It's only 8:30 in the morning, and I've already come across three items in my first commentary perusal of the day that have a common theme that's nothing short of spine-chilling.
That theme is race wokeness and the real and rapidly deepening damage it's doing to the very fabric of our society.
I'll lead off with a personal account that has me praying for a particular family. An academic in a bi-racial marriage has watch in horror as his family has disintegrated before his eyes. He gives his account of the process in a 30-tweet thread. Here's a taste:
1/ Woke anti-racism is child abuse.
My family is living the antithesis of @thomaschattwill's Self Portrait in Black and White. And I fear it may damage my children irrevocably.
Let me explain…2/ I’m white, my wife’s black. When we met, we “saw each other’s race,” but we didn’t think that was the most interesting thing about us. We foolishly thought our children would be part of a post-racial future, in which all Americans could just be human beings to one another.3/ Then came Trump. I decided I should try to learn more about my fellow citizens, who I now realized were completely opaque to me. In contrast, my wife decided she was at war with an immutably white supremacist America.4/ My wife began to read authors like Nikole Hannah Jones and Michael Harriot. She had a "racial awakening," concluding that she'd been "inauthentically black" all her life.5/ My wife came to think that her mind—trained in exclusive private schools and in two Ivy League institutions for a BA and a PhD—had been “colonized.” She's come to think she owes her success to being “the right kind” of black woman...6/ ...an inauthentic and “white-acting” black woman who is “non-threatening” to “white spaces.” Most disturbing, she's reinterpreted her 5 decades of life—in which she only ever had one very mild story of a microaggression—as a history of brutal, grinding racial oppression.7/ Deep beneath her inauthentic “white” acculturation is an oppressed black woman, struggling for freedom. This is what racial grievance entrepreneurs like NHJ have done to my wife's mind. What she's doing, in turn, to the minds of our small children makes my blood run cold.8/ My wife is teaching our children that America hates them and wants to kill them b/c they're black. Rather than take the birth of our children—ambiguous, innocent, raceless little creatures—as an opportunity to rethink the oppressive American race ideology...9/ ...and not hand it down to a new generation, my wife got “woke” after Trump and doubled down on anti-racist racial essentialism. Here are three hair-raising stories.10/ First story: she regularly explains to our kids that the police want to kill black people. Blacks are people police like to kill, and always have been. They will keep using the pretext that they get "scared" when unarmed black people reach into cars, like Jacob Blake...11/ ...or steal police tasers, like Rayshard Brooks, as long as using that pretext allows them to keep killing black people w/ impunity. That's what she told our children, who by plantation logic, are among the black population that the police go out hoping to kill every day.12/ Second story: she told our kids that Kyle Rittenhouse, like so many whites, hates black people and wants to kill black people, so he went to a BLM protest and opened fire. When I asked, in a neutral way, why she thought Rittenhouse had shot those people, she became upset...13/ ...and stormed out of the house, not to return for 3 hours. The “obvious” answer is that Rittenhouse is a white supremacist (I don't think she even knows that he shot only white people). Any probing beyond this self-evident axiom is too triggering to indulge.13a/ (BTW I have no defense of Rittenhouse, a confused, stupid kid, whose foolishness and apparent criminal behavior led to his needless killing of two people.)14/ Third story: We drove by a poster that said "Ahmaud" w/ a pic of Arbery. Daughter: "Who's that?" Wife: "That's a black man who was killed." My 7-yr-old daughter, now trained to think white people hate and want to kill black people like her, went straight to the inference...15/ "Oh, so they killed him because they hate black people?"
This man's home has become a highly concentrated microcosm of post-America in 2020.
Then there's a piece by American Enterprise Institute scholar Frederick M. Hess's piece entitled "Anti-Racist Education Is Anything But". A taste:
The famed KIPP charter schools abandoned their longtime slogan of “Work Hard, Be Nice” after KIPP’s leadership decided that the decades-old slogan hinders efforts to “dismantle systemic racism.” This summer, the National Museum of African American History and Culture’s website featured an educational resource which described traits like “individualism,” “hard work,” “objectivity,” “progress,” “politeness,” “decision-making,” and “delayed gratification” as hallmarks of “white culture.”
The superintendent of New York’s East Harlem Scholars Academies penned a back-to-school essay for Education Week which instructed “white teachers” to steer away from talking about the individual accomplishments of black Americans, because doing so would “unintentionally teach students that ‘really good, really successful’ Black folks are exempt from racist structures.”
These cartoonish dogmas are both insulting and insane. For one thing, no one who’s been to Singapore or South Korea would view traits such as “hard work” or “politeness” as especially “white.” For another, across Africa and South America, air-traffic controllers and cardiovascular surgeons put a lot of faith in things such as “decision-making” and “objectivity.” And, for what it’s worth, black parents are a bit more likely than white parents to think it’s important to teach their kids traits such as “hard work” and “persistence.” Truth is, we’d rightly condemn as an anachronistic menace any good ol’ boy who suggested that there was something uniquely “white” about being polite or working hard.
Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist instructs us that there is one correct stance on standardized testing (it’s racist), pot legalization (it’s anti-racist), Medicare for All (it’s anti-racist), and even the capital gains tax rate (low rates are racist). To Kendi and his followers, there is no room for good-faith arguments — there are only disciples and racists. Kendi, whose August has included a $10 million donation from Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and a fawning cover story in The Atlantic, has promised to “build the world anew” with antiracist research and public scholarship.
It’s one thing to work in good faith with those who disagree about pedagogy or policy, it’s another when “anti-racists” insist that pointing out that 2 + 2 = 4 “reeks of white supremacist patriarchy,” or that “whiteness is a cancer.” Yet, not only are such statements loudly and proudly shared by “anti-racist” educators, but they’re frequently conjoined with the disturbing insistence that those who disagree need to be reeducated into a more enlightened stance.
The third item is a lengthy deep dive, but I recommend you carving our the time for the whole thing. It's by John Murowski at Real Clear Investigations and it's entitled "The Deeply Pessimistic Intellectual Roots of Black Lives Matter, the '1619 Project' and Much Else in Woke America." It'sbasically a look at how critical race theory, long regarded as an academic fad with insufficient substance to give it momentum, has indeed acquired momentum and is the foundation of all this destructive nonsense we now see in all sectors of society.
It's going to be hard to give you a representative sampling, so chock full of instances of what he's sounding the alarm about is his report, but let's try:
The budding movement held its first conference in 1989 at a convent in Wisconsin, attended by 24 activist-scholars. The “crits,” as they called themselves, combined insurgent scholarship with 1960s-style activism, quickly picking up adherents; in 1990, students at more than 40 law schools boycotted classes to protest the underrepresentation of minorities on faculty.
In critical race theory, racism is not a local variant of the ancient practices of caste or slavery, but something new in the world that was born with European imperialism, colonialism, capitalism and rationalism. Racism is understood not a smattering of intentional acts of bigotry, but as an entire system that runs on auto-pilot and operates imperceptibly to whites who are punch-drunk on the myths of color-blindness and individual achievement.
“People don’t exist solely as individuals,” said Juan F. Perea, a U.S.-born Latino and a professor of law and social justice at Loyola University Chicago. “We certainly have individual characteristics but many of our outcomes are heavily influenced by how we’re viewed and treated because of our group membership – such as race, such as sex.”
According to CRT, racism is a constantly shape-shifting phenomenon: morphing from slavery to Jim Crow to redlining to the schools-to-prison pipeline to "I Can’t Breathe." The landmarks along this moral timeline include the New Deal and G.I. Bill, federal social programs offering financial assistance for college tuition and home purchases that helped create the modern American middle class, but which are characterized by race scholars as being structured to largely bypass black Americans.
Murowski looks at the individual developers of CRT such as Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic and Clayborne Carson. These are the pioneers who paved the way for Ta-Nehisi Coates and Robin DeAngelo.
This is not merely the stuff of academic conferences and highbrow journals. In the flyover-country city where I live, the local school system puts on implicit-bias workshops, the human rights council is pushing to get the 1619 Project inserted into the public-school curriculum, and a multinational corporation headquartered here has an official position that there is systemic racism in America.
Threading the needle - that is to say, maneuvering through the toxic atmosphere of contemporary American society with a determination to see individual human beings as just that - gets more difficult each day. We must not let that be an excuse to lapse into rigid and cartoonish stances of resistance. Real resistance must take the form of steady nerves, prayer and a determination to be adults and responsible citizens.
It will be an effective form of resistance if enough people are willing to be on board with it, which is, at present, an open question.
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