of the hosts remarked on the results to the effect that Labor’s platform was based on the following appeal [paraphrased]: “You are racist human garbage. Vote for us”
Art Deco: “This is all socially sanctioned aggression.”
That’s an important point to acknowledge and keep in mind. Beneath all the jargon there is a perfectly straightforward power play which is perfectly intelligible to anyone who hasn’t fallen for the delusion that “progress” means the old atavistic instincts only exist among the opponents of “progress.” Which is a bitterly amusing instance of those same atavistic instincts.
Mbunge: “How do people not see how this ends? Tell white people to think of themselves as a racial category because you want them to eat crap for discrimination real and imagined and eventually they will think of themselves as a racial category, one just waiting for someone to come around and tell them they don’t need to eat crap anymore.”
Yep. I’ve been pointing this out for years, as have people with fairly extensive communications reach. It just does not seem to compute. In spite of all the evil the new racialists attribute to white people, there seems to be an assumption that they/we (w.p.) will just sit there and be pummeled indefinitely. There’s no sense of any risk to the pummelers involved at all, which of course makes one question the sincerity of the view that w.p. are actually the source of all the evil ascribed to them.
Ackler:
I actually don’t agree that it’s the best course of action – although when faced with CRT, I do agree that it’s hard to find a good course of action. But silence is often defined as not being able to think of any way to respond or to counter an argument.
In my opinion, for what it’s worth, the best way to counter CRT is to argue process in particular. I’ve described the process/content dichotomy several times, at greatest length here.
In other words, instead of being silent, or arguing whether this is a racist country or not or whether you are racist or not, describe the game that’s being played – the double-bind or the Kafka trap or however you want to label it. Explain also that it’s a way to avoid debate on the merits. If they say that debating on the merits is a white supremacist notion, say that describing the methods by which their arguments might be found wanting as racist is another way they have of evading challenges and defining their own argument as correct and unassailable before the discussion even begins. The game is rigged and not worth playing – it’s of the “heads I win tails you lose” variety.
I think that is what needs to be called out.
@DNW:
Yep, UK Labour got smashed in the recent Hartlepool by-election. They’ve pretty much lost the North, which was their traditional stronghold — and this as you say by first abandoning and then scorning their traditional White Working Class Northern vote bank.
Labour has lost out to the differently loony Scottish National Party in their other big traditional stronghold, so the future for Labour is looking grim.
Doesn’t necessary make much difference though as like all of the West there is in effect a UniParty State and electoral politics is largely a Punch and Judy Show to keep the punters distracted while the real business of misgoverning is done behind the scenes. I hope none of the readers of this fine here blog are still at the infant stage of political understanding where they might think that the UK Conservative Party exists to Conserve stuff.
Still, it’s nice to see that the ordinary People are not all asleep. Despair is a Sin and Hope Springs Eternal.
DNW @ 7:25pm,
If it doesn’t seem self evident to you, then I’m not sure a response is possible. I’d have to run down all societies in recorded history and make guesses at circumstances prior to human record keeping.
There is the obvious instance that many (most? nearly all?) cultures in human history employed captives from war or criminals in forced labor. Kings, Emperors, Pharaohs, Shahs, Chiefs, Sheikhs… could pretty much grab any subject or citizen and conscript him or her into any role the ruler chose. If you are a peasant during the Ming Dynasty and one of the emperor’s courtiers is on a ride in the country and decides your daughter would make a good concubine what do you think happens next?
It’s the definition of slavery, I suppose. Solzhenitsyn? Those in the Auschwitz prison camp? Native Americans who walked the trail of tears? The Poles, Czechs, Dutch and French from 1940-1945? Japanese comfort women in WWII? Orphans forced on a children’s crusade? And on and on and on…
OBloodyHell:
Yes, it’s true that no one ascribes the racial disparity in the NBA as being the result of systemic racism against white people.
Geoffrey Britain @ 7:13pm,
I intentionally chose that phrase because it does not mention Christianity. Judaism and Islam also fit that phrase, as do many other world religions.
People who are filled with rage and want to cancel others will do so, regardless of my response. I just don’t want to meet their rage with more rage, or fear or a lie.
I’m old enough now that I’m starting to feel like Bruce Willis yelling “Welcome to the party pal!”
I saw the early stirrings of this dog’s breakfast 35+ years ago when what they called “Liberation Theology” crawled out of the fever swamps of Latin America, & the broken down wrecks of the James Cones of the black power theological world emerged from the already converged seminaries.
I was usually less than polite to the feminists & marxists masquerading as Christians among my peers who demanded an apology for my simply being. In my wilder youth I challenged a professor to settle our disagreements outside in the parking lot. I despise bullies & he was the worst & a moral litter box.
I have managed to escape that quicksand & am saddened no one put a spoke in the wheel somewhere along the way. I’m beyond cancelling now and simply tell folks the truth I hold to from forever to forever. I am assured that “a gentle answer turns away wrath”…I’m not always so good at that.
Agree with Ray SoCa. We need lawyers, lots and lots of Repub lawyers, on speed dial.
Meanwhile…
Bi-racial high school senior who can pass for white receives failing grade after refusing to publicly confess his ‘white dominance’ and ‘attach derogatory labels’ to his race, gender, religious and sexual identity
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9352639/Bi-racial-high-school-senior-looks-white-failed-refusing-confess-white-dominance.html
These people are simply evil.
@Rufus T Firefly:
Go back far enough into pre-history and we’re all the descendants of women whose tribes (i.e. all the males of all ages) were slaughtered by tribe from next valley over. Every single one of us is descended from countless more generations of murdering rapists and women who chose compliance over any kind suicide or Death by Saying No (to the man who just butchered her husband and brained her infants in front of her) than from other patterns of sexual and group selection practiced in the last eye blink of time we call Recorded History.
This who we are as a species. Traditional societies gradually *evolved* mitigation strategies as civilization progressed — natural features as borders, shared cultures bonding people beyond clan and tribe boundaries, etc…. But only mitigation. We can’t abolish war, or any of the other unpleasant aspects of who we are.
Modernism, Postmodernism, Progressivism are all about throwing out all these imperfect-but-at-least-they-kind-of-worked strategies in the belief that we just have to will a New Dawn and kill off some malcontents and everything will be rosy. Of course the result will be rather more like pre-history. And we can sense it looming.
As far as Recorded History goes, I can think of some exceptions, but pretty much everyone has the blood of slaves, serfs, villeins, conscript labour in their veins. ‘We was hard done by’ is merely a Who Whom issue. It’s a waste of oxygen to debate who suffered more in the past with these people. Just make sure they’re not in a position to make you suffer. This might entail ‘stuff’.
This is what we are. I get very impatient with people on both Left and Right who can’t survey Humanity with a cold dispassionate eye.
Neo,
I respectfully disagree. I think your approach has great merit, but not during one of these ‘trainings’ (a/k/a ‘struggle sessions’). From what I’ve heard and read, I think it is unlikely one would have enough time to be able to challenge or explain the manipulative tactics of the game the CRT grifters play. I think they’d dismiss one quickly as betraying one’s ‘white fragility’ and then deconstruct and move on. A non white person might have a bit more success here, but I still doubt it would go very far.
That said, I agree with your approach in pretty much any other context, particularly when chatting casually with other participants before and after the ‘trainings. It could have a huge impact.
Oh Holy Hell Rufus Tee, My many time grandmother was shipped over from England in the 1640’s as an indentured servant and went on to marry and had a number of nice decedents. At the same time my mom’s family owned slaves and made barrels in Virginia between Jefferson and Washington using Madison as a lawyer at one time and they were part of a Baptist church which recognized black people who were slaves as full voting members of their congregation. This stuff has been going on for a hell of a long time.
By the way, the Cherokee’s on the trail of tears brought their black slaves who they owned with them, they were not slaves but they were unfairly disposed people who were relocated. Vitally all of the plains Indian tribes owned and slaves and sold and traded them as property because things were different in the old days. The whole indian thing is a different thing that happened in a different time as the West was Won and they did become wards of the US government who did a decent job, at times, compared to the rest of the world. I have a granddaughter graduating from High School in Dallas in a couple of weeks who has enough Indian tribe blood from her dad, my daughter’s ex, that she qualifies for extra college money and good for her.
My early years were in the segregated South and they were real and wrong and I watched as the majority of the people worked hard to give other races a fair chance and doing hiring in the early 1970’s I went out of my way to hire minorities almost 50 years ago. This racist stuff is an invented bit of smoke and mirrors to explain the problems of the black demographics that moved away from families and marriages for government money for dependent children and now we have generations of people who have no working parent role models and others with enough power to take advantage of the media images when things go South.
Enough Said. . . the current mess will have to reach a point and we are not even close when the majority of both parties will say enough, this is not working.
Rufus,
“People who are filled with rage and want to cancel others will do so, regardless of my response. I just don’t want to meet their rage with more rage, or fear or a lie.”
Meeting their rage with fear or a lie is submission. As for not meeting their rage with more rage, ultimately that puts you in the cattle cars on your way to the camps. Those filled with hate and rage will settle for nothing less. It matters not that you personally may have done nothing to offend. Your existence itself is an affront because the ideological tenets that you embrace stand as a fundamental obstacle to their ideological imperatives.
Zaphod,
Not to dispute the raping of captured women, slaughter of their husbands and braining of children but civilization does not arise if brutal competition greatly exceeds cooperation.
Who we are is composed of a devil and an angel whispering in each ear. Shadows cannot exist without light.
Humanity’s glass is neither half empty nor half full, it is both. To focus on one side to the degree that denies the existence of the other side is to be blinded to the whole.
@GB:
I don’t disagree with you. The Black Pill is not a universal panacea, just a bitter antidote to the poison of Magical Thinking.
And the pendulum has swung too far toward Magical Thought. We’re all going to be paying for this for the rest of our lives and for generations to come.
Geoffrey:
I suspect that Rufus would be very sorry to have to shoot the poor soul who is attempting to rape or murder his near and dearest, he just wouldn’t revel on it. But I’m just speculating. Where does your great insight into his character come from?
CRT is Maoist.
With new Red Guards.
The goal is the same.
“Rufus T. Firefly on May 11, 2021 at 8:43 pm said:
I misunderstood. I thought you were referring to white Anglo-Saxon descended Americans within recognizably historical times.
My guess is that you could quite easily go back before the Norman conquest and find lineages of “Englishmen” who were never “slaves” in any legal or practical sense. The status levels of the various classes of tillers of the soil may not have seemed much different to some of us than that of near slaves, but they had hereditary rights and time out of memory customs that were recognized in the law courts.
I would say that if you can trace your ancestry back to the 15th century and there are no bondsmen in the line, then for all practical intents and purposes to go on to say that one had slave ancestors is meaningless.
People also make the mistake of assuming that all humanity is interbred in the last couple thousand years or so, which is mathematically beguiling I guess, but ignores generations of intermarriage between 3 and 4th cousins in rural societies. One’s ancestry does not necessarily spread out like a uniformly inverted pyramid.
One Roman centurion forbear 18 centuries years ago somewhere in the maternal line does not turn a Scot into a Roman.
It is no surprise that our “African American” population has “troubvles” since the vasty majority of the West Africans “transferred” from tribal slavery were the non-productive, hostile people who were often evicted from their families and who were a “burden” transferred to the Europeans in exchange for steel tools, brightlyt colored fabrics and/or cheap rum. Historians can’t even decide how many West Africans were transported to the “New World”,and the genetics of complex behaviors is not well studied, so I can not conceive of a way to track individual behavioral characteristics of the “slaves” to their descendants., but all the “stories” are supportive. Note This has nothing to do with “intelligence” as estimated by IQ. Few “jobs” require a high IQ. A sense of “community” and a willingness to cooperate with others is probably what is involved. I have worked well with individuals who were “Functional Illerates”. I suspect that the West African individuals “transferred” into the Atlantic Slave Trade were un-cooperative, a-social or anti-social.
Teaching any child that he or she is inherently better or worse than another child because of the color of their skin is the essence of racism-and a horrible thing in and of itself.
These people are evil.
CRT presents history as a pretext and justification, but it is not a real history. It is a simplified stage prop, concocted to perfection in its service to the story and the mission. We all know the real history of race and western civilization is much more complex, much more nuanced, much more interactive, rife with exceptions to the age old conventions.
Never accept any part of CRT, anywhere in your life or the lives of your loved ones. You accept the historical lie, if you do. Resist and be the disrupter. It’s not about history, and it’s not about race. Your politicians have no interest in saving you or our society from this.
For many of them, it’s their new Shiny Toy and they are eager to explore its function in play.
P.S. I think that the type of argument that you are referring to is generally considered a “Kafka Trap”:
https://dangerousintersection.org/2020/06/25/recognizing-and-escaping-from-kafka-traps/
If you disagree, it proves that you opponent/accuser is correct. “Systemic racism/bias” is so pervasive that you can’t see it. Denial proves the charge.
Zaphod on May 11, 2021 at 9:03 pm said:
Possibly. And there are certainly many historical instances which would seem to indicate as much.
But just for kicks, I’d suggest that we all – including myself – review, or re-review, the latest genome related information on the introduction of first, farming, and later, bronze working and the Indoeuropean languages along with the R1b1b2 male lineage into Europe.
Some aspects seem to bear out that story-line, or one like it more or less. Others seem to indicate that the early farmers including the females were at some point wiped out wholesale in certain regions, after having successfully introduced farming via the Danube route many generations prior.
Something weird happened between groups that had apparently coexisted in somewhat separate eco niches for generations. Or that is the impression I have come away with from scattered readings.
If people can, they need to be among like minded people. The whole “ strength in numbers”. The problem is, they are coming after the kids, so conservatives are loosing their children to the cult.
om,
It is not great insight into Rufus’ character that I possess but recognition of the predictable/historical results when a nonconfrontational approach to ideological fanaticism is employed.
No doubt Rufus is familiar with Chamberlain’s “Peace in Our Time” assertion and the results. The hypocrisy of the left; they act as Nazis and accuse the right of what they alone are guilty of… and their fanaticism justifies any and all means neccessary, just as the Nazi’s did.
Ideological fanatics are humanity’s version of a rabid animal.
There is only one way to deal with a rabid animal.
I truly wish it were otherwise but fanaticism is mankind’s greatest curse, even worse than racism.
@DNW:
My admittedly limited reading gives me the impression that recent genomic research shows that the old stock ‘Anatolian Farmer’ male lines in Europe were largely wiped out in pretty short order by invading Steppes Peoples (Kurgan Hypothesis) back in neolithic pre-history.
No big deal here, given that much of Recorded History consists merely of Horse Peoples predating on Farming Peoples. Scythians to Teutonic Order… not much difference (Especially if you ask Sergei Eisenstein :P)
Except it is a big deal because the Boas Brigade spent the last century promoting fantasies of peaceful migrations and interminglings of peoples…. why this might be so, one could only speculate.
Much is happening in the world of paleo-genomics, and even when it has to be filtered through the likes of David Reich, data is data and we slowly slouch asymptotically toward some deeper understandings of who we are and how we got here.
The idea of making children uncomfortable might be attractive in itself, purpose and concept notwithstanding, for some people.
If a group leader were to ask if I could recall a time when I felt marginalized…time for imagination. Like the time in jump school when I couldn’t find an extra large harness.
Like the time when I, not bad in judo at the club level, got slung into the NCAA level to fill in for the light heavyweight who’d been hurt. Kind of embarrassing, those guys were so good.
Like the time when I was doing the civil rights thing and some of my lefty colleagues figured I should be Mr. Protector Man, but wouldn’t otherwise give me the time of day, they were so lefty.
Or when I was in a play in high school and I got the lead. Some people said that it was because I was the only guy big enough to wear the cavalry sabre we had in the props department as if it were really a sword instead.
Somebody stop me.
Point is, if you don’t get roped in with defensiveness, and you don’t line up the history–“My family never, arrived after, helped out, all other cultures……” You can have some fun with it.
Or, “Nope. Can’t think of anything.”
Don’t take it seriously. The problem is, as when rioters are yelling at police that they’re racist, that they themselves don’t take it seriously. They want you off on another tangent, with you figuring that if you satisfy them on that basis, you won’t twig to what they really want.
om,
You are correct. I will stop at nothing to protect my family.
Geoffrey, got any other chestnuts?
Apologies if this has been stated, but the name for it is “kafkatrapping”. The sort of “when did you stop beating your wife” logic.
“To Fight Racism, Should White Children Be Made ‘Uncomfortable’?”
To fight American supremacy, should White children be purposely mis-educated? And if that was NOT the intention of the US Educational Bureaucracy, how would you tell the difference?
Dr. Chaotica:
Do you know what happened with Eric Raymond’s blog? Used to be some lively discussions there, then the posts stopped cold.
@Baggins:
Very good point. He’s been quiet for a while.
If he’s still living in the Seattle area, I don’t blame him for lying low.
Suspect, too, that some of the recent #metoo cancel culture developments might have shut him up. Like Stallman, he had some ‘interesting’ notions about how one might live one’s private life back when. Much of 70s/80s/90s Uber Nerd Culture had some very strange ideas floating about which are incompatible with current Woke Values.
Why do big corporations go along with the woke baloney? Dinesh D’Souza had a recent podcast about this. He hypothesized that woke employees pressured Coke, who went along to get along. Didn’t work out well for Coke.
Bigoteering: The act of labeling a person “racist”, “sexist”, or somethinglikeit-ist in situations where these are not warranted, in an attempt to exploit the stigmas accompanying such labels and force the opponent to spend time and energy explaining “why he/she is not a bigot”.
Ex: If you disagree with Sally on anything political, all she does is call you a sexist, racist, homophobe. Classic bigoteering.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Bigoteering
h/t Bayou Renaissance Man
These made my reading list recently.
https://notthebee.com/article/heres-your-97-item-privilege-checklist-youre-welcome
Most of you know who he is & why this is an important post.
https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/can-we-please-ditch-the-term-systemic
Christopher Rufo – his work comes up a lot for this topic.
https://www.city-journal.org/how-to-fight-critical-race-theory?wallit_nosession=1
Yes, you can fight back. They aren’t used to getting strong opposition.
The Left prefers to pick off the enemy one at a time.
https://tennesseestar.com/2021/04/24/williamson-county-parents-form-facebook-group-to-fight-school-systems-alleged-critical-race-theory-curriculum/
“Teaching children to hate other children is clearly evil.” – Kate
“South Pacific” (1958)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPf6ITsjsgk
You’ve got to be taught To hate and fear,
You’ve got to be taught From year to year,
It’s got to be drummed In your dear little ear
You’ve got to be carefully taught.
You’ve got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff’rent shade,
You’ve got to be carefully taught.
“My religious faith instructs me that all humans are made in the image of God.” – Rufus.
This is what we learned in the Baptist Sunday School in the 1950s & 1960s.
Glad to see kids are still being taught its simple, and yet profound, message.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cg6W76q6a2E
Jesus loves the little children,
All the children of the world.
Red, and yellow, black, and white,
They are precious in His sight
Jesus loves the little children of the world.
This is what my children sang & their children sing now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOrcqqpHCt8
1. I am a child of God,
And he has sent me here,
Has given me an earthly home
With parents kind and dear.
[Chorus]
Lead me, guide me, walk beside me,
Help me find the way.
Teach me all that I must do
To live with him someday.
2. I am a child of God,
And so my needs are great;
Help me to understand his words
Before it grows too late.
3. I am a child of God.
Rich blessings are in store;
If I but learn to do his will
I’ll live with him once more.
The first verse is idealistic and aspirational, of course, since some people don’t live in the best home environment, but the goal is for us, as adults, to ensure that our children’s experiences accord with the ideal, as far as we possibly can.
And to not teach any child to hate.
I take exception to the South Pacific lyrics.
In fact you have to be carefully taught to ignore your highly-evolved instincts to distrust foreigners and people of other races and cultures.
Lyrics get it ass-backwards. Deliberately, of course. Just because it’s a Broadway Musical doesn’t mean it doesn’t have an agenda.
Note that I am not claiming we should go marry some WASP instead of Polynesian Mary Sue. Just interested in objective truth. And it is objectively true that it takes indoctrination (call it Education to taste) to not be wary of the Other.
Which is why they come for the children first.
Kids are usually eager to learn.
Enthusiastic.
Eager to please.
Eager to obey.
Usually.
Oh, and not generally eager to find themselves outside the group.
(There are always exceptions.)
The next step: tattling on the parents if those parents dissent in some way from the party line so as to attempt to destroy the family unit—(as in: “Listen up! The state is your mother and father…. And you know how much Uncle Joe truly loves you all…”)
And so—prudently and pragmatically—first they come for the CHILDREN…
(And then they come for us….)
FWIW, compare and contrast (warning: may trigger higher than FDA-approved levels of paranoia):
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/american-cyber-stasi-will-suppress-all-digital-dissent-bidens-dystopia
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/dissenters-unite
Baggins:
I’m guessing you haven’t looked at Raymond’s blog lately. The most recent post gives a pretty good indication of what happened. It says: “This is a test to see if the database server issue that froze this blog is resolved.” That was posted two months ago. No updates since then. So I suspect that the server issue has NOT been resolved.
Eric S Raymond is not the kind of guy whose blog goes down for months because he’s too lazy/retarded to solve a blog hosting issue. This guy is a tech god. He’s gone to earth with a fig leaf of plausible deniability.
Also this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/fcsaty/eric_s_raymond_was_today_banned_from_the_osi_he/
The Woke were on his case before BLM and election hysteria ramped up.
Appears that he may be posting behind paywall on Subscribestar but I’m not going to pay to find out.
Very relevant article by Peter Grant:
https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2021/05/defending-yourself-in-progressive-left_12.html
“However, there’s another side to tribalism. In the absence of normal social structures, with civilization, peace, the rule of law, etc. conspicuous by their absence, the clan and the tribe are the only structures that make sense. Throughout human history, those who’ve tried to “go it alone” have ended up becoming victims of organized groups; and small organized groups have all too often ended up as the victims of larger organized groups. Therefore, for security, for survival, it’s imperative for individuals to form together into clans, and for clans to form together into tribes, and for all concerned to work together.”
OT but Irresistible.
Can’t imagine how I managed to miss this tasty morsel last week, but Taki didn’t miss it and I just read about it there.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/first-jew-of-color-to-lead-a-us-jewish-museum-resigns-citing-discrimination/
I think I’m going to have to go with the Jews here.
Somewhere above is a comment with the theory that black Americans are the descendants of “misfits” who were thrown out of their groups and sold into slavery. The history of West Africa indicates that, instead, slaves were most often the losers in tribal warfare. The victors hauled the captives to the coast and made money — in Benin, at least, sometimes decapitating a few as an offering to their gods before selling the rest.
This type of thing is what’s so horrifying about the attempt to tribalize America. The “other” people are often brutally treated.
Zaphod
From my comment @5:20
Tribes (continued) from someone who KNOWS tribes intimately and sends this warning:
https://nypost.com/2021/05/11/i-saw-tribalism-rip-a-country-apart-and-now-its-happening-here/
Meanwhile, “Biden” is busy super-tribalizing America—correction: “continuing the tribalization of America started by his mentor of the creased trousers and given a substantial boost by she who, alas, failed to cheat enough to win the presidential election in 2016.
Tribes (for n >= a famously stiff-necked and persistent 1) are always with us. And even amongst Whites there will always be vestiges of old tribal rivalries. That’s all just part of life’s tapestry.
What is unconscionable is the importation of yet more alien tribes and the deliberate out-grouping of non-elite Whites into a pariah tribe. Messing with the only group of people who stand a good chance of ending up with nothing more to lose is a Bad Idea.
@Gringo:
Small Chinese Babies find Westerners a bit disconcerting at first.
What’s disconcerting when they become toddlers is that the middle and upper classes have sent them off to full-immersion Native English-speaker supervised playgroup crammers from about 1 year old and by the time they can walk and talk, they have a propensity to burst into amateur theatrics or song in English at the sight of random Westerners on the subway. One is then supposed to do handstands in response, I guess. Conversely, you can figure out who is a mini-prole because that’s who turns to it’s mother and blurts out in Cantonese “He’s got blue eyes!”
Barry Meislin, thanks for posting that article from Ayaan Hirsi Ali. I had it in mind but couldn’t remember where I’d seen it.
om,
“Geoffrey, got any other chestnuts?”
Well this comes to mind;
“I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left.” Margaret Thatcher
Not that your passive/aggressive attacks were particularly wounding but in personalizing my disagreement with Rufus over tactics you characterize as arrogance what is at base a disagreement as to the efficacy of his approach. A reasonable approach works with reasonable people but not with fanatics.
And those who resort to the fundamentally dishonest Kafkatrap are not interested in truth, only in the furtherance of their agenda. And, in pursuit of that agenda willing to use whatever means are necessary.
Great logic.
Anyone proposing this for my grandson to my daughter is likely to get kicked in the ding dong.
A whole plantation of chestnuts there Geoffrey. You weren’t particularly calling calling Rufus an appeaser, a “Chamberlain?”
Pride goes before the fall, or so I’ve heard.
Time to make school boards uncomfortable.
zaphod,
I grant that most people* seek to form groups and group together. Makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, and for a lot of other, practical reasons. But I disagree that skin color is a primary, motivating factor, or even much of a factor at all. Yes, you are correct, that if Finland is fighting a war with Zambia on the unpopulated plains of northeast Bulgaria skin color will quickly become a shorthand to spot the enemy, but in 99% of human interactions it’s not particularly useful.
A successful male athlete or entertainer has no trouble getting attention from women of any ethnicity or skin color. They are attracted to his wealth, power and stature in society. Our planet is full of people who have adopted children of another ethnicity or “race” and raised them identically as their own. Heck, Andrew Jackson of all people, along with his wife, raised a Creek orphan as his own**.
I agree that when things really get rough, in times of starvation and severe hardship, people will get more insular to protect themselves and “their” own, but that is restricted to immediate family groups. Even in dire situations family groups will join together based on how they can help one another; skin color being unimportant.
I traveled with my family in China and many, many locals were fascinated by us; especially those of my kids who do not have dark hair or brown eyes. People would touch them (they usually asked) and pose for pictures with them. Must have happened a few hundred times in the span of two weeks. My wife’s red hair was also of major interest. But this was almost exclusively with folks who had not seen Westerners in person (or who had little interaction with Westerners). In the wealthy areas of the big cities pedestrians were as aloof and disinterested in others as one finds in Paris or New York.
* There are outliers like folks with Asperger’s or people who prefer isolation for myriad reasons. Societies have always created hermits.
** The boy was orphaned because Old Hickory had led a charge that killed his family and eliminated the Creek nation from the southeast.
Newmanian: “Time to make school boards uncomfortable.” Amen!
While bias is intrinsic, prejudice is progressive. Diversity (i.e. color judgment), inequity, and exclusion breeds adversity. Baby Lives Matter
om, Geoffrey,
I probably didn’t explain my motive or goal well enough.
You have probably seen the same footage I have of BLM protesters barging into a restaurant or similar venue and demanding that some poor soul simply trying to digest a hamburger repeat, “Black lives matter.” And, like me, you’ve probably wondered what you would do in a similar situation. There is a good chance whatever you say or do, including silence, will end up being posted on social media*, or worse, local or national news.
Yes, they are in the wrong. They have no right to disrupt me. I particularly despise any form of “loyalty oath.” Even if I agree that black lives matter I would refuse to say so in that situation, as I am a free man who will not respond to intimidation by submitting to the intimidator’s demand. In this case I think silence is also giving into the intimidation somewhat.
I should add that I have read through BLM’s reasoning on why “Black lives matter” is an important oath and why “All lives matter” is an indication of ignorance and bigotry. I do not agree with their reasoning, it is illogical, but odds are they know the words and they sound good on a 20 second news clip.
So, how to not appear racist or ignorant or cowardly in a viral video if put in such a situation? “My religious faith instructs me that all humans are made in the image of God.”
How do they reply to that with a pithy remark that makes them look good? It has the added benefit of being true. It has the additional, added benefit of pointing out the ignorance, division and bias of their oath.
*Protesters understand the value of recording everything and editing and posting for maximum effect.
Rufus T Firefly:
Well put.
Who speaks for whom?
Who shouts for whom?
Who lies for whom?
Who intimidates for whom?
Who threatens for whom?
…and for what?
Here’s some exemplary, and welcome, pushback on the more general level:
https://justthenews.com/nation/culture/raynard-jackson-says-stacey-abrams-does-not-represent-black-community
Barry Meislin,
Our best hope for getting through this and coming out the other side better is for black Americans to address the division and racism in their own community. I see that happening more and more. I am hopeful it can reach critical mass. It is long overdue.
is for black Americans to address the division and racism in their own community.
‘Division’ isn’t a problem in the black population (quite the contrary) and racial animus is mainly a problem among people in bullsh!t jobs and people who are unemployable. You’d have less of it if foundations and bureaucracies quit manufacturing bullsh!t jobs and the lumpenproletariat faced a stark choice between desultory wage jobs and prison. You’d also have less racial animus among blacks if the sorosphere and the educational apparat weren’t bent on generating it.
Each in the black population individually needs to address personal short-comings which show up in aggregate statistics. Which means that each needs to do something the purveyors of the lies of our times tell them they needn’t do: own their habits and own their choices.
Our problems arise from a (largely white) professional-managerial element for whom blacks are mascots and vernacular whites objects of hostility and contempt. Our problems will begin to diminish when the rest of us can muster the strength to stomp that professional-managerial element flat.
Having given some thought to my answer ,if accosted by Burn,Loot ,Murder and the mantra is demanded. I would simply respond with a big smile
“Not in the womb”
Quickly followed by
, “ please move on, I’d rather not shoot anyone today”
Children, all children, should be made to feel uncomfortable about many things. Racism is not one of them.
neo,
I’ve been wrestling with effective means for dealing with CRT (an offshoot of CT) for the last few years, and more so since it went mainstream. To my great consternation, I’ve tentatively reached what I think is inherently a psychologically manipulative approach.
Why? The “process” approach you outline is only effective in more traditional Western discourse – attacking premises, or form vs. substance, logic, reason, or the entire range of tools we’re all used to using in discussion and argument. CT, and thus CRT explicitly rejects this entire structure through postmodern deconstructionist gobbledeegook. Ironically, and childishly, this philosophy* uses the very structure it rejects to establish itself, then it immures itself from its own style of deconstruction.
This is a cult technique.
In practice, their tactic is an emotional one. Accuse people of the most vile thought crimes possible. Lay the blame of the New Original Sin at their feet. Induce feelings of panic, fear, helplessness, guilt, shame, and smuggle in the ideology. Apply the kafkatrap in cases of anger or denial to get confusion. Go ahead and officially respond about process, or facts and reason. See how far you’ll get in the faces of people who reject that utterly.
That’s sad, but it’s where we are.
Guys like Alinsky and Marcuse understood exactly how to apply psychology to politics and activism. There’s a reason the modern Left is so emotionally incontinent. Some of their tools from Rules for Radicals and Repressive Tolerance are incredibly useful here. The Leftists who brandished these weapons did not get where they are by being silent. Nor did they argue logically and reasonably. So pushback to CRT must adopt some of its less gaudy trappings to get your foot in the door.
Use their language. Inform them, forcefully, that their language is that of the “abuser”. That your “personal story” (whatever it is, exaggerate if you must) is one of having survived “abuse” and “oppression” and that they are “triggering” you. Highlight your personal “trauma”. Do whatever it is you must to turn it around on them in the most emotionally charged way possible. Put them on the defensive. Don’t deny, don’t argue (yet), and certainly don’t admit guilt. Counter-accuse. Make the “space” so incredibly hostile through passive-aggressive guilt slinging that the “conversation” they want to have becomes all but impossible on their terms.
This is repugnant and against the nature of probably everyone here, but it is the only way you’ll get your foot in the door for a possible later discussion on the actual merits. The likelihood of that happening is small, but it is greater than attempting to launch a rational rebuttal, or keeping your mouth shut – both guaranteed losing strategies.
There is no easy win.
*Ideology is more accurate. Postmodernists abandoned postmodernism long ago, but their flint tools are still around.
gmmay70:
Oh, I know the trainers themselves reject logic and all the rest. But this approach is NOT to appeal to the trainers. It is for those other people in the room (the trainees) who still value logic.
Calling out a kafkatrap doesn’t rely just on logic, either. It is partly an appeal to the emotion of those caught in it. They are often confused and don’t know what’s happening, being unfamiliar with kafkatraps or double binds, and naming and describing it can help them emotionally to reject it, by offering a way out. The idea is that it’s the equivalent of Alice saying, at the end of the trial in the book, “you’re nothing but a pack of cards!”
Here’s the passage – and note that Alice’s ordeal is in the form of a surrealistic trial:
neo,
I understand the need for convincing the fence-sitters or spectators, but the issue remains – you’ve convinced some others in the room, what then do you and your convert/s do?
Are they more persuaded by logic than fear for their livelihood. And what if the logic of the trainees is not all that well-developed? I’ve seen some intelligent people suckered in by this completely. Their logic is well-developed, but the emotional appeal overwhelms it. Logic doesn’t always win.
I’ve seen limited success with this in that sort of situation. Limited success being defined as stalemate, or at least stopping the advance of this toxicity. But it also works in debate on the issue. Sort of like when you apply deconstruction techniques to postmodernists, they short circuit and mercifully shut the fuck up, or become completely unglued. Either of which have the same effect on many spectators as a well-reasoned argument.
Ultimately, it’s not going to be until someone manages to wage a successful Title VII lawsuit with massive punitive damages against this madness before the tide turns.
Alas, to put our faith in the court system…
in terms of psychology it is somewhat like (although not exactly the same as) a double bind…
Nah its like the Denial loop… where the shrink gets to claim your negation is an example of your denial… and so, you can never leave therapy till the shrink is good and ready to let you go
“Zaphod on May 11, 2021 at 11:28 pm said:
My impression was that the mass graves which have been found of first farmers, probably descendants as you say of Anatolian farmers, were victims of WHG locals; or at least “local” in the sense that there was some proximity.
However, once you read about inter-tribal warfare among Indians in what became the old Northwest territories, you gain a new respect for the distances which even Mesolithic man was willing to travel in order to murder and pillage.
Here is a podcast by Christopher Rufo about fighting back against the CRT. It is downloadable and not apple, MP3 format.
https://ricochet.com/podcast/high-noon/christopher-rufo-on-critical-race-theory-and-fighting-back/
Nah its like the Denial loop… where the shrink gets to claim your negation is an example of your denial… and so, you can never leave therapy till the shrink is good and ready to let you go
The segment of the mental health trade that specializes in the talking cure for alcoholics and their close relatives used to play these games. Don’t know if they still do.
“I take exception to the South Pacific lyrics.
In fact you have to be carefully taught to ignore your highly-evolved instincts to distrust foreigners and people of other races and cultures.” – Zaphod
“Discomfort with a stranger is often the default reaction of a child.” – Gringo
Discomfort is natural, and normal (those are not identical concepts).
Parents can alleviate it, by teaching their children that differences in personal appearance are not per se dangerous (side-stepping the tribal conflict situation until it actually occurs).
Some kids aren’t even bothered by the differences.
Note the reaction of Chinese to westerners cited by Rufus.
Or, parents (or their surrogates) can exacerbate the discomfort and elevate it to the level of an emotional apocalypse.
I maintain that you have to be taught to HATE.
@Aesop:
Being Taught to Hate is a bit of a diversionary red herring though.
The more pressing issue today is (a) people being taught to hate ‘Us’. and (b) being taught to ignore all differences — e.g. stupid Karen Birds who go off hitch hiking in Morocco or Pakistan and get raped and beheaded… or your typical dumbass brainwashed tourist skank goes for a walk on the beach on the fair isle of Koh Koconut after midnight with some local fisherman she met in a beach bar and ends up raped fish food.
@Chaoticus & Zaphod:
Thanks for your replies re ESR. I saw the “server issue” post when I checked the kafkatrap link and had heard of the OSI situation. I am guessing that blowback from his “controversial” blog was too much. Also, thought he lived in Pennsylvania, not Seattle.
@Baggins:
I could be wrong about Seattle for sure.
I did notice that last year he seemed to get more ideological dissent from some of his regular commenters — in the old days they would have tagged him as merely an Eccentric Libertarian (but I repeat myself). In the current year, a Libertarian had better spout the right Prog Cant or will find him or herself in the same tumbril as the Far Right (whoever they are… I couldn’t possibly comment) headed for the chop.
K, I think the resolution is in the numbers. Wars were dangerous and expensive. The Ashante wars generated a number of “POWs” which were generally unmanageable. The Brits, who eventually ended up with them in the “Islands”, called them “Maroons”, as in “wild and untamed”. I am told that the same source became “Cimmeron” in Spanish. The wars were “occasional”, the Igbo “welfare/debt slavery and the human tribute demanded by the Oyo Empire (Youruba variants) went on for centuries. If you did well for your Igbo “caretakers”, you were “family”. Otherwise, off to the boats. I am sure that those who had to send theirown people as tribute to the Oyo, did not send their best and brightest.
I have no idea of how a complex characteristic might be inherited in an “outbred” group, so I would default to “Regression to the population mean”. [That is an old “saw”.] As such, I would expect at least two subpopulations with some intermediate mixing. Modern “normals” seem most likely to be from the kidnap, POW founder population. The modern “misfits” are more likely to be descendants of the non-productive “discards”. There is obviouly going to be mixing of populations and characteristics. Our area of the County has and has had a functional, low- crime Black-majority “community” since before Illinois Abe took that joib back East. I hear the “N-word” alot, Neighbors. The area “down in the city”, is a different world with different people. For some years, I lived along the “fringe” where a woman could not go out to her car at night without a large, well-trained dog or male escort (Woof. Woof.) An AA friend decided to stay “down town” where he had his business, family and old friends. When I went out to get the last of the “fixings” that my Wife and I had prepared, two males escorted me, and i am not a small person.
I am not talking intelligence, or whatever it is that IQ is about. Modern West African immigrants seem to interview well, do well in school, and are decent coworkers. The neighborhood in the county had professionals and had people just scraping by. When I met the woman that would eventually be my wife, I got to see one of the adjacent Black-majority communities. There were some “up-scale” residences, some mid-range, some rentals, and some actual tar-paper shacks. It was a neighborhood. Violent crime is virtually non-existent. On maps of crime in the metropolitan area, “it is that blank area, over there”.
Discards vs. kidnap (with and without “war”) seems to explain the radically different population characteristics. The difference between the two AA populations that I see is in hostility, sociability, and reliability. The slave ships took them all. Now “we”[America] gets to deal with the result. “Selection” has some bad history attached but such a “process” would account for the different population characteristics. “Racism” or “Slavery” didn’t make them “that way”. “We” got them because their founder population was “that way” at the onset of the Atlantic Slave Trade.
There is no obvious way to disentangle this puzzle. Historians can’t even agree on the number of Africans sent into foreign slavery let alone the condition of those populations. Generalities derived from “reading between the lines” seems to be all we are likely to have. My guess is that the “normals” in the Atlantic Slave Trade from West Africa will constitute 30% or less of the African American population. This is derived from the Compton (California) “Experiment”. [Yes. That was a poor attempt at a pun.] Compton was ~100% Black with about 100 homicides per year. The Hispanic iimmigrants moved in along with Hispanic gangs. The Hispanic and Black gangs fought a brutal “war” in which the Hispanic gangs were reported to target Black gang members, their friends and their families. Homicides surged to ~200 per year for two or three years. Compton now has little or no “violent” crime and is ~60+% “Hispanic”. I have not seen a report of who left, who survived, or who stayed and prospered. There are great story opportunities there!
If you have a better explanation for the apparent Black sub-populations than the West African slave selection process, please share.
Mike-SMO:
Here’s what Thomas Sowell had to say about the subject of black culture.
It is perhaps simplistic to assert that Culture is Downstream of Race (*). However it ought to be blindingly obvious that Culture and Race feed back into each other. Selection does not just occur in the classical Darwinian Survival sense — there’s also Sexual and Group Selection. Both these latter dynamics are heavily Culture-Bound — when you think about it, a healthy Culture is a stable (for a while) optimum, regulating S and G Selection which has been iterated towards over hundreds of generations — all the more reason not to mess with traditional social arrangements, but I digress.
(*) Bushmen and Pygmies whilst highly-adapted to their ecologies are unlikely to excel at Fluid Dynamics or Functional Programming even if kidnapped at birth and raised by educational experts:
https://www.human-intelligence.org/bushmen-and-pygmies/
The Flynn Effect (waves hands and swings the incense censer impressively) won’t jump that hump.
Readers may find this of interest:
Powerpoint slides by Jean Hansen on Ashkenazi Intelligence cf. the other Jewish communities + Israeli Arabs:
https://onedrive.live.com/View.aspx?resid=31E02ADB1C372BA0!1655&app=PowerPoint&wdSlideId=256&wdModeSwitchTime=1534346888703&authkey=!AG0YB0h1AsXGRt0
There’s either such a thing as Racial IQ or there’s a boatload of Systemic Racism going on in Israel. Now I for one happen to think it’s the former. YMMV.
Sources:
https://www.human-intelligence.org/
Plenty of discomfort for all when you get down to it. But telling ourselves pretty lies won’t make the world a better place.
I’ve no idea what to do about it — the big problems seem to occur when public policy is formulated with the assumptions of Blank Slate and Level Playing Field. It would be inhumane and asking for trouble to state clearly and openly some of the truths of Racial cognitive and other behavioural traits.
I note that Singapore seems to get it more or less right. Singapore has three main ethnic groups: Chinese, Malays, Indians. Cognitively Chines >> Malays & Indians. Some outlier Malays. Some outlier Indians — and some Caste differences and differences in Indians based on when their ancestors arrived — at one time agricultural workers more than commercial castes, later this flipped. Each of the two less smart groups gets plenty of official respect — e.g. the ceremonial President will be an Indian or Malay every few times around — Chinese also get to be President sometimes. And heavily controlled media will go out of its way to publicise successful Malays and Indians.
But… You won’t find too many Malays or Indians flying fighter jets or getting too close to the levers of real power. And any attempt to form racial voting blocs gets swatted down immediately. For that matter the government is ruthless in swatting any Chinese who makes incendiary statements about Chinese superiority.
^– This largely works because all groups know that more or less their government and political class don’t hate them and won’t play evil games setting one group off against another. Whereas in the West, it’s open season on White people and their motivations and they are the only people who are censored.
I’m not sure how long Singapore’s model can remain stable, though. That’s yet to be determined.
The Sowell link went “404”.
From what I have read, and after working with “Biological Psychiatrists” and neurologists, I appreciate inheritance/genetics. For all the wailing, culture follows biology. We have what the tribes sold. In spite of the theories of “psychologists”, especially those with a fondness for Marx (or neo-Marxism). We have incorporated all the tribes of the world, except one. There is only so much that you can teach, or tolerate. “Selection” produced something “different”.
That Singapore makes it work, is hardly encouraging for “”Murica”.
Mike-SMO and Zaphod:
Here is a podcast about Singapore from a US Navy viewpoint, history of the nation, geopolitics, and naval issues from cdrsalamander.blogspot.com
Midrats Episode 583: The Navalist View from Singapore, with Blake Herzinger
https://www.spreaker.com/user/midrats/episode583?utm_medium=widget&utm_source=user%3A10959567&utm_term=episode_title
Mike-SMO:
Here’s the correct link.