The issue is going to be adjudicated in various courtrooms in the coming months.  A post at Real Climate Investigations examines the cases for and against policies based on Critical Race Theory (CRT). Critical Race Theory Is About to Face Its Day(s) in Court by John Murawski.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and images.

Critical race theory is about to face a major real-world test: a spate of lawsuits alleging that it encourages discrimination and other illegal policies targeting whites, males and Christians. But unlike Trump’s executive order, which ran into First Amendment problems by prohibiting controversial speech, the lawsuits name specific policies and practices that allegedly discriminate, harass, blame and humiliate people based on their race.

The common thread of these legal challenges is the inescapable logic that making accommodations for critical race theory will erode the nation’s anti-discrimination law as it has developed since the 1960s. This would mean replacing the colorblind ideal of treating all people equally, which has been widely viewed as the crowning achievement of the civil rights movement, with a contrary strategy: implementing race-based policies, which can range from affirmative action to reparations for compensating African Americans for the injustices of the past and for producing equitable outcomes in the future.

“Critical race theory is a Trojan horse of sorts,” said David Pivtorak, a Los Angeles lawyer representing two white men who are suing two California state environment agencies. “It disguises itself as the gold standard of fairness and justice but, in fact, relies on vilification and the idea of permanent oppressor and oppressed races. Its goal is not ensuring that all people play by the same rules, regardless of race, but equity, which is a euphemism for race-based outcomes.”

About a dozen lawsuits and administrative complaints have been filed since 2018, with another wave planned this summer by conservative public interest law firms and private attorneys. Their goal is to draw attention to some of the more pronounced practices and win court judgments to slow down the spread of CRT in K-12 schools, government agencies other organizations.

Proponents of critical race theory say the lawsuits are a form of white denialism that confirms the pervasiveness of the problem that CRT exposes. Many critical race theorists believe that the United States has functioned as an elaborate affirmative action scheme to empower and enrich white males, a strategy that depends on a certain degree of coverup.

“I see these lawsuits as a last gasp attempt of those who benefit from the racial hierarchy to cling to the power and the privileges that have been associated with whiteness from the beginning of the country,” said andré douglas pond cummings (who writes his name in lowercase letters), a business law professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock who has taught courses on corporate justice and “Hip Hop & the American Constitution.”

CRT rejects the foundational premises of classical liberalism – such as legal neutrality and individual rights – and from that perspective, colorblindness is not understood as a strategy to overcome racism but as a method to perpetuate it.

“It’s a white ideology,” Burnham said. “Colorblindness really comes into fashion as a means of denying the persistence of racial stratification in the United States.”

The lawsuits face a number of challenges, a point borne out by early setbacks some of the claims have experienced so far, including the defeat of Trump’s executive order on free-speech grounds. In another case, lawyers dropped the discrimination allegations in one of the first such lawsuits, filed in 2018 against the Santa Barbara Unified School District in California, because, they said, students and staff who supported the lawsuit were “deathly afraid” of repercussions if they spoke out and came forward publicly as plaintiffs.

Claimants generally have to prove the alleged discrimination is severe and pervasive. They also have to overcome the freedom-of-speech rights of those who are professing to be dismantling systemic racism. What’s more, lawyers on both sides say that courts traditionally defer to employers and educators to set policy on workplace training and classroom curricula, a built-in restraint on activist judges.

Perhaps the biggest wild card in these lawsuits is the staggering cultural shift of the past five years, during which many of the precepts of CRT have become widely accepted, especially among many in the nation’s intelligentsia and the professional managerial class.

President Biden has adopted the language and made equity part of his platform, including a proposal to establish an Equity Commission “to support the rights of Black, Brown and Native farmers.” Immediately upon taking office, he issued an “Executive Order on Advancing Racial Equity” to address systemic racism and “affirmatively” promote equity and racial justice in the federal government.  “Our Nation deserves an ambitious whole-of-government equity agenda that matches the scale of the opportunities and challenges that we face,” the executive order states.

The nation’s current anti-discrimination law does not make such a distinction, and would read Kendi’s proposal as absurd as claiming that there’s a meaningful difference between good theft and bad theft; instead, all discrimination is wrong in the existing legal framework, with the exception of limited, narrowly tailored exemptions that are subject to strict scrutiny by the courts.

In one of the more unusual cases, the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights agreed in early January with an Illinois public school teacher that her school district violated anti-discrimination law when it implemented a discipline policy that explicitly directed staff to consider a student’s race when evaluating behavioral and disciplinary issues.

The case offers indications that different judges will likely reach opposite conclusions in such disputes: Just two weeks after ruling for the schoolteacher under the Trump administration, the Department of Education put the case on hold when President Biden took office and issued the “advancing racial equity” executive order.

Hovering in the background of these lawsuits is the unresolved question: To what extent does truth provide a defense against charges of discrimination? It will come as no surprise that to conservatives and other critics of CRT its fatal flaw is its factual wrongness.

“The ideology is so patently stupid and racist to the common person that the only way you can implement it or teach it is with an element of coercion, otherwise it would just be laughed at,” said Jonathan O’Brien, the lawyer representing the student and mother who filed the Nevada lawsuit. “That’s why the training sessions are like pressure cookers.”

But if critical race theory is true, as its adherents believe, then labeling the truth as discriminatory smacks of censorship.

The stakes of this dispute couldn’t be higher, at least judging by the rhetoric expressed by both sides.

One of the conservative groups planning to file lawsuits, the Upper Midwest Law Center in Golden Valley, Mich., is in talks with prospective clients who include non-whites, said the center’s president, Douglas Seaton.

Seaton described the abandonment of the colorblind idea as giving up on the nation itself.

“You can’t have a country as diverse as ours without equality before the law,” Seaton said. “It’s a recipe for communal violence, tribalism. You can’t simply proceed that way. You’d be doomed to internecine battles between groups.”

 

 

 

 

Amber Athey writes at the Spectator When does the media cover a horrific crime? Excerpts in italics withe my bolds.

Answer: When the perps are white.

What makes a tragic death a major news story? The races of the perpetrators and the victims, of course. As the media goes all in on critical race theory, many journalists have decided to only provide obsessive coverage of horrific crimes when they can be used to advance the idea — as so eloquently explained by NBA star LeBron James — that minorities are being ‘literally hunted’ by evil white people.

Proof of this phenomenon has never been so clear as in the past several weeks.

It all started when a white man was charged with killing eight people — including six Asian women — at three different massage parlors in the Atlanta area. The shooting capped off weeks of media outlets reporting that hate crimes against Asian-Americans were skyrocketing, spurring the hashtag #StopAAPIHate. The media blamed this trend on President Trump because he had called COVID-19 the ‘China virus’ or ‘Wuhan virus’ and white supremacy. Most journalists ignored the fact that the majority of suspects in hate crimes against Asian Americans are other minorities. Also brushed aside was the fact that the Atlanta shooter claimed his motivation was not about race, but anger stemming from his own sex and pornography addiction. When a law enforcement official tried to relay the shooter’s alleged motivation to the public, Vox reporter Aaron Rupar selectively edited a video to spark outrage at the officer. How dare he suggest this was anything but a race-based crime?

Just a few days later, another mass shooting occurred in Boulder, Colorado. Initial videos from the incident showed a light-skinned individual being detained by police, so writers and activists rushed to blame ‘white men’ and insisted that the suspect would’ve never been taken alive if he were a minority. The shooter was later identified as Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, a Syrian immigrant, who friends and family say was bullied for his Middle Eastern name and was often paranoid about being attacked because of his race. Still, some found a way to double down and blame whiteness, including Kamala Harris’s niece, who wrote, ‘I made an assumption based on his being taken into custody alive and the fact that the majority of mass shootings in the US are carried out by white men.’ In any other context, her remarks would have been roundly condemned as prejudice. Even when white men are not the suspects, they are still somehow the culprits. [That assumed “fact” is false, as shown later below.]

Both of these shootings received wall-to-wall coverage. Meanwhile, a shooting that saw eight people injured and two dead in Virginia Beach was hardly touched on cable news. The suspects are black, so the liberal outrage machine did not kick into gear. [Also not mentioned was a white girl raped and killed in Florida on spring break with two black males as suspects.]

Finally, this week in Washington DC, an Uber Eats driver was murdered after two teenage girls tried to hijack his car. The girls allegedly tased Mohammad Anwar, a 66-year-old Pakistani immigrant, before trying to drive away as Anwar was still hanging out of the driver’s side of the car. He was killed when the vehicle crashed. The video is horrifying, particularly as one of the suspects expresses more concern for her phone being left in the car than she does the man she just killed. This story, which caps off a year of skyrocketing carjackings in the DC area, should be top news. However, the two teenage girls are black.

So instead, we got CNN referring to Anwar’s death as an ‘accident’ in which he was ‘fatally injured’. DC mayor Muriel Bowser sent out a scheduled tweet telling residents they can prevent auto theft by locking their cars and avoiding parking in unsafe areas.

Yahoo News! reporter Hunter Walker accused conservatives of highlighting Anwar’s death because the girls were black. It is sad that terrible crimes are now merely pretexts for ugly media posturing. But it is right to point out the glaring double standard that so many in the media deploy to advance anti-whiteness. The events of the past few weeks have only cemented this vile tendency toward desperate and divisive race-baiting.

Footnote: Photo Collage Reveals Who Commits the Mass Shootings in the US Today

Democrats continue to push the ridiculous talking point that white men commit the majority of mass shootings in the United States.  The left continues to push this with every mass shooting.  A Wiki Page was created to list every mass shooting in the US in 2019.

The list does not include those shootings where no one will speak to police.

At least 20 of the mass shootings in 2019 were in Chicago, Illinois.

More than 140 mass shootings are unsolved largely because no one will give descriptions to the police.

Many will recognize the expression for taking on an idea or proposition so deeply in your gut that, like a fish on the line, there is no escape no matter how hard you try. Jacques Parizeau, one time separatist Premier of Quebec coined a similar idiom regarding voters resisting the referendum on Quebec independence from Canada. Meeting privately with foreign diplomats, he said that in the event of a Yes vote, the result would be like a “lobster pot.” That refers to the traditional wooden traps that have a one-way gate allowing a lobster to get in, but not out.

These expressions come to mind concerning the plight of US citizens following the installing of Biden-Harris in the White House. The intention of this administration is clearly to fundamentally transform America: From “The Land of the Free, Home of the Brave,” to “The Land of the Victims, Home of the Afraid.” The movement in this direction has been a long time in the works, and was only recently triggered by the election of Trump and the leftist need to cancel the alternate ideology of “Make America Great Again.” Time will tell if those now in power are reaching too far, too fast, going for broke before the majority were caught in the pot.

No doubt the program to undermine American global dominance has been operating for several generations. Those not familiar with the Marxist revolutionary four-stage process can read my synopsis article Four Steps to Take Down a Free Society

Pioneered by the Soviets and exported into many countries before their empire collapsed, the method is now employed by the Chinese Communist Party updated with cyber tools, along with traditional espionage tactics of honey traps and buyouts. The first stage of demoralizing involves teachers indoctrinating students to disparage their national heritage and destroy commitment to traditional social values and customs. Tom Wolfe wrote with his satirical wit and historical knowledge about the demise of liberal US academia into leftist dogma in his essay In the Land of the Rococo Marxists. My synopsis is Warmists and Rococo Marxists.

Of course the present manifestation flies under a different banner: Social Justice. And the reverent refer to George Floyd rather than Karl Marx. But Critical Race Theory is so obviously intended to divide and conquer a free and democratic society, you would have to be in a trance (claiming to be “woke”) to be taken in by it. Yet, indoctrinated children, now adults abound in the ranks of corporate management, others churning out copy for mass media or organizing activists in the streets and in cyberspace.

The protests in city streets of developed countries are coordinated and led by Social Justice Warriors indoctrinated in Western academies of higher education, after elementary school slanted teaching. If neo-Marxist progressive post-moderns take pride in this as accomplishing their agenda, consider what happened in China’s cultural revolution in the 1960s and is repeating itself in 2020. The useful dupes, like teachers, become outcasts and themselves targets for cancellation once power and control is seized. See article Teachers Beware Your Cultural Revolution Turning on You.

Have the scales yet tipped in favor of the slide into a socialist autocracy? Will Americans mount a resistance to this revolution? Depends on who and how many are on the line or trapped in lobster pots.

Damon Linker seeks to understand what is driving the woke madness in his The Week article What the woke revolution is — and isn’t.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and images.

The surge of censoriousness isn’t just taking place in the worlds of journalism, media, and publishing. It’s also leaving lasting marks on a wide range of universities, producing anger at elite prep schools, inspiring sweeping decisions by public school boards, and having a strong influence on how corporate departments of human resources and government agencies lay down expectations for employees and otherwise deal with members of their staff.

How should we explain this wildly proliferating trend? Where did it come from? And where might it be going?

As you’d expect from a huge story having a big impact on the lives and livelihoods of writers, we don’t lack for explanations. Though most of them fall short of the mark.

The most common one takes its cue from academic champions of the woke trend who describe their scholarship as “critical race theory.” That has led critics, especially conservative ones, to treat the woke movement as a form of “critical theory,” which is itself derived from the Marxism developed and promulgated by thinkers affiliated during the middle decades of the 20th century with the Frankfurt School for Social Research. Critical theorist Herbert Marcuse is frequently named as a popular progenitor of woke progressivism.

The problem with this account is that social change doesn’t work this way, with ideas spreading like a viral contagion that infects (and corrupts) large swaths of a culture once it is unleashed. (Indeed, some champions of woke ideas make precisely this assumption about the viral character of ideas they don’t like, using it to justify “cancelling” people who supposedly make politically dangerous arguments.) Yes, authors can exert a powerful influence on the world, but the way their ideas are received, interpreted, and deployed is always a function of a complex interaction between those ideas and other influences in the culture’s present and past.

This isn’t to deny certain family resemblances among the ideas of Karl Marx, Marcuse, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, Ibram X. Kendi, and Robin DiAngelo, But it is to say that pointing to those resemblances doesn’t tell us very much about why the ideas contained in their writings (which were first formulated in the mid-19th century and first revised for a modern American audience 56 years ago) have caught on now.

What we need above all is an account of the reception of ideas — why an argument or assertion that falls on deaf ears in one time and place ignites a cultural firestorm in another.

Where does that leave us in trying to come to grips with the woke revolution going on around us? With a lot of work to do, I’m afraid. But that doesn’t mean tentative intellectual advances haven’t been made. I’m especially fond of author Wesley Yang’s evocative description of woke ideas and arguments as liberalism’s “successor ideology.” That’s because the phrase manages to capture the trend’s origins in liberal ideas of meritocratic fairness, while also signaling that in decisive respects it has moved beyond (and turned against) liberal assumptions and aspirations to become a distinct ideology the precise contours of which remain undetermined.

Beyond that, I can see three potentially fruitful paths for further exploration of where the successor ideology comes from and where it might be going.

Religion

It’s become an interpretive cliché to describe impassioned social movements as forms of “secular religion.” But in this case, there’s something to it. The very name “woke” is a play on the Christian Great Awakenings that swept across the United States at various times in our past, revitalizing old faiths and giving birth to new ones. And as Yang and other thoughtful critics of the trend have noted, there are important sociological and moral connections linking the political sensibility of the woke activists, ensconced within elite institutions of American culture, to the old liberal Protestant mainline, and from there all the way back to the officially sanctioned moral rectitude of Puritan New England.

In many respects, the successor ideology isn’t a political movement at all.

It eschews policy positions in favor of a call to individual moral purification. It proposes to achieve this end through denunciation of sinners who are invited to confess and give public testimony of their transgressions, with punishment taking the form of social ostracism. The purity of the accusers, meanwhile, is demonstrated by the severity of their denunciations and by their refusal to countenance mercy or forgiveness. The social dynamic has reminded some critics of the “struggle sessions” of China’s cultural revolution, but there’s no need to invoke secular totalitarianism and mass murder. The comparatively smaller-scale terror of the Salem witch trials is a more apt analogy.

Business

In a pair of highly suggestive essays for City Journal, Jacob Howland, an emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Tulsa, has explained how the school has been remade in recent years, with its commitment to the liberal arts abandoned in favor of an outlook of “corporatist progressivism.” Shuttering humanities majors in favor of technical training, mandating “woke” reforms of the remaining curriculum, and pursuing profits for the wealthy financiers bankrolling the university — these moves have reinforced one another, with the embrace of outspoken left-wing anti-liberalism allowing those bulldozing the liberal arts to claim the moral high ground. Much more work remains to be done in analyzing the rise of “woke capital” and the part it plays in fostering and encouraging current trends, but Howland’s writing gives us a good start.

An International Crusade for Justice

The successor ideology is no longer simply an American phenomenon. When French President Emmanuel Macron blames the spread of woke ideas in his country on the insidious influence of professors in the United States, he is reproducing the error of American conservatives who cast aspersions on German philosophers. But just as it is incumbent upon us to come up with an alternative theory of its spread at home, the rise of cancel culture abroad demands its own explanation.

What can account for the appeal of these ideas in other cultural contexts? One possibility is that the successor ideology answers a longing among idealistic young people around the world to devote themselves to a grand spiritual crusade in the name of a transcendent ideal of justice — and it does so at a moment when the only political ideal on offer is democracy and its moral corollary: equality or egalitarianism.

Whereas liberalism treats equality as one valuable ideal among many (including liberty, solidarity, and piety) and seeks a pluralistic balance among them, those in the grip of the successor ideology find this aspiration toward equanimity an intolerable compromise with moral evil. Moreover, they view their own privileges — their own part in contributing to liberalism’s failure to achieve an egalitarian ideal — as a source of disgust, guilt, shame, and self-loathing. Those emotions are notoriously volatile because they’re so painful to endure. That can lead those suffering from them to create a scapegoat who can become an alternative object of ire — a person or group in the world who can be made to take the blame and suffer just punishment, allowing the sins of the punisher and the punished alike to be expiated.

That’s just the barest sketch of what might be behind the Great Awokening roiling our politics and culture. Until we make more progress in coming to terms with its deepest motives and ultimate aims, we will find ourselves at a loss in how to respond.

See also Encountering Thomas Sowell at Law & Liberty

In this season of racial reckoning and pseudo-religious panic over identity, it is genuinely shocking to realize that Sowell not only anticipated these same debates several decades ago—he refuted many of the positions now in ascendance.

Scott Yoner exposes how wokeness has debased our civic language to confuse and subvert traditional American values.  His article at Law & Liberty is Translating Social Justice Newspeak.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

We must re-train our ears to hear what social justice ideology peddles.

Americans, after all, value diversity, inclusion, and equity. Diversity of faculties and talents produces inequalities—and protecting such diversity was, as Madison writes in Federalist 10, “the first purpose of government.” Inclusion reflects the universality of the rights of man, though certain people would enjoy them sooner and others later as enlightenment spread. Equity is a characteristic of impartial laws, derived from English common law, that protects and recognizes all equally before them; it provides predictable rules and doctrines for settling disputes.

Diversity, inclusion, and equity produce inequalities that serve the public good: they reward productivity, expand opportunities for individuals, and provide a basis for stable common life under equal laws.

Our regnant social justice ideology redefines these words, taking advantage of their sweet sounding civic bent. This co-option represents a thoroughly new civic education. Social justice advocates have won no small ground in American political debate by seeming to adhere to the words and ideas of the old civic education, while importing a new, pernicious vision. We must re-train our ears to hear what social justice ideology peddles.

Opponents of this movement can best grasp social justice newspeak through an analysis of its public documents. What follows is based on my analysis of the state of Washington’s 2020 Office of Equity Task Force’s Final Proposal. The same word salad is served everywhere critical race theory is taught—in university task forces (like Boise State’s), in corporate trainings, even in K-12 curriculum.

Equity. Social justice ideology starts with equity.

Susan Rice, lead of the White House Domestic Policy Council, has made achieving equity the centerpiece of the new administration. Equity means creating equality of outcome among recognized identity groups. This is accomplished through the redistribution of society’s resources and honors as a means to correct real historical injustices (e.g., slavery) and inequalities traceable to what are perceived society’s implicit oppressive infrastructure. As the Washington report has it, “equity achieves procedural and outcome fairness” by distributing and prioritizing “resources to those who have been historically and currently marginalized.” Inequalities that seem to reflect a disadvantage to a protected identity group are ipso facto evidence of the need for remedy. “Outcome fairness” is equal outcomes.

When advocates say “equity,” one must retrain one’s ears to hear the following: all disparities are traceable to discrimination (or institutional racism, etc.) and must be remedied by re-distribution (such as reparations) or other actions (like abolishing meritocratic standards that produce disparities or abolishing the police). As Washington’s Equity Task Force defines it, Equity requires “transformative work to disrupt and dismantle historical systems.”

A far cry from English common law indeed, where equity was a basis for a stable execution of the rule of law.

Diversity. The social justice dispensation famously “celebrates diversity.”

It considers diversity a strength. Its definitions of diversity are long, meandering, and self-contradictory. Diversity refers to different racial or cultural identities, rooted, perhaps, in physical difference. Different identities are products of power structures that make men and women or blacks and whites different. What sits in front of us are not people with different skin colors or of different sexes but rather products of power structures that pigeonhole aggrieved minorities into this or that different identity. Women are made women by patriarchal control; black men made subordinate through white supremacy; black women victims of both. When the people who are shaped by all these power structures are all present for conversations, the power structures themselves are broken down. White, male social-engineering represents a power structure that excludes and dominates. Debate is not about discovering the truth, but about the representation of power structures.

One must go further. Equity is only a step on the road to diversity. Achieving diversity is about maximizing the presence of aggrieved minorities (e.g., blacks, women), while minimizing the presence of the dominant group (e.g., white, heterosexual men). As David Azerrad relates, the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports judges the National Basketball Association the most diverse sports league. Its rosters are 82% people of color, though people of color make up at most 40% of the American population. The representation of historically oppressed groups count for diversity, even when it is not demographically representative. In contrast, baseball has rosters with only 41%. This makes it count as less diverse than the NBA, even though it is more in line with the country as a whole.

When advocates demand diversity, one should hear the following: privileging the supposedly marginalized and marginalizing or punishing the supposedly privileged through intentional practices. The fewer of the privileged group (i.e., white, males, straights, cis-), the better. To where? All the way to zero?

Inclusion. Diversity policy requires “inclusive” practices.

All identities must be “respected” or nurtured in “a safe, positive environment” or a “welcoming environment,” which must after all be created, maintained, and policed.

As the Washington Task Force defines it, “inclusion refers to how groups show that people are valued as respected members of the group, team, organization, or community. Inclusion is often created through progressive, consistent, actions to expand, include, and share.” Inclusion includes! What does this mean? Creating a welcoming environment for supposedly marginalized groups entails singling them out for “welcoming” treatment and protecting them from what they consider unwelcoming. The dominant culture is already “welcomed.” On university campuses it begins with establishing safe spaces like an LGTQ+ Center or a Women’s Center, where the special needs of supposedly disfavored groups can be provided (whether counselling or meals). In health care, it requires special outreach for aggrieved minorities (singling them out for getting a vaccine, perhaps).

Inclusion demands more. What does not affirm their identity as a member of the marginalized group also compromises a welcoming environment. Even the presence of the dominant culture and its symbols can be unwelcoming. Some of this agenda deserves universal support, like stigmatizing racial epithets. But inclusivity policies can also proscribe criticism and allow the supposedly marginalized group to define what makes for an “unwelcome” environment. SAT, unwelcoming. Grades, unwelcoming. A thin blue line flag? Exclusive! Black power fist. Inclusive!

Hate speech codes arrive, when they do, in the name of inclusion. Anyone wearing a MAGA hat violates the dictates of “inclusivity,” while a BLM shirt affirms and confirms the status of marginalized groups.

Ideas of meritocracy and even kind words on behalf of traditional marriage are, on this definition, violations of inclusion.

The infamous incident at Evergreen State, where whites were ordered off campus for a “Day of Absence”, was done in the name of inclusivity. Black-only spaces on campus or Rainbow graduations are safe, affirming, inclusive spaces where the marginalized will be affirmed, though these practices appear exclusive on the old definition. A white, male graduation space would be exclusive and prohibited. Orwell called this blackwhite in 1984, since who is saying the thing determines its truth and justice, not the actual content of the saying.

When advocates demand inclusivity, one should hear: the virtue of purportedly marginalized groups as well as their victim status must be affirmed and cannot be questioned, while privileged groups must confess both their privilege and their guilt. It may not start there, but it goes there.

Instead of recovering these words they must be ruthlessly attacked. This involves retraining our ears and lips.

Together these new words—diversity, equity, and inclusion—point toward the formation of tyranny.

The idea that people freely associate or can rise and fall based on their own merits is considered dangerous and false. One’s place must be determined and allocated; one’s environment constructed to match this ideology. This new ideology never imagines individuals apart from their identity group, nor identity groups apart from power structures. It empowers the state and elite institutions to un-make invisible structures of supposed oppression and to re-make an environment that is supposedly welcoming.

The ideology of the new diversity, inclusion, and equity infiltrated our language and put opponents of this revolution at a rhetorical disadvantage. It is probably necessary to stigmatize and jettison these corrupted words, because their double-meaning paralyzes those who would oppose social justice ideology.

This is unsubtle, of course. So instead of recovering these words they must be ruthlessly attacked. This involves retraining our ears and lips. For our ears, I recommend the following:

• Equity now means equality of result;
• Diversity now means “anti-white” and “anti-male”; and
• Inclusion now means social engineering to favor aggrieved minorities.
• When Americans hear Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, they should hear tyranny.

In the face of this rhetoric, we need to find new ways for our lips to speak old truths. This hard teaching should not send opponents of social justice ideology to extremes. It must point to a revival, a new appreciation of the old civic education. The old concept of diversity is valuable—and we should call it pluralism, whether it is a pluralism of talents or opinions. The old inclusion is valuable—and we should call it the protection of individual rights. The old equity is valuable—and we should call it the rule of law.

JimBob weighs in on “progressive” education.

Background from Previous Post: Why Progressives Hate Math

Two recent posts (links at end) discussed the progressive attack upon classical liberal knowledge and natural law.  One includes a series of questions getting at the difference between liberal and leftest orientations on many cultural issues of the day.  A thoughtful comment educated me on the question of musical greatness by referencing a number of classical greats who were not  dead white guys.  That led me to this post concerning mathematics and racial identity groups.

When the comment appeared, I happened to be reading a substack article by John McWhorter Is it racist to expect black kids to do math for real?  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Yes, serious people are arguing this. Make sure they don’t infect your school district.

There is a document getting around called Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction, a guide put together by a group of educators. It has a black boy on the cover.

The idea is to show us how our racial reckoning of late ought change how we expose black kids to math. I suppose the counsel is also intended for kids of other types of melanin, but this is in essence a document that could be called “Math For Black Kids.”

The latest is that state-level policy makers in Oregon are especially intrigued by this document. There is all reason to suppose that its influence will spread more widely.

And this is to be resisted, as this lovely pamphlet is teaching us that it is racist to expect black kids to master the precision of math.

To wit – its message, penned by people who consider themselves some of the most morally advanced souls in the history of the human species, is one that Strom Thurmond would have happily taken a swig of whiskey to.

Now, part of “antiracist math teaching” here is to teach about black mathematicians (the authors have this as kids “reclaiming their mathematical ancestry” – the jargon is, we must admit, beautiful) or to air facts such as that the traditional Yoruba approach to numbers (and wow, numbers in Yoruba, I note as linguist me, are indeed fierce!) use base 20. No one would object to these things, nor to the idea that we “teach students of color about the career and financial opportunities in math and STEM fields.”

But 96% of people reading this kind of thing will be thinking “Yeah, but what about the math??”

And there is nothing white supremacist in that question. The substance of a serious proposal about teaching math will be, well, teaching how to do math itself, not its history and sociology.

More to the point is that this entire document is focused on an idea that making black kids be precise is immoral.

Yes, the document pays lip service otherwise, claiming at one point to seek to “teach rich, thoughtful, complex mathematics.” And rather often, the word praxis is used. But the thrust of this pamphlet is that:

1. a focus on getting the “right” answer is “perfectionism” or “either/or thinking;”

2. the idea that teachers are teachers and students are learners is wrong;

3. to think of it as a problem that the expectations you have of students are not met is racist;

4. to teach math in a linear fashion with skills taught in sequence is racist;

5. to value “procedural fluency” – i.e. knowing how to do the fractions, long division … — over “conceptual knowledge” is racist. That is, black kids are brilliant to know what math is trying to do, to know “what it’s all about,” rather than to actually do the math, just as many of us read about what physics or astrophysics accomplishes without ever intending to master the math that led to the conclusions;

6. to require students to “show their work” is racist;

7. requiring students to raise their hand before speaking “can reinforce paternalism and powerhoarding, in addition to breaking the process of thinking, learning, and communicating.”

You may wonder if this is a cartoon but no, this is real! This is actually what this document tells us, again and again. This, folks, is the “Critical Race Theory” that so many of us are resisting, not a simple program for “social justice.” To distrust this document is not to be against social justice, but against racism.

Many will dislike the general flavor of it but, amidst so much we all have to pay attention to, may question just what we must object to specifically about Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction.

There are two things. Racism and religion. Just those.

As in, first it is racism propounded as antiracism. Black kids shouldn’t expected to master the precision of math and should be celebrated for talking around it, gamely approximating its answers and saying why it can be dangerous? This is bigotry right out of Reconstruction, Tulsa, Selma, and Charlottesville.

Second, it is not science but scripture. It claims to be about teaching math while founded on shielding students from the requirement to actually do it. This is unempirical. It does so with an implication that only a moral transgressor numb to some larger point would question the contradiction. This is, as such, a religious document, telling you to accept that Jesus walked on water.

Humans may grievously sacrifice the 9-year-old, the virgin, or the widow upon the pyre in worship of a God. Too, humans may sacrifice the black kid from the work of mastering the gift of math, in favor of showing that they are enlightened enough to understand that her life may be affected by racism and that therefore ,she should be shielded from anything that is a genuine challenge.

This is not pedagogy; it is preaching.

My Comment:

In addition to the above, progressives attack math on grounds of gender equality.  You see, the majority of serious mathematicians are not only white, but male.  Here’s where progressives and their identity politics are so wrong and destructive.  In some fields of human endeavor, such as the arts or entertainment, the judgment of quality is a individual right and freedom, a matter of opinion.  People who attend to music, for example, develop a sense of excellence informed by their experiences.  Despite differing musical tastes, there are still standards that determine what will be widely appreciated as high quality.  Genres involve their own measures and disciplines by which performances are judged.  Renowned classical pianist Arthur Rubinstein commented:  “If I miss a day of practice, I can tell it in my performance.  More than a day, and the critics take note.  Skip a week, and the world knows.”

Science and especially mathematics are different because they contain elements of knowledge, not subject to opinion.  When asked how many apples you have after adding two more to the two you already have, the only answer is “four’, by the laws of mathematics.  It is not a matter of opinion.  Of course, beyond the core of scientific knowledge and logic, many questions arise and diverse theories form and are debated.  But this is about the data and facts.  Referring to identity groups of scientists is a distraction and undermines the process of finding truth.

Sports is an interesting field combining science and art.  A movie about basketball was titled after the cliche: “White Guys Can’t Jump.” There are other cliches like “Black Guys Can’t Skate.”  But those who follow a sport, like NBA players and their fans, know that it is the jumping (and associated skills) that matter, and that some white guys are also world class.  Importantly, there are rules dictating game play, and scores define winners and losers.  Talent, discipline and hard work are rewarded without appeal to victimage or racial injustice.  As McWhorter says above, overloading math (or science, or sport) with sociology and history only inflames emotions and destroys both the art and the science.

See also 21 Perversions Inflicted by Wokeness

How to Know a Liberal from a Leftist by Asking

The list is provided by Gad Saad in his article and video Welcome To The Abyss of Infinite Lunacy.  Psychologist and author of “The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense,” Gad Saad, warns that society is descending into an abyss of ultimate lunacy. Text in italics with my bolds and images.

GAD SAAD: The rate at which our society is tumbling into madness is truly bewildering.

One, it is now racist for a white person to translate the work of a black person.

Two, it is now homophobic for a straight actor to play a gay role.

Three, it is now racist for a white therapist to treat a black client.

Four, it is now racist to have advanced high school programs.

Five, it is now transphobic for biological females to reject having to compete against trans women.

Six, it is now Islamophobic to criticize any tenets of Islam.

Seven, it is now science denialism to question the ongoing COVID lockdowns.

Eight, it is now science denialism to question any tenet stemming from climate change alarmists.

Nine, it is now epistemological bigotry, yes I coined that term, to support the scientific method as the means by which you adjudicate scientific hypothesis.

Ten, it is now racist to argue that mathematics yields right and wrong answers.

Eleven, it is now racist to promote the ethos of individual dignity over collectivist identity politics.

Twelve, it is now racist to question a noble person of color, be it a famous athlete or celebrity.

Thirteen, it is now transphobic to posit that only women menstruate.

Fourteen, it is now racist to publicly proclaim your support for “wrongthink” black individuals such as Thomas Sowell or Larry Elder.

Fifteen, it is now misogynist to note that women greatly outnumber men in universities.

Sixteen, it is now sexist to publish scientific research that yields sex differences that are contrary to accepted politically correct Orthodoxy.

Seventeen, it is now racist to point to FBI murder stats broken down by inter-racial markers.

Eighteen, it is now racist to openly support national borders.

Nineteen, it is now racist to seek to curb immigration from countries whose values are anti-liberal.

Twenty, it is now racist to not decolonize philosophy and literature departments.

Twenty-one, it is now racist to request that job offers be based on the merits of an individual rather than their immutable traits.