Morning,
I appreciate these thoughtful replies! I've been a depressed hermit for a few years now, and I am therefore rusty as I attempt to communicate with people and the world again, and I am already afraid I have written too much ...
Feel to free to skip it/parts of it, I've been working on some of these ideas for a while now in my personal writing, and got on a roll. Course, I'd love to hear your thoughts on it.
And, I want to be as respectful as possible in disagreeing with you as a 'privileged' white male in Toronto or simply as a human being.
I think "America is a racist country" is more of a meme, in the Richard Dawkins sense. And this meme has been weaponized in the hands of awful narcissists, while at the same time a collision of communication technologies monetized groupthink. It works the same way on the right, for sure, MAGA, as intentionally vague as 'racist country'.
The unknowable, hidden enemy can be anyone, can serve any purpose in the hands of the loudest of the voices found.
Because by all the best data, America is demonstratively
much less racist than it has ever been, although the past five years are going to be hard to measure and parse, and it takes time to do social science like that. So, there is a lag-time in the data, but the best data continues to show all sorts of agreed-upon-across-the-spectrum demographic positives.
It's only the framing of the issue, not the data, that asserts the unique 'racism' of America. Since there is no data aside from
outcomes-based data that 'proves' racism - we cannot 'prove' anything, scientifically, about any ideologies, we are left to make a best-case argument. Again, the woke are ahead of the curve, deconstructing objectivity, 'decolonizing' education (the irony. We are literally colonizing the minds of our students with this dogma).
Now all the best arguments against the woke are simply proof that the woke are correct, with devastating consequences for anyone who wishes to reference, say, philosophy, quality data, or anyone even speaking 'out of place' by opining on gender as a male, etc.
Coleman Hughes calls your statement and others of their ilk "The Myth of no Progress". I could rattle off a dozen sources though, that I've read in the past year (hermits have time for reading), from across the political spectrum, who see this meme (however they express this idea) as toxic, for everyone, for white people and for all the people it is supposed to help.
Heck, I could name a dozen
black authors off the top of my head, if you include academic essays and such, who authoritatively denounce woke thought from across the political spectrum as illiberal, harmful, patronizing, racist, proven ineffective, etc, etc ... depends on the author. The acrimony towards woke is the common denominator. And this level of discourse, across the spectrum, a lateral discourse, with this much forceful argument is generally ahead of the curve on social trends.
The myth of no progress diminishes the real suffering of people who lived under Jim Crow, suggesting that their suffering is the same as those today. It breeds discouragement, resentment, an 'external locus of responsibility', that is robustly associated with poor mental health outcomes in psychology.
And yet, for me to seek out black perspectives on race that run contrary to woke narratives is racist by
definition. I could get cancelled, easily, were I to return to the classroom, simply for sharing my GoodReads reviews.
Have you heard of the "Great Replacement"? This is the belief by right-wing whites that the white race is going to be literally fucked out of existence and replaced by minorities because we're not having enough kids. — RogueAI
Man, I know some of these people personally. Some are friends. It doesn't mean the same thing to the guys I know as it seems to mean to you.
First time I heard that spoken was over a decade ago, easily. From a guy whose been a friend since high school. The first smart MAGA type I ever encountered, even though there are differences here in Canada, the core beliefs and values of these new conservative types tend to be the same.
It sounded super creepy to me right away, but then I looked into it, and yeah, this is just a stupid conspiracy theory propped up by a few legitimate arguments and data points, a really stupid way to talk about immigration. I would posit that this is sort of an inevitable outcome of a society that is failing to even teach reading, but is unfailing in teaching dogma that casts these kinds of people as 'deplorables'.
That paranoid conspiratorial thinking was sweeping through the right back then for sure though, that language. The collision of social media and the smartphone in 2014 swept up both tribes, exaggerating outrage via algorithm. Society is no longer able to keep up with sourcing good information as our tech advances far outrun our cultural adaptations. Conspiracy theories on both sides is just one outcome.
I was talking to people on Quillette as Jan. 6 was taking place, heterodox types mostly, but the majority of the community seemed to be highly conservative, this
new kind of conservative, and I was watching some of these conspiracy theories taking hold in real time. Within days I saw the same talking points around whether or not it was an insurrection coalescing around the same crazy stuff that was baked into the conversation from the beginning on the 6th.
I know conspiracy theories. 'White supremacy' is a conspiracy theory too.
The genius of it is the way is has co-opted morality entirely, despite their own morality being so opaque.
Broadly speaking, MLK was a deontologist. He believed the word of God taught him to understand that humanity is a shared experience, fundamentally. This belief gave power to the mans words and character, his ability to lead.
It appears to me that wokeists are, weirdly, deontological. I think the majority are likely moral relativists, which leads them to a technocratic, neoliberal outsourcing of morality to 'experts' for utilitarian ends. They claim to exist in the same moral tradition as MLK, but their movement and ideology is fundamentally secular, lacking that shared sense of unifying moral purpose embodied by MLK.
But can you point to anyone arguing woke arguments who isn't, by definition, exclusionary? Who doesn't feel of an entirely different category, morally speaking, from MLK? Who inspires you to difficult action through moral force of character?
Thus lacking the moral strength for their arguments, wokists turned to controlling language and education, storytelling and cultural expression. This, along with the beginning of our virtual age in 2014, allowed certain fringey people to gain an extraordinary amount of power fast, by advancing narratives perfectly suited to our shiny new virtual realities.
Wokism and MAGA are two peas in the same neoliberal technocratic dystopia that we now live in ...
(Haha, sorry. I also like to write horror stories as a hobby, and sometimes the existential dread I feel at the state of the world tends to bleed between the two).
Sorry man, this is too long. Overall, to come back to what you are saying, I don't dispute any of those experiences or observations you've shared. That thing about your partner teacher is frightening, appalling. I have never experienced such a naked, hatefully racist thing. Racism and hate of all kinds ARE real.
But this dreadful experience is simply increasingly less and less likely over time, has been for decades. And there will always be assholes. There are mentally ill people prone to racist outbursts. I've known a few. It is their psychosis talking though.
But pouring everybody's worst experiences of hate into one overflowing kiddie pool of prejudice isn't enough to outweigh the data, more and more of which emerges daily, on the failures of woke to accomplish anything at all, really, but division and wasted resources.
Heck, a principle here in Toronto killed himself after getting bullied for disagreeing with a wokist in PD that Canada was 'more racist' than the US. Disagreement with the dogma is killing people, literally.
This belief system, well-intentioned though she and her proponents may be, has had disastrous social consequences across the WEIRD world.
It is not even the best way to deal with the issues it purports to advocate for.
But the best argument, to me, remains that of Walter Benn Michaels and Adolph Reed Jr, who describe woke thought as a means of neoliberal elites presenting themselves as 'moral' by ensuring that the top ten percent of society is representative, thus dodging the need to do anything at all about economic disparity.
MLK himself argued for a movement based on social class, rather than racial essentialism.
The governor of Alabama, Darren Beattie, that dreadful weekend in Charlottesville, this stupid Afrikaner stunt which is obviously just a stunt, this is all a result of a conversation that has been weaponized and monetized by tech elites more powerful than many countries. Freaking Zuckerberg has blocked posting Canadian news for years, for example.
Your examples are of the worst of the worst sort of thinking, nefarious actors, often with agendas completely at odds with their words and actions. They take advantage of the weaknesses and blindspots of conservative, fan the flames of the worst fires, and sometimes it SEEMS like the FOX news talking heads are representative about what actual people think.
But these kind of people simply do not represent ordinary conservatives.
Do you think every woke person is represented by the extreme and seemingly insane fringes of their movement? Of course not.
Just last night I read about a decade-old study finding that exposure to conversations around white privilege lead white people to be more judgemental of poor white people as deserving of their poverty. We are teaching all sorts of people to be suspicious of white men. This seems stupid, given how many of us there are.
These trends I'm describing are sometimes decades old. That Richard Reeves book is new, but when Christina Hoff Sommers wrote about our schools' betrayal of boys twenty years ago, it was old news even then.
And Sommers is still vilified by wokists, despite two more decades of evidence piling up to vindicate her arguments.
Woke is a moral house of cards, and that shit's about to fall down.
If you made it to the end of this, thank you for reading, and I'd love to hear your thoughts!