Lifting for those who don't read the comments in the post:
> Scott Says:
Comment #12 April 17th, 2023 at 11:26 pm
So, why shouldn’t I cheer the destruction of universities, if they’re full of woke ideologues who hate me?
One might just as well ask: why shouldn’t I cheer the destruction of the earth, if it’s full of assholes, and morons, and antisemites who’d probably kill me if they got a chance, and wild animals that would rip me to shreds?
In both cases, the answer is simply: because this is my world, and nearly everything I love and cherish is here along with nearly everything I hate, and I believe that the former ultimately outweighs the latter, and if people don’t mind, I’d like to continue living in this world.
I would be curious what kind of person feels like they're on the receiving end of hate from "woke" people. Such a thing is practically the anthesis of what it even means to be part of that group. I'm in no way saying this means they're good people or that their legislative direction is good public policy but the only time hippie liberals push back at all is when someone tries to hurt one of their own. Liberals for the past decade have been entirely on the defensive. In my state there are 14 bills right now in the state legislature that explicitly target vulnerable populations. The democrats and our chapter of the ACLU can barely do anything but try to stop them.
> I would be curious what kind of person feels like they're on the receiving end of hate from "woke" people.
In December 2014, Scott posted a comment [0] in a discussion on his blog about how, as an adolescent, he had struggled greatly with anxiety issues, and how he believed that some messages some feminists were broadcasting had contributed to his mental health problems. And in response, a huge number of online feminists decided to publicly denounce him in a massive pile-on; Amanda Marcotte's contribution is representative [1]
Ever since then, some "woke" people have been convinced that he's a "bad person". And he's said other things to upset them since, e.g. publicly disagreeing with proposals that his field (quantum computing) abandon some of its technical terminology ("quantum supremacy"), which some claim "makes women and minorities uncomfortable in our field" [2]
So yes, Scott really is on the receiving end of a lot of online hate from certain people, and it has never stopped–including trolling campaigns against his blog [3], demands sent to his department that he be fired/disciplined, etc. And Scott calls the people behind this campaign against him "woke" (or even, as he does in this blog entry, "wokesters"). I know a lot of people have an allergy to that word, but can you see how it makes sense from his perspective? Why shouldn't he use it?
A sample of the "woke" people that are attacking him:
> And oh, your wife? I lookrd her up Scott and… She’s maybe a 3 on a good day. You know, maybe a 6 at a MAGA rally where all the other chicks are fat midwestern racists. She’s got that TERF Karen look Scott. Let’s be real, you wish you could have bagged one of those hot blondes instead but that’s what you ended up with. I really doubt that’s satusfying enough to keep you from lusting after your younger hotter students. God you’re such a fucking sexist creep.
Sounds like an obvious troll to me (and to some of his other commenters). But he replies in full earnestness to him. Probably a mistake, but I'd still put the blame on the troll rather than the victim.
I mean, sure, you can dismiss the perpetrator(s) of the recent trolling attacks on him as not really being "woke", maybe it's even an "anti-woke" person just pretending to be "woke" in order to make "woke" people look bad. We don't really know what the perpetrator's motivations are, all we can do is guess, and maybe one guess is as good as another.
But what about Amanda Marcotte's vicious public attack on him? (And many other less well-known figures besides). She's now a senior journalist employed by Salon.com, I don't think she can be so easily dismissed as just a "troll"
Such trolls depress me because people will conclude 1) they're real and 2) representative. And then I and my people get blamed for their behavior, even though I'd never do anything like that. sigh
Anyway, what a cesspool. I'd enjoy reading his blog but I don't need that toxicity in my life.
By "my people" I meant trans women, but I'm sure you'd be able to find instances of bonafide trans women saying abusive or hateful things. Regardless, there are trolls, and the comment bore hallmarks of being a troll. But even still, my point is that I don't post hateful things like that, most of the trans people I know are kind people, and reading dehumanizing comment threads like this is incredibly depressing for me.
Maybe I’m misinterpreting you, but your comments give the impression that you think Scott is anti-trans, or when he says “woke” he means trans people. I don’t think that’s true. The term “woke” is used by lots of different people in lots of different ways. Some people view the existence of trans people as a type of “wokeness”, so I can understand how you could have formed the impression that’s (part of) what Scott means by “woke”-but if you read more of what he has to say, I think it will become clear he doesn’t define “woke” in that way at all.
Unless I’m misunderstanding what you are saying. You started talking about “my people” in a conversation about “wokeness”, I thought you were self-identifying as “woke”, and I’m probably not the only one who read you in that way. Now you say by “my people” you meant trans women, which leaves me confused about what you were trying to say all along.
You also speak of a “cesspool” and “dehumanizing comment threads” and I’m wondering what you are actually calling those things and why you are calling them that. Again, I suspect you may have the wrong impression, but I’m not entirely sure what you mean, so maybe my suspicion is based on misunderstanding you.
oh, I'm sorry, I wasn't talking about Scott. I don't have any problem with him. My problem was with some of the comments on Scott's blog, specifically with the (suspected) troll who used degrading and objectifying language to talk about Scott's wife, rating her appearance and calling her a "TERF Karen." There's a stereotype of trans women as violent men shouting down and degrading women by calling them TERFs, which has been used to rile up the public against us (particularly in the UK, see JK Rowling for example.) I assume that was a troll pouring fuel on the fire.
So to sum up, I have nothing against Scott, I'd greatly enjoy meeting him and reading his blog, I just had a bad time in the comments section today.
>I would be curious what kind of person feels like they're on the receiving end of hate from "woke" people.
An arbitrary example I saw yesterday:
An elderly white man was leaving a parking lot with one-way traffic flow. A young white woman was standing in the road talking with a friend. He pulled few feet away from them, waited, then politely asked them to move when they didn't.
One woman started accosting him about entitlement, white privilege, male privilege, and refused to move. The scene went on for a while until he was able to reposition the car and barely drive by her brushing her with the car.
These are the "woke" people who are poisoning the well for others. They just use it as a pretext to rage and hate on strangers simply because of their race, age, or gender.
I'm not saying this is typical behavior, just an interaction where someone probably felt targeted.
In a more general sense, I have been told by hiring managers and recruiters that white males shouldn't bother applying for some jobs. That certainly made me feel angry and targeted by ideologs.
The term "woke" is supposed to be related to awareness of racial injustice and inequality. Not one group exercising prejudice and bias and against another based on ethnicity. Furthermore, this term has become a label associated with loaded language employed by the conservative right to vilify opposition. It is a reflexive control word and propaganda device to used to focus hatred and resentment from conservatives towards any aspect of culture or ideology contrary to their interests, regardless of it actual relevance to racial injustice. So when you start calling assholes "woke", I am not sure if you are conflating the meaning of it because you are a victim of this propaganda or if you are intentionally using the term to foster resentment against others.
Either way, claiming that people "who are aware of racial injustice" direct hatred, resentment, and prejudice against others because of their race, age or gender is so blatantly contradictory that it is absurd.
Being woke and being an asshole are not mutually exclusive. You can do both. As you say,The term "woke" is supposed to be related to awareness of racial injustice and inequality. What you do with that awareness is an entirely different question. If you use the fact that someone is part of privileged group as a justification for harming them, that makes you both woke and an asshole.
>Either way, claiming that people "who are aware of racial injustice" direct hatred, resentment, and prejudice against others because of their race, age or gender is so blatantly contradictory that it is absurd.
I don't think this is contradictory at all. Victims of abuse and Injustice are certainly capable of victimizing others and carrying out injustices of Their Own.
The idea that a victim of racism, for example, can't also harbor racist prejudices themselves is laughable. History and the contemporary world are full of examples of people who are simultaneously victims and abusers.
You labeled them as 'woke' and then subsequently said they were demonstrating prejudice. The idea you may assert your opinion that they both have awareness and that they do not is your self-contradiction, not theirs. Claiming they are both is doublethink.
I honestly don't understand where you think I said they don't have awareness. They obviously have awareness that privileges exist because they are accosting someone for having them. Where do I deny their awareness intimate doublethink?
I can be aware and angry that someone hates me for my identity while simultaneously hating someone else for theirs. This does not negate my awareness of their identity.
Do you think that being 'woke' (aware of racial injustice and inequality) means that a person is incapable of holding hate and biases of their own?
The differentiation is based on which person is making the observation.
>I can be aware and angry that someone hates me for my identity while simultaneously hating someone else for theirs. This does not negate my awareness of their identity
This statement is correct because you would intimate and factual knowledge concerning the matter.
>One woman started accosting him about entitlement, white privilege, male privilege, and refused to move. The scene went on for a while until he was able to reposition the car and barely drive by her brushing her with the car.
To then further say that woman or those people are woke is not, because you do not have any intimate or factual knowledge of them to make the claim.
It's like saying that you saw man in a firefighter jacket intentionally set fire to a building and run away and then said "That firefighter burned a building down." In reality, you only observed a man commit arson but had no idea of whether he was actually a firefighter despite what his clothing might have suggested.
In the instance where the two things are contradictory, and you have one unknown, the assessment must be based on the known (they were assholes). You cannot claim both.
I see what you are saying, but disagree that it is unknown. They are verbally accosting him of having unequal racial privilege, which is direct factual evidence that they are "aware of racial injustice and inequality".
What could possibly be stronger evidence of awareness then them verbally demonstrating it? Am I to think that the person shouting about someone having white male privilege verbatim is not aware that the concept of white male privilege exists?
It is like saying that "a person who knows how to make fire burned a building down". The evidence is in the observation.
>In the instance where the two things are contradictory, and you have one unknown, the assessment must be based on the known (they were assholes). You cannot claim both.
Why would there be any contradiction? Being woke has no bearing on being an asshole or not.
> What could possibly be stronger evidence of awareness then them verbally demonstrating it? Am I to think that the person shouting about someone having white male privilege verbatim is not aware that the concept of white male privilege exists?
The fact that they screamed what they did at him shows they do not understand the concept, as what he was doing was not an expression or instance of white male privilege.
Regular people. I've been, long ago, at college, before "woke" was coined I believe. To be honest the vitriol was over the top, I found it funny. Just my experience, not proxy for anyone else's.
What was your experience? Genuinely curious. I've definitely experienced the "economic" prejudice since college was when I found out the hard way that my family was poor. I had a friend who had to deal with insecure butthurt white folks being mad that the kid from China swept them in exams. I was not at his level but we bonded because I was the only girl in class. Dude is legit gonna be one of those mathematicians where every other theorem is named after him. Oh god and the computer science shit. Fuck that "make me a sandwich" nonsense. That was the subject where I had the upper hand but you'd never know come project time when nobody wanted to work with me because they thought I wouldn't pull my weight.
An ex-girlfriend had shifted deeper into women's studies, had spent a week or so chuckling over the fact that you could castrate by crushing, and in a bit of anger over my not living up to her ideals (we were still friends) called me "a racist sexist homophobe" which was the worst insult she could think of. Women have dealt with a lot of shit, so I understand the enjoyment of misery, but my testicles recoiled.
At 20 or so, I was more of the latter two than I am now, not at all the last one that I can tell and conscious of my failings at the second one. Product of Chicago in the 70's.
The insult came, if I remember the sequence of events correctly, after I said that in my experience white people can come by racism from daily experience, not just other people spewing it. I was mugged five times from 5th grade through high school, jumped for fun once, had an older girl say "come here little white boy, let me set your hair on fire" holding matches when I was in second grade, and had a crowd of 5 or 6 follow me and a friend home chanting "honky" and running up to almost touch us, I think around 6th or 7th grade. I've never been anonymously attacked by a white person, just a statistic but it's mine. I've also had plenty of black friends over the years.
When I was in college I did a small thesis on race riots in Chicago. To my suprise, most have been whites rioting against blacks, especially moving onto a white block, and they were mostly not reported on in the papers to avoid spreading the word. I gained total sympathy for the shit they went through, and of course their kids would grow up feeling the burn too and trying to maybe even the score. It just creates a cycle that sucks. Gandhi and King were right, though progress hurts while the cycle is getting stopped.
Oh I completely agree which is why I put it in quotes. I've never found anyone on any side of the political spectrum actually self-identify with that label except ironically. Right now today it just seems to be pejorative-de-jour for people who are vaguely liberal.
Which is kind of funny, since if you asked me 10 years ago about the cultural associations of “woke,” they’d be, uh, more scattered. Black nationalists of the wacky “Beethoven? Oh yeah, he was black” sort, but at the time I also saw a neo-nazi using the term. Almost always in the “woke to” formulation. Nazis were “woke to the JQ”, but maybe some special type of weirdo would be “woke to big foot” or “woke to the templars”. So basically I think it was appropriated from a specific black culture to general extremist/conspiracy culture, if such a thing truly exists, and maybe was re-appropriated into modern discourse.
And now I find my self using the term occasionally to describe a set of views without really engaging with them. Such as when someone showed me some pictures from their cruise (which was neat, they’re an engineering nerd and carefully detailed some elements of the ship) but had to give me a cruises are evil disclaimer before uh, saying well I went on one anyway, family, and so on. “the typical woke reasons.”
Maybe, there is plenty of fodder out there for #persecutionfetish but someone who is calmly like, "yeah they might hate me but I still don't wish them ill" feels pretty good faith. They can still be wrong but I don't believe for a second this person in particular would be like "and because they hate me I'm justified in x, y, z."
There are people who actively wish ill on all kinds of groups and the “woke” are no exception. Plenty of people hate their political enemies and have no great concern if they are hurt and some take real joy in the idea.
Yale invites speakers who talk about their fantasies of killing white people. Mainstream feminist websites do backflips trying to sugarcoat that they think every single man is a threat.
> Yale speaker says comment about killing White people was meant to spark deeper talk about race
> But the socialization of men is such that even a good man – a supportive man, a respectful man, a trusted man – has within him the potential for violence and harm because these behaviors are normalized through patriarchy.
> And as such, we know that even the men that we love, never mind random men who we don’t know, have the potential to be dangerous. Surely, all people have that potential. But in a world divided into the oppressed and the oppressors, the former learn to fear the latter as a defense mechanism.
> So when you enter a space – any space – as a man, you carry with yourself the threat of harm.
> In a controversial move, an adjunct professor at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, has lost her job after showing her class Medieval paintings depicting the Prophet Muhammad, founder of the Islamic religion.
Ezra Klein supports laws he believes will lead to miscarriages of justice because of the political consequences.
> "Yes Means Yes" is a terrible law, and I completely support it
> For that reason, the law is only worth the paper it's written on if some of the critics' fears come true. Critics worry that colleges will fill with cases in which campus boards convict young men (and, occasionally, young women) of sexual assault for genuinely ambiguous situations. Sadly, that's necessary for the law's success. It's those cases — particularly the ones that feel genuinely unclear and maybe even unfair, the ones that become lore in frats and cautionary tales that fathers e-mail to their sons — that will convince men that they better Be Pretty Damn Sure.
The new Harry Potter game is a perfect example. They went around screaming the game and JK Rowling were causing 'real world harm to trans people' which of course was BS.
But the people trying to boycott the game couldn't leave it at that. They bullied and doxxed streamers just for enjoying a game without gender politics.
Because of perceived slights they resorted to becoming actual bullies.
I mean JK herself literally is, the game definitely isn't. If you've stayed out of this dumpster fire enough to actually not know you're probably better off.
JK is a 70's-era radical feminist who's always been a little transphobic (that was the era, everyone was) but in this decade got sucked into the feminist-lesbian-to-TERF pipeline and dug her heels in when people started calling her out for it. Ever increasing levels of escalation on both sides later she's weirdly become the most prominent transphobe in the English speaking world and throws her weight behind hate groups like the LGB alliance. She even got a shoutout from Putin for it which is kinda funny.
This is no way whatsoever justifies being mean to someone playing a video game but it's not hard to see how we got here. We live in a world where absolutely horrible people are so completely insulated from the consequences of their actions that the people who are harmed by them are pretty much powerless to do anything and have nowhere productive to direct that anger and frustration. In a less civilized time a mob would have shown up to her house with pitchforks years before it got to this point.
Last headline I saw, she made a comment about how fake women were taking away from the progress that real women had made via feminist pushes of the past few decades. That comment doesn't seem inaccurate to me.
What has she done to become the most prominent transphobe in the English speaking language?
You have a theory that certain speech causes violence. Well there's no evidence of the alleged "tweets -> violence pipeline". If anything it goes the other way: as the amount of speech increases, there seems to be less and less violence.
That aside, I find it interesting that you're honing in on JK Rowling. If speech really does cause violence, then lots of speech is causing violence, including speech with which you agree. It seems notable, then, that you're going after speech with which you disagree. Makes me think the whole "speech causes violence" argument is a ploy to attack speech you dislike.
This presumes the only thing she's done is make public statements but that's not actually all that important to my point so whatever.
So look, I don't know, I obviously fall on one side of this issue but disagreement on it is more American than apple pie at this point. The idea that certain kinds of speech manifest in real life harm is the basis for hate speech laws around the world.
I'm just gonna quote Germany's legal code because they distill what hate speech is better than I could. "Assaults the human dignity of others by insulting, maliciously maligning an aforementioned group, segments of the population or individuals because of their belonging to one of the aforementioned groups or segments of the population, or defaming segments of the population." In my view you can only say "la la sticks and stones" up until the point where all the dehumanizing speech turns the political tide and the cultural forces that keep people from wantonly harming particular groups fall apart and we get articles like
Something even less benign than that, such as "men cannot get pregnant" is enough to be labeled a transphobe. If you went back as little as 15 years ago and told people "men can get pregnant" they'd rightfully laugh at you.
What usefulness does that sentence hold? It is true that in our society some people who you'd socially describe as men are able to get pregnant, because they have biologically female sex organs. We also know that following their social wishes (i.e. referring to them as men) dramatically increases their quality of life.
Given these facts, can you really not understand why people see that sentence as transphobic? It doesn't accurately describe our social landscape, and it hurts some of the more vulnerable among us.
What usefulness do objective facts and the truth hold?
>It is true that in our society some people who you'd socially describe as men are able to get pregnant
That is not true at all. It's actually a gross inversion of the truth, a foundational feature of Big Lies. There are trans-men, who are actually women, that may get pregnant, but they're by definition not men. They are human females, AKA women. No amount of cross-dressing and body mutilation will change that.
>because they have biologically female sex organs
Yes, they're women. Glad we agree.
>We also know that following their social wishes (i.e. referring to them as men) dramatically increases their quality of life.
"We also know telling schizophrenics that the coffee maker IS indeed an evil demon and removing them from the office will dramatically increase their quality of life."
No, feeding into delusions will not increase their quality of life.
>Given these facts
"Given the fact that the coffee maker is a demon".
>can you really not understand why people see that sentence as transphobic?
"can you really not understand why not believing that coffee makers are demonic is schizophobic?"
>It doesn't accurately describe our social landscape, and it hurts some of the more vulnerable among us.
It does accurately describe our social and biological landscape. If biological realities, truth, and objective facts hurt "the most vulnerable among us", it sounds like they have a mental illness.
>> It is true that in our society some people who you'd socially describe as men are able to get pregnant
> That is not true at all. It's actually a gross inversion of the truth, a foundational feature of Big Lies.
Please read what I write carefully. I specifically said "socially describe". Do you walk through your whole life checking the genitalia of any person you interact with to make sure you refer to them by their biological pronouns? Or do you rely on social cues (e.g. their looks, outfit, hair, voice and so on) and assume their gender? I really hope it's the latter.
Now please read my earlier response again with the correct understanding of what the words I type mean.
>> We also know that following their social wishes (i.e. referring to them as men) dramatically increases their quality of life.
> "We also know telling schizophrenics that the coffee maker IS indeed an evil demon and removing them from the office will dramatically increase their quality of life."
> No, feeding into delusions will not increase their quality of life.
Can you show me studies that indicate this? I don't care for what you believe, I care about data and studies.
>> Given these facts
> "Given the fact that the coffee maker is a demon".
>> can you really not understand why people see that sentence as transphobic?
> "can you really not understand why not believing that coffee makers are demonic is schizophobic?"
Next time make sure not to go overboard with mocking the other person, or at least wait until you've made sure you understand them correctly. Since you fully misunderstood the opening of my earlier response this reaaaaally makes you look bad.
The best our actual doctors (obviously not you) have been able to determine, yes it really does increase their quality of life. I know that doesn't matter to some people, but a lot of us do care.
>> The best our actual doctors (obviously not you) have been able to determine, yes it really does increase their quality of life.
> No they haven't, and you don't need to be doctor to know that.
Do you have studies that indicate this, or do you just believe this to be true? The latter part of your response strongly points towards one side, but I'd like to give you the chance to send any contrary data, if you have it!
CRT places black people in the center of the political universe in the same way that Marxism places the proletariat at the center of the political universe. (I’m not using the comparison to Marxism pejoratively, it’s simply apt.) That’s the whole point. It is by design a framework for criticizing the failure of traditional liberal principles to remediate the disadvantages facing black people in America. When CRT purports to address other non-white races, it does so only by treating them as another kind of black person. Hence the term “people of color,” which is just a way to project how the CRT framework conceptualists black people onto all non-whites. (And on the front it’s wrong. It’s central premise that racism is a structural problem requiring a structural solution is wrong as applied to Latinos and Asians just as it did not apply to Italians.)
That focus carries through to the “pop” version of CRT manifested by folks such as Ibram Kendi and Nikole Hannah-Jones. In “how to be an anti-racist” Kendi doesn’t grapple with any of the implications of his ideas beyond the hoped-for effect on black people. In the quote from Hannah-Jones, she reduces “nearly everything truly exceptional about America” to slavery.
It also manifests in how ordinary liberals today talk about political theory. For example, despite the obvious advantages of federalism for a multi-ethnic democracy (which is why India has a federal structure) it’s impossible to get ordinary liberals to approach federalism except from the perspective of how it was used to uphold segregation. Similarly, critiques of the Senate invariably mention that it empowers primarily white states as if people’s skin color is the problem.
This is of course not a critique of CRT. It’s an analytical framework designed to analyze and solve the challenges facing the specific group that created it. But when it’s adopted as a generalized political theory, it leads to the antagonism noted above.
Critical race theory isn't critical theory, as you know.
Critical race theory qua critical race theory is a legal theory that explores the ways in which critical legal studies --- itself a separate concept from critical theory --- fails to account for the varied ways in which the US legal system fucks over Black people. It is not, in fact, a general theory of why white people are evil. In fact, some of the earliest/most influential critical race theory papers try, in a sense, to ask critical legal theorists to dial it back a little bit. You should read Crenshaw; those papers aren't the caricature subliterate culture warriors want them to be.
Critical race theory qua "CRT" is a meaningless culture war slur/valediction, and a strong signal that whoever's non-ironically using it (whether from the left or the right) isn't operating in good faith.
The problem with the way you operate in these discussions is that it's very clear that you want "liberals" to occupy luridly stupid positions, like "the true purpose of all US institutions, which we as liberals support wholeheartedly, is to suppress white people". And, if you go looking for people to hold those positions, you'll find them (often because, like DiAngelo, they're looking to make a buck off it). There are people occupying every lurid position. We contain multitudes.
That's no way to have a curious conversation.
Late edit
I wrote "critical legal theory" where I meant "critical legal studies". Might as well get the names right myself.
You just restated what I said: CRT is a theory centered on black people. Which it is, by design, the same way Marxism, as a political and economic theory, is centered on the proletariat. Insofar as it doesn’t ignore the needs of other groups, such as poor whites, it leads to incorrect and actively harmful conclusions, such as for Asians and Latinos.
However, CRT, like Marxism, is designed to undergird a political movement, not just an academic theory. The repurposing of terms like “white supremacy” to describe things other than KKK members, or “racism” to describe things other than prejudice, is advocacy, by design. And that political movement, which I refer to as “wokeness” above, is antagonistic to white people (and often Asians and Latinos) in the same way that Marxism as a political movement is often antagonistic to rich people. There is a direct line from CRT to Alison Collins.
I’m not criticizing liberals for anything other than failing to defend (little “l”) liberal ideals, and relatedly for uncritically adopting an analytical framework developed for black people onto other non-whites, in ways that are harmful to those groups.[1] That’s a sufficient indictment. No need to resort to caricature.
[1] For example: insofar as Latinos and Asians face prejudice and not structural racism, making society more conscious of race in an effort to change existing structures is almost certainly bad for them. Likewise, insofar as those groups are assimilating into the majority society like prior immigrant groups did, it’s probably a bad idea to teach Latino and Asian kids about historical racism against their groups, for the same reason we don’t teach Italian kids about the same.
Marxism is defined in part by a totalizing focus on class struggle in virtually all aspects of politics, policy, law, and economics (critical theory is an extension of that idea to culture).
Critical race theory draws on (and pushes back on) critical legal studies --- which is a weird counterculture fringe movement that happened to have been au courant when the critical race theorists were getting started. Both of those movements are ways of looking specifically at the law and the way the law is studied and interrogated. Intersectionality comes from observations of things like cases where Black women were denied standing because either their Black heritage or their gender were escape hatches for judges (they either couldn't represent all women, or couldn't represent all Black people). Structural or implicit bias, another big critical race theory idea, is an idea you yourself repeatedly endorsed and explained: after operating for decades (centuries) on a program of overt discrimination, simply ending the discriminatory rules isn't enough to eliminate the bias; the system is in a steady state primed, powerfully, to exclude (women, Black people, whatever).
These are straightforward ideas. Importantly: they are, in context, legal ideas, and specific ones. They are not assertions that white people should move to the back of the grocery store line to make way for Black people.
There's a Nelson Muntzian element to the argument that critical race theory is somehow as risible as classical Marxism. Critical race theory is literally the legal field's attempt to work through the implications of the segregation that continued into the 1980s. It's as obviously a legitimate focus of study as virology is for a biologist, or compilers are to a computer scientist. It strikes me as profoundly disingenuous to attempt to disqualify it by suggesting, as its critics seem to, that any study of structural racism in the law must be diluted, or else be just another flavor of Marxism.
I read things like this and think of Berny Belvedere's quip in response to this argument: "new Marxisms just dropped! Chipotle raising their prices is burrito Marxism! Daylight savings time is temporal Marxism! Alarm clock ringing is snooze Marxism!"
There's no shortage of people willing to be professors. It isn't clear that the incumbents are dramatically better than those who narrowly miss the cut. It might be that even better people are drawn to the profession (even in STEM) if there was an easier exchange between academia and industry. The challenge is actually that 'moonshot' or fairly theoretical stuff with long-term payoffs may be hard to evaluate.
Is this really the case on any college campus for any faculty member? It seems like this hasn't been true regardless of tenure for a few decades now - there are a lot of things that you don't dare speak, no matter who you are.
I like the term “Social Justice Fundamentalism”. I’m a fan of social Justice. I’m also a fan of feminism and liberalism.
But some of what we are seeing today isn’t that, and I think using the term fundamentalism to describe it, which, I suspect deliberately, draws a parallel between the efforts to force everyone to adopt these moral views with the attempts by religious fundamentalists to force everyone to adopt their views, makes a lot of sense.
If you mean fundamentalism in the strict sense of rigid adherence to a core principle, religious fundamentalists act as they do because the core they follow, scripture, has claims over all aspects of personal and private life and makes assurances about the absolute correctness and necessity of its followers bringing everyone under its mantle.
I don't see that "social justice fundamentalists" would have any such requirement imposed by their core principle. I'm pretty sure their core principle would be one of or some set of the things we already acknowledge, that we claim our society values: equality, personal freedom absent harm to others, justice yes. The difference isn't what they believe or even maybe how strongly. It's that they're calling our bluff on what we believe.
These things are more social norms than moral necessities: you don't need to believe everyone is equal but you need to act as if you do. A liberal would say the right way to fight bigotry is to convert the bigots, a social justice-oriented leftist would say it's to limit the impact of their bigotry. I think history is in their favor too. If we had waited until every racist was on board before ending segregation we'd still have segregation.
> If you mean fundamentalism in the strict sense of rigid adherence to a core principle, religious fundamentalists act as they do because the core they follow, scripture
I don't like the way many people use the term "fundamentalism". It started out to describe an early 20th century movement in American Protestantism. And indeed, they were all about following scripture–or at least what they claimed it was saying, since other Christians have always disagreed with their interpretations of it. And I don't have a problem with calling them "Fundamentalists", since that is their own term they chose to describe themselves. Nor do I have a problem using the term to describe (ultra-)conservative Protestants who consciously continue the same approach today, and look back on the early 20th century Fundamentalists in admiration.
The problem is when the term "fundamentalism" gets extended to (ultra-)conservative factions within other religions such as Catholicism, Islam, Judaism, etc. None of those belief systems shares the Protestant belief in "Scripture Alone" (sola scriptura). All three believe in the binding nature of extra-scriptural/post-scriptural traditions. So while "the core they follow, scripture" is an accurate description of the basis of the original Protestant fundamentalism, it ends up misrepresenting "fundamentalism" in other religions, and distorting them through a Protestant-coloured lens. Which is why a lot of scholars of religion object to using the term "fundamentalist", and instead advocate using customised terminology for each religious tradition. Hence people speak of "Islamism" or "jihadist Salafism" or "Khomeinism" rather than "Islamic fundamentalism", for example. Instead of "Catholic fundamentalism", people speak of "Feeneyism" or "radical traditionalism" or "integralism" or so on. Instead of "Jewish fundamentalism", we have terms like "Kahanism". Instead of "Hindu fundamentalism", "Hindutva".
And I know by trying to talk about a "core principle", maybe you are acknowledging that for "non-Protestant fundamentalism", the core might not be "scripture". But, just because Protestant Fundamentalists might be said to have a single core principle, doesn't mean every other religion does. Sometimes there is no single core principle, just an assortment of views. People use "fundamentalism" to describe religious views which have a rather hostile attitude towards what we might call "modern scientific liberalism", and whether you have a single core principle or an amorphous blur of many principles is irrelevant to whether you have such a hostile attitude or not
I agree that fundamentalism is good descriptor of the problem. A lot of comments replies arguing about the meaning of the word. To me fundamentalism means this. Where you fall on a certain issue defines a set of values. Fundamentalists are those believe that their one issue and the subsequent value structures are THE fundamental issue and value structure that individuals should be judged (morally and otherwise) as well as how we should see the world and organize society - above all other issues and value sets.
With that definition one of the things you see a lot in American culture aside from Christian fundamentalism is capitalist fundamentalism - that free markets divine what and who is right.
Social Justice fundamentalists do just that - dismiss or trample over other world views and values systems, in the name of equality.
Preface: I say this as a leftist who believes in reparations and cooperative ownership of capital.
When I hear fundamentalism I think less about the proseltyzing aspect and more about the divergence from the core ideology. Fundamentalist is probably a misnomer, maybe "radical" or "sectarian".
For example, someone sufficiently "woke" would understand that the slave and sharecropping economy of the rural south impacted the majority of whites negatively and that racism was a tool used to prevent them from developing class consciousness.
With this knowledge, any discussion about anti-racism w/ respect to the US south needs to also be explicitly anti-capitalist to help the "poor white trash" understand that their economic anxiety is being redirected unproductively. These people do benefit from white privilege in some ways, but solidarity should be the primary message here as there is a spectrum of victimization going on.
A concrete example of how you could respond to someone saying "immigrants are taking our jobs" is to reframe it (correctly) that US immigration laws are being taken advantage of by employers. The immigrants and workers have no leverage in the system and the decision-makers are the capital owners. It is not productive to call this person a bigot and leave it at that (even if it is true).
People who want to fit into the cultural zeitgeist but without the fundamental understanding of the system they criticize will just use these people as a punching bag, which doesn't help anyone. These types of people are easily co-opted into positions of power that don't fundamentally challenge the system. The head of a DEI initiative at a college does not challenge the existence of legacy admissions or donations from war profiteers and oil companies. They are smart enough not to bite the hand that feeds them.
There's also a purity aspect to it. When there's no solid basis for the ideology you can just start measuring people against their purity level. "No true scotsman" and all that.
Would it fair to say that racism has really largely been about classism? I’ve always thought that if capitalists wanted to make a campaign that would misdirect people’s sense of injustice, that blm and subsequent woke ideology would make the perfect foil.
> Would it fair to say that racism has really largely been about classism?
Please do some reading on the subject. Cursory reading on the history of labor unions, immigration in America, or literally any book on the US south that isn't Lost Cause mythology will tell you resoundingly yes.
I am not even talking about Marxist authors or Howard Zinn. You can easily find primary sources, the people who historically weaponized racism, telling you exactly how and to what end they are weaponizing their racism.
Secondly, capitalism is great at co-opting all sorts of messaging. Since you are on HN I assume you are familiar with the concept of a Paperclip Maximizer. The "machine" in this sense does not love you or hate you. You are a customer and they will adopt the aesthetics of your ideology to sell to you, inherent contradictions be damned.
Every oil company that spent the last 50 years denying climate change now pours their money into showcasing their green energy products. Companies who benefit from convict labor of African Americans adopt BLM banners on their websites. Companies who donate to the political campaigns of every republican in both houses of legislature change their logos to pride flags in June.
I dont want to assume but your phrasing makes me think (unless I am misreading it) that you think blm and "wokeness" are elite belief systems manufactured by "the machine", and that more reactionary "working class" ideology (a la Tucker Carlson) is grassroots. I really implore you to consider the Paperclip Maximizer idea and realize that the ideologies you are presented with on TV and print are the ones that have been passed through a corporate filter and sanitized to pose no threat to the machine. What you are seeing is a facsimile of what was once probably a more nuanced belief system.
When was the last time you heard Georgism or Anarcho-syndicalism or de-growth discussed by any talking heads? The answer is never because these concepts are inherently antithetical to capitalism and cannot be co-opted.
Honestly I don't care, I've been using ChatGPT (+ open source variants to get uncensored truth) to learn new concepts radically fast. I think ChatGPT + khan academy is going to be the greatest paradigm shift for anyone self motivated.
I'm half debating introducing CHATGPT based education to my home schooling pod.
I really wonder if Universities will survive the "woke", the "reaction", and the "paradigm shift.
> Scott Says: Comment #12 April 17th, 2023 at 11:26 pm So, why shouldn’t I cheer the destruction of universities, if they’re full of woke ideologues who hate me? One might just as well ask: why shouldn’t I cheer the destruction of the earth, if it’s full of assholes, and morons, and antisemites who’d probably kill me if they got a chance, and wild animals that would rip me to shreds? In both cases, the answer is simply: because this is my world, and nearly everything I love and cherish is here along with nearly everything I hate, and I believe that the former ultimately outweighs the latter, and if people don’t mind, I’d like to continue living in this world.