Update: They removed the affinity groups from the public page.
I don’t write much about the culture war because it seems that one side won, and it’s not my side. If my side is going to win, it won’t be through arguing. In the early 9th century the Patriarch of the Church of the East in Bagdhad had to defend Christianity in the court of the Caliph Harun al-Rashid. Obviously, he had to tread lightly. This was not a debate he was going to win. The goal was not to lose too badly. This is where I feel the ‘non-woke’ faction among cultural elites is. Just not losing is the victory. But in the long run, the Church of the East went into decline. If you even feign the shahada, the punishment for apostasy is social death.
So I don’t try to argue in public. Resistance needs to be in private because public attention is an invitation to get targeted.
But sometimes something so ridiculous comes on my radar that it warrants public comment.
Over at Bari Weiss’ Substack, she posted a piece from a teacher at an elite private school, I Refuse to Stand By While My Students Are Indoctrinated. This part jumped out at me:
Recently, I raised questions about this ideology at a mandatory, whites-only student and faculty Zoom meeting. (Such racially segregated sessions are now commonplace at my school.)
This seems crazy to me. Racial segregation? I wondered on Twitter how common this sort of thing is. It must be an aberration, no? Well, a friend who is faculty at Michigan State screenshotted an email he received (this is on a public page too).
I’m going to blockquote a portion if you don’t want to click to enlarge:
We invite attendees to participate in an affinity group during the Student Success Spring Conference. Affinity (or caucus) groups provide spaces for people to work within their own identity groups. To advance racial equity, there is work for white people and people of color to do separately and together. For white people, an affinity group provides time and space to work explicitly and intentionally on understanding white culture and white privilege and to increase one’s critical analysis around these concepts. For people of color, a caucus is a place to work with peers to address the impact of racism, to interrupt experiences of internalized racism, and to create a space for healing and working for individual and collective liberation.
If you are “woke” you see nothing wrong with this I assume. And that’s fine, we understand each other. On the Last Day, we’re on different sides. There’s no possibility of meeting in the middle. No compromise. I’m marked as to who I am. You know me as an enemy or friend, and there’s really no ambiguity about that. And I will know some of you too! I call you friend now sincerely, but on the Last Day I’ll show you as much loyalty as I’ve received from you.
But what about the rest? There are many academics who find these racial affinity groups disturbing. But they are busy with research. Do they need the hassle of speaking out about these things? Enough. As my friend who sent me the screenshot said: this is being complicit. Other academic friends tell me there is a “hidden majority.” If there is, you are all weak cowards. You count for nothing. The insanity marches and you avert your eyes. Why are you devoting your life to truth, while not confronting the abomination suffocating your institutions? This is evil.
Evil is a strong word. Some of you who are not woke, but moderate, may argue like Abraham haggling with the angels that there is some righteousness in Sodom and Gomorrah. My feelings here are quite personal. I have small children of mixed racial backgrounds. Though the infractions are minor, we’ve encountered strange things in regards to the race of my children. Both my wife and I have been disturbed by requests to clarify our children’s racial identity by school authorities. The only way I can explain what’s going on is it’s like being a Jew in 1980’s Northern Ireland and being asked if your children are Protestant or Catholic. We’re not Christian, and race isn’t super important to our identities (unlike some people). Being asked even implicitly is an imposition and we don’t appreciate our children be asked to racialize themselves (I’m being politic, we were enraged).
But the real problem I have is the white affinity groups. I am not happy with the “people of color” affinity groups either, but in some way, these have been around since the 1960’s. The emergence of white affinity groups seems a nod to the re-racialization of society as the explicit text. The fundamental issue is simple: I do not want white people to think about their race. I do not want white people to think of themselves in racial terms. The history of white Americans thinking in racialized terms is not good for people who look like me. These fools are going to get us killed!
Taking activists who are nonwhite at their word rather than self-interest, they believe white examination and embrace of their racial identity will allow for true anti-racism and justice. My rejoinder is simple: you put far too much faith in the innate goodness of these white people. My wife’s grandparents were good people, yes, but I know for a fact they were opposed to integration. They were good people, but of their time. Most people conform and follow the spirit of the times. Don’t tempt fate to think you can tame the snake of racial identity. It’s evil among all races and all people. It is always with us, but it is sin. As a brown-skinned minority in a majority-white country, I do not want white people to think in racial terms.
More concretely I cannot tolerate resegregation in this country. It would separate me from those who I care about most in the world. It would possibly separate my own children from each other. Today their differences of complexion are matters of happenstance. Perhaps in the future, it would be more important? When on Sesame Street a character says “The color of our skin is an important part of who we are” I feel a cold wind blowing. The context is much more innocuous than some have made it out to be, but for some of us, skin color is an accident.
As a quick aside, this is where some white nationalists freak out and declare “see, his mask has slipped, he’s anti-white!” Fools, I’m brown. My opposition to your kind is on my skin. I was always against you, just like I’m against the Critical Race Theory Bolsheviks. I see you two as the same thing. I always have. I’m a brown-skinned man whose ancestors took the alien name Khan and adopted a foreign religion. I have relatives across the world as we scatter. My whole lineage screams cosmopolitan. It has for hundreds of years. This is my nature, constitutive to me. Since the Axial Age there have been symbol-manipulators who transcend nations and bind peoples together ideologically. That is me and my kind.
The way I differ from some of my kind is I do not expect most humans to be like this, nor do I think it is feasible that we should force others to be like us. Human societies need to operate at some sort of equilibrium so that extreme cosmopolitans (like me) and extreme localists can coexist. The liberal democratic compromises of the late 20th century were good. They established an equipoise for a pluralistic society. What is happening now is cultural radicalism is destroying the social capital and trust that liberalism needs to survive and persist. Once the capital is exhausted people will fall back on other identities. Religion is one possibility. But race is another.
And that is why I think complicity with racially segregated groups is horrible and evil. Most people have no deep beliefs. They have shallow conformities. It’s best not to reawaken affinities and identities that have been submerged and sublimated.
Finally, the universities need to account for themselves. The public fisc will face more stress in the near future. Those of us who feel persecuted by the radicalism bred on these campuses need to stop arguing with the new commissars and ask why we’re subsidizing their livelihood. We need change the course of history or it will run us over. This is not a plea. This is a fact.
they are as smart as the SJWs
Today it was quite revealing as to what kind of readership Razib has.
The more intelligent readers appear to keep silence but the way some of these people came out of the rat-hole (once their White victimhood was triggered) was quite amusing.
These people also appear to be somewhat computer illiterate and when they click the comment button and see only Razib’s comment as the 51st they may think Razib deleted all their comments.
Whoa, that should be a great show.
Some of these moral accounts – who victimized whom, what “rights” one group has over the others etc. is deeply rooted in the different philosophical outlook of the world – both mental and physical.
Razib appears to be well read in history, culture, biology, religion but I have not seen him give more metaphysical treatments of these from philosophical perspectives.
In the narrowest sense, philosophy, much like mathematics, was developed only in Europe. As my moniker indicates I am not very happy about it but that is the way it is.
This is a genetics blog but I want to see a live discussion on continental vs analytic philosophy, especially their effects on the philosophy of modern science, Ernst Mach and positivism of various kinds. These should be at least as relevant as a discussion on history is to this blog.
“Fools, I’m brown.”
That’s not an excuse. I know plenty of North, East, and South Asian people who advocate for the White race. They might be a minority, but they definitely exist.
Today it was quite revealing as to what kind of readership Razib has.
posts exhibit bias in who comments. also, this got ‘big’ on what remains of ‘frog twitter’. lots of these are not readers
In the narrowest sense, philosophy, much like mathematics, was developed only in Europe.
this is false. the greeks themselves recognized in India another group of philosophers
Liberalism drained the talent pool for white nationalists, because under colorblind individualism combined with relatively colorblind law enforcement, no talented white person needs a white identity. There is basically only one way for them to get talent again, and that’s if leftists terrorize regular white people into thinking their only options are to defend their white identity or else be subjugated.
Increasing the level of racial conflict ideology makes opposing racial conflict ideology more desirable in response. That’s why the SJ approach is completely f’ing nuts in the absence of a working intervention to converge group outcomes.
Razib is right to be worried, even if it’s unlikely that white Americans would go that far. After all, the first step is mutual knowledge of white identity, which makes future coordination cheaper. This is an order-of-magnitude increase in risk for… well, very little gain. There’s no way this is boosting URM test scores. We might maybe wring a couple of police improvements out of it.
Who the fck is “you,” compadre? Regardless, both the Han Chinese and the Yamato Japanese are industrial colonial imperialists, and the Koreans benefited substantially from the global order instituted by the so-called “white supremacist” American Empire, including having somewhere to export goods to to build up their economy.
You’re almost certainly some kind of white nationalist troll pretending to be an East Asian, trying to stoke up the exact kind of “fight-or-die” sentiments necessary to rebuild the charred husk of WN.
Even if you weren’t, if we’re scoring based on collective stats, no one has to take that from someone who out-earns, out-scores, and out-lives them.
—
Anyhow, best wishes to you and your family Razib. Hopefully this stuff will turn out to have been one big, scary fad, and it’ll be the ’90s again some day soon, and we can go back to not thinking that much about race as an attack surface. What a nightmare.
I initially interpreted Razib’s concern about white identity politics simply as the fact that whites are the majority, not some kind of statement about the innate violent racism of white people (though I am open to this claim with empirical support). If the woke poke the tigers cage too much and the majority become racially aggrieved that won’t be good for minorities Razib seemed to be saying. However Raazib calling commenters showing any kind of white racial consciousness nazis makes me think I might have been too charitable.
But back to the initial interpretation of a raising majority white racial consciousness that could menace minorities. I don’t see that as a risk . White liberals are more racially liberal than minorities in many cases. They’re the only racial-political group that views other races with more warmth than their own. White liberals have a religious and patronizing fervor for being on the side of minorities, and contempt for whites who show any kind of racial identity. I don’t see how this would change, especially seeing the absolute insanity and at time racism white liberals are putting up with from the woke.
Some charts and an article to support the above:
https://twitter.com/ZachG932/status/1100501799260311553
https://i.imgur.com/X853KAK.png
https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/h1GH_gQS21fhtSybN1LM37AEeG0=/0x0:1800×1800/1200×0/filters:focal(0x0:1800×1800):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/15980179/awokening_chart6_liberalsv1_left.jpg
https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/white-liberals-present-themselves-as-less-competent-in-interactions-with-african-americans
>> You allege that your present day fellow “white Americans” can be trusted to go on a genocidal spree against brown people.
> you put words in my mouth again i will ban you.
»The history of white Americans thinking in racialized terms is not good for people who look like me. These fools are going to get us killed!«
If that didn’t mean white Americans, what group will be doing the killing, then? I’m not a native speaker of English, maybe I –and others– merely got semantics or grammar wrong? Can anyone explain what’s going on?
I am the white guy that showed up in one of your Zoom calls a while back that has been reading you since the beginning. In those early 2000’s days the future looked fun! Maybe everything is just more vibrant and exciting when we are young?
I 100% believe white racial solidarity would currently be unseemly, unnecessary and probably detrimental to the best interests of other races given current white numerical and socio-political dominance. You’ve outlined a credible “nightmare scenario” for your kith and kin which SJWs are stupidly increasing in probability.
It would conversely be unseemly and possibly detrimental to the best interests of whites if they still were commonly culturally prohibited from solidarity even after falling to some small percentage of the population that I can’t precisely define (somewhere between 15-35%?), if other races still have their solidarity. The only way it couldn’t be somehow detrimental to whites is if they are super-beings. WN’s and alt-righters fantasize that they are preventing this scenario but they are mostly making this and other shitty scenarios more likely.
The third shittiest scenario is everyone in racially loyal blocks but with no individual race being large enough to dominate the others. It would be a sad downfall from the good old America that aspired to universal civic nationalism. (As Hermetic said, people that can’t see you don’t want any of these three shit scenarios are idiots or just willfully misinterpreting).
Hopefully, intermarriage smoothes things out and both WN’s and SJWs are defeated decisively. I’m part Mexican and while I consider myself White, I would strongly oppose Hispanics being abused en-masse, not only on high minded principals, but because they are literally family.
Thanks for having the courage to actively oppose unadulterated horseshit under your own identity, despite the cost.
White liberals are more racially liberal than minorities in many cases. They’re the only racial-political group that views other races with more warmth than their own.
all happened in 5-10 years. what is made can be unmade.
However Raazib calling commenters showing any kind of white racial consciousness nazis makes me think I might have been too charitable.
don’t engage in mind-reading or i will ban you.
white liberals engage in plenty of racial subsonsciousness. look at who they marry. look at who they live among. look at who they send their kids to school with.
there is plenty of ‘white racial identity’ out there. wokeness is fake.
I’ve run this blog for 18 years. WNs never behave well in the long term. that’s a fact. i’m a realist 😉 if you have a problem with that never comment here again.
my liberal phase in these comments is over.
EastAsianMan, also stop trolling.
If that didn’t mean white Americans, what group will be doing the killing, then? I’m not a native speaker of English, maybe I –and others– merely got semantics or grammar wrong? Can anyone explain what’s going on?
i meant it as a figure of speech. this wasn’t a treatise!
We don’t need a full-scale awakening to result in murders. We just had an East Asian man arrested for attempting to retaliate against a random woman over the “white supremacist” ‘wave of hate crimes against Asians’ that the media whipped up.
Racialized relations within an environment can be enough to destroy any individual, as well as driving high-susceptibility individuals to violence.
It’s possible that white liberals are the most “anti-racist” group, even historically, but the question is, how is that implemented? That is where the problems start to sneak in.
Glenn Loury has also said what Razib is saying now: that any kind of race war will turn out very badly for minorities. His concern was (naturally) for blacks while Razib is expressing similar concern for non-white people of immigrant background like him. Because when push comes to shove, if the racialization of society is complete, then the woke facade will slip and most white people will likely decide that white nationalism is a better bet than subscribing to the tenets of wokeness.
If you want evidence, look to India. Half a century of left-wing rule, with forced “secularism” that seemed to be a mask for giving privileges to religious minorities drove a hard backlash among Hindus. What was a mix of castes and linguistic groups has now mobilized into a powerful and intolerant Hindu majority. The position of Muslims (and to a much lesser extent Christians) is quite precarious in this country today, quite independent of whether they believe themselves to be patriotic Indians.
“I am the white guy that showed up in one of your Zoom calls a while back that has been reading you since the beginning. In those early 2000’s days the future looked fun! Maybe everything is just more vibrant and exciting when we are young?”
I’ve been reading GNXP since the early 2000s, and I recall even back then it attracted some right wing commenters who were attracted to the genetics posts and criticism of the left, but irked by the lack of enthusiasm for white racialism by the writers at GNXP.
The social media driven online right that’s developed over the past decade includes a significant component of white racialist/nationalist types who mask their views and aims with irony, code, and memes out of concern for practical politics and “optics.” One has to be pretty naive not to notice this. The vituperative reaction to this post from these types on Twitter speaks to the bad faith that increasingly animates much of the online right.
I think razib has read more than enough history to know that encouraging the majority group to become obsessed with their identity is not the road to peace, harmony and kumbaya.
Right now, white liberals are ok with turning their Instagram display picture black, donating some money to BLM charities and occasionally denouncing white supremacy and racism in their twitter feed.
It’s pure symbolism to the new gods, while the old ones remain worshipped. But there’s a significant subset of true believers who demand more than token expressions of fealty and want societal scale change. And the true believers are running the show now!
I imagine that a lot of the Robin Angelo crowd don’t realize they’re probably creating a kindergarten to alt right pipeline. Their actions including an unhealthy obsession on white guilt are gonna create a group of ex woke who are gonna make the ex Catholics other 2000s look mild!
We’re on the verge of a negative feedback loop where attempts by the woke to create a better society instead radicalise more people, leading to more radicalism by the woke and so forth!
January 6 isn’t the end, it would be quite sad yet ironic if the us government spends this and next decade in an insurgency against white nationalists just after leaving Afghanistan!
Let’s hope smarter voices prevail in the Biden admin and the race genie is kept in the bottle!
@Razib,
I can bet the faculty who are White, are cowards because of racial passivism.
They feel uncomfortable challenging any sjw claim on race because they’ll be labeled a “Cracker Lover/sympathizer.”
This is THE number one reason why.
Racial passivism, imo, is what opened the door to the extreme sjws we see. No one fought back against them, because they didn’t want to express any white identity.
If Arabs were being used as a scapegoat for an ideology, I would expect them to say stop talking shit about us. It should be no different for White people. That isn’t a strong or dangerous identity.
Numinous: Glenn Loury has also said what Razib is saying now: that any kind of race war will turn out very badly for minorities. His concern was (naturally) for blacks while Razib is expressing similar concern for non-white people of immigrant background like him.
It’s a weird place to focus though (presuming any pretence of liberal equality and common humanity). Like analogously (if more intensely) imagine a white woman in 1930 who said “Oh, but the problem with segregation of black folks is it might raise the racial consciousness of blacks and unleash angry spirits and lead to terrorism against us. It could get my daughter killed.”. Like that. Kind of back of the line relative to “Their disparate treatment, the exclusion, the demonisation are all in itself wrong”.
I like Razib’s stuff a lot and have read him for years, but there are some of his memes I don’t get which try to reframe Woke stuff as bad because it somehow helps some minority of White folks or encourages White identity or centricism. Y’know Woke is bad because some tiny minority of clever manipulators within the White group can use it to gain power (at the cost of most of their group). Woke is bad because the ideas of Europeans as evil destroyers of the world whose colonialism caused everything plays down PoC agency in history. And so on. This stuff may be true in a sense, but it seems frustrating in that none of it is the primary driver or the primary problem of this stuff, or real seems any proportionate prime concern. It doesnt seem so hard to just say “My prime concern is with the demonized, with their safety, with their position in society, with their freedoms, and let me be clear, this was done to them.”? I think these set of memes are maybe, treated charitably, clever attempts to weaponize bad ideas against themselves by making them undermine their own bad moral logic. But seem maybe a bit too clever for their own good, against focusing on condemnation of the main problem, the main injustice, and the main falseness and bankruptcy of the ideas. It’s probably wrong for me to be too harsh behind the wall of anonymity to someone who is standing against a bad social trend publicly, but really do think it’s a bad tactic (morally, practically).
It increases the likelihood of conflict in both directions – both outcomes are bad, but the possibility of each feeds on each other.
Matt,
It’s a weird place to focus though
I think this is a tendentious reading of Razib’s post. He can speak for himself, but I thought he was addressing his comments primarily at woke brown people in America, just like Loury was addressing the African American chattering class.
Clearly there are objective race-neutral reasons to oppose wokeness, but there’s definitely a self-preservation angle too, so if one desires its rollback in the culture, why not use all the tools at our disposal? And it’s not like Razib’s been shy about making such objective arguments in the past, so why not try this kind of argument for once? It may hit the mark better.
I’d give similar advice to my Muslim friends in India, to not go overboard with the leftism and the overblowing of incidents, as it’s inevitably going to come back and bite them (and the cosmopolitan class).
I don’t think I am tendentiously reading in the sense of “expressing or intending to promote a particular cause or point of view, especially a controversial one”. It’s not “putting words in the mouth to advance another cause”. But obviously this is subjective. I could say your reading of my response is highly tendentious, but this is just mud-slinging, so pointless.
I won’t repeat why I think it’s a “bad tool”.
Some Guy>
What makes you think I’m a guy? I might be a they.
Liberalism drained the talent pool for white nationalists
Kind of built into the definition, no?
Razib is right to be worried
The threat to Razib, his family and his home from a BLM mob attack is many times greater that the threat from any given Billy Bob and his Easy Rider Rifle Rack.
Increasing the level of racial conflict ideology
Choosing up sides is a good thing.
Hopefully the two sides will not be white and non-white. Instead it should be liberalism, knowledge and virtue on one side with hate, racial divisiveness, and the post-modern rejection of scholarship on the other.
@Numinous
why not use all the tools at our disposal
Being white, if I see the woke Borg as the final Armageddon from which there will be no return, and I see White Nationalism as the only solution, I should “hide” my liberalism and help create a White Nazi Party?
People are mistaken to think self-styled “antiracists” don’t want more white racism. Their self-conception of their own virtuousness DEPENDS on white racism. They’re not going to be troubled if, in the end, their policies and programs actually create more of it. In their own minds, at least, that would only make them more important.
@Chrisare
On white liberals being more liberal on race than racial minorities, the problem is that those same white liberals tend to be wealthy, even very wealthy, and if they’re not wealthy, often young. These are two demographics that can’t be counted on to remain particularly resolute in their political beliefs; the former because they’ll follow what is necessary to protect their wealth and professional status, the latter because even though we’ve set about changing the workplace to conform with Oberlin campus norms, eventually that high school and college environment, where the main bad consequences you fear in life are bad grades or social ostracism, ends.
I’ve seen South Asian and East Asian nouveau riche, who were saying absurdly racist things about black people as recent as 6 or 7 years ago that no middle class white person would have said in polite company even if they agreed with it, now talking about white supremacy, BIPOC identity, and the like. Wealthy white liberals who bought into wokeness very fast can dump it very fast too.
iffen:
I couldn’t parse your comment; don’t get the references.
More generally, I don’t understand what’s getting peoples’ goats here. Are people offended at the notion that white people can turn white nationalist if they are pushed hard enough? Newsflash: that was reality like 2 generations ago. And yes, unlike what some of you may believe, history does repeat itself. As far as I can see, Razib is fighting the good fight, so I have no problems with what he said.
(As I mentioned, Hindus in India radicalized in recent times too, so I’m not sure why some of you are so damn sensitive.)
@Numinous
I couldn’t parse your comment; don’t get the references.
You said, “if one desires its rollback in the culture, why not use all the tools at our disposal? “
My question was what should I do if I thought that the only way to save liberalism was to become a WN? Is that a tool that I should use? It would be along the lines of saying that the only way to save a village from communism would be to destroy it.
white people can turn white nationalist if they are pushed hard enough?
Not going to happen.
Another question that I have, not just for you, but anyone is: What if this is the endpoint of liberalism? What if this result is baked in? Why try and save it if we just end up here again?
What if the Jacobins were ahead of their time in more ways than one? What if they merely skipped a lot of the tedious intermediate stages and went straight for the end result of the guillotine?
@ Razib – The problem with white people not having any racial identity is illustrated by white liberals and our current predicament. White liberal’s preference for other races over their own allows them to advance, support or at least ignore this madness.
If they had a normal level of racial self regard, like other races or like white conservatives according to ANES, wokeism would have been dead in the water.
So while I understand your concern about a majority becoming overly race conscious, I also don’t think having zero or negative racial self regard is good either.
@iffen
On your final question, that was Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis from 1990: that liberal democracy was the endpoint because the lessons of the 20th Century (and earlier) showed that the extremes of Communism/Jacobinism and various far-right ultranationalisms were horrifying, and that the American Cold War settlement would endure forever because of the lessons of history and its material prosperity.
Unfortunately, it took less than a generation for that history to be forgotten, either out of ignorance or because true believers left and right don’t like being stuck in a holding pattern knowing they could go further. Boring parliamentary debates and spreadsheet jockeying are, to repeat a phrase I used earlier in this thread, a lot less sexy and dramatic than some final confrontation.
“white liberals engage in plenty of racial subsonsciousness. look at who they marry. look at who they live among. look at who they send their kids to school with.
there is plenty of ‘white racial identity’ out there. wokeness is fake.”
The increasingly hawkish consensus regarding China you see among white liberals doesn’t seem completely unrelated to China being a racial Other, particularly one that is increasingly prominent in areas traditionally dominated by white liberals like international commerce, major real estate markets, elite universities, etc.
Great post, Razib. One reason I read–and subscribe.
Maybe I’m hopelessly naive, but I don’t believe the culture war is over and the woke won. I imagine this thought experiment. Somebody (it would probably have to be a Republican) runs for president, saying, “In 1964, this country proclaimed that discrimination on the basis of race is wrong, always and everywhere. But some powerful people have turned their back on that legacy. They think that racial discrimination is wrong only when it is done by the wrong people for the wrong reasons. They think it is good when it is done by the right people for the right reasons. I totally reject that. We must loudly and clearly reaffirm our commitment to non-discrimination. I support legislation that would make all racial discrimination illegal, no matter how it is justified.”
There are only two remotely honest ways of responding. One, that nobody discriminates. But then the candidate brings up all the “we are diversifying our workforce” and says that should only be legal if there is no discrimination. The candidate must have had research done so s/he is ready to present many, many examples (“affinity groups”, etc.)–which would form part of a position paper, campaign literature, commercials, etc
Two, “Well, yes, but we have to discriminate to get diversity, equity, and inclusion. Weaker measures haven’t worked.” But then the opposition has to explain why diversity, equity, and inclusion is so important that it requires discrimination. After all, today everybody pretends that they think discrimination is bad. And most ordinary people think it is! The reason that woke is winning is that ordinary people don’t get the message that “reverse discrimination” has become policy in many places. Because everyone respectable is afraid of what will happen if they point that out.
Now maybe the argument “racial discrimination is wrong, always and everywhere” will lose. People will come to the conclusion that discrimination is necessary. But the discrimination is happening anyway, and it will get worse if nobody respectable pushes back. At least, if somebody does, there will be “a conversation”. And, no, I don’t think there’s any real pushback today when Republicans say, “we oppose all discrimination” but then aren’t willing to take the heat for trying to end any of the “good” discriminations.
The title of Lawrence O’Brien’s memoir was, “No Final Victories.”
Collectivist thinking is a scourge. I never felt comfortable with this garbage. I’ve been called “race-blind” as an insult IRL, but I’m not I assure you. I just don’t want to be the one opening Pandora’s box. Thanks for writing this for all of us!
I just can’t get emotionally in sync with Razib’s panicked reaction here. I think that sooner or later the system will recalibrate and the woke nonsense will subside.
I’m of the opinion that most of this recent racial hysteria is artificially stoked in large part by the neoliberal elites to divert attention from widespread looting and rampant inequality. Don’t think for a second that they aren’t keenly aware of using race as a divide-and-rule tactic.
http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=61403
Somewhat apropos to the OP (if not the weird net-nazi element of some of the comments) prominent youtuber Lindsay Ellis posted a long video yesterday about how she was “canceled” on twitter for anti-Asian racism.
For those not in the know (which are probably many) Lindsay is part of the loosely-defined “breadtube” community on Youtube – of which most are identified as being self-identified socialists. She posts much more about things related to her academic background in film criticism, but she is certainly “of the left” and fairly “woke.”
A twitter mob decided to “destroy” her because she made a comment about how the new Disney film Raya and the Last Dragon was very similar to Avatar: The Last Airbender. She ultimately deleted her twitter, and now the mob is going after known friends of hers. This video is more or less her public response, which is “fuck yall, I’m doing what I want now.”
It’s an hour and 40 minutes, so I can understand not watching – particularly the long middle section, where she goes over each of the “sins” that her enemies dragged out against her (going back through 13 years on the internet, and recycling old frog-nazi attacks against her. But she’s always funny, and makes a lot of insightful comments about performative wokeness which…aren’t too different from the points that Razib often makes. She notes that left white mobs on twitter mostly seem to be interested in “listening to POC voices” to help them win their own arguments, and aren’t interested in meeting these people where they are. That the real emphasis here seems to be to prove they’re “one of the good ones” and casting anyone who is “bad” to “racist island.” I sincerely think it’s worth a listen for anyone who has the time.
But wokism is opposed to neoliberalism.
@Principia
This presumes that 1) neoliberal elites know what they’re doing, and can just shut it off when they feel like it, 2) nobody in the woke mob is aware that the neoliberal elite might be using them and planning a double-cross, and 3) there are no actual believers in wokeness among the elite. Razib has on multiple occasions noted that he thinks our elites have gone crazy and are decadent, and I tend to agree with this: they’re not grand puppetmasters in control who can just shut it down on a whim.
There were plenty of liberal reformers in pre-WWI Russia who made cynical alliances with all sorts of radicals in the hopes of bringing down the tsarist system, but it didn’t work out for them. History is replete with reform-minded elites, looking out mostly for themselves, making partnerships with mobs and radicals, thinking that because of their status, educational prestige, and wealth they will always get the better end of it, but in plenty of cases that doesn’t happen. If behind-the-scenes divide-and-rule was so effective, the sun would have never set on the British Empire, whose elites were much more effective and school in history than our own. Too bad for us that everyone, not just the elites, pays the price for these kind of divisive gambits.
A twitter mob
Twitter mobs work for them, but I never see them working for “our” side. Why is that?
Twitter mobs work for them, but I never see them working for “our” side. Why is that?
Are you sure they don’t? Most of these twitter mobs actually end up attacking are people on the “left.” As Ellis notes in her video essay, to a large extent this boils down to who is vulnerable to shaming and who is not. Woke scolds can silence those who care about having cred as “one of the good ones” but they cannot do anything regarding people like Donald Trump or David Shapiro who just don’t give a fuck, or even get off on their contempt. Thus Twitter mobs if anything actually make the “left” weaker, insofar as they attempt to cast more and more people off the island.
There’s also the aspect that Twitter is anonymous (when not talking about public figures), and many of these individual accounts have been uncovered as imposters in the past (like white guys claiming to be women, or POC, or something like that). While I doubt it’s anything close to the majority, I am sure there are some frog nazi types who attempt to use wokism as a tool to take down their enemies in a way which is literally impossible to do from the outside.
Rather controversial comment section. One possibility is that the day isn’t far when everyone will spend most of their concern on securing their own networks for the fear of their fate without the networks. I don’t think that race-wide (or class-wide for that matter) consciousness can develop practically. But within networks, most people will be of the same race (and maybe class); even with white liberals mostly associating with other white liberals. This kind of fragmentation isn’t the only possibility, but it is among the more extreme ones, with networks replacing formerly broader societal services and functions.
DaThang: But within networks, most people will be of the same race (and maybe class); even with white liberals mostly associating with other white liberals.
I get the sense that there has been some relatively rapid change in this recently… Doesn’t seem like the era of “Talk about racial social justice; Actually hang out with a bunch of white guys of my same age, interests and class in my mathrock/Nordic Black Metal band” (a 90s-00s trope) so much any more. But this is a subjective thing.
On a tangent, in recent past there’s been an argument that got made often which was like “Oh, these White Progressives say they’re so anti-racist… but just look at their social networks and who they associate with!”, which seemed to me a sort of an attempt to make them look back at their social networks, reflect and be self-aware, and then moderate some of their extreme political rhetoric.
I get the impression (if we’re doing “noticing”) that this has kind of failed. That the targets, who were really genuinely stung by this cricticism, have chosen to double-down on the politics and reconstruct their social relationships to include many more “White Progressive adjacent” people from non-white ethnic groups. (I guess the omnipresent type of person that seems to crop up more within WhiPro friendship groups are bookish, young, white-black biracial, college-educated women). Rather than abandoning or moderating their political sentiments. Again though, admittedly though, these aren’t my (limited) social circle, so this is kind of second-hand, and could be a biased impression.
If that is a real change (and it may not be, I have no representative data), and not cosmetic, such a change might be good or bad for society. (I guess in some senses good as if you bring people “in” to a society, you should probably follow through and converge into a single ‘marriage network’ to use an adna-ism, and friendship network and make a coherent “people”. But might also socially embed ‘Woke’ politics a bit more in marriage, birth, friendship; the things that actually matter to create enduring committed social movements). Of course, I’m interpreting this all through my general antipathy to doing these “Turn the ideology against itself” things (which seems to do nothing much more than push the ideology to greater heights) rather than “Attack and refute the central point as being morally bad and essentially factually wrong” things. (But this is easy for me to say as an anon who faces no real pressure).
@Matt
“reconstruct their social relationships to include many more “White Progressive adjacent” people from non-white ethnic groups.”
White liberals have been trying to get black people to stop doing black people stuff and start doing SWPL forever.
“Attack and refute the central point as being morally bad and essentially factually wrong” things.
I agree with this, but it then confronts the fact that the Woke are organized and have the power of all the institutions behind them while “our side” are a bunch of libertarian slanted individualists that seem to abhor collective political action.
@iffen, oh sure, it might be eventually a self-limiting process as you run out of “The Talented Tenth” and “boil them off”. But I do think trying to halt White Progressive racial radicalism with “Look at their/your hypocritical social networks!” has made them at least try to extend the networks as far as they can into these groups of “Poc” (to “live their values”)… rather than actually achieving anything in terms of moderating the radicalism (I think it achieved exactly nothing in that goal!).
@Karl
Thus Twitter mobs if anything actually make the “left” weaker, insofar as they attempt to cast more and more people off the island.
This depends on whether you think purification is desirable. I know that if “my side” was organized, I would love to throw some people overboard. To name just a few: Pollyannas who think that we will “win” because the Woke will self-destruct, the defeatists who just give up and daydream about “dissolution,” monarchists and other reactionaries, etc.
My question was mostly rhetorical. What if Trump was “our” enforcer? Where would we be now?
In any case, “our side” is not big on mob action and enforced orthodoxy. Even if we were, the institutions would not allow us to target our enemies. Twitter being one of many.
@Matt I was talking more so about a near collapse or post collapse scenario. People can only meaningfully associate with a few hundred others at max and once society’s guarantees and safeties are gone the aforementioned kinds of groups will emerge.
Universities make a strong effort to bring in non-white students and then enlighten them in progressive attitudes.
> The history of white Americans thinking in racialized terms is not good for people who look like me. These fools are going to get us killed!
>> If that didn’t mean white Americans, what group will be doing the killing, then?
> i meant it as a figure of speech. this wasn’t a treatise!
@Razib: that’s disingenuous nonsense, the sentences are clear. You choose to throw you fellow white Americans under the bus, then you shrieked “Nazi!” repeatedly for no good reason, same as crazed SJW hyenas. When they come for you you may point them to this, may get you some brownie points, pun intended. An opportune move, though a bit late.
@Razib: that’s disingenuous nonsense, the sentences are clear. You choose to throw you fellow white Americans under the bus, then you shrieked “Nazi!” repeatedly for no good reason, same as crazed SJW hyenas. When they come for you you may point them to this, may get you some brownie points, pun intended. An opportune move, though a bit late.
i write under my real name. you do not, asshole
Oh, this flyer is so cute. It asks participants “to opt into the affinity group that aligns with [my] own racial identity.”
I am almost tempted to sign up and participate. Imagine the fun after I opt into the white affinity group for discussion. After all, I identify as white (at least inside, hence “Twinkie”) and I have certainly led a very “white” life. At minimum, I’m “white-adjacent” and if anyone dared to question my choice of alignment, I’ll shout “Love is love!” and accuse him/her/them of some sort of bigotry.
And if they let me participate, I’ll make sure to be the most racist, heteronormative male in the group. It’s going to be hilarious to have the least biologically white guy be the most racist in the discussion (“Look, I have fair skin like you! I no darkie! Is okay – wink, wink – you can tell me how you really feel about the dark people”). If then they all jump on me, I’ll cry electronic lynching.
Guys, don’t argue about this nonsense. This kind of idiocy deserves our derision, not our brainpower or keystrokes. Laugh at it.
@Twinkie
»This kind of idiocy deserves our derision, not our brainpower or keystrokes.«
No. Their donors mean it and enforce it with resounding success.
nytimes+com/2018/10/29/opinion/stacey-abrams-georgia-governor-election-brian-kemp.html
“We Can Replace Them: …an embittered white conservative minority [is] terrified at being swamped by a new multiracial polyglot majority. … American voters can do to white nationalists what they fear most. Show them they’re being replaced.”
bloomberg+com/opinion/articles/2017-05-24/american-prosperity-depends-on-a-nonwhite-future
“American Prosperity Depends on a Nonwhite Future”
bbc+com/news/uk-politics-18519395
“EU should ‘undermine national homogeneity’ says UN migration chief”
(en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Sutherland: also founder of the WTO, EU-commissioner, chairman of global players)
More at wp+me/pc5QDQ-11.
>I do not want white people to think in racial terms.<
We are not being given a choice.
@Nick G – The point.
Razib has written very many outstanding pieces in the 19 years (!) that I have been reading him, but I rate this as one of the best.
@Nick G
We are not being given a choice.
Obviously we have a choice, the same choice as always. If you let a cult of totalitarian SJWs turn you into a WN Nazi you were on shaky ground already.
@Nick G – The point.
I read two points.
One is that the anti-white stance and propaganda could drive the creation of a more robust WN faction. I don’t see it happening but do see an increase in white self-awareness and resentment, not to mention a greater resignation that race relations are deteriorating and not likely to improve. The second point, and I think he is more agitated about this is that the intellectual class needs to come out of the safety of the closet and put an end to the madness before the madness puts an end to us.