Possum’s Guide for the Unwoke
Rational thought about Irrational Topics: Updated 10/18/22
Rational people in Western society have been puzzled in recent decades by a series of disturbing words, some new, some old with new meanings. Information and analysis is in fact available to help these ‘unwoke’ people understand their predicament. It may even help the occasional ‘wokester’ who has a side-interest in reason. The guide follows:
REPARATIONS
This has become a big issue in 2020. It was kicked off by black writer Ta-Nehisi Coates in a June 2014 Atlantic article. Are African Americans worse or better off than if they and their ancestors had remained in Africa? REPARATIONS: Taking Ta-Nehisi Coates Seriously looks at the pros and cons of the idea.
More on reparations…from the reparations section of Harvard’s luxury Guilt Trip:
Is it fair to punish Harvard for its past sins?
Will the faculty, students, and staff of Harvard be asked to pay a price for the supposed evils of a century or more ago? Well, yes, apparently: “[T]he responsibility for involvement with slavery is shared across the institution—by presidents, fellows of the Corporation, overseers, faculty, staff, donors, students, and namesakes memorialized all over campus.”
Some form of reparations are in order. But just reparations must satisfy at least three conditions: They are paid by the individuals responsible; they must be paid to their victims; and there must be demonstrable harm to the victims. Harvard’s action satisfies none of these conditions.
First, a person should never be held responsible for something over which he had no control. This is a fundamental feature of any just legal system—a child born in Germany in 1944 is not, and should not be held, responsible for the Nazi horrors of the time. Why should children born in the twentieth century, Harvard employees and students, present and future, be held responsible for bad practices a hundred or more years before they were born?
Most obviously, neither the victims nor the perpetrators are alive. So living black people (possible descendants of the handful of slaves at Harvard who can be identified) must be somehow compensated by otherwise innocent living whites. But what for? Perhaps due to the contemporary injustice referred to earlier?
“Contemporary injustice” is not discussed in the Report. Perhaps the reference is to the existing wealth, health, and other disparities between whites and Asians, on the one side, and blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans on the other. But these have contemporary causes. To link them to slavery, a ‘cause’ many generations in the past, is essentially impossible, especially as many B-W disparities have increased, rather than decreased, in recent decades, contrary to what we would expect if the cause was in the past.
Contemporary blacks have not suffered as their ancestors did. Indeed, they might well be better off than if their ancestors had remained in Africa—or so says African-American journalist Keith Richburg, who writes:
[E]xcuse me if I sound cynical…it’s Africa that has made me this way. I feel for her suffering…But most of all I think: Thank God my ancestor got out, because, now, I am not one of them. In short, thank God that I am an American.
A solid argument can be made that but for colonization and slavery, contemporary black people in the West would be worse off than they in fact are. Compare the handful of black-majority colonies that escaped colonization or were freed a hundred or more years ago with those that remained colonized until relatively recently: Compare, for example, Antigua and Barbuda (independence from Britain in 1981, GDP per capita $17K) with Liberia (independent in 1847, GDP per capita $677). The more colonization the better, evidently. This is just one comparison, and there are obviously many factors involved. But there are many comparable examples of greater prosperity after a longer period of colonization.
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that African Americans’ current condition is considerably better than it would have been had their ancestors remained in Africa. The continuing flood of migrants from modern Africa into the West suggests that they agree. If contemporary American blacks are in fact better off than they would have been without slavery, then no harm, no foul—and no reparations. This obvious argument is conspicuously absent from Harvard’s long report.
MICROAGGRESSION
“Aggression means “an intent to harm”; microaggressions are usually unintentional. What are they then? Microaggression, Mens Rea and the Unconscious Mind and It's All About Power explain and Blinded with Science! reassures the ‘unsafe’.
COLOR-BLIND RACISM
This paradoxical idea was mooted a few years ago by scholars of race and ethnic studies. Recently it has given birth to the racism vs, anti-racism dichotomy, aka “you’re either with us or against us”. The New Racism, Part I: How ‘Race and Ethnic Studies’ Made Color Blindness a Bad Thing and The New Racism, Part II: The Sociologist’s Toolkit: Justifying Racism Through Language explain what is going on.
DIVERSITY
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (appropriately: DEI) have become a new religion among administrators everywhere, from schools and colleges and the military to big business: “demographic diversity is a proxy for perspectival diversity…” says one historian of science. Well, no it’s not: Diversity and Inclusion of Identity Groups Often Means Uniformity and Exclusion of Ideas and Is Diversity an Enemy of Excellence? explain why, and this article https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/34/3/the-diversity-dilemma describes a logical flaw.
WHITE FRAGILITY
This has become a popular theme and a very successful book, but as social science (as opposed to propaganda), it is nonsense. De Angelo’s style resembles a novel, anecdotes in which white people are brought to understand their racist ‘whiteness’.
The introduction, by distinguished black academic Michael Eric Dyson, echoes DiAngelo’s anti-white bias: “whiteness is at once the means of dominance, the end to which dominance points, and the point of dominance, too, which, in its purest form, in its greatest fantasy, never ends.” Not crystal clear, but sounds…racist?
What exactly is whiteness? Dyson continues, “true—it’s not a biologically heritable characteristic that has roots in physiological structures or in genes or chromosomes. But it is real, in the sense that societies and rights and goods and resources and privileges have been built on its foundation.” Okay, so we’re not talking about actual white skin, which is in fact “biologically heritable.” Like Kendi’s racism, DiAngelo’s whiteness is an unmeasureable, omnipresent and sempiternal oppressor. Like Kendi’s racism, we are constantly reminded how bad it is. This quote is typical:
Whiteness repels gossip and voyeurism and instead demands dignity. Whites are rarely without these “protective pillows”[1]…
From a scientific point of view, this is nonsense: one unmeasureable thing repels (how?) gossip and voyeurism (meaning what?) and demands dignity (how?). White people (“whiteness”) are slandered without evidence. It turns out that some white people are upset, which just proves their fragility, says DiAngelo. What a great strategy! First you slander people then when they get upset you tell them that it proves you were right! This is the essence of White Fragility.
DiAngelo, who has been running what are euphemistically called “training sessions” for many years, has honed her persuasive methods so as to answer, or at least, address, every objection. In effect, she says, “Does discussing race upset you? Why of course, my dear, you are white and fragile and just coming to grips with the inevitable racism that is part of whiteness. But if you just recognize it you will still be racist but you’ll feel better for acknowledging it.” The book is full of novelistic interactions in which DiAngelo persuades her listeners first of a “whiteness” that goes beyond skin color and then in inevitable racism that is attached to it.
DiAngelo’s commitment to identity politics is front and center. She begins, as such books usually begin, by recounting the horrible things that white Americans did to native peoples, how they racially discriminated and delayed female suffrage and how white men were always the ones in power. All irrelevant to conditions now, but it starts the guilt process and lets us know that white men always misbehave. Like Kendi, she self-flagellates, admitting that she herself was, and is, guilty of all those sins—yes sins: the book is a an incredibly annoying, not to say offensive, combination of sermonizing and therapeutic indoctrination[2].
Throughout DiAngelo uses a story-telling rhetorical method that seems to be accepted in the educational community. See, for example, how teachers are taught[1] that elementary math is a “Struggle for Justice” via creative analysis of video clip of a couple of black kids trying to solve a problem. Every comment by the teacher is interpreted in a racialized way: the speaker repeatedly reminds her audience that math is dominated by whites and Asians. A teacher’s quite reasonable comments are “positioning” the student as a troublemaker” and that they “contribute to the perpetuation of marginalization and oppression.” None of this story-telling refers to anything factual, anything that could be verified by the methods of science. But its effect on the audience is undeniable.
DiAngelo condemns a straw-man version of what she calls “individualism”. (Racial-) group membership is all that matters. For example,
Individualism is a story line that creates, communicates, reproduces, and reinforces the concept that each of us is a unique individual and that our group memberships, such as race, class, or gender, are irrelevant to our opportunities.
Again a false dichotomy: it’s either group membership or the individual: how about both?
I could go on, but the point is just that this very influential book is basically racist propaganda that relies on the good will of white audiences who feel guilty for what other whites have done in the past (never mind the guilt of other races, much less the good that whites have done). DiAngelo uses that guilt to persuade them that their intentions are irrelevant. Even if they have not acted in racist ways, their very existence as white people makes them complicit in everything that went before. If they will just admit this guilt they can be at least partially absolved. But the guilt of the white race must remain. It is a load white people must carry for the rest of their lives. It is sin with no possibility of redemption.
Treating people as individuals is wrong, she says; group membership—meaning membership defined by immutable characteristics—is all that matters. All fault lies with whites. Intention is irrelevant. When a black woman is upset by an interaction with a white, the fault is always on the white side; it she who must readjust. No obligation on part of the black lady at all. This is demeaning to both parties: the white is permanently guilty and the black always a helpless victim. White Fragility is a dishonest, divisive and destructive book.
[1] Math Teachers are Taught that Elementary Math Education is a “Struggle for Justice”. Martin Center, Sep. 8 2021.
[1] R. DiAngelo (2011) White Fragility. International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, 3(3), pp 54-70. https://libjournal.uncg.edu/ijcp/article/viewFile/249/116
[2] What one reviewer called “a barrage of psychological manipulation techniques”. See also Matt Taibbi’s takedown:
SYSTEMIC RACISM
This has become a biggie. Now systemic racism is everywhere. We all know about individual racism: how is systemic racism different? Does it even exist? How Real Is Systemic Racism Today? , The New Racism: How activism and pseudo-science have corrupted sociology and Response to Vicky: Is racism everywhere, really?
PREJUDICE
How can we recognize prejudice? It isn’t always easy. Is stimulus generalization prejudice, or just an automatic learning process? Offense intended? Or not? gives an example.
What is this?